Why does the Father’s Heart Bible say “our Father” instead of “God”?

The Father’s Heart Bible renders God’s name and titles as “our Father” in the places where the original text is already speaking of God in His fatherly, covenant relationship to His people. It is a translation decision about which true thing to say, not an addition to Scripture.

The clearest example is the best-known verse in the Bible. Where most English Bibles open John 3:16 with “For God so loved the world,” the Father’s Heart Bible reads: “For our Father so loved the world that he gave his only Son.” Nothing has been inserted. The One who loved the world and gave His Son is the Father — the verse says so in its second half. FHB simply names Him at the start of the sentence the way the sentence itself ends.

Every distinctive choice of this kind carries a footnote in the text, so a reader can always see what was decided and why.

Because “God” is a category, and “Father” is a relationship. Both are true, and the Father’s Heart Bible uses both. The word God is right and necessary wherever Scripture speaks of God as God — His deity, His power, His otherness. FHB has not removed it.

But English readers have inherited a habit of hearing “God” as a title of distance: a ruler, a judge, a force. When the text is describing a Father who binds Himself to His children, translating that with the most generic available word quietly costs the reader the very thing the passage was revealing. Jesus did not teach His followers to pray “Almighty God in heaven.” He taught them to begin, “Our Father in heaven” (Matthew 6:9) — and that word choice was the scandal of it.

So the rule is narrow: where the text reveals the Father, say Father. Where it speaks of God as God, say God.

No — and the test is simple: every “our Father” in the Father’s Heart Bible stands where the passage is already about the Father, and can be checked against the surrounding verse.

Translation always requires choices. Hebrew and Greek do not map one-to-one onto English, so every English Bible you have ever read is the result of thousands of decisions about which English word carries the original best. Older translations rendered the divine name as the LORD in small capitals — itself a substitution, and one most readers never notice. The question is never whether a translation makes choices, but whether it makes them openly and traceably.

FHB footnotes its distinctive renderings for exactly that reason. The claim is not that other translations are wrong. It is that one true thing in the text — God’s fatherhood — has been consistently under-translated, and that recovering it changes what a reader hears.

A common assumption is that God is a distant sovereign in the Old Testament and becomes a Father in the New. Scripture does not read that way. Long before Matthew, He names Himself in fatherly terms: “A father to the fatherless and defender of widows is our Father in his holy dwelling” (Psalm 68:5), and “But now, you are our Father; we are the clay, and you are our potter” (Isaiah 64:8).

What the New Testament adds is not the fact of the Father but access to Him. Jesus calls Him Abba in Gethsemane (Mark 14:36), and Paul says the same cry is placed on our lips: “You did not receive a spirit of slavery, to fall back into fear, but received the Spirit of adoption, by whom we cry, ‘Abba! Father!’” (Romans 8:15).

Reading the whole canon with that thread visible is what the Father’s Heart Bible is for.