If you want to emulate someone, you learn about them. You learn their behaviors, their attitudes, their way of talking to people. You learn about who they are.
So it stands to reason that, in order to be a good father, we would emulate the father.
Through the Bible, God gives us a blueprint for being a solid father. He starts early, and demonstrates often.
On the sixth day of creation, God made man. But He did not make man by just any blueprint -- He said. "let us make man in our image. ... " (Gen. 1:26a ESV, emphasis added) We were imprinted with the characteristics of the Holy Trinity from the beginning. And because of that, we -- mankind as a whole -- knew God from the moment we were born. But at the moment of conception, man (our parents) implanted into us the nature of sin, instantly separating us from God, but not from the characteristics He imparted to us when we were designed to begin with.
Love
From the beginning, God loved us. He created us as the rules of the world He created. He gave man dominion over the Earth: " ... And let them have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over the livestock and over all the earth and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth." (Gen. 1:26b ESV)So we see that a good father loves his children by trusting them with responsibility.
God loved man enough that he saw his need for a companion. In Genesis 2:18 (ESV), God said, "it is not good that the man should be alone; I will make him a helper fit for him."
So God took a rib from the man and made from it the first woman. And the Bible is clear on the subject of marriage between not just the first man and the first woman, but for all men and women: "Therefore a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and they shall become one flesh." (Gen. 2:24 ESV, emphasis added). They are, from then on, spiritually one.
God shows us here that men, and by extension fathers, are to love their wives sacrificially.
Finally, we see God's ultimate example of love in His Son, Jesus Christ. His ultimate goal, of course, was to die as the ultimate living, spotless sacrifice, replacing the need to sacrifice animals to atone for our sins.
Work is a part of life
When God removed Adam and Eve from the Garden, he had already instilled in them the spirit of work. Many think this is the point at which man was required to work, and to toil away; however, God had given man the responsibility of work long before they were banished from Eden.We get a hint of this before God created man -- before Eden itself had even been created, as a matter of fact -- in Geneisis 2:5 (ESV): "When no bush of the field was yet in the land and no small plant of the field had yet sprung up—for the Lord God had not caused it to rain on the land, and there was no man to work the ground" (emphasis added). God intended, from the start, that man would work. In the Garden, where the land was fertile, the animals docile, and childbirth an easy process, work was to be seen less as a means of survival and more a means of obeying and worshiping God. And it still is; Adam and Eve just made it a much more difficult process, as we will see later.
God gave man a pioneering spirit, and an entrepreneurial spirit. Neither of these are needed in any way if work was never intended. And they had to have been there from the start; nowhere in the Bible, after the fall of man in Genesis 3, did God ever say, "let us change the spirit of man, because clearly we goofed the first time." That would not be possible, because God is perfect. And through his own perfect, he is unable to make a mistake in His creation! One could argue that the fact that man fell proves an imperfect God, but that argument ignores that God built into man the ability to choose his own destiny. The single, most perfect part of the creation of man is man's free will. For without it, we are all automatons, and without it God's creation becomes pointless, from the human perspective at least. We cannot know why God chose to create us, but we know He did, and we know from the Bible that we were created as we are from the very beginning. And that absolutely included a need to work.
And, so, it is the role of the father to foster that desire, and that need, to work. For the Bible itself instructs us to not care for those who will not work: "For even when we were with you, we would give you this command: If anyone is not willing to work, let him not eat." (2 Thessalonians 3:10)
Discipline
Man got himself kicked out of the Garden of Eden. There is no other way to look at it. It happened, and man paid a heavy, heavy toll. All because a woman (men, you are not off the hook here; you will see more about why in just a moment, but remember this: Eve was made from a part of Adam) allowed herself to be deceived by Satan, who that day took on the form of a serpent. God saw it go down. Don't be fooled by his call out to Adam, "Where are you?" (Gen 3:9b ESV) He heard it, he saw it, and he let it happen because he loved Adam. One of the greatest gifts a parent can give their child is to allow them to mess up. God allowed it, and then God did exactly what a father should do: he disciplined immediately, and the consequence was in proportion to the violation.God's admonishment of Adam carried with it many levels. First, God had made Adam the head of the family. He was created first, and woman was made from Adam. But Adam made three enormous mistakes in eating the fruit from the forbidden tree: first, he knew what fruit it was because he was standing right there next to Eve when she was deceived (" ... she also gave some to her husband who was with her, and he ate." -- Gen. 3:6b, ESV, emphasis added). Second, he tried to pass blame to his wife, who he was supposed to protect as head of the family ("The man said, 'The woman whom you gave to be with me, she gave me fruit of the tree, and I ate.'" -- Gen. 3:12 ESV, emphasis added). Finally, Adam did so before an omniscient God, who knew their sin before it ever happened.
And, so, God made childbirth painful for the woman and ordered her to obey her husband (in this way, he was saying among many other things, "check with him next time someone tries to talk you into anything") (Gen. 3:16 ESV). But for the man, it went further. Genesis 3:17-19 (ESV) may be but a few short lines, but they carry with them thousands of years of pain, toil and even war for mankind. God pointed out to man his weakness in not leading his wife ("Because you have listened to the voice of your wife ... "), and gave man ground that would not yield such food as he had known in the Garden:
cursed is the ground because of you;But this was not God giving up on man. Quite the contrary, this was God setting up man for his own salvation! This set into motion all that would take place leading to the coming of the Lord, Jesus Christ!
in pain you shall eat of it all the days of your life;
thorns and thistles it shall bring forth for you;
and you shall eat the plants of the field.
By the sweat of your face
you shall eat bread,
till you return to the ground,
for out of it you were taken;
for you are dust,
and to dust you shall return.
A Hope for Tomorrow
Finally, and quite simply, we all need a hope for tomorrow. That is why Christ came the first time, and it is the reason he has promised to return again. We have been given the chance of salvation because God loved us from the start and set in motion the events leading to His own Son dying to conquer both sin and death once and for all for all those who believe He is the Son of God, who believe He died specifically for their own sins, and who choose to welcome Him into their hearts as their Savior.The father is the spiritual head of the household. It is a mother's job to pass along knowledge of God and Christ, as well, but the ultimate responsibility lies with the father.
It is a father's responsibility to pass on to his children the message of the Gospel, along with all these other lessons, so his children, in turn, do the same.
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