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Our morning family devotions have centered around using a William Barclay commentary on the Gospel of Matthew (from the Daily Study Bible Series). Barclay's commentary has added rich insight and extensive knowledge to our readings, using the occasional story analogy to even more highlight God's truths. Here's one we read just Friday that I want to share with you. After reading it, my children and I sighed with deep satisfaction at knowing we have this kind of relationship with our Lord. I think it's a wonderful precursor for our Easter celebration.
If we believe that God is Father, it settles our relationship to God. It is not that it removes the might, majesty and power of God. It is not that it makes God any the less God; but it makes that might, and majesty, and power, approachable for us.
There is an old Roman story which tells how a Roman Emperor was enjoying a triumph. He had the privilege, which Rome gave to her great victors, of marching his troops through the streets of Rome, with all his captured trophies and his prisoners in his train. So the Emperor was on the march with his troops. The streets were lined with cheering people. The tall legionaries lined the streets' edges to keep the people in their places. At one point on thetriumphal route there was a little platform where the Empress and her family were sitting to watch the Emperor go by in all the pride of his triumph. On the platform with his mother there was the Emperor's youngest son, a little boy. As the Emperor came near the little boy jumped off the platform, burrowed through the crowd, tried to dodge between the legs of a legionary, and to run out on to the road to meet his father's chariot. The legionary stooped down and stopped him. He swung him up in his arms: "You can't do that, boy," he said. "Don't you know who that is in the chariot? That's the Emperor. You can't run out to his chariot." And the little lad laughed down. "He may be your Emperor," he said, "but he's my father." That is exactly the way the Christian feels towards God. The might, and the majesty, and the power are the might, and the majesty, and the power of one whom Jesus taught us to call Our Father.
-excerpted from The Daily Study Bible Series, The Gospel of Matthew, Vol. 1 (Chapters 1 to 10), Revised Edition, translated with an introduction and interpretation by William Barclay, The Westminster Press, Philadelphia, 1975.
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