In 1966, a wealthy Pakistani woman, Bilquis Sheikh did something that could have cost her life. She was a begum—a noblewoman—from a family in Wah that had held power and land for generations. Her husband, a high-ranking government official, had left her. She retreated to her estate, with its gardens and servants, but found comfort wasn’t the same as peace. So she began to search. She read the Qur’an. She found it spoke of the prophet Jesus. And out of curiosity she opened a Bible.
And there she read a word that made her pause. In the faith she’d known thus far, God has many names—the Merciful, the Almighty, the All-Knowing. All 99 of them, but not one of them is Father. To speak to the Most High as a child speaks to a parent wasn’t merely strange. It was unthinkable.
But that was exactly what the Bible invited her to do. Slowly, hesitantly, she did so. She lost her family’s protection. She received threats. In 1972 she left Pakistan altogether. Years later, she wrote her story down, and she gave it a title that says everything in five words: I Dared to Call Him Father.
Dared. Not “enjoyed.” Not “learned.” Dared. She understood something many of us, raised on the language of Christian songs, have quietly forgotten: that calling God “Father” is an astonishing thing to be allowed to do.
What the title means
You’ve probably heard it from a pulpit, or sung it in worship: Abba means “Daddy.” And the preacher rubs it in: God isn’t a distant judge, he says, but a warm father you can climb onto the lap of. It’s a feelgood thought. Many weep at the thought of it.
There’s only one problem. It isn’t quite true.
But here’s the surprise. When we find out what Abba actually means, we don’t lose the sense of intimacy. We gain something far bigger, far sturdier, and far more comforting than “Daddy” ever could. The real meaning of Abba will hold us up on the worst nights of our lives. “Daddy” will not.
So let’s look carefully.
Three verses, one cry
Abba is an Aramaic word. Aramaic was the everyday spoken language of Jesus and His neighbours in first-century Palestine, related to Hebrew rather as Spanish is related to Italian. The New Testament, however, is written in Greek. So when an Aramaic word survives untranslated in the Greek text, it’s worth stopping to ask why.
Abba appears exactly three times in the whole New Testament.
| Reference | Who is speaking | The words |
|---|---|---|
| Mark 14:36 | Jesus, in Gethsemane | “Abba, Father, all things are possible for you. Remove this cup from me. Yet not what I will, but what you will.” |
| Romans 8:15 | The church, by the Spirit | “…you have received the Spirit of adoption as sons, by whom we cry, ‘Abba! Father!'” |
| Galatians 4:6 | The Spirit of the Son, in us | “God has sent the Spirit of His Son into our hearts, crying, ‘Abba! Father!'” |
Look at the pattern. The only person in the Gospels recorded praying “Abba” is Jesus. And the only reason the church ever prays it is that the Spirit of that same Son puts the Son’s own word into our mouths.
That’s not a devotional detail. That’s the gospel in miniature. Whatever Abba means, it belongs first to Jesus and reaches us only through Him.
Notice one more thing. In all three verses, the Aramaic Abba is immediately followed by the Greek ho patēr, “the Father.” The writers translate it for us on the spot. They tell us what it means. We only need to listen.
Where “Daddy” came from
The “Daddy” idea has a traceable source. German scholar Joachim Jeremias proposed in the mid-20th century that abba came from infant babble, the sounds a small child makes while learning to speak, and that it therefore carried a toddler’s warmth. Preachers loved it. The idea spread across the English-speaking world and into countless songs.
Jeremias himself began backing away from the strongest form of his claim during his own lifetime. His followers didn’t.
Then, in 1988, Oxford linguist James Barr published an article in the Journal of Theological Studies with a title that settled the matter for most scholars: “Abba Isn’t ‘Daddy'”. Barr went through the evidence patiently and concluded abba did belong to ordinary, familiar, everyday speech rather than to formal ceremony, but that it was, in his words, a more solemn, responsible, adult address to a father. Grown men used it of their own fathers. It wasn’t baby talk.
Others reached the same conclusion. Georg Schelbert, in a full-length study called ABBA Vater (2011), called Jeremias’s reading an error and unwarranted. Geza Vermes, a leading scholar of Judaism in the period, agreed.
Three pieces of evidence make the case tight:
- Grammar. Abba is simply the ordinary Aramaic word for “father” (ab) in what grammarians call the emphatic state, roughly “the father.” It’s not a diminutive, not a cute form, not a shrunken word. It’s the standard adult noun.
- Vocabulary. Aramaic had no other everyday word for “father.” If Jesus wished to say “father” at all, this was the word available. A word cannot be special because of its warmth if it’s the only word there is.
- Translation. Greek did have a genuine word for “daddy”: pappas, a real diminutive used mostly by children. The apostles never once use it. Three times out of three, they render abba with ho patēr, the plain, standard, adult word for “father.” Under the inspiration of the Spirit, they chose the dignified word. We mustn’t overrule them.
In one box
- Abba is not: baby talk, “Daddy,” a diminutive, a special mystical term, or a word unique to Jesus’s vocabulary.
- Abba is: the normal, warm, everyday, unguarded word a son or daughter of any age used for their own father, as opposed to formal, distant, ceremonious speech.
- Which means: closeness with respect. Not familiarity instead of reverence, but both at once.
Losing “Daddy” is a gain, not a loss. It strips out the sentimentality and leaves something stronger standing: a real son speaking to a real father, freely, without fear, and without flippancy.
Then what was new about Jesus?
If the word itself is ordinary, where does the wonder lie?
Not in the vocabulary, but in the use.
The Jews of Jesus’s day did address God as Father, but almost always together, corporately, and carefully: our Father, the Father of the nation. Direct, personal, habitual address of God as my Father in private prayer was strikingly rare. Jesus does it constantly, everywhere, as naturally as breathing. He never joins the disciples in praying “our Father”; He teaches them to pray it. He speaks to God out of a relationship that’s simply His by nature.
And then He does something staggering. He hands His family word over. To us.
That’s the shock of Romans 8 and Galatians 4. The private speech of the eternal Son becomes the common speech of forgiven sinners. The word is ordinary. The permission is not.
The doctrine you may have skipped: adoption
The New Testament has a technical word for what happens here: huiothesia, usually translated “adoption as sons.” In the Roman world an adopted son wasn’t a second-class member of the household. He took the family name, the family standing, even the family inheritance, permanently and irreversibly.
The Westminster Confession of Faith gives adoption an entire chapter of its own (chapter 12), and the Westminster Larger Catechism (Question 74) defines it as an act of God’s free grace by which believers are received into the number of His children and given all the liberties and privileges that belong to them.
JI Packer, in Knowing God, explains adoption is the highest privilege the gospel offers, higher even than justification. That sounds like an overstatement until we see his reasoning.
Justification is courtroom language: the Judge declares the guilty righteous. Wonderful, for we’re now free to leave the court and return to our own homes.
Adoption, on the other hand, is the Judge then stepping down from the bench, taking me, the acquitted prisoner, by the hand, saying: “Now come home with me; you are my child.”
Packer even has a test to measure how well we’ve understood Christianity: Ask yourself: “How much do I make of being a child of God?”
John Murray, in Redemption Accomplished and Applied, insists adoption is a distinct act of God, not merely another name for being born again or being declared righteous. It’s a permanent change of status. And relationship.
And the cry “Abba! Father!” is the sound adoption makes.
Sons in the Son: the shape of the whole thing
Read Galatians 4:6 slowly, because every word carries weight: “And because you are sons, God has sent the Spirit of his Son into our hearts, crying, ‘Abba! Father!'”
Notice the structure:
- The Father sends. The initiative is entirely his. Nobody adopts himself.
- The Son is Son by nature. Eternally, necessarily, not by grace and not by promotion.
- The Spirit is “the Spirit of his Son.” Paul does not say “the Spirit of God” here. He is being precise. The Spirit who comes into us is the Son’s own Spirit.
- The cry is the Son’s cry, reproduced in us. It is not a sound we work up. It is the Son’s relationship to the Father echoing in adopted hearts.
John Calvin makes exactly this point on Romans 8: the Spirit is the seal and witness of our adoption, and prayer is where that adoption shows itself. Our access to God isn’t native to us. It’s granted, mediated, given. And it’s completely real.
Sinclair Ferguson, writing on the Holy Spirit, presses it further: the Spirit’s work isn’t to give us an experience alongside Christ but to conform us to Christ, so that the Son’s own filial relationship becomes the pattern of ours. Herman Ridderbos, surveying Paul’s theology, notes how tightly Paul binds sonship to being in Christ: we’re never children of God alongside Jesus. We’re only ever children of God in Jesus.
The line that must not be crossed
Here’s where we must be careful, because a great deal of modern religion trips exactly here.
| Jesus’s sonship | Our sonship | |
|---|---|---|
| Basis | Eternal generation: He is Son by nature | Adoption: we are sons by grace |
| Beginning | No beginning; eternal | Begins when we are united to Christ by faith |
| Ground | His own divine being | His work, credited to us |
| Can it be lost? | Unthinkable | No, but only because his cannot |
Jesus Himself guards the line. After the resurrection He tells Mary: “I am ascending to my Father and your Father, to my God and your God” (John 20:17). He doesn’t say “our Father.” Not once, in that sense. Two relationships, one source.
This matters enormously, because it blocks the popular idea that everyone is already a child of God simply by being born. The New Testament is precise. John 1:12: “But to all who did receive him, who believed in his name, he gave the right to become children of God.” The right to become. Galatians 3:26: “for in Christ Jesus you are all sons of God, through faith.” Through faith, in Christ.
God made everyone. But He is Father only to those who’re in His Son. Blurring that line sounds kind, but it isn’t. It tells people they already own what they are still without.
“Abba” is a word for the worst night
Now notice something almost everybody misses.
Where does Jesus say “Abba”? Not on a hillside in the sunshine. In Gethsemane, on His face, in the dark, sweating, hours from torture, asking for the cup to be taken away and then surrendering: “Yet not what I will, but what you will.”
And where does Paul put our “Abba”? In Romans 8, the chapter of groaning, weakness, futility, and suffering. The cry sits between “the sufferings of this present time” and “we ourselves, who have the firstfruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly as we wait eagerly for adoption as sons.”
Abba is not the language of the comfortable. It’s the language of the afflicted who still trust.
That’s the pastoral heart of this whole study. When you’re in your own Gethsemane, united to Christ, you’re given His prayer to pray. You may ask for the cup to pass. You may say plainly you don’t want it. And you may then say, not my will but yours. Then you discover the Father is genuinely your Father even when the cup isn’t removed. It wasn’t removed for Jesus either. That didn’t make God any less His Father. It was the very moment His sonship shone brightest.
And when we cannot find words at all even to pray, Romans 8:26 says the same Spirit “helps us in our weakness” and “intercedes for us with groanings too deep for words.”
The cry is your evidence
Romans 8:16 comes next, and it’s no afterthought: “The Spirit Himself bears witness with our spirit that we are children of God.”
Read that alongside verse 15 and the logic is beautiful. Where does assurance come from? Not from working up a feeling. The very impulse to turn to God and call Him Father with trust, rather than fleeing from Him in dread, is itself the Spirit’s testimony we belong to the family.
So if we’re anxious about whether we’re truly God’s adopted, let’s ask ourselves: what do we do with that anxiety? If, even trembling, we take it to God and call Him Father, that’s not the reflex of a slave. That’s the Spirit of the Son at work in us.
From slaves to sons
Both Pauline passages set Abba against bondage. This is the movement of the gospel itself.
| Before | After | |
|---|---|---|
| Status | Slave, minor, under a guardian | Son, heir |
| Motive | Fear of punishment | Love and confidence |
| Relation to law | Taskmaster | Father’s household rules |
| Prospect | Wages, at best | Inheritance |
Romans 8:15 says it flatly: “For you did not receive the spirit of slavery to fall back into fear.” Galatians 4 traces the same road, out of guardianship and slavery into sonship, freedom, and inheritance.
Abba is the sound of a door closing behind us.
The word that holds
So: Abba doesn’t mean “Daddy.” It means something better.
It means the word which belonged, from eternity, to the Son alone, has been placed by the Spirit into the mouths of enemies who’ve been forgiven, orphans who’ve been brought home, slaves who’ve been made heirs. It means intimacy that never becomes cheap and reverence that never becomes cold.
And it means that on the night when everything falls apart, we’re given the same prayer the Son prayed in the garden, and the same Father heard it.
Say it slowly. Abba, Father.
Tough Questions, Honest Answers
If “Abba” was an ordinary word, why did the apostles keep it in Aramaic instead of just translating it?
Most likely because it had become a fixed liturgical cry in the earliest church, and because it was Jesus’s own word. Paul is writing to Greek-speaking congregations in Rome and Galatia who did not speak Aramaic, yet he assumes they know this cry. That tells us it was already treasured across the churches. Keeping the Aramaic preserves the link to Gethsemane: this is not our word about God, it is his word, on loan.
Should I actually say the word “Abba” when I pray?
There is nothing wrong with it, and nothing magical about it either. Jesus, when he taught us to pray, gave us the word in our own language: “Father.” The Aramaic is not a password. If saying it helps you remember whose prayer you are borrowing, use it; if it becomes a performance, drop it and say “Father” instead.
Does calling God “Father” mean God is male?
No. God is spirit, without body or gender, and Scripture can compare his love to a mother’s (Isaiah 66:13) without ever addressing him as Mother. “Father” is not a metaphor we chose from a menu of options; it is the name the Son uses of the first person of the Trinity, and the name he authorises us to use. It tells us about a relationship of origin, authority, and love within God himself, not about biology.
My earthly father was absent or cruel. Does that ruin this for me?
It makes it harder, and God knows that. But the direction of the argument runs the other way from what we assume. We do not learn what God is like by starting with our fathers and improving the picture. Ephesians 3:14–15 says every family in heaven and on earth is named from him. He is the original; every human father is a copy, and some copies are badly damaged. Your father failed to show you something real. He did not make it less real.
Is “Abba” evidence that Jesus is God, or just that he was unusually close to God?
On its own, the word proves neither. But the way Jesus uses it does the work. He never puts himself in the same category as his disciples before God, he claims a knowledge of the Father that only the Father has of him (Matthew 11:27), and he hands out the family word as though it were his to give. That is not a devout man’s intimacy. That is a Son’s authority.
If I am adopted, why do I still sin and still suffer?
Because adoption changes your status instantly and your condition gradually. Romans 8 is honest about this: we already are children (v.16), and we are still waiting for adoption, the redemption of our bodies (v.23). The family name is settled; the family likeness is being worked in. Discipline is part of that, and Hebrews 12:7–8 makes the striking claim that discipline is proof of sonship, not a threat to it.
Can a person lose this status?
No, and the reason is not our grip but the ground. Our sonship rests on the Son’s, and his is eternal. Romans 8 moves from “Abba” to the promise that nothing in all creation can separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus. An adoption that could be reversed would not be adoption; it would be probation.
