I remember the old Budweiser commercials of my youth ... "When you say Budweiser, you've said it all." The inherent inferred meaning being ... you can't top this. How shallow to contemplate that being said of any beer ... even of the self-proclaimed "King of Beers." But how else would they compete with Schlitz and "You only go around once in life, go for all the gusto you can" unless they're the King of Beers? Speaking of Schlitz, is it even brewed any longer? And the "Great American Beer" ... Budweiser ... is now owned by InBev of Belgium. Oh, the irony of that. [A quick Google search shows Schlitz was just resurrected essentially from the dead in 2009 after its original recipe had been rediscovered ... it had long since been changed into something else after being swallowed up by Stroh's in the early 1980s following a dreadful strike and then changed to a can-only product with a hurried up fermentation process such that for almost 30 years it existed as Schlitz in name only, having been essentially ignored out of existence ... so much for the "Beer That Made Milwaukee Great"]. All this serving as an interesting and quite ironic prelude to something that is truly beyond remarkable.
In Luke 11:1, Jesus' disciples asked Him "to teach us how to pray, just as John taught his disciples." What followed was nothing short of amazing. He said [and this parallels the same prayer given in the Sermon on the Mount in Matthew 6] "Our Father in heaven ... " When He spoke these words just about every jaw in the place dropped to the ground. No one in the entire history of Israel had ever prayed like this. No one!
That God should be personally addressed as "Father" may not seem out of the ordinary to those of us who frequently attend church and regularly repeat the Lord's Prayer, but it was absolutely revolutionary in Jesus' day. The writers of the Old Testament certainly believed in the Fatherhood of God, but they saw it mainly in terms of a sovereign Creator-Father. In fact, God is only referred to as Father fourteen times in the Old Testament's 39 books, and even then rather impersonally. In those fourteen occurrences of Father the term was always used with reference to the nation, not to individuals. You can search from Genesis to Malachi, and you will not find one individual speaking of God as Father. Moreover, in Jesus' day, His contemporaries had so focused on the sovereignty and transcendence of God that they were careful never to repeat His covenant name -- Yahweh. So they invented the word Jehovah, a combination of two separate names of God. Thus ther distance from God was well guarded.
But when Jesus came on the scene, He addressed God only as Father. He never used any other word! All His prayers address God as Father. The Gospels [just four books] record His using Father more than sixty times in reference to God. So striking is this that there are scholars who maintain that this word Father dramatically summarizes the difference between the Old and New Testaments. But this amazing fact is only part of the story, for the word Jesus used for Father was not a formal word, but the common Aramaic word with which a child would address his father -- the word Abba.
The German New Testament scholar Joachim Jeremias, perhaps the most respected New Testament scholar of his generation, has argued quite convincingly that Abba was the original word on Jesus' lips here in the Lord's Prayer and indeed in all of His prayers in the New Testament, with the exception of Matthew 27:46 when He cried out from the cross, "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" But there, Jeremias explains, Jesus was quoting Psalm 22:1. Of course, Jesus reverted back to Abba with His final words as He died: "Father, into your hands I commit my spirit" [Luke 23:45, quoting Psalm 31:5]. The word Abba was the word Jesus regularly used to address His father Joseph from the time He was a baby until Joseph's death. Everyone used the word. But as a careful examination of the literature of that day shows, it was never used of God -- under any circumstances. Abba meant something like Daddy -- but with a more reverent touch than when we use it. The best modern rendering would probably be "Dearest Father."
To the traditional Jew, Jesus' prayer was revolutionary. Think of it! God was referred to only fourteen times in the Old Testament as Father, and then it was always as the corporate Father of Israel -- never individually or personally. And now as His disciples ask Him for instruction on how to pray, Jesus tells them to begin by calling God their Father, their Abba! In the Lord's Prayer, Jesus essentially authorizes His disciples to repeat the word Abba after Him. He gives them a share in His Sonship and empowers them, as His disciples, to speak with their heavenly Father in just such a familiar, trusting way as a child would with his father. So functionally, Jesus transferred the Fatherhood of God from a theological doctrine into an intense, practical experience, and He taught His disciples to pray with the same intimacy as He did with His Father. And that is what He does for us. "Our Father" -- "Our Abba" -- "Our dearest Father" -- this is to be the foundational awareness of all our prayers.
Lastly, I want to conclude by considering the idea that addressing God as Abba [Dearest Father] as being not only an indicator of our spiritual health but also as a mark of the authenticity of our faith. Paul tells us in Galatians 4:6, "Because you are sons, God sent the Spirit of His Son into our hearts, the Spirit who calls out, 'Abba, Father!'" The impulse to call on God in this way as being a sign of actually being God's child. Romans 8:15, 16 says the same thing: "you received the spirit of sonship. And by Him we cry, 'Abba, Father!' The Spirit Himself testifies with our spirit that we are God's children." True believers are virtually compelled to say this.
Dr. J. I. Packer considers one's grasp of God's Fatherhood and one's adoption as a son or daughter as of essential importance to one's spiritual life. He writes: "If you want to judge how well a person understands Christianity, find out how much he makes of the thought of being God's child, and having God as his Father. If this is not the thought that prompts and controls his worship and prayers and his whole outlook on life, it means that he does not understand Christianity very well at all. For everything that Christ taught, everything that makes the New Testament new, and better than the Old, everything that is distinctively Christian as opposed to merely Jewish, is summed up in the knowledge of the Fatherhood of God. 'Father' is the Christian name for God."
That God is our Abba-Father is a truth we must cultivate for the very sake of our soul's health!!!
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