God's Identity as Father: Why does it Matter?

In recent years, both in pop culture and politics, we’ve seen claims that seek to undermine God’s identity as Father and mislead those who may not know Him or be familiar with teaching on the matter. Two examples are Ariana Grande’s song “God is a Woman” and, more recently, Texas Senate candidate James Talarico’s claim that God is nonbinary. These statements are not harmless and they sow division and confusion among many. When we disregard Jesus’s revelation that God is Father and He is the Son, we are disrupting the unity that God wishes for His people and being disobedient to the revelation that He has given us.

When Jesus Christ came and assumed our human nature, He chose to become a man to reveal something about Himself, His Father, and the way that we, His creatures, relate to Him. A father is one who provides for his children and that is what God does for us, and so He chose to come among us as a male to represent this to us. In Jesus’s prayer to His Father in the Gospel of John, He prays that all may be one just as He and the Father are one, so that they may also be one in the Father and the Son so that the world may believe that the Father has sent the Son (John 17:21). When we reject the teaching that God is Father, we break this unity and instead seek to divide the family of God and throw it into confusion. God wants His children to be happy and united to Him and in order for this to truly happen, we must accept our identity as children of the Father, not of a God who acts as mother or of a nonbinary God. When we accept this and begin to see God as He intended, we can properly bring Him to others, fulfilling Jesus’s wish that the world might believe that the Father has sent Him.

We must pray for the grace to be obedient to the teachings and revelations given to us by Christ, for they are only given to us for our good. We must also pray for those who are misguided and want to teach things about God that are not true, that they might be converted and come to see the beauty of the truth that God is Father.