Just as a Father

Mark Dunagan
02/28/10 - Sunday Evening

Psalm 103:13-22

Verse 13 “Just as a father has compassion on his children, so the Lord has compassion on those who fear Him”

“An important clarification: Fatherness is not a metaphor. It is not as if God, as an afterthought, cast about for a convenient analogy to communicate approximately His heart toward us and was fortunate enough to stumble upon this crude human relationship we call the parent-child relationship and said to Himself, ‘This will do’” (An Insomniac’s Psalm 103, Andree Seu). Instead, our concept of Fatherhood is patterned after the fact that He is the first and ultimate Father. In Isaiah 9:6, Jesus is called “Eternal Father”, and this is said, not because Jesus and the Father are the same person, but rather, Jesus likewise has the heart of a Father. God is not being compelled to “act like a Father” to sons that He doesn’t really want, rather, He longs for a Father-son relationship with us.

“Has compassion”: Long before Jesus came to earth and identified with us, “God” had compassion, sympathy and empathy for the faithful.

• He knows exactly what we go through in this life.
• He knows all the “costs” of living.
• He knows the pull of every temptation.
• He knows the difficulties and complexities of human relationships.
• God truly wants us to succeed.
• God will not abandon us when we slip up – in order to wind up abandoned, we must abandon Him.
• God has an entirely different relationship with the saved than He has with the unsaved. Yet His desire is that all be saved. (1 Peter 2:9-10).

Verse 14 “For He Himself knows our frame; He is mindful that we are but dust”

“God remembers what went into the making of us – That’s a relief to me. He did not fashion us and then launch into some other project and absentmindedly forget our heat and cold tolerances and ‘fatigue life’, so that He put us under too much stress. In freshmen year of high school we were all scared kittens. When we became sophomores, it’s amazing how we forgot how bad it is to be scared and persecuted by upper classmen. God doesn’t forget. Sometimes heat is turned up pretty high, but God is always at the controls (Isaiah 66:10-12; 2 Corinthians 1:9; 1 Corinthians 10:13)” (Seu). God certainly knows:

• Our emotional and mental limitations.
• Our physical limitations.
• What we are like on the outside as well as the inside.

As a result I can face the duties as a Christian with confidence, if the Maker commands, then He knows better than anyone else, even me, what I am capable of accomplishing. “Sometimes I pay the ‘dust’ card with God. When I feel I can take no more heat, I say, ‘Lord, remember that I’m just dust’. It feels good to remind Him, not that He has forgotten for a minute” (Seu).

Verses 15-16 “As for a man, his days are like grass; as a flower of the field, so he flourishes. When the wind has passed over it, it is no more; and its place acknowledges it no longer”

On the surface the verse can seem to be rather depressing. “The firstNew Yorker cartoon I ever saw, before I was eight years old, depicted an aging man on his second story balcony, observing lovers below walking hand in hand and muttering to himself something like, ‘I too was in love. But I still got arthritis” (Seu). Yet I don’t think that the verse was designed to depress those that fear Him. I think God is saying:

• Our frame is more “dust” than we realize, it will actually return to dust – literally.
• It will return sooner than most people imagine.
• Do not get discouraged when man has his “day in the sun” boasting with reference to all sorts of things, because every “day in the sun” is short-lived. Even people who look like granite will wear down quickly, and even the strongest and hardiest among us is nothing more than a little flower in the breeze. 
• The Bible is balanced. Yes, life is short, yet the Bible avoids either the response of hedonism (go and grab all the gusto you can) or stoicism (cease to care), rather it teaches us to live fully and godly (Ecclesiastes 11:9).

Verse 16 “Its place acknowledges it no longer”

“My grandfather build a large farmhouse around 1920, on a site with two great barns and many acres, and by good providence I grew up across the street. I passed many of my important milestones there. There I learned about friendship, and there I learned about the ends of friendship. I formed my earliest sense of eternity there. I put my confidence in the very wooden beams and A-framed structures themselves, that they would endure. Now everything has been removed. My mother said it took the wrecking ball two hours to take down the house. Today a graduated living facility occupies the space. The most obscene thing to me is that people coming and going in the parking lot that stands where our pine grove and mud pie-making operation were have no idea who my grandfather was or of anything we did there. For the most appalling thing about the brief agitation of man on the earth is that when he is gone his place remembers him no more (Ecclesiastes 1:11)” (Seu). Yet, this verse prepares us to rejoice in the next verse.

Verse 17 “But the lovingkindness of the Lord is from everlasting to everlasting on those who fear Him”

I have learned in my short-life that it is a rather rare situation in which property or other things which were owned by one generation actually make it to a couple of generations later. “A verse just in time – if there ever was one! (See how He is already being considerate of my frame and my dust). After the doldrums of flowers gone with the wind, and houses that remember us not, He lifts up our sights to that which is the deepest cry of our heart – something that lasts. I got a letter from an inmate who described the struggle preceding his conversion: ‘I never found true happiness – no not in many different drugs, drinks, sex; nothing could stay long enough’. That’s the trouble. If one something stayed. I would settle for even lesser things – a happy marriage, a great body, a satisfying job – if only they stayed. But the impermanence of everything under the sun conspires to bring us kicking and screaming to Permanence Himself” (Seu).

• The greatness of heaven will last – it will stay: 1 Peter 1:4
• The love of God will continue.
• God’s steadfast love for the faithful – will live.

Verse 17 “And His righteousness to children’s children”

The best inheritance I can give my children and grandchildren is to help them have a relationship with God. If you pass anything on – make sure it is this.

Verse 18 “To those who keep His covenant, and who remember His precepts to do them”

“Keeping covenant is increasingly a foreign concept in America. The closest we had to it was perhaps marriage” (Seu). A covenant is a relationship, yet it is much more than that, it is a relationship that is governed by His commandments. We need to remember what He has commanded us, and do more than remember, we need to “do” what He has said (Matthew 7:21). There is no substitute for “obedience” to His commandments. “As my brother Marc likes to say, ‘When all is said and done, more will have been said than done’”(Seu). And the spiritual realize that God’s commandments are actually pleasant, it is the devil who falsely advertises that God’s commands are too difficult, unnecessary, unreasonable, impossible to decipher or understand clearly. “As a matter of fact, to begin to venture out into the virgin territory of moment-by-moment obedience is to soon discover that the commandments are doorways to joy. Yes, what we have been avoiding doing all our lives turns out to be the way to our own joy. And when we reread the Psalmist’s exclamation, ‘Oh, how I love your law!’ And suddenly we don’t think he’s a weird ancient Hebrew enthusiast anymore” (Seu).

Verse 19 “The Lord has established His throne in the heavens; and His sovereignty rules over all”

This is not something future, as if the writer is saying, “God doesn’t rule now – but don’t worry He will in the future”. Rather, David is saying that God presently occupies His throne and that He is in charge right now and has always been.

Verses 20-22 “Bless the Lord, you His angels... Bless the Lord, all you His hosts... Bless the Lord, all you works of His”

The angels are always praising, never glum, and all His works praise Him. Remember, we are one of those works (Ephesians 2:10). Praising God is not strange, rather it is natural and universal. Those who do not praise God are the oddities, for they are out-of-step with everything in the heavens and all God’s wonders on the earth. Let us ever live to praise Him.