Themes in 1 John 1 (1): The Fatherhood of God

The Fatherhood of God and the Sonship of men. 

In verse 2 God is spoken of as "the Father." 

(1.) The Old Testament conception of Fatherhood is national. "Israel is my son, even my first born." (Ex. iv. 22, 23.) The relationship is still national, not personal, when God addresses the Hebrew king, the representative head of the nation, thus: "Thou art my son, this day (of solemn consecration) I have begotten thee." (Ps. ii. 7.) The individual Israelite did not dare to call himself a son of God. The Jews were shocked at what they deemed blasphemy when Jesus called himself the Son of God, and they took up stones to stone him.

 (2.) The Gentile idea of sonship is purely physical. Homer calls Zeus or Jupiter, "father of gods and men." To this physical conception Paul alludes on Mars Hill when he quotes a Greek poet as saying, "For we are also his offspring." 

(3.) But in the Gospels and Epistles the conception of sonship is spiritual and personal, being limited to those only who have been born from above, born of the Spirit. To such has the Son of God given the right, the privilege, the prerogative "to become the sons of God, even to them that believe on his name." (John i. 12.) Spiritual sonship relates to confidence, obedience, love, holiness and a predominant similarity of moral character, hating what He hates and loving what He loves. There is nothing saving in either national or physical sonship. It must be personal and spiritual: "Ye must be born again." The denial of this is the taproot of modern liberalism, which rejects those Scriptures which teach that the wicked are children of the devil. (Matt xiii. 38; John viii. 44; Acts xiii. 1O; 1 John iii. 10.)