XXVIII
The Fatherhood of God
“If ye then, being evil, know … how much more … your heavenly Father.”
Luke 11:13
If it were a conceivable thing that we had to part with all the words of Scripture save one, and if we were allowed to choose that one, there are some of us who would elect to retain that great declaration of Jesus—“If ye being evil know … how much more … your heavenly Father.” For, having that, we should still be rich in knowledge of the Love and Fatherhood of God. We should still know Christ’s dominating conception of God, and have His last and highest word regarding Him. We should still be able to rise, as Jesus not only warrants but invites us to do, from the little broken arc of true fatherhood on earth to the perfect round in Heaven.
At the warm reassuring touch of that “How much more your heavenly Father” whole systems of brainy divinity vanish away! The truth of the Fatherhood of God, vouched for and lived on by Jesus, kills men’s hard and unworthy and hurtful thoughts about God as sunshine kills the creatures that breed and prevail in darkness and ignorance. They can no more live alongside of a realisation that Christ’s name for God is His true name, and really describes His attitude to all the sons of men, than the dark, creepy things that live under the stone can remain there when you turn it over and let in the air and the light.
But, say some, you must not carry the truth of God’s Fatherhood too far. What is too far? I ask. I want to carry it, and I believe Christ means us to carry it, as far as ever it will stretch, and that is “as far as the East is from the West.” Think of a father’s goodwill. It is conceivable that other men may do you a deliberate wrong. But you are entitled to believe that your father won’t. You may not understand what he proposes, but you can be quite sure that he means only your good. Henry Drummond tells how his early days were made miserable by the conception he had of God as of some great staring eye in the heavens watching all he did. But that is a policeman’s eye, not a father’s.
There are many tokens that, even yet, we have not realised what these blessed words of Jesus mean and imply. A mother vainly trying to answer the old, old question why her little one was taken from her, will say, “Perhaps I was too fond of him.” Or, should sudden sorrow come, the explanation suggested by the troubled one himself is, “I was too happy.” There are plenty of people who are afraid to declare that they feel very well or are very happy, in case the upper powers should hear and send trouble, apparently out of sheer malice! “Bethankit, what a bonny creed!” Oh! what a dreadful caricature of God! How it must pain the Father to hear His children talking so!
There is another mark of fatherhood, as we know it on earth—compassion, pity, the willingness to forgive. There is no forgiveness on earth like a father’s or a mother’s, none so willing, none that will wait so long and yet give itself without stint at last. Pity, as the world of business and of ordinary relationship knows it, is at best a transient emotion. It murmurs a few easy words and then forgets. But parent love suffereth long and is kind, hopes against hope, and waits and is still hopeful when everyone else has written the offender down irreclaimable. It is such compassion and pity for us sinners, how great soever our sins be, that Jesus would have us come for to God in Heaven.
But will not men abuse such patience and long-suffering? it is asked. Is it not a risky thing to tell them that God is our Father? It is. But it is the risk that Love takes cheerfully, and that only Love can take. And when men talk lightly and complacently about the great mercy of God, there is something, I think, which they have forgotten, namely, that at the heart of the divine Fatherly forgiveness there lies the shadow of the Cross. I do not say that in any conventional sense. I say it because I have seen for myself that at the heart of all true earthly forgiveness of a fatherly sort there lies this same mysterious shadow. Shall not the father forgive his returning prodigal? Yea, verily, and with all his heart. But, ah, before that, think how the father has suffered with his son, and for his son. The prodigal’s shame is the father’s shame too, and lies heavy on his heart. And it is out of a chamber where he and that pain have long been companions that the earthly father issues to welcome and receive at last the lad who has sought his face penitent and in his right mind. The welcome is real. The forgiveness is full and free. And yet behind it there is sacrifice. The price of it is suffering. Aback of it lies—the Cross! That is what silences cheap thinking and glib speech about the forgiveness of God. If God’s long-suffering be like a father’s here, it is, first, long suffering.
The danger, however, is not that we abuse God’s grace knowingly and in callous complacency. Far more is it, I think, that we never actually accept and realise and build our lives upon the gracious compassion of the Heavenly Father and His willingness to forgive.
Every parent ought to know Coventry Patmore’s beautiful lyric, “The Toys.” In it a father tells how, when his little son had
