the new occupants come to take possession.

The Bible never calls God a mother, though the mother language, as here,
is used of Him many times. It takes more of the human to tell the divine.
You must take many words, and several of our human relationships, and put
them together, in the finest meaning of each, to get near the full meaning
of what God is. Up on the higher level, with God, the word "father" really
includes all that both father and mother mean to us.

The word "father" is even used once of God in what we think of as the
strict mother sense. In speaking of God's early care of the Hebrews Paul
says, "as a nursing-father bore he them in the wilderness."[1] That word
"nursing-father" is peculiar in coupling the distinctive function of the
mother in caring for the babe with the word father.

The word "father" applied to God includes not only our meaning of father
in all its strength as we know it at its best; but all of the meaning of
the word "mother," in all its sweet fragrance, as we have had it breathed
into our own very life.

We have come commonly to think of the word mother as a tenderer word than
father. Though I have met many, both men and women, who unconsciously
revealed that their experience has made father the tenderer, and the
tenderest word to them. Father stands commonly for the stronger, more
rugged qualities; and mother for the finer, gentler, sweeter, maybe
softer qualities, in the strong meaning of that word soft.



God Giving Himself.