Why we need to see God as both Father and Mother – Our Identity: In God, Part 2

The Bible says that God is not just our creator, but our parent.  The Bible uses both Father and Mother imagery for God. We normally call him God, the Father.  But God does not have a gender.  God is not actually male.  God is not human. God is a Spirit. 

We could be missing out on the ways in which God loves us in a fully feminine way.  And that has ramifications for our identity.

For example, there are numerous times when God is described in the Bible symbolically as having a womb, such as Deuteronomy 32:18, “You forget the rock who begot you, unmindful of the God who gave birth to you.” Consider what is perhaps the most common metaphor of salvation: being born again.  We find that in John 3:3, when Jesus met one of the religious leaders, Nicodemus, under cover of night, and he said, “you must be born again.” The central salvation metaphor is feminine!  Did you ever think about that? 

Sometimes God is described using feminine terms in other ways, and these verses tell us about what God is like. 

In Isaiah 66:13 God says, “As a mother comforts her child, so I will comfort you; you shall be comforted in Jerusalem.” In Matthew 23:37 and Luke 13:34 Jesus says, “Jerusalem, Jerusalem…How often have I desired to gather your children together as a hen gathers her brood under her wings, and you were not willing!”

Why does it matter that we see God as both mother and father?  Because our core identity is not rooted only in God as masculine father, but also in God as feminine mother.  Fathers and mothers each have unique tendencies.  Think about your own fathers and mothers and how different they are or were.  God is both.  If we only think of God as masculine, we are missing something very important, and that has great implications for our identity. We would do well to rest our lives on God as both mother and father, the perfect loving mother and father.  This is an important image because none of us had perfect mothers and fathers.  None of us are perfect mothers and fathers.  Yet God is.  It can be very difficult for those of us who had difficult experiences with our own parents to view God as the perfect parent.  So it starts with a decision to trust in God that he is not only creator, in whose image we are made, but also the loving perfect parent we long for.  We know how important stable family is for children to develop their identity as loved, cared for.  We have that stable parent in God.  He loves and cares for us like no other, in both the masculine and feminine ways of parents.