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The fatherhood of God possesses three analogous and related components: creative fatherhood, theocratic fatherhood, and adoptive (redemptive) fatherhood. First, God's very creation of mankind, the imprint of his image on man, and his providential care over all his creation, demonstrate his fatherly origination and care for humanity. Since God is Father, those whom he created in his image are his sons. Second, the theocratic fatherhood of God appears in his corporate adoption of Israel as his chosen people. As demonstrated by the exposition in Romans 9, this covenant people is definitively recognized by God as his son (cf. Ex. 4:22-23). In establishing the son ship of Israel, God elucidated his sovereign expectations of his people (Ex. 4:23), but also his particular and paternal care for his chosen ones. In this elevated position as corporate son, Israel typologically foreshadowed the exclusive privileges of those adopted under the provisions of the new covenant, and affirmed the intended teleology of covenantal sonship. Third, the adoptive fatherhood of God restores the original blessings of intimacy established in the Garden of Eden, and advances these blessings to their glorious denouement in solidarity with Christ the Son par excellence (cf. Rom. 8:12-17) by the eschatological Spirit. In view of this development of the filial interactions of God with humanity in history, we must say that God acted in a fatherly fashion throughout Scripture, because he is a Father by nature. More specifically, the ontological character of God as Father is determinative of the creative and the redemptive; God's fatherly actions in creation and redemption are derivative of his eternal ontological character. Presupposed by God's eternal fatherhood, created men are sons, who alone are redeemed to intended sonship privileges and constitution by the messianic Son himself. Adoptive sonship realized in Christ is grounded for Paul in the eternal reality of God's fatherhood, and is in direct continuity with the created reality of Adamic sonship as a finite replica of the archetypal sonship of Jesus Christ.

To reiterate, Jesus' eternal sonship explicitly attests to God's eternal fatherhood and man's created sonship.