Ninety-nine Names For God

Ninety-Nine Names for God

She became a Christian eighteen months ago, she told us. My classmates and I were sitting seminar-style around a table in a graduate theology course, talking church councils, doctrine, and heresy. Most of us, I suspect, came to Christianity from no belief at all, or perhaps some vague, cultural belief in a benign but distant God. Not her. She converted from Islam.

Then she said something that made my heart ache and my eyes water: “There are ninety-nine names for God in Islam,” she explained. “But not one of them is Father.” What kind of God, after all, willingly adopts misfits and makes them heirs?

Well, mine does: “When the time arrived that was set by God the Father, God sent his Son, born among us of a woman, born under the conditions of the law so that he might redeem those of us who have been kidnapped by the law. Thus we have been set free to experience our rightful heritage. You can tell for sure that you are now fully adopted as his own children because God sent the Spirit of his Son into our lives crying out, ‘Papa! Father!’” (Galatians 4:5-6, MSG).

A friend said her toddler son’s cry—whether the issue is a broken crayon or a broken limb—is a loud and urgent “Dada! Dada!” He may be small, but he knows who his daddy is and where help comes from.

I thought of my own dad, past eighty now, who says without fail every time we part, “Call me if you need anything.” Earthly fathers, even very good ones—ones who hear our cries and invite us to call out to them—will one day no longer hear us when we do. But in Christ, we have a Father who is eternal, constant, powerful, true, and near.

We are precious children—whatever our age—who are loved with an everlasting love.

My classmate who once worshiped a god who was no father is now adopted by a God who insists on being called Abba. That, she said, was a wonder to her. And it is to me, as well.

Doesn’t that privilege of intimate conversation with God make it plain that you are not a slave, but a child? And if you are a child, you’re also an heir, with complete access to the inheritance.

Galatians 4:7, MSG