This morning I have been pondering two words that keep coming back to me again and again.
King and Father.
God is spoken of as King. Adam was placed in the earth with dominion, commandment, stewardship, and authority under God. Even though the Bible does not use the word king for Adam, the pattern is there. He is placed in the garden. He receives commandment from God. He names the living creatures. He is given dominion. He is given sacred responsibility.
That is kingly.
But Adam was not only set up to rule over the earth. He was set up to become a father.
In the beginning, kingship and fatherhood belong together. Adam’s rule was a fatherly rule under God. He was to receive the woman God brought to him, multiply seed, teach his children, tend what God had placed in his hands, and bring his family toward God.
That is a very different kind of king to what most people today think of as a king.
When I look upward, I see the same thing.
God is not only King. He is Father.
Father means something. A father has children. A father has a house. A father has family. A man does not become a father by standing alone.
Where has there ever been a father without a woman?
That question seems so simple to me, and yet modern religion often seems to step around it. A man becomes a father because there is woman, covenant, seed, birth, children, and family. Fatherhood is not an idea floating by itself. It is tied to life. It is tied to increase. It is tied to a woman bearing children.
So when scripture calls God Father, I cannot make that word smaller than it is.
If earthly fatherhood teaches us anything about heavenly fatherhood, then the way I see it, God is not a lonely ruler sitting in heaven. A father has woman. A father has children. A father has a house.
The same is true of a king.
Across the history of the world, the kingly man was rarely pictured as a man standing entirely alone. Whether he was called king, pharaoh, emperor, chief, sultan, monarch, or some other title, the ruler was usually surrounded by a royal household. In the majority of cultures that household included more than one woman. The kingly household was often built through women, children, covenant, alliance, inheritance, and increase.
Modern people often recoil at that thought because they have inherited a Roman and Western way of seeing the world.
Rome emphasized one legal wife at a time. That system did not remove disorder from men. It often protected the outward law while leaving room for divorce, hidden women, abandoned women, and children who were not cared for as they should have been. It also made it much harder for a man, who may have been able to love, provide for, and care for more than one woman and their children honorably, to do so openly and lawfully.
That Roman legal pattern became very powerful in the Western world. Later Christian institutions grew inside that world and carried much of that mind forward. So now many people read the Bible as though one man and one legal woman was always the obvious divine rule from the beginning.
But when I look at the fathers, that is not what I see.
Abraham had more than one woman. Jacob had four women who bore the house of Israel. If the scriptures wanted to teach that a man having more than one woman was itself evil, then the lives of Abraham and Jacob become very difficult to explain. These are not fringe men. Abraham is called the friend of God. Jacob is Israel.
So I cannot honestly read the fathers through a Roman lens and then pretend that lens came from Adam.
The Order of Adam calls me back before Rome.
Back before church councils.
Back before state marriage law.
Back before institutions took sacred things and placed them under offices, titles, and permissions.
Back to Adam and Eve.
Back to the fathers.
Back to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.
Back to the family order of God.
This does not mean the fallen versions of kingship were right. Most kings made a mess of it. That is not what I am defending. That is Cain’s way wearing royal clothing.
But the fallen version does not erase the original.
A righteous king is a father under God.
A righteous father receives woman as covenant, not as property.
A righteous household is built for children, worship, teaching, order, holiness, and return to God.
So when God is called King and Father, I cannot separate those words. He is Father over His house. He is King over His family.
That language is not random.
King.
Father.
Woman.
Mother.
Children.
House.
Inheritance.
Kingdom.
These are family words as much as royal words.
And so I am left pondering something that feels very plain to me, even though I know it will be difficult for many people.
If God is Father, then there is Mother.
If God is King, then there is Queen.
And if the order on earth was meant to reflect the order of heaven, then the fatherly king with covenant women and children is not a strange thing.
The world has made it ugly.
Rome made it legal.
Religion made it narrow.
Modern people made it embarrassing.
But the righteous fathers lived before all of that.
And I am looking to the fathers.