God the Father Almighty

Tiago Santos opens the first line of the Creed: we believe in one God, the Father Almighty. This breakout session looks at what the church confesses about God the Father, Maker of heaven and earth, and why the Creed begins there.

Tiago Santos, “God the Father Almighty,” breakout session, Nicea Conference 2025, Istanbul.

Opening prayer

Anyway let’s pray together. And then we I want to be able to share with you a few thoughts from the word of God this afternoon. Dear heavenly Father, I thank you for the opportunity of being here with my brothers and sisters and for this time that we have a fellowship and learning so many years ago. Your word was all over this land and we know that where your word is your spirit is also is. So we ask that your spirit may speak to us through the word in these sessions in this time that we have together in this conference and that the word may flourish not only in this land but in everyone’s who is attending this conference hearts and everywhere where they go. We pray this in Jesus name. Amen.

Brothers and sisters, I will today work with you a more pastoral devotional word. And by the way, just before I forget, you already know that I’m not an American or English, so you will have to put up with my Brazilian accent. And I hope I can make myself clear enough so I will not be on the way of God’s spirit in the word.

But yes my intention here is to bring a more devotional word as an encouragement to you. So if you have your Bible with you might want to open on Psalm 73. And I want to connect the parts of this psalm that I’m going to read with you with the declaration that we have in the creed. We believe in God the Father.

We believe in God the Father

We believe in God the Father. So the first thing is that the creed is a as a confession is a confession of faith that the word we believe is so important in a creed like this because it’s the gathering of men of God who not only defined the limits of dogma of doctrine but also confessed it as their faith and that’s what how it is important for us to really start a confession of faith with the idea of believing So faith is the beginning, is the being the end and is the end of Christian life and the creed is calling all of us to affirm that God is our Father. You see it’s important that we understand that by denying that Jesus is the eternal Son of God, Arius was also denying the eternal fatherhood of God.

So just as Nicea defended the eternal paternity against Arius, I want to see with you as Asaph, the author of this psalm, rediscover the fatherly goodness of the almighty Father in the face of evil, anchoring his faith in a sovereign God. You see, believing that it serves as an anchor that will guard against heresies.

heresies that may distort the fatherly care much like the personal doubts that sometimes assails believers just like we see in Psalm 73. Scripture will speak of the fatherhood of God in many ways. The Father is the source of all things in Scripture. God is described as the Father of Adam. He is the described as the father of angels. God declares that the people of Israel is his first born and that he would be the Father of the descendant of the of King David. And the Bible even says that those who believe in Christ receive the spirit of adoption and cry out Abba, Father. But is this the only thing that the Bible means when the Bible calls God the Father? No. Because he is the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. Jesus said in John 17 that before the world existed, he was in glory with the Father. The Bible speaks of an ontological fatherhood of God. Not just a resemblance but a fact. An external and temporal form of fatherhood in Scriptures is grounded in the point that the eternal internal fatherhood of God in Christ from all eternity. God the Father of the Son is the Father of the Son. So it only makes sense to say that God is the Father because we have the Son.

So as just the way we transmit to our children our human nature, God also communicates his divine nature to the begotten Son, God of God. And because he’s the almighty Father, he fully imparts everything of himself to the Son. His divinity, his power, his eternity, and his glory. The same glory that Jesus shared with the Father before the world existed. True God of true God. So my point is if God is fundamentally the Father, then the ultimate reality of all existence is the relationship of love between the Father and the Son. And I want to reflect with you how we confess our faith in God’s paternity in the face of a broken world like the one we live in. And to do this, I would like to read portions of Psalm 73 with you.

Psalm 73

So here’s what the word of God says.

Truly God is good to Israel, to those who are pure in heart. But as for me, my feet had almost stumbled, my steps had nearly slipped. For I was envious of the arrogant when I saw the prosperity of the wicked. For they have no pains until death. Their bodies are fat and sleek. They’re not in trouble as others are. They’re not stricken like the rest of mankind. Therefore, pride is their necklace. Violence covers them as garment. Their eyes swell out through fatness. Their hearts overflow with follies. They scoff and speak with malice. Loftily they threaten oppression. They set their mouth against the heavens and their tongue struts through the earth. Therefore his people turn back to them and find no fault in them. And they say, “How can God know? Is there knowledge in the most high? Behold, these are the wicked, always at ease. They increase in riches. All in vain have I kept my heart clean and washed my hands in innocence. For all day long, I have been stricken and re rebuked every morning.” [Psalm 73:1–14]

So let’s stop in this point.

A weary soul

You see, Psalm 73 is the outpouring of a very weary soul. It is a very honest and sincere prayer. I would say it’s a raw prayer, if you will. Asaph is moving from envy of the wicked towards trust in God’s providence.

That’s the journey we will see when we go through Psalm 73. He was a Levite. He was a worship leader and he turned his prayer into music understanding maybe that many of us share the same feelings and but we lack the gift to express them in words. So he does that for us. He’s guided by the Spirit of God.

But what we see here is that he’s very sincere. He’s profoundly sincere and he’s baring his soul before God. Look what he says. He was envious of the arrogant because he saw the prosperity of the wicked. They have no pangs until death. He said their mouth is against the heavens and so on so forth.

So he’s expressing his frustration, his indignation at the moral evil that he sees around him. And this moral evil makes no sense to him. Corruption, wickedness, violence, vanity, lust, betrayal, lies. So he’s his voice and his outrage at the reality of evil in the world that has been created by God. More specifically, he sees the reality of evil and struggles to reconcile that with his faith in the paternal almighty God. How can that be possible is the question that is coming out of Asaph’s prayer.

He’s trying to understand the reality of a loving God and the existence of evil in the world and he knows that this can shake his own faith. It’s diffic it’s difficult to understand evil and to even to define it.

God is good

Augustine of Hippo defined evil as non good or privation of good. He says that just as darkness is the absence of light evil is the absence of good. He saw no substance in evil and he considered it as a perversion of the will turned away from the supreme substance. God is the supreme substance.

So evil is far from God. It’s just being far and far away from God, the creator of all things. And Asaph is dealing with a crisis in his heart and because he sees evil everywhere. But the way for him to deal with that is to recognize that God is good. That that’s exactly what he does in the very first verse. He acknowledges that God is good. And in some ways, this is what is going to preserve Asaph’s sanity. And most of all, that’s what is going to preserve his faith.

You see, he declares a very absolute reality about God. He starts by saying God is good. So no matter what happens, no matter the circumstances and no matter the sizes of our problems or no matter the issues around the world, God is good and he remains good. Even in the face of human wickedness, even amid human injustice, even in a world hostile to its own creator, he remains good.

Augustine argued that the Christian God is the absolute good. He’s the absolute truth. He is the sum bonum, the supreme good, absolute and incorruptible. And because God is the absolute good, he’s incorruptible. Everything else that was created, even as being created as good, because when God saw the creation, he said this is good. But they are not absolute. They are they have their goodness derived from God. So creation is corruptible while God is not.

So goodness is part of God’s nature. It is a moral attribute of God. Scripture will declare everywhere that God is benevolent. He and he is good in his thoughts and his words and everything that he does is full of goodness. God’s goodness is a reality of the intra-trinitarian relationship of love in the Godhead.

You see, the creed proclaims that God is the Father and his goodness is revealed in as the eternal Father who has a loving relationship with his son. And Asaph goes on as he understand that God is good because he’s claiming that not only God is morally good but he’s good to him. He’s good to the people of Israel. Asaph says that God is good to his people the covenant people. He starts from this certainty that God in pure goodness having brought a people to himself will always remain close to his people.

So he’s highlighting that God is good to those of clean hearts, which means those who have received God’s goodness, God’s grace, by faith and have had their hearts purified by God, he has this certainty. That’s his starting point as the certainty that will help him gain perspective when he sees wickedness around him.

You see that’s the certainty to know that God is good. Father of our Jesus who always existed in a relationship of love with his son and knowing that embracing that by faith having the certainty is what will pull us off and will pull all of us from an ocean of doubts.

It’s what will give strength for him to suppress cynicism, skepticism, anger, rage, bitterness of heart. In this prayer, he’s presenting his case. He’s speaking of his doubts. He’s putting his dilemma before God. And how important that we do the same that we are honest before God with our doubts and fears. He will even say my feet almost slipped.

When the wicked prosper

He’s crying out loud to God saying he could barely stand. He feels unsteady. He’s he feels stumbling. And he was close to straying from God’s path, close to losing his faith because he’s looking around and we could do the same exercise. For a thousand years, this very city was the heart of Christianity. And as we walk around, we don’t see but a resemblance of that.

And then as we go around the globe, we see the same kind of violence and cynicism and the world in Rowan. He’s seeing that he’s seeing the elites hoarding resources while the poor languish. He’s seeing that authorities are silencing truth tellers. They’re trying to cling to power. He’s seeing corrupt religious leaders twisting their sacred duties for personal gain.

This is very familiar to our own situation. Our society persecutes and mock Christians. While God’s design for family, for life, for justice is scorned everywhere. So he’s lamenting that. And then at some point he’s going to ask if it’s kind of fruitless to be honest. His heart is very close to despair. If God our Father is really looking at his children, why do we suffer injustices? If he is good, why does evil flourish?

These are the questions that Asaph is putting in this prayer. But you see thinking just in these terms falters just because we will judge God through our human eyes and perspective. We ignore his sovereignty and we ignore his providence when we do so.

What we are called to do when we proclaim that God is our Father is to believe that he is good and his goodness will prevail. And that’s what is going to happen from verse 15 on. If we continue to read this psalm, he will say if I had spake this, I would have betrayed the generation of your children. What he’s saying here is that he went to God the Father, the source of all wisdom and goodness, the source of pray of grace with all his fears and doubts. And then he prayed. That’s what Asaph did. He lamented before God. He presented his case to God. He went to the right place when his heart was shattered.

You see, he even is concerned about preserving others from his doubts and fears. He’s saying that he felt like giving up, but he didn’t. He went to the very presence of God, his father, because he acknowledged that the Father was aware of what was going on, not only around him, but also with his very heart.

So prayer my friends is our very personal declaration of faith in God the Father is God’s children clinging to the Father and saying father we believe in you we trust in you we believe that you are powerful and we depend on you even when things don’t do not make sense to us.

In the sanctuary of God

He goes on verses 16 and 17 and he will say, “But when I thought how to understand this, it seemed to me a worrisome task until I went into the sanctuary of God. Then I discerned their end.” What is he saying here in these verses? He’s revealing how the drama of the worship of God rekindled his faith.

The sacrificed lamb representing his own sinful life. And also the blood of the lamb purifying his heart by faith before the presence of God pointed in the lamb that would come once and for all. You see, he thought about these things and it softened his hard heart.

And let me put it this way. I think we cannot underestimate the importance of church life and worship in our lives. He was a man of the covenant people. And in dealing with all this distress, seeing the wickedness around him and then feeling really heavy in his heart, what did he do? He entered into the tabernacle.

He sought answers in the drama of the worship. How many times has it happened to you that you have maybe entered in the place of worship, gathered with the people of God, and you may be feeling distressed and angry or doubtful or maybe even ready to throw everything away.

But then you go inside, you hear the songs. Sometimes you don’t even feel like singing. But then you hear the reading of the word, the prayers, the confessions of sin, the proclamation of the word. And during this hour and a half, something happened in your heart and they just changed not the situation around you, changed the way you perceive it, changed your maybe your feelings. It’s not like your problems went away just like magic.

But God used the very act of the worship service as a balm for to cure your wounded heart. And perhaps you left still maybe confused but much in a much better state than you were when you got in. It has happened to me so many times and that’s what happened to Asaph just to be in the presence of the drama of the worship of God the creator.

He felt that the uneasiness of his heart went away. He goes on and says truly you set them in slippery places. He’s now thinking about the destiny of the wicked. You make them fall to ruin. How they are destroyed in a moment, swept away utterly by terrors. Like a dream when one awakes. Oh Lord, when you rose, when you rouse yourself, you despise them as phantoms. So you see these in these verses we see that when he beat his lack of faith, he ran to God’s promises. Through God’s word and God’s promises, he renewed he his the sense of God’s justice. He remembered that time is nothing before God.

God will vindicate the cause of the righteous. He will destroy the perverse. He will end evil in the world. Human wickedness will end. So our Christian response to the fact that evil exists is that if God our Father is perfectly good, he will defeat evil.

If he’s omnipotent, he is God Almighty, he can defeat evil. Evil has not yet been defeated. So it will be defeated. It’s the logical conclusion of believing in God Almighty, a God who is purely good. He will have to put an end to evil. And that’s Aaf’s conclusion before the realization of God’s promises. The perverse will be crushed by God himself.

“Nevertheless, I am continually with you”

And he keeps going on in verses 23 and 25.

Nevertheless, I’m continually with you. You hold my right hand. You guide me with your counsel. And afterward you will receive me to glory. Whom have I in heaven but you? And there is nothing on earth that I desire besides you. [Psalm 73:23–25]

Now you see how there is a turnaround in Asaph’s mind and heart. You see how our heavenly Father treats his children and how he feels in the presence of God. God was with him the whole time. That’s what he’s saying. I am continually with you. Have you ever realized that? That in your moment of despair, in your moment of sadness, in your moment of loneliness, when even you’re feeling burdened and heavy by the sin of your heart, you cannot really escape from God’s presence. Just like the psalmist will say in Psalm 139, he is always with us.

Even when he was angry, God was with him. Even when he was confused, God was with him. When even when he was sinfully envious of the wicked, God was with him, he says, “I am continually with you.” Even his in his bitterness, he cannot flee from God’s presence.

See that this is the fatherly love of God who will always be among his children. Even when his children are not only in fear but in sin. That’s what the word of God will tell us in Hebrews that our Father will visit us in discipline. He will be by our side because a father will never abandon his children.

And in verse 26, we find faith. That’s what we find there. That’s where he reveals his renewed faith. And he knows that even when his faith fails, God will never fail. And even when he’s stumbling, God will be firm.

And even when he feels like a downcast, he’s wounded. God is strong. He will be his fortress. Faith is this trust in God. Not in ourselves, not in our perceptions, not in the circumstances around us. God will be with us.

In verse 28, that’s what we see Asaph doing. You see, he will lean toward his father who will carry him all the way through the end. But for me it is good to be near God. I have made the Lord my refuge that I may tell of all your works.

Not only is God close to us, but he invites us to be close to him. You see, it’s impossible actually to be far from God for anyone. God will always be near his creation, his children. And even the men and women who despise God, it’s impossible to flee away from him, to fly away from him.

And he knows that. But now there’s an attitude of heart for Asaph. Not only to understand the omnipresence of God Almighty, but also to really cling, to really draw near, to really get close to him through his prayer by faith in the congregation of the saints. He will seek God’s presence.

And we are invited to do just the same to seek his presence. That’s the way for us to feel the comfort of a fatherly God who will never abandon his children even when the circumstances are very difficult around us.

That’s his conclusion. He ends his this prayer, this psalm just the way he began it. It is good to be in God’s presence. So, I’d like to end this devotional word with you with a few thoughts.

What Asaph learned

You see, at some point, Asaph had to admit that he had envy of the wicked. He had for a moment self-pity. You know, we have to realize that we are really not different from the wicked.

And sometimes in comparing himself with the men who have not had the grace of God to change their hearts, he put himself in a position where he thought he was better than them. He may have forgotten that if he had experienced any goodness in his life that didn’t really come from him, that came from God who purified his heart in the first place.

So that will change his perspective. Instead of hatred towards those who are wicked, he should realize that they are really not different from who he is. He should pray for them. He should seek for them. He should preach to them. Just like when he finishes his prayer on verse 28, he will say that now he will speak of God’s work to all men.

So seeing wickedness around us is a reminder that we are wicked ourselves without God and that we are called that to love people and preach the gospel to them. But there’s a second lesson that we can draw from reading this psalm 73.

You see, embracing the gathering of God’s saints, to be close to God’s people, to live the church life, to worship God is a powerful means of grace that will draw us very near to God. That’s a way for God to renew our faith and we will not fall into cynicism.

Really, we cannot leave the Christian life outside of the church life. We will not be fed. We will not be encouraged. We will not be rekindled in our faith if we are far from the place where the Spirit of God really moves, which is the gathering of his people, where we hear his word, where the sacrificed lamb is worshiped, where the eternal Son of God is worshiped. So to treasure the getting together of God’s people and listening to his word is something that may heal our hearts in times of distress.

Also Asaph he went back to God’s promises. He remembered the promises that God will one day end evil on earth. And it’s a call for us to meditate in his promises. To meditate in our hope. Apostle Paul will say that if our life is just this, I mean, if there’s no transcendence, there’s no hope of eternity, then we are the most miserable people that exists.

But because Christian faith is a faith of hope that points to the future, that points to the end of evil, to the shalom, to the peace of God that will prevail forever and ever, to the vindication of the cause of those who suffer injustices in this world.

That’s what’s being promised from Genesis all the way through Revelation. That there’s going to be an end to the wicked wickedness in the world to the corruption of what was once good creation in human beings. Assessing those promises through the meditation and reading of the word can rekindle our hearts before God.

And finally Asaph at some point had to learn to be really content in the presence of God. You see, sometimes we think that societal so societal corruption is somewhat unique to our time. But God the Father has ordained history and he can make good out of evil.

Surely the text will say that he felt he was in his slippery places. But towards the end he was able to find peace and contentment and he invites us to do the same. In a world where evil seems to prosper, our hope will not really rest in appearances. It will just rest in God the Father. He is the inexhaustible fountain of goodness. This goodness that is seen in his relationship with the Son is the same goodness that he will outpour to all those who really believe in him.

So this is the calling of this psalm. This is the calling of a desperate heart who finally understood that he was in the presence of a God who is eternally good and that his soul can rest in the presence of God. And may God the Father do the same to us. Let me pray with you.

Prayer

Oh dear heavenly Father, we thank you for your word is powerful and is transforming and is a balm to our hearts when we are in distress. Just like Asaph, we can trust you that we you will be near us and we ask that through your spirit.

We may embrace your goodness towards us in such a way that all the difficult situations around us, violence, famine, sadness and all sorts of separations and distress that in our hope in Jesus Christ we may know that these things will end that they are not defining of who we are in Christ and that we may have hope that because you are good all evil will cease to exist.

We pray this in confidence because you are our Father. You are our Father in Jesus our Lord. Amen. God bless you brothers and sisters.