God's Motherly Love? Godly Thoughts For Mothering Sunday

15 “Can a woman forget her nursing child, And not have compassion on the son of her womb? Surely they may forget, Yet I will not forget you. 16 See, I have inscribed you on the palms of My hands; Your walls are continually before Me. 17 Your sons shall make haste; Your destroyers and those who laid you waste Shall go away from you. 18 Lift up your eyes, look around and see; All these gather together and come to you. As I live,” says the Lord, “You shall surely clothe yourselves with them all as an ornament, And bind them on you as a bride does.

Isaiah 49:15-18

Last weekend I was away as a leader at a Christian youth camp, where we all enjoyed a great time of ministry, prayer and fellowship. I, like many others, felt a great spiritual high during our time there. In fact, after the first morning’s prayer meeting, after both my roommate and I shared a bad night’s sleep, I can remember saying to him, “Who needs a good night’s sleep when the day begins with such a wonderful time of prayer as that!”

Now, having returned home for a couple of days, my illness demanded that I catch up on much of that lost sleep. Although some of the weekend’s spiritual high can still be felt, much of it has, sadly, already subsided. That which is left is more akin to a spluttering spark plug, than it is to the soaring flames of a raging fire.

My prayer, both before and during the camp, had been that a fire would be lit within my own and others’ hearts, that would remain and be the start of a great work of God in my area and its churches. Now, the encouragement of the weekend has been joined with the discouragement of the weekend’s spiritual hangover.

Within the book of Isaiah, God makes many wonderful promises to His people of various future great and gracious works that He would be soon to perform. Many of these promises could as easily apply to restoration and revival in our own time as well as to restoration and revival for the remaining war-ravaged families of Jerusalem of Isaiah’s time. These promises from God offer out to a decimated people a wonderful amount of good cheer, hope, and optimism when those promises are first heard. However, these promises, as wonderful as they are, can also lead to a sense of despair, depression, and dismay whilst the current conditions of sadness, sorrow and desperation continue to be seen, felt, and suffered as days turn into weeks, and weeks turn into years.

In His eternal graciousness, God has further moved to allay those feelings of despair, depression, and dismay, by counteracting the resultant doubt that such feelings are prone to beget. This counteraction takes the form of powerful reminders of His great love for His people. As Mothering Sunday looms large, these reminders of God’s love are particularly pertinent.

God’s Love

As a father who loves his two daughters with a love that sometimes scares me, I still determinedly feel that a mother’s love for her child must surely be the greatest natural love that can exist in this world. With this in mind, how, then, can one hope to portray a strong, unbreakable love without an actual mention of the word ‘love’? By portraying a mother with her young, suckling child, held in her arms – and that is exactly how God reminds His people of His strong, unbreakable love for them in v.15.

This image is particularly poignant because God is here speaking to Israel, who at this point can be considered a desolate mother herself, for many of her sons have been lost to her, either killed through war or carried away in captivity to a distant land. The remaining Israelites in Jerusalem would also be made up of a large proportion of individual desolate mothers too, whose love for their sons would be tearing their grieving hearts apart. The full extent of a mother’s love for their child would certainly be being fully appreciated at this time by these mothers of mourning.

God also points out that in this fallen, sinful world it is, heartbreakingly and times horrifyingly, possible for a mother to forget her child – whether through outright rejection or through placing the love of objects before and above the love of their child. Yet God will never forget His child. That a mother can forget her child at all is nothing but a symptom of sin, but God’s love is a holy love. God’s love is a love that is separate and set apart to all earthly loves. It is a perfect love, that never fails, never forgets, and that surpasses our finite conceptions of what love can even be. In response to our doubts of God’s promises to us in the face of discouragement God reminds us just how greatly He loves us; and, as God’s child, just how greatly He therefore loves you. God will never forget you. He will never fail you. He will never not love you perfectly. He will never not keep His promises to you because He loves you.

God’s Love In Action

God reaffirms this love in v.16, but this time with a progression to the promise too. When God says that our walls are continually before Him, He is talking about the walls of Jerusalem that currently lie all broken and in ruins. God is saying that He is looking upon them constantly; they are grieving Him and pulling on His heartstrings continually.

For us to think about how the state of our own churches may currently be so weak, so sad, and so desperate we can also understand from this that God is looking upon our churches constantly too, even as we are. The sorry state that our churches may be in are not being missed or given scant thought by God. He sees them, and just as sure as He was grieved by the state of a war-destroyed Jerusalem, so will God look upon and be grieved by the sad state of that church that you are currently looking upon and are being grieved by. Neither will God get distracted from this grief, as we are so often so easily distracted from it by the things of the world. It is continually before Him; continually in His sight; continually pulling on His heartstrings.

As reassuring as that may be, the further point that God gives to His child isn’t this but is actually found in where God tells us that we are inscribed in the palms of His hands. This is, firstly, a reaffirmation of the promise found in v.15, that God will never forget us – the inscription on God’s hands is permanent and thus will serve to be a never-ending reminder of us to God (not that God would ever need that reminder, but rather it serves as a picture from which we can be reassured that God will never forget us). What we must also realise here, however, is that it is God’s promise to rebuild Jerusalem by His own hands. The message that God is trying to get across to us here is that God’s work in building, and (in the case of the peak and troughs of the church throughout history) rebuilding, the church will be done, in part, out of love towards His people.

We find a further echo of this, as well as an allusion to how this will be done, in v.17, 18, when God promises to bring the many lost sons back home, and in far greater numbers than were even lost (v.20). This is perhaps an inference to the bringing in of the Gentiles to the Israelite nation as part of the New Covenant but it is also certainly a promise of greater blessings than what had first been lost.

Can you imagine the sheer strength of the power of the feelings of hope that Israel’s mourning mothers would have felt as they envisioned through God’s words (v.18) the lifting up of their eyes to see all of their lost sons, and more, returning home to them? What hope are we able to take, then, from these promises of God after such a certain and powerful reminder of His love for us too? Are we also able to envision with such clarity and certainty the keeping of God's promises, being strengthened in might by the Spirit in the inner man through a greater sense of God's love (Eph. 3:16)?

The Sin-bearing Servant

It must not go unnoticed that these verses are part of a larger portion of God’s Word that is building towards a glorious prophecy of Jesus’ coming as the sin-bearing Servant (Isaiah 52:13-53:12). If the images of a mother holding her young child and our names engraved on the palm of God’s hand are enough to bring strength to our weakened, drooping spirits, then how much more will the remembrance of Jesus Christ bearing the load of our sin upon Himself in His great work salvation?

If we are discouraged, despondent, or despairing in the sad state of our church or in our own weakness and ineffectiveness in the work what we need first of all is a reminder of God’s great love to us. When we are discouraged and weak we do not need, firstly, to be reminded of the love we ought to have for God, but of the love that God does have for us. What better way can there be to this than to obey the very words of God, that say, “Behold, My Servant…” (Isaiah 52:13).