The first Person of the Trinity is God the Father. The Father is eternal - He has always existed. The Father is fully God, yet is a distinct Person from the other members of the Trinity - God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit. God is only explicitly named as Father in the New Testament because it is only in the New Testament that we see His Son, Jesus Christ, fully revealed to us. In the Old Testament (as well as in the New Testament), when the term ‘God’ is used, it is normally referring to the Person of the Father, although it may include the other members of the Trinity as well (e.g. Genesis 1:1, John 1:1-2). He is a perfect Father, who disciplines His children because He loves them (Hebrews 12:5-11), and gives good gifts to them - in particular He gives His Son (John 3:16) and the Holy Spirit (Luke 11:11-13). He cares for and loves all the people He has made, even His enemies (Matthew 5:43-48), and demonstrates this most amazingly by sending His Son to die on the cross in order to rescue us (Galatians 1:4). Jesus, God the Son, addressed His prayers to His Father (e.g. John 17:1); said that He was one with the Father (John 17:11); and that the only way to the Father was through Him (John 14:6). It is through God’s revelation of Himself in the man Jesus Christ that we see what the Father is like (John 14:7, Hebrews 1). And it is only through the Father’s loving act of giving His Son to die on the cross that it is now possible for us to have a relationship with Him (John 3:16). The early church preserved the Aramaic term ‘Abba’ to express the new intimacy with God they had in Jesus Christ, as it is a term a young child would use for their father.
