“And His Name Shall be Called: Everlasting Father (Isaiah 9:6)" | 12/11/22
Isaiah 9:6 | 12/11/22 | Will DuVal
Few cinematic moments are more iconic, and more MISQUOTED, than the conversation between Darth Vader and Luke Skywalker at the end of “Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back”, in which Vader reveals what really happened to Luke’s father: I didn’t kill him; “I AM your father.”
Well, that may be the ONLY way in which JESUS is like Darth Vader, but it’s true nevertheless: both are VERY unexpected FATHERS. So much so in JESUS’ case, that some skeptics have even wondered if the prophet ISAIAH misquoted God’s revelation to him, when Isaiah identifies the coming Messiah as “Everlasting Father” in our text for this morning. And I do want to take this opportunity to thank Lily Stewart for sharing her artistic take on this name for Jesus with us.
We’ve been unpacking this text - really this VERSE; Isaiah ch9, v6 - for two weeks already, mining it for what it shows us about the Messiah, Jesus:
-In week ONE, Isaiah prophesied that he would be a “Wonderful Counselor”; that Jesus would be full of WISDOM and WONDERS (miracles).
-And LAST week, that he would be “Mighty God”; Jesus would be God in the flesh, and as such, he would be STRONG and SOVEREIGN.
But now we come to Isaiah’s THIRD, and most perplexing of ALL his names for the Messiah: he will be our “Everlasting Father”. And at first glance, this title seems to rule JESUS OUT, as a messianic candidate. For one thing, we know he was BORN; isn’t that the whole point of CHRISTMAS?! “Go tell it on the Mountain… that Jesus Christ was… [BORN!]”; how can Jesus be “everlasting” if he was BORN at a distinct time and place in history? So some have concluded - WRONGLY; like the 4th century heretic Arius - that Jesus must NOT be eternal. Arius forgot to read John ch1; the passage we’re gonna read in just a moment, that identifies Jesus as God’s eternal, PRE-incarnate, present-all-the-way-back-in-Creation WORD who became flesh, became human, for us.
But the SECOND half of Isaiah’s title here seems even MORE problematic; the idea that Jesus is FATHER. Now the heresies come FLOODING in! There’s the DaVinci Code heresy: maybe Jesus literally fathered a child, with Mary Magdalene, a secret royal bloodline passed down through the ages. That one’s just silly.
But how about the more popular ONENESS heresy - the idea that God is NOT Trinity, NOT “three in one”, but rather just ONE. Also called “modalism”, because it posits that “Father, Son, and Holy Spirit” are three different “MODES” or forms that the one God can take at any given time, but never at the SAME time. It would be fun to hear a modalist try and explain Jesus’baptism, where the Holy Spirit descends like a dove upon Jesus, while God the Father simultaneously declares: “This is my beloved Son”. God must have been doing an awful lot of shapeshifting on that day.
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And yet, we can poke fun, but there’s a reason why Isaiah 9:6 is every modalist’s favorite verse of the Bible: isn’t Isaiah confusing JESUS, the Son, the second person of the Trinity, with GOD, the FATHER, the first person of the Trinity, when he calls him “Everlasting Father” here? How do we make sense of it?
Well, I wanna suggest there are not one, but TWO possible ways we can make sense of this title for Jesus, actually. Both have been suggested for centuries now by orthodox interpreters - orthodox means “right doctrine”; it is the OPPOSITE of heresy; we wanna be ORTHODOX in our beliefs about Jesus. Moreover, both of them reveal something vitally TRUE about Jesus’ character and his calling; who Jesus IS and what He ACCOMPLISHED for us. We’ll spend the majority of our time on interpretation #1, because the majority of commentators favor it. But interpretation #2 is gonna blow your socks off; just wait!
We’re gonna be bouncing around again this morning, looking at a LOT of rich, biblical texts. But I tried to find one key passage per main point here to help illuminate each of these two interpretations of Jesus’ “Everlasting Father”hood for us. So we’ll start with Isaiah 9:6, but then we’re gonna consider Exodus 34:4-7 and what it tells us about fatherhood, and lastly, we’ll look at John 1, and what it reveals about JESUS’ paternity, in particular.
Would you STAND… Isaiah ch9,v6; Exodus 34:4-7; John 1:1-13:
“For to us a child is born,
to us a son is given;
and the government shall be upon his shoulder,
and his name shall be called
Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God,
Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace…
Exodus 34:
So Moses cut two tablets of stone like the first. And he rose early in the morning and went up on Mount Sinai, as the Lord had commanded him, and took in his hand two tablets of stone. 5 The Lord descended in the cloud and stood with him there, and proclaimed the name of the Lord. 6 The Lord passed before him and proclaimed, “The Lord, the Lord, a God merciful and gracious, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness, 7 keeping steadfast love for thousands, forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin, but who will by no means clear the guilty, visiting the iniquity of the fathers on the children and the children's children, to the third and the fourth generation.”
John 1:
In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. 2 He was in the beginning with God. 3 All things were made through him, and without him was not any thing made that was made. 4 In him was life, and the life was the light of men…
The true light, which gives light to everyone, was coming into the world. 10 He was in the world, and the world was made through him, yet the world did not know him. 11 He came to his own, and his own people did not receive him. 12 But to all who did receive him, who believed in his name, he gave the right to become children of God, 13 who were born, not of blood nor of the will of the flesh nor of the will of man, but of God.”
This is the word of God… Let’s pray…
What does it mean to call Jesus our “Everlasting Father”? For starters, it means that Jesus is…
#1 - PERPETUALLY PATERNAL toward us. But He’s even more than that: Jesus really is our “Forever Father”.
How so? If God the FATHER is… well, father… and Jesus is the SON. But if we just stop and think about it for 3 more seconds, we’ll realize that those familial descriptors for God and Jesus are pointing us to their relationship to ONE ANOTHER. When we call Jesus “the Son”, whose “son” do we mean? GOD’S Son, right? So it’s not a contradiction AT ALL to call Jesus both “Son” (of God the Father) AND to call him OUR “everlasting father”.
It’s like that riddle: “Two fathers and two sons go fishing. They each catch one fish. But they only catch THREE fish total. How’s it possible?” Because it’s me, BO, and Bill. I am both a father AND a son; I’m a father to Bo, but a son to Bill. Jesus is a son to God, but a father to us.
Someone might say, “Well wait a minute: if JESUS is our father, then does that mean that God the FATHER is NOT our father?” Didn’t Jesus teach us to PRAY: “Our Father, who art in heaven…”
But we ALL of us have MULTIPLE fathers, don’t we? You’ve got at LEAST two: a biological father and a spiritual one. Some of you have THREE: my other son, Elijah, has a biological father, an ADOPTED earthly father (me), and he has a heavenly father as well. So why NOT throw a second spiritual father - Jesus - in the mix as well; Heck - we need all the parenting we can GET! And praise God, Jesus is ALSO our father.
Now, it may feel awkward CALLING him that, because we’re so used to thinking about God the Father as “our Father”, and therefore, if Jesus is His Son, we may think of Jesus more often as our “elder brother”. And in fact, the Bible identifies him as such: Mark 3:35, Rom 8:29, Heb 2:11 & 17 all call Jesus our “brother”.
NOW it’s starting to sound like an episode of Jerry Springer: Jesus is both our FATHER… AND our brother?!
But it’s true! And I think the reason it’s not EMPHASIZED more frequently in Scripture is that God KNEW how confusing this was gonna be for us. That there would already be enough folks slipping into heresies like modalism with only TWO references in the Bible to Jesus as “father” - other than Isaiah 9:6, the only other place Jesus is explicitly called “father” is the very END of Scripture, in Revelation 21:7: “he who was seated on the throne [we know from ch4 that’s JESUS!] said… “I am the Alpha and the Omega, the beginning and the end [we know from ch1 that’s ALSO Jesus! Who then declares:]. …The one who conquers will have this heritage, and I will be his God and he will be my son.” So to all who conquer sin and death by the blood of the Lamb and the word of our testimony, Jesus promises to be our God, and to be our FATHER.
Now, this all begs perhaps an even DEEPER question: what does it even MEAN to BE a “father”? In a society in which words like “man” and “woman” seem to have lost all coherent meaning - perhaps you’ve seen Matt Walsh’s telling and terrifying documentary “What is a Woman?” - how much MORE so do the words “Mother” and “Father” lose their meaning.
But let’s make this even more personal this morning: in a world where so few of our “fathers” have actually BEEN fathers to us, how can we possibly understand what it means - what it’s SUPPOSED to mean - to be a father? Does it really just mean contributing a sperm to fertilize an egg? By that definition, Elijah’s biological father - who he’s never even MET - is MORE of a father to him than I am. Is that true? We know at a MINIMUM, God is our father in the sense of having given BIRTH to us. Malachi 2:10 asks, “Have we not all one Father? Has not one God created us?” But is that the ONLY sense in which God is our father, as creator? Is God the DEADBEAT dad of Deism, who cared just enough to create us, but can’t be troubled to actually parent us?
Some of us kept God at an arm’s length for many years, because we grew up hearing in church about “God, our father”, but then we went home and suffered the failed fathering of our earthly dads, and we concluded: “If THAT’S what it means to be a father, then it’s bad enough I’ve got ONE of them! I’m NOT interested in a SECOND!
Instead of realizing our NEED for a father, and if my earthly one was bad, then that’s all the MORE reason I need a perfect, HEAVENLY one!” And as with ANY concept - “man”, “woman”, “marriage”, “love”, “sin” - we can’t look around us for an accurate definition; we have to look to God’s WORD. How does HE define “fatherhood”?
Well, God does so by pointing to HIMSELF. God says, “If you want to know what a father is SUPPOSED to be like, look to ME.” And of all the many passages we could go to, for a snapshot of God’s fathering, Exodus 34 may be the best. Especially given the context. This is basically Israel’s ADOPTION ceremony, as God’s children.
I announced last week at the Annual meeting that we’re actually going to be spending much of next year, God willing, walking through the book of Exodus, so I don’t wanna spoil too much of it now. But here’s the quick context:
God fathered Adam and Eve, all the way back in Genesis 1&2.
But in ch3, they ran away from home (metaphorically speaking); they rejected God as father.
So God called a man, Abraham, and promised to be his Father and to make him the father of a multitude.
And God DID, while Abraham’s descendants - the Israelites - sojourned in Egypt. God multiplied them to the point that the Egyptian pharaoh began to FEAR how numerous the Israelites had become, and started killing and enslaving them.
So the Israelites cried out to God: “God- aren’t you our FATHER; save us!”
And God HEARD their cries, and he called a man MOSES to go to Egypt, and to say to Pharaoh (Ex 4:22): “‘Thus says the Lord, Israel is my firstborn son… “Let my son go…”
But Pharaoh didn’t listen, so God supernaturally intervened to punish his enemies, and deliver his children.
And as SOON as the Israelites were out of Egypt, God told them in Exodus 19: “if you will indeed obey my voice and keep my covenant, you shall be my treasured possession among all peoples’” (19:5-6). In other words, I’m ADOPTING you, but if you’re gonna be part of my family, then you better start ACTING like it!
So in ch20, God gave them the family rules: the 10 commandments. But while he was in the process of explaining the family expectations, the Israelites were already down at the foot of the mountain breaking the first THREE commandments. So Moses gets mad and throws the tablets down and breaks them, symbolizing what God’s children just did. And in ch34, which we read earlier, God RE-dictates His commandments again, but this time, in v5: “The Lord descended in the cloud and stood with [Moses] there, and proclaimed the name of the Lord.” God revealed to Moses, in perhaps the clearest terms in all of the Old Testament, who God IS; God’s own nature, His character. If you want to know who God is, in God’s OWN words, you turn to Exodus 34. And He reveals here not only what it means that He is our GOD, but what means that He is our FATHER. 7 attributes here of God’s fatherhood, revealed at Israel’s adoption ceremony:
First, He is MERCIFUL. “The Lord, the Lord, a God merciful…” Mercy is not getting what you deserve (in a good way). And a good father is FULL of mercy; he is MERCI-FUL.
When my son pees his pants, after I’ve encouraged him three times, “Hey son, lets try the potty”, but he told me, “No, I don’t need to go”, so I reminded him: “Okay, then you need to TELL me when you DO need to go, so I can help you,” but he STILL pees his pants: what he DESERVES is to walk around in his wet, smelly underwear, so maybe he’ll LISTEN to me next time. But a merciful father doesn’t GIVE him what he deserves; he lovingly corrects, but then wipes his son down and changes his undies anyway. See, the reason I can USE this example - they say be careful using yourself in sermon illustrations, because you don’t want to portray yourself as the hero; but I assure you: I wanted to leave Elijah in the pee pants last week; teach him a lesson! Lucky for my kids, they have a merciful MOTHER. Because I am NOT a perfect father.
But God is. And God’s mercy was on display as early as the Garden of EDEN. After He had warned Adam and Eve not to eat of the Tree of Knowledge, “for on that day, you shall surely DIE” - sin is disobeying God; the WAGES of sin (what one DESERVES for disobedience; Romans 6:23) is DEATH. And God is not a liar; so in a sense, Adam and Eve DID experience DEATH on that day: the death of their innocence, the death of Paradise, the death of ETERNITY, as we’ll discuss in point #2. But in another important sense, they DIDN’T receive the immediate, literal, physical death they deserved. God killed an animal instead - the world’s first sacrifice - to spiritually cover their sins and literally cover their naked bodies; God was MERCIFUL. Psalm 103:13 says, “As a father shows compassion to his children, so the Lord shows compassion to those who fear him.”
Exodus 34 continues: “The Lord, the Lord, a God merciful and gracious”. If mercy is not getting the bad thing you deserve, GRACE is getting the good thing you DON’T deserve. If God’s mercy means He is our PROTECTOR, from the evils we deserve, then God’s grace means He is also our PROVIDER, of the good gifts we don’t deserve, but so desperately need. Gifts like LIFE! The very AIR we breathe! Once again, God’s grace started in the Garden, when he made us from the dust and breathed LIFE into our bones; even before that, actually - it started on Day ONE of creation with “Let their be LIGHT!” And God has been giving us good, undeserved gifts ever since. He is SO gracious.
Thirdly, a good father is “slow to anger” with his children. He is PATIENT. My daughter - I’m getting ALL my kids in the sermon today - Ellery told me the score last week of a World Cup game I had recorded that she KNEW I wanted to watch. Ruined the game for me. Not cool. But she’s 6. And the way I reacted, you would’ve thought she just set the HOUSE on fire. You’d of thought she was Harry Kane, missing the penalty kick that lost us the game. I was NOT slow to anger.
But God is patient with us, HIS children. Remember when God said, “if you OBEY me, I’ll be your father and bless you”, well, God also warned them, in Deuteronomy 28: “if you WON’T obey me, I will PUNISH you;” I’ll send you OUT of the Promised Land, into exile. That was in the 15th c. BC. Anyone remember when God made good on THAT promise? His ominous promise, to PUNISH their DIS-obedience? It wasn’t until the SIXTH c. BC, in the Babylonian captivity. God put up with His children’s disobedience for 900 years! Such is his PATIENCE, his “slowness” to anger, with his children.
Fourth, a good father “abounds in steadfast love”. He is LOVING. Once again, we can almost hear the Father’s love for us in His voice as far back as Genesis 1, when he said, “It’s good,” “It’s good” on every other day of creation - about the sun, the moon, the stars, the earth - but on that SIXTH day, after He created US, God at last declared, “It is VERY good”; WHOLLY good. Because God set His special, personal LOVE on humanity above everything else in Creation. Jeremiah 31:3 says he loves us with “an everlasting love”. If God DIDN’T love us, our sin wouldn’t break his HEART so much. Just listen to God describe His love for His people, despite their sin, in the book of Hosea:
“When Israel was a child, I loved him,
and out of Egypt I called my son.
[But] The more they were called,
the more they went away;
they kept sacrificing to the Baals
and burning offerings to idols.
3 Yet it was I who taught [them] to walk;
I took them up by their arms,
but they did not know that I healed them.
4 I led them with cords of kindness,
with the bands of love…
and I bent down to them and fed them…
My people are bent on turning away from me…
[But] How can I give you up, O Ephraim [that’s a nickname for Israel]?
How can I hand you over, O Israel?
…My heart recoils within me;
my compassion grows warm and tender.
9 I will not execute my burning anger;
I will not again destroy Ephraim;
for I am God and not a man…
and I will not come in wrath.” (Hos 11:1-9)
God says: “I am GOD, and not a MAN”; any other earthly, HUMAN father would have given up on y’all by now. But not me. After 900 years of disobedience, you STILL haven’t exhausted the depths of my mercy and steadfast, never-ending, unconditional LOVE for you.
Because God’s love is related #5 - to his “FAITHFULNESS”. A good father is faithful; he is devoted, LOYAL, thru thick and thin, in the good times and the bad. Psalm 36:5 declares, “Your love, O LORD, reaches to the heavens, your faithfulness to the skies.” It is INFINITE, everlasting. King David said, “Even my [own] father and mother [my EARTHLY parents] have forsaken me, but the Lord will take me in.” (Ps 27:10) I saw a meme on Facebook last week put it this way: 3 things God promises he’ll never do: he’ll never give you up, he’ll never let you down; he’ll never run around and desert you… God is the OG RICK-ROLLER! Because He is faithful.
And BECAUSE He is faithful, #6 - He is also FORGIVING. God says, “I KEEP my steadfast love”; HOW? How is God able to remain loving and faithful, to a bunch of children who are CONSTANTLY disobeying Him? v7: By “forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin”.
As the Psalmist asked: “If you, O Lord, should count iniquities… who could stand? [God, if you kept a record of wrongs, and counted them against us, NONE of us could stand in your presence, much less remain your beloved CHILDREN. But then he reminds us of the GOOD news…]
4 But with you there is forgiveness… And [God] will redeem Israel
from all his iniquities.” (130:3-4,8)
But lastly, #7 - a good father is also JUST. He is FAIR. He “will by no means clear the guilty”. And that means when necessary, a good father will DISCIPLINE you. Proverbs 3:12 assures us that “the Lord DISCIPLINES him whom he loves, as a father the son in whom he delights.” It’s not LOVING for me, as a father, to watch my son hit my daughter, and just sit back and do nothing about it. Not just for HER sake, but for HIS! My love for him compels me to want the BEST for him, and it is NOT best for him to grow up thinking it’s okay to hit women! So a good father will HATE the sin that he sees in his children, and he’ll do everything in His power to try and DISCIPLINE that sin out of them.
So to summarize: what does it mean to be a father?
A father is a merciful protector, a gracious provider, he is patiently “slow to anger”, abounding in steadfast love; he is FAITHFUL, he is FORGIVING, but he is FAIR, in his discipline.
Brothers and sisters: this is who our God IS. He is our perfect heavenly FATHER.
SO… when Isaiah prophesied that the Messiah would be God’s SON - “for unto us a SON is given” - but that he would ALSO be our “Everlasting Father”, he’s essentially saying: “Like father, like SON.” As Jesus Himself put it in John 10:30 “I and the Father are one.” When his disciple Phillip asked in John 14, “Lord, show us the Father”, Jesus replied: ““Have I been with you so long, and you still do not know me, Philip? Whoever has seen ME has seen the Father.” Elsewhere, the Bible says Jesus is “the exact imprint of [God’s] nature” (Heb 1:3), Jesus is “the image of the invisible God” (Col 1:15); “No one has ever seen God [the FATHER; but JESUS…] has made him known” (Jn 1:18).
So if GOD is perfect in his paternity toward us, we should expect the SAME of His Son, Jesus. They say “the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree”, and that could not be truer of Jesus:
Jesus was MERCIFUL. He was constantly helping hurting folks: healing the sick, feeding the hungry, welcoming the outcasts; it earned him the pejorative nickname “friend of SINNERS”! Such was his MERCY.
Jesus was GRACIOUS. If we had read the rest of the John 1 passage we opened with, v16 says of Jesus that “from his fullness we have all received, grace upon grace”. And the greatest GRACE - the best “undeserved GIFT” of ALL that Jesus offers us - is eternal LIFE. “It is by GRACE that we have been saved through faith… Not by works; it is the GIFT of God” (Eph 2:8). JESUS is the gift of God; “God so loved the world that he gave - as a GIFT - his only begotten Son that whoever believes in Him should not perish, but have… WHAT?” EVERLASTING life.
Jesus is PATIENT. Jesus is coming back to judge the world; to right every wrong and to reward every right. It’s gonna be a glorious day, at least for those who have trusted in Him. So what’s he waiting for? 2 Peter 3:9 answers: “The Lord is not slow to fulfill his promise… but is patient… not wishing that any should perish, but that all should reach repentance.” Jesus is waiting for even MORE followers who will repent, and trust in Him, and be saved.
Jesus is LOVING. He said, “Greater love has no one than this, that he lay down his life for his friends.” (Jn 15:13) I guess that makes Jesus’s love even GREATER than the greatest love, cuz HE laid down HIS life, not for his friends, but for his ENEMIES! “While we were YET SINNERS, [rebels against God; children of WRATH, Ephesians 2 calls us] Christ died for us” (Rom 5:8). Such is his love.
Jesus is FAITHFUL. It’s his NAME in Revelation 19:11; he is called “Faithful”. Just like Isaiah had foretold of the Messiah: “faithfulness shall be the belt of his loins” (11:5). Jesus was faithful to His FATHER - Heb 3:6 “Christ is faithful over God's house as a son” - and he is faithful to US as his children - 2 Tim 2:13, even “if we are faithless, [Christ] remains faithful, for he cannot deny himself.” It’s in Jesus’ very NATURE to be faithful.
Jesus is FORGIVING. He’s not just forgiv-ING; Jesus is himself our forgive-NESS! Ephesians 1:7 says, “In him [JESUS] we have redemption through his blood, the forgiveness of our trespasses”. So Ephesians 4:32 commands us to “forgive one another, as God in Christ forgave you.” 1 John 2:2 calls Jesus “the propitiation for our sins”; he is God’s once-for-all-time atoning sacrifice that purchased our everlasting forgiveness.
But lastly, Jesus is JUST. And he will one day return to judge the living and the dead. To separate the sheep from the goats, the wheat from the chaff, the SAVED from the DAMNED.
Friends: Jesus is our merciful, gracious, patient, loving, faithful, forgiving, fair… EVERLASTING FATHER. Even the BEST earthly father will not only let you down from time to time, but he will eventually LEAVE you. He’s just a TEMPORARY Father. But just like God the Father, Jesus also promises never to leave or forsake us; he said: “Behold, I am with you always, to the end of the age.” (Matt 28:20) Jesus is our FOREVER father.
Now, I could just end right there, and I think you would have gotten your money’s worth this morning. Interpretation #1 was worth the cost of admission. Jesus is perpetually paternal, our forever father. But I think interpretation #2 is just as valid, and perhaps even more meaningful, though I have less time to spend on it. But here it is: to call Jesus our “Everlasting Father” COULD mean he is perfectly fatherly toward us, like God; but it could ALSO mean…
#2 - He is our SOURCE OF SALVATION. Our SOURCE of SALVATION.
There are a number of commentators who prefer this second interpretation, but I’ll let Warren Wiersbe explain; he writes: “‘Father of eternity’ is a better translation [of the Hebrew name ‘Abi-ad’]. Among the Jews, the word father means ‘originator’ or ‘source’. For example, Satan is the ‘father [originator] of lies’ (Jn 8:44). [In other words,] if you want anything eternal, you must get it from Jesus Christ; He is the ‘Father of eternity’.” (1162-3)
The great Charles Spurgeon, similarly interpreted: “Jesus is so surely and essentially eternal, that he is here pictured as the source and Father of eternity.” (https://www.spurgeon.org/resource-library/sermons/his-name-the-everlasting-father/#flipbook/ ).
Consider with me, quickly:
We were MADE for eternal life. Romans 5 says that death only entered the world through SIN. That we were MADE to live in Paradise with God FOREVER.
But our FIRST “father”, Adam, was the source, the originator, of SIN, and its rightful consequence: DEATH. Eternal life: interrupted.
But we’ve never quite gotten OVER it, have we? We all experience this deep, profound LONGING for life to mean more than just 70 or 80 or 90 years and then you’re gone; that’s what ECCLESIASTES was all about, that we studied together this fall: “God has put eternity into man's heart” (3:11).
But for thousands of years, it was a desire unfulfilled.
Until John ch1. When JESUS, the Word of God, became FLESH, and dwelt among us. He is our “father”, our SOURCE; the source of EVERYTHING that exists: “All things were made through him”. But in a unique way, for humanity, Jesus is our source of LIFE: “In him was life, and the life was the light of men”. And what KIND of life did he “originate” for us? “Whosoever believes in him shall no LONGER perish, but have… what? [EVERLASTING life]”.
“To all who received him, who believed in his name, [Jesus] gave the right to become children of God.” He’s our FATHER. And he’s the father of ETERNITY - eternal life; “if you want anything eternal, you’ve GOTTA get it from Jesus”.
Have you gotten it from him? Salvation… eternal life? Friends, we ALL need a father. We ALL need mercy, grace, patience, love, faithfulness, forgiveness, discipline. But more than ANYTHING, we need SAVING. From our SIN. And Jesus, the “Father of Eternity”, is offering it to you this morning. Will you receive it? Will you receive HIM, as your “Everlasting Father”?