God the Father is Father to All Who Trust in Jesus

When Mary Magdalene got her view of the Risen Savior, several great truths were impressed upon her.

Christ called His people His Brethren, and declared His ascension to His Father. Indeed, the relationship between the First and Second Persons of the Trinity so completely fills up the ideal of Father and Son - the Son's perfect obedience and love for the Father, and the Father's love and exaltation of the Son - that all our human father/son relationships seem but pale imitations.

Yet the Lord Jesus declares that His Father is our Father - and in the context of His glorious relationship with His Father, our relationship must be of a remarkable and unexpected character.

Though the world likes to think that we are all God's children, in fact rebels and sinners are children of wrath and not of God.

God declares that He has chosen His children from before the foundation of the world. It is to those who receive Christ in all His fullness that He gives the Right to be called the Children of God. It is by the Father's will, and nobody elses, that we are made His children, and He becomes our Father.

This is all according to the good pleasure of His will. Imagine: God delights in His Children and works out His desire to receive us by adoption.

But how can we ever live up to the standard of obedience and love that His Son has exhibited?

The Scripture says we are "accepted in the Beloved" - that is, Christ's perfections as a Son are transferred to us, and the Father accepts us as lovely and desirable as Sons in His Only Begotten Son!

The Savior's blood has made us perfectly fit to be God's Sons, and obtain all the entitlements of Christ the Son!