Father heart of God

Hosea 11:3

It was I who taught Ephraim to walk,
taking them by the hand,
but they never knew that I healed them.

Thought for the day – Father heart of God.

Hosea is a hard book to read. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, it’s hard. But as Biblical scholar Derek Kidner puts it Hosea ‘is one of the boldest … in exposing us to the mind and heart of God in human terms.’ And we see that in today’s chapter. We see God as a father teaching his children to walk, taking them by the hand as they grow up and then watching them walk away from him and forgetting who he was and what he had done for them. It is a heart-breaking image.

And in our chapter today we see a tension between the image of God who is Almighty and image of a God who loves us like a gentle father. And if I’m honest, I’m not quite sure where to go with that. Maybe it’s one of the images we are just encouraged to sit with and wonder about. That’s not a cop out because it’s something we all struggle with.

I know we are in a different covenant than the people of Israel and so our relationship to God is different. So the idea of the God teaching us to walk like a good father sits more easily with us. But that doesn’t preclude the all-powerful God from being our judge. And maybe that’s the scary part. The image of an angry father, rather than a gentle one. So in many respects much like our own fathers then.

This blog post is part of the Walking the Way Podcast series. All views expressed in this essay are those of the author. This essay is freely available under Creative Commons License with Attribution-ShareAlike, allowing users to share it in other mediums/formats and adapt/translate the content as long as an attribution link, indication of changes, and the same Creative Commons License applies to that material.

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