2 Timothy 1:2 – The Father's Regard

2 To Timothy, a beloved son:

Grace, mercy, and peace from God the Father

"We get the odd notion," exposes A.W. Tozer, "that God is showing mercy because Jesus died. No, Jesus died because God is showing mercy."

Inspired Paul is allowed to nudge aside the veil a little on the united Trinity's heart toward us and confront some of these assumptions in 2 Timothy 1:2. If we can ever grow accustomed, believer, to the reality that the unmerited favor that is grace, the absorbed consequences which are mercy, and the combined reality which is peace of realizing who we now are all belong to us in Christ, we can still hold onto a stunted understanding. We can keep the notion that these blessings began with Christ's taking on human flesh and our hours tenuously only so long as He can keep arguing with His temperamental Father successfully.

This is unscriptural. Before Christ was a Babe in Bethlehem, the Father gave Abram the grace of faith and reckoned it to him as righteousness. Before Christ was a Babe in Bethlehem, the Father instituted the Passover as a multimedia picture of the judgment His people deserved and would not receive. Before Christ was a Babe in Bethlehem, the Father taught His priests to continually remind His people that His peace with us was so palpable and perpetual that His face shone on us. The pedigree which is ours through Christ has an ancient heritage, older than time, certainly older than Bethlehem.

When we pray, then, we pray to the same Father that Jesus did. We pray to the Father Whom He taught us knows our needs before we ask. We pray to the Father of Whom He said it is the Father's good pleasure to give us the Kingdom. As a wag said wherever there are two rabbis, there are three opinions, we can be sure of human division, even over Scriptural matters. We extend this principle, though, at the cost of much of our peace into the councils of the Trinity.

We were not the stray dog, as it were, who followed the Christ home. We are, as Rich Mullins pointed out, one of the stars the Father pointed to in His dealings with Abraham. Our place was certain before the foundation of the world. All the powers and delights of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are fixated on our smallest dealings today.

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