The Character of God as Father Pt 6 — The Proverbs 11:1 Parent

Proverbs 11:1 A false balance is an abomination to the LORD, but a just weight is His delight

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I learned that verse from 3-2-1 Penguins, which my now 13 year olds used to love.  But I am going to apply it differently than most people do.  It’s a verse about integrity in business, certainly, a verse about not cheating people and hearkens back to Torah law, but when the scriptures says that something is an abomination to the LORD, or that He hates something, we have to go a lot deeper because it is revealing something important about God’s character.  And if something is true about God’s character, then we are supposed to be conformed to that over time as we grow in maturity.

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In my last few blogposts, I have been showing how patient and consistent God is in His dealings with His children, and how, when it looks like He has double standards it boils down to mainly two realities — the heart and maturity level of the person in question.  A rebellious “spit in his face with a smile” type of person is going to be treated differently than someone who wants to please Him but just screwed up.  On top of that, the types of people who spit in His face will also be dealt with differently — have they rejected Him when they do it, or are these people whose thinking has been so warped that through circumstance that they see God the Father through the lens of repeated beatings and rejection?  You see, we can hold Him at arms length because of anger and hatred towards our own earthly fathers, or we can simply hate Him without any such provocation whatsoever. As God knows our innermost thoughts, our mindset and hangups play a big part in how He treats us, if it did not, then let me assure you that many of us would be quite dead.  Many people who think that they hate Him actually love Him but are too frightened to let their guard down, and my entire focus over this blog has been combating that and restoring His reputation among the children.  Simply put, to paraphrase Malachi, I want to return the heart of the children to their Heavenly Father by cutting through all the false perceptions of Him.  It took me over a decade, but I’d like for everyone else to fast track it — why?  Because He deserves it and you deserve it.  He deserves to be loved as He is and you deserve to experience the kind of Father He really is.

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Let’s go back to Proverbs 11:1 and the false balance. Other versions call it “inaccurate scales” and I like that better.  Say on one hand we have someone who has been walking with God for 50 years, knows the commandments, preaches righteousness, and yet violates Lev 19:18 “Love your neighbor as yourself.”  Say there is another person who has been walking with God 1 year, who doesn’t really know the commandments very well and doesn’t preach, and yet breaks the same commandment?  Does God hold them to the same standard?

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Now let me add to that scenario.  The guy who has been walking with God 50 years was brutally abused and even molested by his earthly father and still carries around in him those misconceptions about the Father.  To him, the commandments are the dictates of a brutal tyrant and not the house rules of a loving Father who simply wants harmony and cooperation among His children.  And the guy who has been walking with God only 1 year had an idyllic childhood, wonderful loving parents who although they were not believers, raised him in kindness and compassion and never taught him to be cruel.  Now what does God do?  Only He can dispense perfect justice in such a case, and so we must trust Him to do so and not simply look at it with frustration from the outside.

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Aren’t you glad we don’t make those kinds of calls?  Whereas we rush to judgment, God has a set of absolutely fair balances and only He can see what is on them.  He judges based on maturity, intent, ignorance, and a whole bunch of other things — and indeed we see the evidence of this in our lives.  There are things He does not allow me to get away with now that He let slide for years, and I am sure you can relate to that.  Heck, there are things He doesn’t allow me to get away with now that He was letting slide a few weeks ago!  That is what it is to have a fair balance, because now on the scale that measures my sin, revelation was added to counterbalance it, and when I do now what I did then, no longer  in ignorance, my Father is going to treat me differently — and frankly He needs to.  That is exactly how we parent our own children.  We don’t treat teens like toddlers.

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And that is why we can feel safe with Him.  I know that many of you had earthly Fathers (and mothers) who were chaotic and inconsistent, and oftentimes demanded accountability in areas completely out of the blue, without even instructing you beforehand.  In fact, with many children, being backhanded was the way they learned something was wrong in the first place.  And I know that when we see things like Uzzah touching the ark to steady it when David was moving it, and being immediately killed, our indignation rises up and just like King David we are offended that it wasn’t fair — but of all the laws on the books, every Israelite should have known that the ark was immeasurably holy, and even the High Priest was only allowed to go before it once a year and sprinkle blood on it on Yom Kippur.  Touching this holy thing meant death, and Uzzah knew it, not only shouldn’t have he been near enough to touch it, but he shouldn’t even have been anywhere near the cart carrying it.  The consequences were absolutely spelled out and absolutely clear and from his childhood he had heard the Torah read once every seven years on the Feast of Sukkot.  Everyone knew to stay away from the ark, with the exception of the priests, and even they were only allowed to approach it when given permission, and specific Levites, who were only allowed to touch the poles supporting it when the camp was moving.   If Uzzah had not died, all Israel would have flocked to touch the ark — I mean, if you saw that people could touch the earthly throne of God, wouldn’t you touch it if you saw that nothing happened?  Just ask Adam when he saw that Eve didn’t physically die from eating the fruit from the Tree of Good and Evil.  And I am not comparing the two, just stating the human predilection for pressing their luck in order to have “an experience.”

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On the flip side, lets look at Ninevah.  Ninevah was the great capital of Assyria, hated by the Israelites.  They were pagans dedicated to the worship of Dagon (the god who was half man and half fish), they were bloodthirsty and unjust, and their crimes were legendary.  But when God sent Jonah to preach that they would be destroyed in 40 days because of their sins, they repented and destruction was diverted.  Jonah preached God’s laws to them, and they humbled themselves in sackcloth and ashes and with fasting.  And God relented and did not destroy them — but why? Why after centuries of wickedness did God not destroy them anyway? Because of accurate weights.  We know this because of how God responded to Jonah’s displeasure.

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Jonah 4:11 And should not I spare Nineveh, that great city, wherein are more than sixscore thousand persons that cannot discern between their right hand and their left hand; and also much cattle?

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God took their ignorance into account and they were saved from physical destruction, for the time being.  It doesn’t mean that they all had salvation and we will see them when Messiah returns, but it means that their ignorance PLUS their repentance tipped God’s impeccably accurate scales in favor of mercy.  I pray that after that, many of them covenanted with the LORD, but we just don’t know.

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If Ninevah, with as wicked as they were, if their genuine repentance was met with such mercy, how much more so is your genuine repentance?  Their ignorance was not enough to save them from the day of destruction, but their repentance was.  That is Fatherhood, that is long-suffering righteousness and mercy.  That is the character of our Father.

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True repentance, which is by definition humble in nature, always tips the scales.

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The Character of God as Father Pt 5: The Father who knows our hearts, even when we don’t

 

Sometimes what seems random in God’s dealings with individuals throughout the Bible is anything but.  Its easy for us to see Biblical characters as fictional or allegorical, but these were very real people who God knew by name.  Some of them were and are so dear to Him that He displayed mercy to their children just because He remembered them.  I’m sure you can relate to that, the concept of being so fond of someone that you are fond of their children and grandchildren simply because you loved them so much.  And it is vitally important that we see them as real, because to our heavenly Father, who dwells in eternity, outside of time, Abraham isn’t a distant memory, Abraham was God’s friend (2 Chr 20:7, Is 41:8).  So it is important that we treat these Biblical people with respect, not glossing over their sins, because we must learn from them, but not being critical of them either.  David wouldn’t even criticize King Saul, so I am very reticent to speak ill of those who God loves very deeply.

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Some people say that God simply loves who He loves, but the scriptures tell us that He is a searcher of the heart and kidneys, our motives and secret thoughts that are even hidden from us.  I know that I am often shocked when He points out an area of sin to me — just recently He showed me how much I grumble, and I was utterly floored at how blind I was to something that must be painfully obvious to everyone else.  It is not the kind of person I desire to be, but it is the kind of person I have been all my life, so when He pointed it out I repented and I have spent a grueling two weeks now learning to live differently.  Now, why did He bother to tell me at all?  Why didn’t He just rebuke me?  Because He knew that although my ego was deceiving me by hiding my shameful behavior, I would want to change my behavior.  He knows my heart, He knows that the most important thing to me is becoming conformed to His image so that I can represent His character accurately.  That doesn’t mean I was thrilled to hear the news, it doesn’t mean that my ego didn’t protest, it just means that He knows that I am becoming the type of person who really does care about His approval.  This despite the fact that I still struggle with sin and many flaws in my character.

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I bring that up as an example of how He really does know us better than we know ourselves.  He knows the areas I am wanting to give in to Him and He knows the areas I still tend to withhold from Him.  In those areas He does not treat me in the same way, because again, He knows my heart.  He knows when He has to be harsh and when He can be gentle.  He knows when to guide and when to discipline.  And my areas are completely different than the areas of others.

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Cain and David both committed murder, and both were seemingly content to go and live out their lives afterwards, but they were treated very differently.  Although David’s sins were greater — not only did he commit adultery, but then he conspired to trick a man into thinking that he was the father of Bathsheeba’s child, and when that didn’t work he had him betrayed and killed, so he broke four commandments — when confronted and brought down to earth again, by a prophet, he repented.  Cain killed his brother in anger, and when confronted by God Himself, he did not repent.  Interestingly enough, Cain was given a warning beforehand that he was in danger of sinning and David was not given a warning.  The answer why is simple — David had the greater maturity, he didn’t need to be warned.  David was King, Psalmist and Prophet.  Cain was the first kid on earth.  Both were given consequences, very different consequences, but again, the consequences were based upon their hearts and upon their response to correction.  Cain was driven away, his entire way of life stripped from him, while David remained King but spent the rest of his life living with the consequences of the treachery he brought into his bloodline.

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So when we look at different Biblical accounts, we have to realize that God the Father is absolutely consistent, doing what it right given the heart condition of each person.  We rely on what is seen, but He judges on what is unseen.  So when we see two people do similar things but receiving dissimilar consequences, we have to look deeply into what that says about the things we can’t see — their motives, their heart, their attitudes, and not necessarily their words.  Talk is cheap, and we can say “I love you” with a knife hidden behind our backs, ready to strike, just as we can openly brandish a knife we have no intention of using.  Appearances are deceiving and only a fool is ruled by them.

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How does this relate to ourselves and how we look at the things that come into our lives?  It is a common Christian misconception to attribute all blessings to God and all curses to the Enemy — except when bad things happen to the people we hate and then we attribute their blessings to the work of the devil and the curses to God’s justice.  But what if, just what if the bad things in our lives ARE the blessings delivered to us by the hand of a loving Father who wants to use adversity to refine us?  What if we start embracing the bad as an opportunity to do righteousness in the midst of it? What if we look at prosperity as something that might be a trap and a snare?  Now, I am not saying it is bad to have success and money, or that it is always good when bad things happen — but we need to really change our perspective of how God operates because He truly does know our heart, He knows our hidden motives, He knows the things that we either ignore about ourselves or are genuinely blind to.  Take my grumbling and complaining for an example.

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I had a dream where I had been diagnosed with a debilitating disease that was going to eat away at me, it was fatal.  I went to two people about it, and I complained to the first person. Then I went to another person I know personally who was just diagnosed with a debilitating disease and you want to know what she was doing?  She was complaining about a certain teacher of the Hebrew Roots of Christianity.  I woke up incredibly confused and very frightened that I had MS or Lupus or something.  But I tucked it away and  took my son to Costco.

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While I was there, I passed the sausages and muttered a complaint in my mind that “every frikken thing has pork around here.”  And it struck me like a bolt of lightening, just that morning I had been reading the Torah portion to my kids and once again, the children of Israel were grumbling and complaining and making comments.  My boys always roll their eyes and say, “Oh my gosh, not again!”  And I warn them not to judge the Israelites, because we all complain too — but I only meant it in the general sense, I had never really examined myself too closely.  But I was struck all at once with the awareness that not only had I muttered and grumbled about something that it was pointless to complain about, but I do it all the time all day every day about so many things I can’t even list them all — the kids, politics, pain, etc….  If I am irritated, I am complaining.  And its a terribly debilitating disease, and it kills, and it does not reflect the character of God.  Its just wretched and there was no excuse I could offer, only repentance.

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Now, why was I given this warning in such a, frankly, compassionate way?  Why not send someone personally to embarrass me? Why not just strike me down with pain and suffering so I’d really have something to complain about (because I got the feeling from the dream that if I did not repent, that was what was in store for me, for continuing to misrepresent His character towards the people in my life)? After all, He struck down thousands of Israelites in the desert for grumbling, just like I was grumbling.  And honestly, I know now that when I am grumbling about my life I am really grumbling that He hasn’t provided me with what I want, when I want it, the way I want it.  But here’s the deal, I was truly ignorant as I was doing it.  No matter how irritating it was to the people around me who must have seen me as just an ungrateful wretch, it never occurred to me that I was murmuring against God.  Rebellion was not in my heart, ingratitude was not my intention.  I was just ignorant because I had been doing it for so long that I was operating on autopilot, and He knew it.  A lot of our sins against charity and grace fall into that category.  But in my heart of hearts, I want to serve God and be under His authority very badly, even though I still struggle with my flesh.

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So what of the Israelites who complained in the wilderness?  Well, God the Father is absolutely fair.  He had just delivered them from slavery, they saw the plagues and walked through the sea.  They received food from Heaven and water from rocks.  I have to believe that rebellion and ingratitude were in their hearts, and that their motives were to throw off that divine yoke and rule over themselves.  They wanted Him as God, as long as they got what they wanted, when they wanted it and how they wanted it.  They wanted a God who would serve them.

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Once we realize that God knows the truth about us, and that we can’t lie to Him or fool Him,  well that makes a lot of people terrified, but it shouldn’t, not exactly.  Yeshua (Jesus) said this.

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John 6:44 No man can come to me, except the Father which hath sent me draw him: and I will raise him up at the last day.

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For as terrible as you think you are right now, you were worse when the Father took notice of you, when He decided to love you and draw you to His Son.  He could have destroyed you or ignored you, He saw the darkness in your life – but He must have also seen something else, some spark of something in your heart that longed for Him to rule over you, to save you and change you.  You weren’t fooling Him then and you aren’t fooling Him now.  He sees you for exactly who you are, right now. But that also means that you can absolutely trust Him, and more than that, you can use His knowledge to show you things about yourself that your flesh would never allow you to see.  Ask Him to show it to you, ask Him to do whatever He has to in order to bring you to a place where you are willing to start having Him work with you to fix it and then cooperate.  Remember, Yeshua said that the Father was the one who drew you, not Yeshua.  Yeshua is our salvation, but He isn’t the reason you came to be saved, the Father is.

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Angry, vengeful, bloodthirsty — those are the constant accusations leveled at our Father by those who only want to read what’s on the surface or who just listen to what people say about Him, or by those who have no other concept of what the word father means.  But it’s not Yeshua with His arms wide open welcoming the Prodigal Son home, it’s the Father.  We’ve been scared because He searches our hearts, when it should have instead provided us with hope. We’ve hated that He sees our every sin, but in the midst of that sin He led us to salvation.  A lot of us mocked Him and lied about Him and taught others to do the same, and we listened to people slander Him and we laughed.  And He was back at the farm, waiting for us to come to Him, and not just waiting for us.
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Luke 15: 20 And he arose, and came to his father. But when he was yet a great way off, his father saw him, and had compassion, and ran, and fell on his neck, and kissed him.

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He ran for us.

 

Copyright Darlene Dine, reproduction without permission is prohibited

Copyright Darlene Dine, reproduction without permission is prohibited




The Character of God as Father 4 — Patient Guidance and Increasing Accountability

 

     I would say that one of the chief hallmarks of godly parenting is the patient acceptance that it takes time and effort and many mistakes before their children can learn and do what is being communicated to them.  Like it or not, our children are not born with an adult understanding of the concepts of obedience and loving behavior.  That takes years of training, and no decent parent would ever expect their 2 year old to show the same self-awareness or have the same level of self-control as a teenager.  Unfortunately, and perhaps this is the result of our being increasingly separated from others, with smaller and smaller families living far from their relatives, many people are unequipped to know what to reasonably expect from small children due to a lack of cultural experience.  An only, or youngest, child, for example, would be quite at a loss.  As a result, we have become increasingly impatient with the learning process, wanting the kids to shape up and get with the program as soon as possible.  It never occurs to many that it takes years for the human brain to become mature enough to start to want to do what we wish it would naturally do — often because we are not really interested in the day to day training up of children.  We want football stars and college graduates, and often push them through the stages leading up to that with the iron hand of impatience.

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     But this is not how we see God operating.  In the garden, Adam was given one do and one don’t and was told the consequences.  He was told to guard “shawmar” the garden and was told not to eat from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil.  I find it interesting, therefore, that God did not rebuke him for failing to guard the garden — after all, Adam was the one who let in the deceiver!  Adam’s failure in this regard introduced evil into their midst and his wife suffered for it and fell into deception, and then Adam fell into disobedience.  Now, did God destroy them and start over?  No, they were children.  He removed them from access to the Tree of Life, and placed them outside of Eden.  He told them the consequences, that the ground was cursed, and told Eve that they would bring up  children in pain.  And we see this is true — the world has been greatly corrupted by the mixing of that which is good and evil, initiated by Adam allowing evil into the garden and Eve being deceived by that evil.  And we see that what could have been a beautiful existence in the garden raising children who were truly innocent, was marred by pain and tragedy.

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     Here is what we do not see in the account.  We do not see God jumping on Adam’s back when he starts getting lax about who he allows in the garden and who he allows to associate with his wife.  Adam is given a chance to get things right, and he does not, which leads to trouble.  Eve was not careful about who she was talking with, and started questioning God after listening to someone who was questioning Him.  Both of them showed a lack of discernment in their actions, but they were allowed to make mistakes without a constant barrage of insults and impatient nagging.  When the mistakes came, God did not insult them, he corrected them and implemented the consequences, some of which they could not have foreseen.  Certainly Adam had been told that he would surely die, but he didn’t know that to God, a day is as a thousand years.  He had no concept that suffering for what we would consider almost an eternity was even among the options.  Certainly if he had perceived that, if he had had experience, he would have probably have moved heaven and earth to drive the serpent from the garden as soon as he started talking trash, or maybe even before that.  But how could Adam relate to the idea of having to work hard, or even sweating, or suffering, or imagine what it was like to raise a bunch of rugrats who oppose you at every step and sometimes end up committing murder?  Adam had never seen sin before, he had never seen consequence before, and so like a child, he couldn’t really fully grasp the consequences of his actions.

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     Did God set them up to fail?  No more so than we set up our children to fail by simply bringing innocent beings into this world.  And so, in parenting, we need to look at the example set for us by God.  Firm guidance, no constant nagging, allow failure, discipline but do not tear down, and then stick with them through the consequences of their failures.  This is how we handle children.  This is also how God, and how we, should handle new believers — as small children.  What I described above it the epitome of the union of grace and law.  Yes there are standards, but grace abounds in a loving paternal way.  God never overreacts, or moves in a hasty manner, or demands more than we have the maturity to give Him.

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     As we move our way through the scriptures we come across many examples where God holds His children to increasingly greater standards, based on their level of maturity.  Again, this is a sound, perfectly reasonable parenting practice.  Toddlers are more understanding and controlled than babies, as youth are over toddlers and teens are over youth.  Greater understanding, more self-control, more responsibility, more freedom — greater consequences.

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     In the Torah, we see that the laws concerning children are very few as compared to the laws which govern adults.  In the book of Acts, we see the same pattern in effect in chapter 15 — the laws governing new believers are few compared to the laws they would learn when Moses was taught each Sabbath.  In this ruling by the Jerusalem council, they followed the parenting principles outlined in Torah.  Now, lets look at Abraham, a man who started out as the son of an idolater (Joshua 24:2) and ended his life as our collective father in the faith, who walked in greater and greater measures of both law and freedom through faith.

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     We are introduced to Abram in Genesis 11, who lived in what we would now call Babylon, Nimrod’s pagan kingdom.  The first recorded contact between Abram and God is when God speaks to him and tells him to leave his life — He gives a command and a promise.

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12 Now the Lord had said unto Abram, Get thee out of thy country, and from thy kindred, and from thy father’s house, unto a land that I will shew thee: And I will make of thee a great nation, and I will bless thee, and make thy name great; and thou shalt be a blessing: And I will bless them that bless thee, and curse him that curseth thee: and in thee shall all families of the earth be blessed. So Abram departed, as the Lord had spoken unto him; and Lot went with him: and Abram was seventy and five years old when he departed out of Haran.

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     So God, (1) tells Abram to leave his pagan land, and his family, and (2) tells him to start walking.  But Abram disobeyed and took Lot — a decision that repeatedly worked out badly for Abram.  But we see no evidence that God was nagging him about it all the way to Caanan, and it is my belief that Abram took Lot because he had no son, it may even be that according to ancient near east tradition, he had formally adopted Lot and made him his heir.  But that isn’t written down, just my hunch.

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     Now, they came to the Land and due to a famine, decided to go south to Egypt.  While in Egypt, Abram concocts a lie designed to save his own life.  As Sarai his wife is very  beautiful, he asks her to say she is his sister so they will not kill Abram and seize her.  Now, I am not condemning Abraham, he was what we call a new believer.  He had a promise that he would be a great nation, but he didn’t believe it yet, otherwise he would not have feared for his life.  I can totally relate to this inability to trust in promises, I think we all can.  Again, we do not see God nagging Abram about this being a bad idea, God is going to let Abram fail and learn from the consequences.  So Sarai is taken, and Abram had to deal with that, and a whole lot of Egyptians suffered for it as well when plagues came down upon Pharoah’s house.  Worst of all, when the lie was discovered and Sarai was set free — they came out of the deal with an Egyptian maidservant named Hagar.  Like Lot, Hagar caused a lot of trouble as well.

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     We see a pattern emerging, sin followed by short term consequence followed by completely unforeseeable long term consequences, and yet what we should also see is that Abram was never smacked around or abandoned by God.

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     It is directly after this event that Lot’s presence starts becoming a problem, our first long term consequence and our first evidence of why Abram was told to leave his family behind.  We have strife between the family groups which leads to separation, which eventually leads to Abram having to go to war in order to rescue Lot.  All of this, of course, was entirely preventable and unforeseeable.  But part of Abram’s walk was learning that God sees the unforeseen, it was part of growing up.

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     In Genesis 15, we see something remarkable happen — despite his failures, he has continued walking with God faithfully.  God repeats His promise that Abram will be a great nation, and cuts a covenant with him.  And Abram believed Him.

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     But in Genesis 16 we see that although Abram believed God, Abram did not yet understand that God Himself brings about those things He promises if we are simply faithful and obey and wait upon Him.  Abram, encouraged by Sarai, takes matters into his own hands and takes Hagar as his concubine.  Hagar’s pregnancy turns out to be a disaster due to her prideful rebellion in the wake of it, and of course the fruit of that union, Ishmael, continues to plague the world to this day.  All this the unforeseeable consequence of one lie in Egypt.

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     In Genesis 17, we see the covenant of circumcision, and the names of Abram and Sarai are changed to Abraham and Sarah.  God tells Abraham that Sarah will bear him the promised son, even though Ishmael is now 13 years old.  I can imagine that only now does Abraham start to see how far he has strayed from the original plan that God had to make Him the father of “a nation” because now the promise is that he will be the father of “many nations.”  God never said, “Because you screwed up and disobeyed.”  Abraham probably figured that out already, but God in His fatherly mercy was making allowances for the situation as it was, even though the long term consequences were still there.

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     In Genesis 20, Abraham lied to Abimelech and Sarah was taken again into captivity, same exact lie he told in Egypt even though he had just been promised that he and Sarah would have a baby in the coming year — sometimes we have to learn things the hard way.  In Genesis 21, Isaac was finally born, and Ishmael was sent away, probably Abraham’s most painful consequence of distrust.  However, Abraham, under God’s gentle guidance, was growing in maturity.  We know this because of what happens in Genesis 22.

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     Now before we get to what happens, I want to state that we never have an example of God raging against Abraham, no matter how badly he screwed up, no matter what sort of immaturity he exhibited.  Why?  Because there is a difference between immaturity and rebellion.  The prophets preached against the rebellious, not the immature.  We must always be careful to discern the difference between someone who lacks maturity vs someone who is willfully rebellious.  A harsh word that might turn around the rebellious might needlessly discourage and crush someone who is failing and yet trying their best.

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     In Genesis 22, Abraham is told to sacrifice his own son as an olah, a whole burnt offering.  Scholars believe that this was probably at least 30 years later, and by this time Abraham had seen God keep every promise he had ever made, in fact, the Word tells us later that Abraham had such deep trust in God at this point that he was sure that if he sacrificed his son, that God would resurrect him in order to keep the promises of a nation through him.  Abraham had reached full maturity.

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     Wow, what a difference, and what an amazing story of parenting.  May we all endeavor to live up to His exalted example.  And may Messiah reign over an age where all children are parented this way.

Copyright Darlene Dine reproduction without permission is prohibited




The Character of God as Father 3 — I Will Never Leave You…..

It’s the pain and sense of loss that doesn’t ever really die — the pain a child feels when their father abandons the family, or was never there in the first place. The sense of loss when the man who had an obligation to be a pillar in the life of his child decides he has better things to do. It may be masked with anger, but the pain is always there.  Our prisons here in America are filled with angry adults who were once sad children, who became angry children, who in turn became angry adults. Abandonment breeds hopelessness, and hopelessness kills. There are many degrees of abandonment, from the father who just stuck around long enough to get their mother pregnant, to the divorced dad who never shows up again.  Or sometimes the wandering type who shows up unexpectedly, raising hopes and making promises and then disappearing again.  Then there are the fathers who are physically there, but emotionally they are far away, or there for one child but not the others.  Being abandoned strikes at the deepest places of fear and insecurity in a child. Being abandoned undermines every aspect of the child’s psyche.

The abandoned child does not have the luxury of feeling completely grounded, because the foundation of their life is incomplete.

The abandoned child grows up in incomplete, unrealized love and longing — regardless of how loving the remaining parent is.

The abandoned child cannot completely relate to reasonable expectations of what a mother is or what a father is.

The abandoned child does not see the world in terms of security, because they grow with the belief that trust is a fairy tale.

The abandoned child will often internalize the blame for the parent not loving them enough to want to stay.

The abandoned child often cannot conceive of a scenario where God the Father will not abandon them at the first sign of trouble — or when He has had enough of their flaws.  They often imagine He is looking for any excuse to leave.

Such a person is not going to be able to make a true emotional connection to God the Father, because the prerequisites to such an attachment were not constructed in their early life.  I have to tell you, that based on my reading of scripture from front to back, our Heavenly Father is literally screaming from just about every page that He is not like that.  And not even every earthly father is like that, some fathers choose that path because they choose to esteem themselves and they choose not to become entangled in committed, loving relationships that require responsibility.  They decided to withhold themselves from those who were born to need them.  It was a personal choice rooted in their personal character flaws, a choice that never could have been changed by the inherent worth of the child.  When a choice like that is made, the merit of the child is not taken into consideration.  A child can be a perfectly behaved, straight A student, Prom Queen or Quarterback, doing all the housework and cooking and earning a living on the side to provide for the family — and it will not enter into the decision.  No child, really, no one, can ever be good enough to turn back a decision that someone really wants to make.  There are some things out of our control, and someone else’s life choices, no matter how deeply they impact us, are at the top of that list.

So before I go any further, let me sum it up.  If you were emotionally or physically abandoned by a parent, even if they tell you it was about you or act like it was your fault, it was really because of what they wanted, not about what you deserved, which was a stable, loving home — whether you were Prom Queen or the social outcast. If you were abandoned, you need to really come to terms with that or everything I am about to share with you about the character of God the Father will go right in one ear and out the other.

From the beginning, the revealed character of God as Father is that of a father who will never leave us, nor forsake us — EVEN when we deserve it.  What He does do is withdraw His protection, but not until it is His only remaining option to drive us towards repentance when we have decided in our hearts to hate Him.  Withdrawing from us is only ever something we decide for Him to do, and it can’t be done lightly, and it doesn’t happen in an instant, and it is generally with the intent of future restoration.  Withdrawal is not the same as abandonment, withdrawal has a purpose towards the benefit of the person being withdrawn from, abandonment is entirely about the person doing the abandoning, for their own purposes.

Gen 28:15b I will not leave thee, until I have done that which I have spoken to thee of

This was the promise to Jacob, and the things referenced to were, in verse 14 “And thy seed shall be as the dust of the earth, and thou shalt spread abroad to the west, and to the east, and to the north, and to the south: and in thee and in thy seed shall all the families of the earth be blessed.”

Here we see an eternal promise, a promise not to leave someone until things that would never occur in his lifetime would take place.  YHVH has still never left Jacob, even though Jacob has been asleep now for thousands of years.  And Jacob wasn’t always wise, he wasn’t always righteous in all his actions, Jacob made mistakes, and so did his children.  But the promise to never leave and forsake was never based on Jacob’s worthiness, it was based upon the character of God, which is a constant.

To the casual eye, the Father portrayed in the Tanakh, what Christians call the “old” Testament, is very violent and unpredictable.  But it only appears that way when we fail to look at the whole picture.  And that picture is always a picture of a Father doing whatever it takes to protect His beloved family from external and internal dangers and guide them towards righteousness leading to life.  But when we lack the perspective of a healthy father/child relationship, we will miss it.  We will see an unpredictable tyrant, ready to leave us at any moment, instead of facing the kind of Father who patiently allows decades of rebellion to pass before taking drastic action – and even then not withdrawing His love, but proving it through creating situations where His children have a choice between returning to Him or dying at the hands of their oppressors.  Because He sees rebellion as a life or death situation, He has to communicate that to the children He loves by lifting His hand of protection and showing them.  But does He ever leave?  No.

What do good parents do when their child is rebelling?  They discipline because they can see the consequences of the behavior that the child cannot see or simply lacks the maturity to care about.  When we look at God’s actions throughout the Word from this vantage point, we start to see two beloved children removed from the tree that would have left them living forever as sinful beings, instead of two people rejected by God.  God never left Adam and Eve, He just took them out of danger.  In the same way, God never abandoned the children of Israel in the Wilderness, even when they were profoundly irritating.  Sometimes He took deadly steps to remove danger from their midst, in order to save the whole nation, but He never left.  They complained and He never left, they worshiped the golden calf, and He never left, they refused to go into the Land and He never left, Moses took credit for getting water from the rock himself, and He never left.  The nation didn’t drive out all their enemies, and He never left them.  Eli and his sons defiled the priesthood and the offerings, and He never left the Nation.  Hundreds of years of idolatry off and on, and He disciplined, but never abandoned them.

He doesn’t leave — but He does allow us to leave Him, and sometimes He recognizes the fact that we have left Him, like when He handed the Northern Kingdom of Israel a certificate of divorce, an admission that they had broken the covenant and had long since walked away.

A Father who has that kind of patience, who tries that hard to reign in His children, who frankly puts up with things most of us never would — a Father who continued to love the unlovable, people who in many cases didn’t even desire His love, or even His blessings or His Name — and He never left.

How likely is it, that when He treated the rebellious house of Israel with such patient kindness for so many hundreds of years, when they wanted nothing to do with Him — well, how likely is it that when someone longs for Him and really does desire to do right that He will abandon them for what, in comparison, are very small things?  Its impossible.

Deut 4:30 When thou art in tribulation, and all these things are come upon thee, even in the latter days, if thou turn to the Lord thy God, and shalt be obedient unto his voice;

31 (For the Lord thy God is a merciful God;) he will not forsake thee, neither destroy thee, nor forget the covenant of thy fathers which he sware unto them.

We are living in the latter days, and we have a promise written here that if we turn to Him and obey Him that He will not destroy us, nor forsake us. Unlike some earthly fathers, He will never do the leaving.  We have all the control over who leaves the relationship.  We have to leave, its all on us, but that doesn’t mean we can behave however we want, because if we are rebellious, we are already leaving Him in our hearts.  But that is our choice. We can leave, He won’t.  He won’t break the Covenant, but we can.  In many ways, this relationship with our Heavenly Father is nothing like the relationships we have with our earthly fathers.  We decide who stays and who goes.  If we want Him, then we stay with Him and He will not leave.  If we want him, then we treat Him like a good father deserves to be treated, by beginning to give Him our trust, to acknowledge that He knows better than we do what is good and bad, that we live in His house according to His rules, and when we fail, we repent and return to Him.

The father of the prodigal son didn’t move away, or build a huge wall, or reject his son, or drive him away, or threaten him.  He let him go, but He also accepted him back because his heart was genuine.  The prodigal son was a fool who became wise, who learned that the ways of his father, which he had despised, actually led to a good life.  The father had the wisdom and grace to let him go and accept him back, and he accepted him back because in his heart, he had never left his son, his son had just left him.

God has never destroyed nor abandoned anyone who ever truly wanted HIM.  And if you are the kind of person who is afraid to get close because you are afraid He will make an exception in your case — then that’s just proof that you want Him very desperately indeed.  If you can find anyone in scriptures who wanted Him, who really wanted him, who He abandoned and callously left, then you have a perfect right to suspect Him of being potentially unfaithful to you.  But if you can’t find anyone like that, with all the wickedness and provocation He endured, then it’s time to let your guard down and realize that He was telling the truth.

He isn’t fickle.  He isn’t chaotic.  He doesn’t have anywhere more important to be or other people He would rather be with.  His dedication to you is based on His perfection, not your imperfection.  He isn’t spending His time anxiously waiting for you to screw up so that He can have an excuse to leave you.  His character is long-suffering, and forgiving and full of grace and it always has been.  He is not anxious to depart but to dwell within, and He has proved it for millennia with people way more challenging than you are.

If your heart longs for Him, it is because He planted that longing within you — not to crush you with hopelessness, but to draw you near to where He wants you to remain.  If your distrust hasn’t driven Him away so far, then I can safely say that you owe Him the benefit of the doubt.  Its not going to be easy, but I can assure you that it is worth it.  He isn’t the one who abandoned you, but He is the one who has adopted you from the one who abandoned you.  He must have seen something incredibly special.

You’ve spent your life judging your earthy father based on his revealed character, its time to judge our Heavenly Father according to His revealed character.   We have a choice in this life, to base our sense of stability and worth upon the memories of a broken pillar, or to take a chance, and lift our eyes and notice the ancient, strong, enduring pillar that was always there in the background.  I love Darlene’s picture here because my eyes were drawn to the broken pillar, and I had to make a concerted effort to notice the intact one.  Isn’t that such a picture of our lives?

Copyright Darlene Dine, reproduction without permission is prohibited

Copyright Darlene Dine, reproduction without permission is prohibited




The Character of God as Father Part 2

Never look for your worth in the eyes of a man who you know does evil.  Even if, even if you were deserving of evil, you wouldn’t find truth in the eyes of the kind of man who perpetrates it.  A man who does evil is always going to find a way to blame his own malicious desires and actions on the victim, and when that victim is a child, it is a relatively easy thing to do.  It’s called conditioning, and its why we normalize what we know — even when what we know is an obvious lie.

If you want to know your true worth, you have to get to know the true character of our Heavenly Father, step by step — because until we understand His character, His integrity, and His love at a basic level, we will keep superimposing the evils we grew up with upon Him, like a defiled sort of mask.  And I will be honest, it will probably take more courage to get to know Him than you think you have — but by simply surviving what you have survived, you’ve proven that you are more courageous than you were led to believe.

I want to talk about two things that Yeshua (Jesus) said about the Father that are just bedrock foundational.

John 7:16 Jesus answered them, and said, My doctrine is not mine, but his that sent me.

Matt 7:9 If ye then, being evil, know how to give good gifts unto your children, how much more shall your Father which is in heaven give good things to them that ask him?

Some people were raised in such a way as to never know that to expect from their earthly fathers.  Their lives were chaotic, and a gift wasn’t always a gift and might have been offered with some pretty distasteful strings attached.  Maybe they weren’t sure if their father was going to be drunk or sober, or happy or angry, or violent or calm — or maybe they weren’t ever sure how to act around him, because anything could set him off.  Maybe he wandered in and out of their lives or never showed up at all — but I will cover that another time.  Right now I want to cover the chaotic father.

Now I want for you to imagine reading the Bible with that mindset of that type of father.  If we come into the faith with that sort of paradigm as to what fathers are like, it will color every single verse, every single law, the tone of voice of every single prophet — in short, one would not read what was really written there because it would not make sense to the brain conditioned to believe lies.  When one comes to the New Testament, however, we are reading about Yeshua — and we treat it as though we are reading about someone entirely different from God the Father.  But yesterday, as I pointed out, Father and Son are echad, united, in perfect eternal agreement.  So we must explore what we believe about Yeshua, find out if our beliefs are Biblically supportable, and then reconcile that with our beliefs about the Father.

A lot of us have hidden from the Father, behind the Son, as though the Son struck down a cruel tyrant, destroyed His unfair system of bondage, and delivered us into absolute freedom from any sort of obligation we deemed unnecessary.  But that doesn’t line up with Yeshua being One with the Father, and it certainly doesn’t line up with Yeshua preaching His Father’s doctrine, and not simply His own.  Yeshua’s message was the Father’s message, just think about that.  Yeshua didn’t preach a kinder gentler message towards the Father, dying so that He would “lighten up.”  Yeshua preached His Father’s message to the first century Jews, telling them that it was the Father’s will that they add justice, compassion and mercy to their commandment keeping.  He didn’t die so that His Father would take a chill pill and start being reasonable, He died because His Father already was reasonable – more reasonable than we can imagine.  He died because the Father was so full of love that He was willing to renew the broken Covenant in His own blood.  You need to understand that the scriptures tell us that the Father is Spirit, and so the only sacrifice he could make was His own Son. Can you imagine being so intimately connected to someone, throughout all eternity, loving someone as a part of you because they are a part of you — and yet having such pity and compassion upon a literal stranger that you were willing to send that beloved someone to them, who would them suffer and die in order that that stranger could live, and come into that intimacy as well?  I don’t love anyone with that sort of love, I doubt if I am even capable of ever loving a stranger enough to offer myself, much less offer someone I love.

Yeshua didn’t come here of His own accord to make things right out of a situation the Father made a mess of.  This was a joint operation, it was the only thing that love could do.  They were making a remedy for the evil works of men, not a remedy for a bad system.  It was our willful history of evil that was being addressed, not simply sins here and there.

Yeshua’s character proves that the Father is trustworthy, or Yeshua would never have preached His doctrine.

Yeshua taught us to pray to the Father — for our needs, for our forgiveness, for our protection.  Yeshua would not send us to a tyrant.

Yeshua said that what we receive from the Father is going to be good.

Yeshua claimed that the Father is a good judge.

Yeshua taught that the Father is greater than He is, so anything we believe about Yeshua, we must give even more credit to God the Father.

John 14:7-11 If ye had known me, ye should have known my Father also: and from henceforth ye know him, and have seen him.  Philip saith unto him, Lord, show us the Father, and it sufficeth us. Jesus saith unto him, Have I been so long time with you, and yet hast thou not known me, Philip? he that hath seen me hath seen the Father; and how sayest thou then, Show us the Father? Believest thou not that I am in the Father, and the Father in me? the words that I speak unto you I speak not of myself: but the Father that dwelleth in me, he doeth the works. Believe me that I am in the Father, and the Father in me: or else believe me for the very works’ sake.

Yeshua boldly claimed that the works he committed were proof that the Father is in Him.  What did He do?

Healed the sick, the blind, the lepers.  Cast out demons.  Raised the dead on multiple occasions.  Preached to, and touched the people no one wanted to preach to or touch — both Jew and Gentile alike.  Had mercy on sinners, showed grace to the humble, gave counsel to the proud, and showed his wrath towards those who sin in the name of His Father, and misrepresented His Father’s character.  And then He died for us.

He did those things because He was the living embodiment of the character of the Father.  And so when He says that the Father gives good gifts, we have to reread the scriptures in a new light, and see the absolute good in everything the Father ever gave His people.  We have to stop looking at Him through glasses that were discolored and even shattered by the failings of those men we grew up with.  We need to realize that they aren’t glasses at all, they are hindering, not helping our sight.  They need to be stripped away and thrown away, and we need to ask the Holy Spirit to show us the Father in truth, through the Word and through the conforming of our mind to the mind of Messiah — so that we can see the Father as He does.

To put it in modern terms, we need to start looking at the Father through Yeshua-colored glasses.

Copyright Darlene Dine, reproduction without permission is prohibited

Copyright Darlene Dine, reproduction without permission is prohibited