The most important event of the Old Testament was the exodus, when God brought the Israelites out of Egypt to bring them to the promised land. The entire rest of the Old Testament keeps looking back to it as the day when the fullness of God’s power, salvation, and covenantal love for his people were gloriously manifest. And Hosea describes how it was also God’s fatherly training of his people, just like a father trains and raises his own child.
Parenting a child is a challenging, multifaceted task, as any parent can tell you. Somehow it has to involve a perfect combo of showering the child with blessings and raising them up into maturity. Good parents would give anything and everything to help their kids thrive—and then they somehow have to handle the heartbreak when rebellious instincts kick in and the kids turn away from everything their parents had done for them. I admire and salute every parent who has been through this and still heroically stayed faithful to loving their kids.
And these parents are in a better position than anyone else to know how much it breaks God’s heart when his people desert him. God had given the Israelites a temporary home in Egypt in which to grow into a nation, gloriously brought them away into their permanent home, and given them prosperity in the promised land, all while surrounding them with an impenetrable hedge of protection. The biblical stories of Israel’s history spill over the brim with God’s steadfast, fatherly love.
It is still true today, as it has always been, that God is a good, good Father. And like any good father, when his children turn away, he disciplines them back to the right path while also showing them incredible loving mercy that they don’t even deserve. Aside from our earthly fathers that have all inevitably been flawed in their parenting, we all are children first and foremost of a perfect Father, one who steadfastly loves us, is just to discipline our wrongs, and is merciful to always pursue us back. It changes everything that the most foundational part of our identity is children of God.
