Sometimes people refer to the Father as God. Then again, people also refer to God in a different, more general sense. This different sense of ‘God’ is a philosophical construct. It rarely appears in the Bible, perhaps only in a few verses. Normally in the Bible, God means the Father.
A different example might help: The police. If there is a police officer at your door, they might say “It is the police”. If there is then a phonecall from the police station they too might say “Hello, this is the police”. The officer is not the same person as the person who telephoned, but it is an accepted philosophical construct for each to identify as “the police”. But there is no person or being who is the police in their entirety. It is not a person. It is a concept. That is one sense of how a abstraction can be used as a common form to which many can identify.
A variation of this sense, using police again, is how each police officer has a different version of a common police image. An officer at a desk has things in common with a broad concept of what a police officer should be, in Plato philosophy (evident in Trinity philosophy) it is the Form, in this case we could call it the police Form.The officers in patrol cars are different to the desk officers but still have things in common with the general police Form. Similarly a sheriff. Similarly a highly trained police raid officer. They comply with the laws. They enforce the laws, in different ways. They maintain an overall reputation and code of ethics. This mixture of these qualities exist in varying ways in each kind of officer but are shared. It is their police Form. Yet no being exists which equates to this Form. Nobody is the police in entirety.
Similarly, one sense of what is meant by God is like this, a Form. It is called essence, being, but not being in a sense we mean today. No one being is God Form in entirety. The word ‘being’ has shifted meaning and did so centuries ago too. Now this is philosophy which is used a little in the New Testament but rarely, just in a few verses. Usually God is used to refer to the Father. People tend to think of God in this sense wrongly, forgetting that this is a Form, not a being. It is called a being in a very ancient meaning of that word or concept. You can phone the police, but if you do so you will speak to an officer, who might be a different person each time you phone. All you care about usually is that it is the police. On occasions you might care which person it is. There are times when we mean ‘God’ in a similar general sense. But this can be confused with the other sense where God means the Father.
