In a previous post, I pointed out that very little is said
in the Old Testament about the fatherhood of God. It took the coming of the Son to
fully expound the ways in which God’s relationship to believers is paternal.
Or perhaps we have that the wrong way round. Perhaps instead
we should say something like this: The human father/child relationship was
designed by God to illustrate how he relates to his creations and his creations
to him. In other words, we can expect that human fatherhood done right will
be “Godly” in character. I don’t think that’s too much to assume.
Either way, until the Son came and made the Father
known — not simply as God but in his role as Father — only a very
small number of the faithful understood God’s parental care for his people, and
only in the most limited of ways.