Our Abba, Father!
And Jesus said, “Abba, Father,
all things are possible for You.”
Mark 14:36
One of the obvious differences between Old Testament
and New
Testament is how God is referred to. In the Old
Testament, God is called the Father of the nation of Israel
or of certain individuals 15 times.
In the Gospels, God is referred to as Father 165 times!
Apostle Paul refers to God as Father 40 different times
in his epistles.
Jesus and most of His contemporaries
spoke Aramaic, a dialect
of Hebrew. The word they would have used for “father” was the
Aramaic word abba, a personal and intimate word. When the
New
Testament was recorded in Greek, most occurrences of abba were
translated with the Greek
word pater—but abba is preserved in
three instances: Mark 14:36, Romans 8:15-16, Galatians 4:6.
Each of these verses reflects a level of personal intimacy
which abba conveys. It has been suggested that abba is
the equivalent of the modern word “daddy”—the way a
child addresses his father.
When you address God as Father in prayer,
reflect on the fact that you are His child,
adopted into His forever family
(Galatians 4:4-7).
"A Christian is one
who
has God as his Father."
J. I. Packer
