Our God is a God of metaphors. Whenever you can’t understand something about His nature, character, choices, actions, etc., it’s fairly likely that you will be able to find a metaphor in the Bible or in His creation, Earth, to help you grasp that part of God.
Metaphors are pretty unique because they excel at turning the abstract into concrete, along with other forms of comparison, such as similes and analogies. And when it comes to God, you can find millions of concrete existences that serve to reveal a small part of the picture of who God is.
My favorite is the marriage/family metaphor because the further you dig into it, the more it reveals of God’s nature. You can literally go as far down the rabbit hole as you like, and you’ll always be finding revelation after revelation. And I loved it even more when I discovered how it applies to free will.
To start from the top, let’s acknowledge and prove that marriage is an earthly representation of the divine relationship we are to have with God.
God, through Paul, states this in Ephesians 5:23, 25. “For the husband is the head of the wife as Christ is the head of the church. He is the savior of the body. (25) Husbands, love your wives, just as Christ loved the church and gave Himself for her.”
There’s a reason marriage is a holy institution, and that is solely because it is meant to represent a holy relationship on Earth. When you apply the selfless love of Christ in the context of marriage, you get a godly relationship in which a man sacrifices himself to provide and care for his wife, and a wife sacrifices herself to love her husband and follow him.
This is the ideal relationship of Christ and church. Christ sacrificed Himself in fully selfless love for his bride, the church, and He provides for us, taking care of our needs. In exchange, we need only sacrifice ourselves and wholly commit ourselves to following Him.
Let’s move beyond marriage, then, and turn to the family structure. The family structure flows from the divine marriage structure, and it then becomes an example of something divine as well. The relationship of parents to kids is literal inasmuch as it is figurative.
In the literal sense, children are just that, children. They are the children of their parents, and they are also children of the church. In both manners, they are meant to be raised and taught about Christ as they grow. A community of believers is meant to come together and train and teach children (Deuteronomy 6:4-9).
But the figurative begins to stretch and define the relationship we are to have with God. When we become believers, we become children of God, and our relationship with God then functions like a child’s relationship with his/her parents does.
When we examine it from the side of faith, we are to look to God as children look to their parents. Like children view their parents as having no ability to do wrong, we are to look to God. Children have the utmost faith in their parents; it’s practically unshakable. We are to have that same faith in God, as Jesus implies in Mark 10:13-15.
From a discipline point of view, we can gather how God disciplines us for doing wrong and rewards us for doing what is right. I think this one is one of the simplest because it’s fairly clear. When a child breaks a rule, the parent provides a consequence, and especially when the child is young, teaches them something in the process. The parent provides this consequence, not out of anger, but from love so the child does not do something they may regret later.
To put the metaphor into another metaphor, let’s say a parent tells their four-year-old not to touch the stove. The child doesn’t listen, touches the stove, and nearly burns their hand after turning it on. The parent, then, stops the child from touching the stove, and puts the child in timeout after explaining what they did wrong and why it was bad. The parent doesn’t take this action just to punish the child, but to keep the child from getting hurt.
Sometimes, even, God allows us to experience the consequences of our own actions to teach us rather than do it Himself. Some parents may choose, in lieu of punishing the child afterward, to allow the child to briefly touch the stove while it’s hot. They do this not to cause the child pain but because they know that’s the only way their child will truly learn the lesson. We’re stubborn people, and sometimes the only way God can be sure we learn to avoid sin is to let us experience the consequences of sin.
If we take the parent/child relationship yet another way, we can discover how free will works in alignment with God’s plan. Typically, parents have plans for their children when they are born. Whether their plans are just as simple as a name or as complex as having everything they want their child to do planned out through high school, parents don’t wing it when it comes to their children. They’re too precious to do that to.
Likely, parents plan out where their kids go to school, what sports they play, who they interact with around home and with family and family friends, where they go to church, what they get to do at home, etc. I think you get the point. But kids are not perfect little angels who are willing to do everything at their parents’ behest. As they grow into their own person, there will be times they go against the will of their parents. They’ll make friends they shouldn’t, do things they shouldn’t, skip church a few times, skip school just as much.
Likewise, God has a plan laid out for each of us before we are born. He knows who He wants us to know, where we should go to school, what friends we should make, what career we should choose, who we should witness to, everything. But we’re not perfect little angels, either. As we go through life, we’ll inevitably choose to go against God’s plan sometimes. We’ll make friends with the wrong people, not witness to someone we needed to, skip church a few too many times, choose the wrong career for us.
See how perfectly that fits? There’s a ton more, too, but I don’t have space in this post to fit it in. God is incredibly complex—He is literally more than our minds are able to comprehend in so many ways—but when you take a look around, you can turn parts of Him into simple, easy to understand ideas so that you can get to know Him better.
I challenge you to look around the next time you find yourself struggling to understand God or why He would do something one way or the other. You may find that the answer is in something as small as the flower by your front porch or as convenient as your best friend.