Good Authority Flow
Father God is all about the flow of GOOD authority.
We humans, males, fathers, still have a flesh that gravitates to sin. That flesh has to be submitted to Jesus, “crucified” and put to death to not express itself. This is not what psychology calls suppression or repression. This is reaffirming your new identity in Christ. It means being real with feelings, just as they are, as bringing them TO God for perspective, for correction, etc..
Patriarchy and fathering are instituted by God and for the GOOD of all people. But there is a huge caveat right here. You can TRUST a leader only inasmuch as they are trusting God. As they are SUBMITTED. Truly humble and filled with the LOVE of Father God — in touch and in harmony with God’s own Heart.
A heart submitted to and in love with God is a heart that, when and if it get’s off track, will be quickly corrected by the Holy Spirit. Selfish and flesh openings in a person’s heart (and 99.999% of people have that) are things that Satan can exploit, can tempt, and can try to drive a wedge in to lure people into sin, into abuse, into control issues, lust issues, into ANY and EVERY issue the fallen flesh is susceptible to.
Imperfect leaders will lead imperfectly. Imperfect fathers will father imperfectly. Even King David, who God HIMSELF said had a heart like His own heart, fell to lust and murder (and set in motion a ton of negative consequences in him, his family, and his generations). So David was far from perfect. It is not about humans having moral perfection (like religious will push for). It is about BEING RESPONSIVE to God (that means open to, trusting in). David fathered very imperfectly. David committed these sins and they are recorded for everyone to know about.
AND YET when God’s prophet called David out on his sin, David turned TO God, not away from God. David admitted the truth, (a very delayed obedience for about a whole year, but finally an obedience). David confessed. David did not turn away from or against God. David sincerely repented and sought harmony in his relationship with God. I say this to say that David was very capable of sin and yet those sins were against the larger picture of his heart.
David’s sins were thoroughly sinful and people got hurt and people died as a result. And these sins were the exception to the larger picture of his life and his real desire to know and please God.
The world is rebellious and says the answer is to rebel against authority. It says to cast it off and do your own thing. It says to be your own authority, which in practice just means to get caught up in the bondage of some movement or trend, and never is truly your own thing to begin with.
Authority is good. God set it up to be good, but we have to also account for the sin and brokenness in this world — we have to be in reality about that. But authority can only flow as something truly good inasmuch as the heart of the leader has a heart like God’s heart.
In this sinful Earth, authority will never be perfect. Obedience to a human is never to be blind obedience. Blind obedience is how cults will thrive. But the answer is not to go to the other extreme of rebellion, chaos, and degrading behaviors.
Give any person, a father, a sibling, teacher, a government leader, military leader, etc. LOTS of Authority and the possibility for abuse of said authority is likewise large!
Patriarchy is not the problem (as Feminism tries to tell people). Patriarchy is God’s design. But that GOOD authority flow chain is only as strong as its weakest link. God is fully good, but authority figures themselves in this life are always some mix.
The problem is hearts reacting from wounds and neediness and bad choices to agree with the messages of the Evil One. Patriarchy WITHOUT GOD’S LOVE as its source, degrades into dominance, into oppression, and into abuse.
The problem is a lack of GOD’S OWN LOVE in leaders and in followers.
To the religious leaders of Jesus day, he called them out on their SPIRITUAL FRAUD. He said:
“but I know you (meaning that I see your heart in an extremely thorough way), that you do not have the LOVE OF GOD WITHIN YOU. I have come in My Father’s Name (the authority flow), and you have not received Me…” (John 5)
Jesus alone can rightly say: “I come in the authority of Father God. By rejecting me and rebelling against me, you show you are an enemy of my Good Father.”
Put someone too much on a pedestal and they will fail you! You can trust, but only trust, someone as much as they are trusting Jesus. And we all know that our own moods change, attitudes waiver, and we have seasons in life of this or that. Our trustworthiness level is thus always in flux.
And so we look for fruit — the behaviors and the results of those behaviors. And you look for the larger picture, while also noting any violations of love (small or large).
My understanding and perspective on love and fathering and God Himself was one way at age 5. Another way at age 18. Another way at age 30. Our spirituality is supposed to mature and deepen. So talking about love and fathering will be heard by someone at wherever they are at in life at that point.
Being Programmed by the messages around us
To make life even more complicated, we can get “bad feedback.” The brokenness and sin in our parent’s lives, authority figures, our friends and associates. They have their own limited perspective, their own issues, their own distortions. Of course, in most everyone’s life (there are exceptions) it is the parents that have the most impact. This leads us to the topic of institutions: institutions have a leader (or leaders). Institutions NEED the continuity of the institution, to pay bills, to maintain and “save face.”
That means that institutions (schools, churches, governments) — anything that presents itself as some authority, will have people IN the institution endorsing its authority. They will say the institution is good and to be trusted/obeyed. This means that they will tend to… downplay, to minimalize their own failures — their own abuse and distortions. God setup His Kingdom as the authority system, not any religion of human authority system, and ONLY His Kingdom is where authority is always truly and fully good.
This feedback from whatever institution you are exposed to has influence. Sometimes extreme control, but Institutions cloak themselves in virtuous terminology. They will always say they have a good reason for existing and being trusted. Of course they will. We thus need to have GREAT DISCERNMENT. because the influence of all the individuals and their messages to trust the institution is a REAL PROBLEM AREA for the abuse of authority!
A church, a Christian College, etc. they all come in the NAME of God, but despite their terminology, the reality may be something that is far away from the Heart of Father God.
We can thus be wrongly CALIBRATED. Our notion of good and bad, trustworthy and untrustworthy, normal and abnormal, what to feel good and bad about, etc. It can all be miscalibrated. A distorted reference point, regardless of whether it is due to your own folly, the intentional manipulation of others, the distortions of the culture around us, etc.. can all mesh together to skew our understanding of, and response to, authority.
And so, due to these mixed influences (sometimes themselves well-meaning but misguided, and sometimes outright deceptive/manipulative/evil), our CALIBRATION is often off. Our calibration as to what is good, is trustworthy, is virtuous, is godly will be off to some degree.
There is no simplistic answer here, and so we much earnestly desire maturity, we must pray for discernment, we must welcome the Holy Spirit in as God’s Spirit of Truth. We are to “grow in Grace” and “grow up into the fullness of Christ Jesus” as the Bible says.
God is TRULY good. Father God is the perfect authority. The enemy will try to wound us and manipulate our interpretations of life events to skew our view of Father God and have us fight God, push Him away, instead of embrace Him. Authority figures will probably thus wound us to various degrees. We must distinguish between the PERFECTLY GOOD authority of Father God Himself, and the broken and imperfect representation of authority in any given person and any given institution.
