The Motherhood of God
one whom his mother comforteth so will I comfort you and ye shall be comforted in Jerusalem.’ Isa. lxvi. 13.
HE tendency of the human heart to look for in God answering to womanly tenderness and maternal love is illustrated by the strong hold which Mariolatry or the worship of the Virgin has always had upon the Roman Catholic mind. The ignorant and superstitious feel that in a woman’s sympathy they can look for something which not even the love of Jesus Himself fully satisfies. They do not understand that the heart of Christ is not only the heart of a man but has in it also all the tenderness and gentleness of woman. Jesus was not a man in the rigid sense of manhood as distinct from womanhood, but, as the Son of Mian, the complete Head of humanity, He combined in Himself the nature both of man and woman even as the first man Adam had the woman within his own being before she was separately formed from his very body.
Back even in the Old Testament we find God revealing Himself under the sweet figure of motherhood. “As one whom his mother comforteth so will I comfort you.’’ And this aspect of His blessed character finds its perfect manifestation in the Holy Ghost, our Mother God. So that we have in the divine Trinity not only a Father, and a Brother and a Husband but also One who meets all the heart’s longing for motherhood.
The beautiful figure which the Lord ijesus used in John 14:18 ‘T will not leave you orphans,” covers this suggestion of motherhood. The Comforter as our spiritual Mother is the author of our being and gives us our new and heavenly birth. We are born of the Holy Spirit, our very life comes to us through the quickening life of the Holy Ghost.
As our heavenly Mother, the Comforter assumes our nurture, training, teaching, and the whole direction of our life. All this is in accordance with the Master’s words in the fourteenth Chapter of John, in explaining the mission of the Spirit. ‘‘He shall guide you into all truth,” “He shall teach you all things and bring all things to your remembrance,” “I have many things to say unto you but ye cannot bear them now, howbeit, when He, the Spirit of truth, is come He will guide you into all truth.” The special feature of the Spirit’s teaching and guiding is its considerate gentleness and patience. He does not force upon us truths for which we are not yet prepared but leads us tenderly and teaches us, as He Himself has expressed it in the Old Testament, ‘dine upon line, precept upon precept, here a little and there a little,”
The ancient teacher in classic times was quite dififerent from our modern school-master. He was the companion and friend of his disciples. They walked with him here and there all the day long on the street, in the market-place, in the fields and on the highway and everything they saw and heard was turned to account and became the subject ol conversation and illustration. So He teaches, using everything that comes in our experience as an object lesson and occasion for some new truth in Christian living. So the Comforter waits until we have learned one lesson well and are able to pass on to a higher class and a profounder truth. So He brings to our remembrance forgotten messages, and goes over again with us the lessons we have not yet fully learned, with infinite patience and unwearied pains.
But it is when the hour of trouble comes that we most need the touch of a mother’s hand and the solace of a mother’s love. We go to other friends when everything is bright and comfortable, but to our mother of whom we say.
‘’Who ran to help me when I fell,
And would some pretty story tell,
Or kiss the place to make it well?
My mother!”
The Bible has much to say about comfort. God is ‘’the God of all comfort’’ and “hath given us everlasting consolation,” and it is the Holy Spirit that administers His loving kindness and divine consolation. Christian life is an experience of trial and sorrow and we are always needing sympathy and consolation. How sweetly the Spirit comforts!
And true motherhood does not leave out the discipline and faithful reproof which erring childhood so often needs. Well may we ask
“Do you think He ne’er reproves me?
What a false Friend He would be.”
And so the Holy Spirit loves us with such inexorable love that He would rather cause us pain than let us miss our way. Sometimes He hides His face and withdraws His conscious presence until we learn our lesson and seek His forgiveness with penitence, surrender and obedience and sweetly learn the truth that “No chastening for the present seemeth to be joyous but grievous, nevertheless afterward it yieldeth the peaceable fruit of righteousness to them that are exercised thereby.”