Most creatures on this planet live in families. No living creature--including us--can survive without some sort of relationship; without it we will die alone. It is family that builds generations, where relationships enrich our lives and insure the survival of our kind. We see God watching Adam and proclaims that "It is not good for man to be alone", and God created every living thing to live in some sort of relationship with an appropriate companion.
We read of God calling a man named Abram to be the "Father of a nation" that ideally will have God as the ultimate Father, with Abram as the human counterpart in of His plan. What makes it interesting--as well as scary--is that we are all created to be God's children, but we are also each different in some ways, but also are each able, if we pay attention to our Creator, to relate to each other. Basically, whether we like it or not, we are all members of one family, and we can, if we follow the rules, live together and build a society. We have often not done a good job of this. Too often we have paid too much attention to our superficial differences and not enough to our common humanity.
We tend to pay too much attention to ourselves and are not willing to learn from God and other people. (I cannot forget my husband's favorite description of conversation at its best: "If I know this, and you know that--think how much we both know!" That was one of the reasons we were able to live together and work together for 41 years, despite having grown up half a world apart.)
The NIV Bible uses the word "Father" (describing both God and our human fathers) 1103 times. It is a word that always implies a relationship, and one that is part of a hierarchy. God is the not only an authority figure, but one that implies a two-way relationship. When it is used in reference to a human father, again there is both an implication of authority but also a very close relationship with at least two other people: at some point, in order to be a father, there has to be a mother and a child. The human relationships we see in Scripture go the full scale from loving and caring for his family to being a total failure, which has the bad side of not doing what is required for the family to thrive. Very often a man who fails as a father also fails at anything else he is responsible for, be it a king or a servant. Some of the major disasters in the history of the Israel and Judah are traceable to men who do not live up to God's intention for them, which not only hurts them but also the other people who depend on him. When we can't get along with the others around us, whether they are our families or our neighbors or our enemies, we have failed in the task God created us for--not only during our own lifetime but in our influence on everybody who depends on us. We can create incredible havoc by not understanding our responsibility as creatures intended for good but allowed to mess up when we try to do it ourselves.
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