A Father of the Fatherless Is a Job Title God Gave Himself

A man told me the hardest part is not the absence. It is that he does not know what he is missing.

He said other people talk about their fathers the way you would talk about a country you have been to. They have opinions about it. They complain about it. They have a picture in their head and they assume everybody else has one too.

He does not have a picture. He was not abandoned dramatically and there is no story with a shape to it. There was simply never a man in the house, and by the time he was old enough to wonder about it, wondering had nothing to work with.

He said the thing that gets him is not sadness. It is that when he hears the word father he gets a blank, and that when people at church say things about God as a Father he is being handed a word he cannot decode.

I want to be careful in this room. I had a father, and what I carry is his silence and not his absence, and those are different and I will not pretend otherwise.

What I can do is show what the psalm actually does with the word, which is something more useful than a feeling.

It is an office rather than a mood

Here is the verse.

A father of the fatherless, and a judge of the widows, is God in his holy habitation. (Psalm 68:5, King James Version)

Read the shape of that sentence. It is a list of offices. Father of the fatherless. Judge of the widows. Those are functions in a society, and both of them are jobs that somebody in that world was legally supposed to do for people who had nobody.

So the verse is not saying God feels fatherly. It is saying He holds the post, and the post has duties attached to it.

That is far more useful to somebody with a blank than a sentiment would be, because a person with no picture cannot generate a feeling on cue. What they can do is find out what the office involves.

And notice the location: in his holy habitation. The post is held from somewhere. It is not a role God plays when He is in the mood; it is where He lives and what He is.

You are dealing with somebody who holds an office rather than a mood. Psalm 68:5 lists a father of the fatherless as a post held in his holy habitation. It is the same Spirit, Romans 8:15 called the Spirit of adoption, who does the legal work of a person being placed in a family.

The next verse says what the office does

The psalm does not leave the title abstract. It says what the holder of it actually does, in the very next line.

God setteth the solitary in families: he bringeth out those which are bound with chains. (Psalm 68:6)

Setteth the solitary in families. That is the duty attached to the title, and it is not a private arrangement between a man and God. It is placement, into a family, with other people in it.

Which is worth saying to anybody who has been told that God will be their Father in a way that means they should not need anybody. That is not what the psalm says. The verse describes God's fathering as putting a solitary person into a room with people in it.

I have watched that happen slowly in ordinary churches, over years, and it never looks like a miracle from outside. It looks like a man being asked to help with something and then being asked again.

You are placed in a family rather than left in a private arrangement. Psalm 68:6 says God setteth the solitary in families, and it is the Spirit of God, 1 Corinthians 12:13 by whom we are all baptized into one body, who does the placing that no individual invitation adds up to.

David says it about a situation that had not happened to him

There is a line in the Psalms that people assume is autobiographical and probably is not, which makes it more interesting rather than less.

When my father and my mother forsake me, then the LORD will take me up. (Psalm 27:10)

Take me up is the language of picking up something that has been put down. It is a physical image about somebody gathering up what has been left.

And Paul quotes a promise from the Old Testament into a letter, and he keeps the family language rather than softening it:

And will be a Father unto you, and ye shall be my sons and daughters, saith the Lord Almighty. (2 Corinthians 6:18)

I will be a Father unto you. Future tense in the quotation, present in the relationship, and stated as an undertaking rather than as a description of a feeling.

For a man with no template, an undertaking is worth more than a picture. He does not need to be able to imagine it. He needs to know what has been undertaken.

You have an undertaking rather than a picture you are failing to form. 2 Corinthians 6:18 says I will be a Father unto you as a stated undertaking. It is His Spirit, Ephesians 1:13 sealing us after we believed, who is named as the seal on it.

The word Jesus uses is not an abstraction

There is one line where Jesus deals with this directly and the word He chooses is domestic.

I will not leave you comfortless: I will come to you. (John 14:18)

The word behind comfortless is orphanos. Orphaned. It is the exact word, and He uses it about people who are about to lose Him.

And then in the same passage He says how the promise will be kept: I will pray the Father, and he shall give you another Comforter, that he may abide with you for ever.

So the answer to being orphaned, in His own words, is the Spirit given to abide. Not a feeling supplied. A Person given, to stay.

That is a template of a kind. Not a picture of a man in a house, which nobody can hand you. Something present, that stays, that is described as a Comforter, which is a word about what somebody does rather than about how they look.

You are not left orphaned, and Jesus used that exact word about it. John 14:18 says I will not leave you comfortless: I will come to you. It is the Holy Spirit, named four verses earlier as another Comforter given to abide for ever, who is the answer that promise names.