Paternal Pity by John McDuff,
1864 How precious are your thoughts unto me, O God! As a father pities his children,
so the Lord pities those who fear Him. For He knows our frame. He remembers that we are but
dust. Psalm 103, 13, 14. What feelings on earth are to
be compared in depth and intensity to those that link a parent to
his children? Has some member of his family
been unjustly wronged? Many a man would willingly submit
to unmerited injury and ridicule, bear in silence the tongue of
culminy and slander, and receive in silence the arrows of unkindness,
who could not rest, thus unmoved, under the affront or stigma attempted
to be fastened on his child. Or does the parent see his child
in suffering? He could himself bear pain with
comparative composure, but when he sees slow, torturing disease
plowing its furrows on the young cheek and dimming the luster
of the young eye, the iron enters into his soul. He would gladly
even risk his own life for that of his loved one endangered.
Many a father has stood by an early grave and said through
anguished tears, I wish that I could have died rather than
you. Behold, O believer, in the loving,
pitting thoughts and tender pitting deeds of the earthly parent,
a picture and symbol of God's thoughts and God's love to you.
No, more he identifies himself with the sufferings and wrongs
of his children. Injure them and you injure him. He who touches them touches the
apple of his eye. He says, as David said to Abiathar,
abide with me for he who seeks your life seeks my life, but
with me you shall be in safeguard. When and where does this pitying
love of God begin? And when he was yet a great way
off, his father saw him. God's thoughts of pity were upon
us when we had no thought of pity on ourselves. And at this
hour, too, is He pitying us in our weakness, in our sorrows,
in our temptations, in our difficulties, in our perplexities. Many an
earthly father can make only a little allowance for the weakness
and feebleness of his offspring. Not so our Heavenly Father. He
remembers that we are but dust. When Job was greatly perplexed
and downcast by the bitter reflections of his adversaries, this was
his comfort. But he knows the way that I take. See how these same thoughts of
pitying love, like the ivy clasping the battered ruin, cling even
around his wayward, backsliding children. Is not Israel still
my son, my darling child? I had to punish him, but I still
love him. I long for him and surely will
have mercy on him. Oh, blessed assurance! This great
being loves me, pities me, pities me and loves me even in the midst
of my true and forgetfulness, ungrateful wandering, and continues
to call me his darling child. I have in him a love in which
fatherhood, brotherhood, sisterhood are all combined. Arise, go to
your father. He is waiting and willing to
welcome you to his embrace. He asks elsewhere, in a passage
which touchingly describes his thoughts, his loving paternal
thoughts at work. How shall I put you among the
children? The gospel plan of salvation
has answered that question, solved that divine problem of parental
love. Jesus has opened a way of access
to the heavenly household and made us heirs to all these precious
thoughts of a father's heart. Seated under Calvary's cross,
we can exclaim in grateful transport, how great is the love which the
Father has lavished on us, that we should be called children
of God. And that is what we really are.