As a Father Loves

As a Father Loves

Philip Yancey describes a defining moment from his childhood: he had broken something important and hid it, terrified of his father's response. When his father found it, instead of the anger Yancey expected, his father pulled him close. 'I expected punishment and received tenderness,' Yancey wrote. 'That moment gave me a small but real picture of what God might be like.' He spent much of his writing career helping people whose experience of human fatherhood had made the concept of God as Father difficult or painful. 'God is not your father's worst qualities amplified to divine scale,' he wrote. 'He is what your best father-moments pointed toward.'

Psalm 103:13 uses the simile of parental compassion to describe divine compassion. The word racham (compassion) shares its root with rechem (womb) — it is the deep, physical, visceral love of a parent for a child. The father in the psalm doesn't love his children because they're impressive or because they perform well — he loves them because they are his. God's compassion operates the same way: it is not contingent on our performance but on our identity as His children. For those for whom the word 'father' carries wounds, this verse is an invitation to recalibrate — not from your experience of human fatherhood to God, but from God's perfect fatherhood back to a new understanding of what the word means.