The Heart of Jesus Reveals the Father of Mercies
God’s Heart for You
“What comes into our minds when we think about God is the most important thing about us.” So begins A. W. Tozer’s book The Knowledge of the Holy.1 Christ’s heart is to clarify what God is actually like, instead of what we expect him to be like. I am trying to help us leave behind our natural, fallen intuitions that God is distant and cold and to step into the freeing knowledge that he is gentle and lowly in heart.
But our study focuses on the Son of God. What about God the Father?
Should the Son as gentle and lowly be “what comes into our minds” but should we think of the Father as something else? Is the Father a little less gentle, maybe?
There seems to be a common idea among Christians that the Son is the nicest member of the Trinity. The Father loves us too, of course. But he’s a little colder. More stern. The Son is the really loving one.
But this is not what the Bible teaches. It is true that the Father’s wrath was satisfied by the Son’s work on the cross. But the Father’s heart is just as filled up with love for you as the Son’s. The Son’s work on the cross opened the way for the Father’s love to flow down to us, but it did not increase the Father’s love for us.
The Heart of Jesus
Dane Ortlund
Featuring short, easy-to-read chapters and helpful explanations, this simplified edition of Gentle and Lowly takes readers into the depths of Christ’s tender heart for sinners and sufferers.
The Bible is clear that the Father’s heart is just as full of love for his people as the Son’s heart. In 2 Corinthians 1:3, for example, we read:
Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of mercies and God of all comfort.
“The Father of mercies.” As Paul opens 2 Corinthians he gives us a window into what came into his mind when he thought about God.
Yes, the Father is just and righteous. Perfectly so. Without such a truth, we would have no hope that all wrongs would one day be put right.
But what is his heart?
What flows out from his deepest being? Mercies.
He is “the Father of mercies.” Just as a father has children who reflect who he is, the divine Father has mercies that reflect him. There is a family resemblance between the Father and mercy.
To speak of God the Father as the Father of mercies is to say that he multiplies compassionate mercies to his needful, wayward, messy, fallen, wandering people. This is the Bible’s way of taking us into who God the Father is. A correct understanding of the triune God is not that of a Father whose central disposition is judgment and a Son whose central disposition is love. The heart of both is one and the same; this is, after all, one God, not two. Theirs is a heart of redeeming love. This is not a love that softens his justice and wrath but a love that beautifully satisfies his justice and wrath.
The Bible is clear that the Father’s heart is just as full of love for his people as the Son’s heart.
What should come into our minds when we think about God? The triune God is three in one, a fountain of endless mercies. These mercies flow down to us and abundantly provide for us in all of our many needs and failures and wanderings. This is who he is. Father no less than Son, and Son no less than Father.
Beyond what we are aware of at any given moment, the Father’s tender care envelopes us with pursuing gentleness, sweetly governing every last detail of our lives. He orders the flutter of the leaf that falls from the tree and the breeze that knocked it free (Matt. 10:29–31), and he controls the bomb that evil minds detonate (Amos 3:6; Luke 13:1–5). But through and underneath and fueling all that washes into our lives, great and small, is the heart of a Father. The Father of mercies.
Some of us had great dads growing up. Others of us were horribly mistreated by them. Whatever the case, the good in our earthly dads is a faint pointer to the true goodness of our heavenly Father, and the bad in our earthly dads is the opposite of who our heavenly Father is. He is the Father of whom every human father is a shadow.
In John 14, Philip asks Jesus to show the disciples the Father (John 14:8). Jesus responds: “Have I been with you so long, and you still do not know me, Philip? Whoever has seen me has seen the Father” (John 14:9).
“Whoever has seen me has seen the Father.”
Jesus Christ is the visible manifestation of the invisible God (2 Cor. 4:4, 6; Heb. 1:3). In him we see heaven’s heart walking around on two legs in time and space. When we see the heart of Christ throughout the four Gospels, we are seeing the very compassion and tenderness of who God himself most deeply is.
As you consider the Father’s heart for your own life, let him be the Father of mercies to you. He is not cautious in his tenderness toward you. He multiplies mercies for your every need, and there is nothing he would rather do. “Remember,” said the Puritan John Flavel, “that this God is your Father, and is more tender toward you than you are, or can be, toward yourself.”2 In other words, your gentlest treatment of yourself is not as gentle as the way your heavenly Father handles you.
The heart of Christ is gentle and lowly. And that is the perfect picture of who the Father is. “The Father himself loves you” (John 16:27).
Notes:
- A. W. Tozer, The Knowledge of the Holy (New York: HarperCollins, 1961), 1.
- John Flavel, Keeping the Heart: How to Maintain Your Love for God (Fearn, UK: Christian Heritage, 2012), 57. I have slightly updated the language.
This article is adapted from The Heart of Jesus: How He Really Feels about You by Dane C. Ortlund.
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