A Parent’s Love as an Image of God’s Love
This post is exceptionally long, and you probably won’t read it all. But it’s from my heart, and I hope you’ll take time to consider reading it.
Tonight as I was cleaning up the kitchen after dinner (something I do only once in a blue moon) and keeping an eye on Elena while Nancy was getting ready to head out to some meetings, I had a profound realization. I love my daughter. I love her almost as much as I love my wife.
She was playing in her playpen and had tipped over sideways in a wonderfully contorted position that only an aspiring gymnast could accomplish. She is not yet strong enough to right herself, and she was laying uncomfortably over several toys and struggling to get up. This is a position she finds herself in quite frequently. Sometimes she manages to make her way onto her stomach (not much more comfortable). Always she ends up whining for help. I smile at this whine (so far, she’s only 8 months old). Never yet has it been annoying to me. This is when I realized I love her.
I walk over and tenderly sit her back upright she goes back to playing without much acknowledging my assistance. A minute later, we repeat the process. These sort of things go on throughout the day. She must be hand-fed. She poops and pees all over herself and we must change her diapers. Soon she’ll be disobeying and we will have to discipline her, which I’m really not looking forward to.
All of this however reminds me how much I love her. These little inconveniences do not annoy me, or make me frustrated at her. Then again, I don’t have to put up with it nearly as much as Nancy does, so maybe I don’t have enough credibility yet to make this next assertion.
This must be fairly close to exactly the way God feels about us, only with him it is to the nth degree. He loves us perfectly and always will. We are like children in his eyes and his love for us is much the same (deeper still) as (than) a parent’s love for their child. Unconditional. Unbreakable. Unfailing. Relentless. Perfect.
This analogy goes very deep, very wide, very high, doesn’t break down very easily. I believe the order of things was created this way. Just as a husband’s relationship with his wife gives us a picture of Jesus’ relationship to the Church, so a parent’s relationship to a child gives us a picture of God’s love for his children. This analogy, as immense as it may be, however, has several strange twists. The first one:
Not all of us are God’s children.
We are not all God’s children
I know that this is a controversial and unpopular, and somewhat discouraging thought. But we must realize who God is: Almighty, Creator, Holy, Utterly Perfect, Perfectly Good, Loving. And we must realize who we are: disobedient, selfish, naïve, ungrateful, proud, and arrogant. All of us have spit in God’s face. This is another facet of the depth of the parent/child analogy. Parent’s know that a child willfully disobeys at it’s earliest opportunity to do, which (I’ve heard) comes much sooner and more unexpectedly than we’d, well, expect. What right do we have to call ourselves God’s children? We have turned our backs on him.
Don’t believe me? Think for a moment about the 10 commandments, the second simplest illustration of God’s law to man (read the old testament, there are 613 laws that Isreal was to follow.)
- I am your Lord and God. You shall have no other gods before Me
- You shall not make for yourself an idol (something you think about more often or love more than God)
- You shall not make wrongful use of the name of your God
- Remember the Sabbath and keep it holy (take a day of rest and do not work…)
- Honor your parents
- You shall not murder (Jesus said that if you hold a grudge, or insult someone, you are guilty of murder)
- You shall not commit adultery (Jesus said if you look at someone with lustful intent you are guilty of adultery)
- You shall not steal (anything… ever…)
- You shall not bear false witness (lying… even little ones)
- You shall not covet your neighbor’s wife or house (or anything else)
How many of these have you broken? I’ll bet you’ve broken all of them. I have. Why? We are sinful. That is the natural state of things. We have broken God’s law. What is the punishment for this? Death is. This leads to the second odd twist:
We Can Become God’s Child
(Read: Romans 5:12)
It’s a strange spiritual truth, but it make’s sense. How can we be someone’s children if we aren’t even alive? We are born into this physical life, spiritually stillborn. But God gives us an opportunity to come to life spiritually. This is what is meant by the phrase “born again”. Jesus taught us that we can be “born again”, not physically, but spiritually. Confused? Don’t worry. So was the Bible expert he first told this to. (Read: John 3). How do we become “born again”? Believe in Jesus. Not just as an intellectual assent to the fact of his existence, but ‘believe’ here means to put your faith, trust, hope, in Him. That everything he said is true. That things happened, and are going to happen the way he says it. It means to obey, live by, follow, the things he taught us, told us, and showed us how to do. This is what it means to “believe in Jesus”. If we do that, we are then told that we are given the RIGHT to become children of God! (Read: John 1). THIS is when we become God’s children. This is a fairly profound statement, being a child of the most supremely powerful entity in the entirety of reality. Whoa. But here is the third twist to the analogy:
God loves EVERYONE.
This is where we get the ‘mistaken’ idea that we are ALL God’s children. Think about this for a moment. With your infant, you have a nearly infinite (as infinite as it is possible for a finite being to have) amount of patience and love, but what about other people’s children? When was the last time you were in a crowded place, or an airplane with a whiny, screaming, upset child? Isn’t that frustrating? It’s pretty difficult to love someone else’s baby.
But God loves EVERYONE with that sort of intensity. We see evidence of this fact and we think that then we must all be God’s children for sure! He loves us so much, we must be pretty special to him. That is an error in thinking. God loves everyone so much because he is a perfectly loving being. But, because he is a perfectly loving being, that means he is going to do the right, the fair, the just thing for everyone, doesn’t it.
Would it be fair of God to let a murder into heaven? Would it be fair for God to let Jefferey Dahmer, Charles Manson, Al Capone, Hitler, Mussolini, into heaven? Of course not! The fair thing would be for them to pay for their crimes against humanity. The same thing is true of liars, thieves, cheaters, immoral people, and every other kind of sinner. We must all pay for our sins. We’re all headed for hell.
We’re all headed for hell when we die. All of us.
See the list of 10 commandments above. If you’ve broken one of those, you must pay for it. This is typically where we pull out our wonderful “it’s not fair… the punishment doesn’t fit the crime…” sort of argument. And all I can say here is that it is likely that we have a good sense of “fair” and “just” in our finite heads, in the cosmic sense. All I know is that God set the rules, and we broke them. So how can I sit here and write this? Because know the last twist. The best of them all:
God’s children never die.
Once you come to life spiritually, you will never die. You will never go to hell. The most wonderful thing Jesus asks us to believe about him is that he paid the price of our crimes for us. He paid our debt. He set things right between us and God, and all he asks us to do is believe it, to accept it. If we accept Him paying the fine for our crimes against God, the slate is wiped clean, forever.
Just as we are born physically alive and spiritually dead, we will die physically but remain alive spiritually. In fact, the bible refers to new bodies, so it may even be that God’s children don’t stay physically dead. This is what I believe, that heaven will be a physical AND spiritual place, in a wonderful combination of the two that we are incapable of perceiving in our limited, physical state.
I came to this realization about seven and a half years ago (late summer 1999) and it changed my life. I had grown up going to church and hearing this message all my life, but never really did anything about it. I didn’t know that there was anything to be done (I missed that part of the message). I did my own thing, but at the end of that summer, through a variety of circumstances, all the Sunday school lessons that I ignored, all the bible verses that I had memorized, all came flooding back to me and I realized that I had never acted on the things I knew, the things I sang about in church. So I decided to actually believe Jesus, that what he said was true, and that what he told/taught/showed us to do, we are supposed to do as well. It was then that I became a child of God.
I was reminded of that this evening while cleaning up the kitchen and watching my eight-month-old daughter fumble around with her toys in her play pen. God loves me like that. And, in my own eight-month-old way, I love him too.
I may not have explained everything very clearly, and I’d be glad to answer questions. I just wanted to get this all down in writing while I was thinking about it.
Thanks for sharing from your heart, Matt. It is helping me freshly appreciate God’s depth of love tonight. I loved the picture of you with Elena- such a touching portrayal of how intimate and personal God is with us.
OH!!! I cannot tell you how deeply this touched my heart! THANK YOU!! I seem to have a very special place in my heart for the three of you… God has just given me this intense love for you guys… and I can’t tell you how deeply moved I am by what you and Nancy share here. This picture of God is such a good reminder of the TRUTH that I am so very thankful for, and during this very real and hard time in my life, I can’t even begin to express how much I need to be reminded of this… Thanks!
Having kids really can change the way you think about things. I know I have only been a dad for two weeks but it is amazing. I have already thought some about these things and the paralells that there are.
Beautiful reflection of God’s heart Matt! Thank you for sharing it!
With our first little one on the way alot of similar thoughts have been running through my head. I’ve always read passages about “dearly loved children” through the eyes of a child, but as a parent, “dearly loved children” seems to be much more deep and profound. The baby started to kick last week in Sarah, and every little thing it does fulls me with pride and joy and excitement.
A child only sees some of the fruit of that joy and affection from it’s parents, and only partially understands it. But I’m learning that as a parent, God’s deep feelings for us seem much more potent and amazing.