10.03 The fatherhood of God

III. THE FATHERHOOD OF GOD In the second place we are often apt to distrust the reality of the Divine Fatherhood. There are mysteries in God’s ordering of the world which we cannot fathom.

They are and must be a heavy strain upon our faith in His Fatherly will. Yet behind even these mysteries, in the ultimate motive and issue of things, there can be nothing finally inconsistent with all that we mean by fatherhood. And when we pass from these mysteries of Providence to the direct relations between the spirit of man and God, there we are to hold to that truth of fatherhood with quite immediate and unfaltering certainty. Yet are there not many good people who, for example in the morbid scrupulosity of their conscience, or in deciding the rival claims of mercy and ecclesiastical rules, or in considering the fate of the heathen, of the ignorant, of the vast masses who have had no chance of worthy life, seem to hesitate in this sure and simple trust? Again, we can think of systems of religion not only in past history limiting, by rigorist views of Church order, or precise doctrines as to “predestination,” God’s own power of saving His own children systems which, for all their imposing aray of logic, have missed the essential mark of truth consistency with the Fatherhood of God. And as that truth is the final test of religious theory, so it is the final stay and security of the soul.

We cannot be too simple in our grasp of it.

Often, under the strain of sorrow, perplexity, doubt, other anchors in which we trusted slip; but if the last anchor holds this faith that below all depths and above all heights stand eternally the Will, the Wisdom, the Love of a Father then we shall not drift; we shall be secure till the storm is past.

“Then was I as a child that cries, But crying knows his father near.”

TAGS: [Parables]