Like as a Father

He has answers ready for nine questions and nobody is going to ask him any of them.

I have watched him do this. He goes over them on the walk to work, which takes about twenty minutes and is exactly long enough. Why did it go on so long. Why did you not say anything. What did you think was going to happen. What about the effect on the others. Did you understand at the time. When did you know.

Nine of them, and he has an answer for each, and the answers are honest, which makes it worse. He is not preparing a defense. He is preparing a full and accurate account for an examination that exists only in the twenty minutes between his door and the shop.

And the reason he is preparing is that the picture in his head has a table in it.

That is the whole thing, and it is worth naming precisely. When he imagines coming to God about this, he pictures a room with a table, and somebody on the other side of it who has a list. Not a cruel person. A thorough one. Somebody whose job it is to establish the facts before anything else can happen, and who will be fair, and who will take as long as it takes.

He has never questioned that picture. It arrived from somewhere, in the way pictures do, and he has been furnishing it for years.

That is you on the walk to work.

You've been preparing for an interview. Your answers are honest and you have rehearsed them and you have a version of each that is neither too long nor too defensive. And the table you are preparing for does not appear anywhere in Scripture, and nobody has ever sat at it, and it has cost you twenty minutes a day for years.

The psalm gives a father rather than an examiner

David could have described God's response to a person's failure in any number of ways. Here is the one he chose.

Like as a father pitieth his children, so the LORD pitieth them that fear him.Psalm 103:13

Like as a father. That is the comparison, and it is doing all the work, because a comparison tells you what to expect by pointing at something you already know.

He does not say: as a judge weighs a case. He does not say: as an examiner establishes the facts. He picks the one relationship in ordinary life where the response to a child in trouble is not an inquiry.

You are met by a father's response rather than by a procedure, and the comparison was chosen deliberately, and I am not making God soft: Psalm 103:13 names the father in writing, and it is the Holy Spirit rather than my saying so who can replace a picture a man has been furnishing for years.

Now let me be exact about the word pity, because English has spoiled it. In the Hebrew it is racham, and it belongs to the same root as the word for the womb. It is the deep, physical, involuntary movement toward somebody who belongs to you. It is not looking down on a person. It is the thing that happens in a parent's chest before any thought about the situation has formed.

That is what the verse says God does. Before the facts, before the account, before anybody asks anything.

In my family, when a child came home having done something, the first thing that happened was never a question. The first thing was food. The questions came later or never, and every one of us understood, without being told, that the eating was not a delay before the real conversation. The eating was the real conversation.

You have a movement coming toward you that starts before the account, and the account has never been the gate, which is written into the verse rather than into my fondness for my own house, with the Spirit of God able to take down a table that years of preparation has built.

And notice who it is aimed at: them that fear him. That is not the terrified. In the psalms it is the ones who take Him seriously, and a man who has spent years preparing an honest account for God is, whatever else is true, somebody taking Him extremely seriously.

This pity is already moving toward you on the walk to work, because Scripture chose a father for the comparison, and the Holy Spirit is the one carrying that into a street in the late afternoon.