An insomniac's Psalm 103: Verse 13

"As a father shows compassion to his children, so the Lord shows compassion to those who fear him."

Ah, finally, the mention of "father"! Security. Unconditional love. The father looks down at his child and sees his own image, sees what he will become rather than the unpromising scamp he is now. The father loves even the runt of the litter, the one everyone else in town raises eyebrows at.

An important clarification: Fatherness is not a metaphor. It is not as if God, as an afterthought, cast about for a convenient analogy to communicate approximately his heart toward us and was fortunate enough to stumble upon this crude human adumbration we call the parent-child relationship and said to himself, "This will do."

The way it happened is that Fatherness and Sonness is of the basic fabric of reality. Before there was anything else, there was a Father and Son (with the Spirit, of course). When it came time to create the universe, God fashioned us after himself. He is the Archetype; we are the copies. That truth gives me permission to mine all I want from this "metaphor" and never exhaust it. Does a father show partiality to his child over other children? You bet. Jesus said to Peter: ". . . 'What do you think, Simon? From whom do kings of the earth take toll or tax? From their sons or from others?' And when he said, 'From others,' Jesus said to him, 'Then the sons are free'" (Matthew 17:25-26).

When a child acts in disappointing ways, the father's disappointment is swallowed up in hope; he sees the future. The father expects imperfection right off the bat. As C.S. Lewis' demon Screwtape noted, with chagrin, "If only the will to walk is there He is pleased with their little stumbles." God's fatherly love creates a safe environment in which to fail, where failure is never grounds for divorce, and where shortcomings are dealt with in a personal, not one-size-fits-all way.

When I think of my sin abstracted from the understanding of my sonship, I'm afraid of God's wrath. But when I come to my senses and remember who I am and who He is, fear flees away. The realization immediately recasts my sin in a whole other category. Verse 12 depicted a forensic relationship; verse 13, a familial one. Even unbelievers have a saying, "You can pick your friends but you can't pick your relatives." Likewise, God is "stuck" with me---but he chose me, too. And I'm "stuck" with him, for the long haul.

To read "Verse 14," click here.

To hear commentaries by Andrée Seu, click here.