Articles and Testimonies

But God You Just Don't Understand What it's Like to be a Parent

by Anonymous

Raising teenagers is never easy, but raising them as a single parent presents even more challenges. One day when it seemed that I couldn't handle my daughters' teenage rebellion years one day longer and still retain some semblance of sanity, I cried out to God in total frustration, and screamed, "You just don't understand what it's like to be a parent! You don't understand the tears I've cried and the sleepless nights I've endured."

At first there was dead silence on the other end of this conversation, but shortly thereafter, I sensed that I was to turn to the book of Genesis and read the story of Abraham and Isaac...the part where Abraham was to sacrifice his son...his only son as a burnt offering to God. I was very familiar with the story, but as I obediently re-read the passage I noticed something I had never noticed before. I noticed that, in Genesis 22:13, (the verse immediately following the unbinding of Isaac), there appeared a ram caught in a thicket. I had never remembered reading about the ram prior to that moment, and as I thought about the ram, I began to understand why the Lord had laid this passage on my heart. For it was then that I understood the agony that God felt as a parent, the tears he must have shed for his own Son. For, you see, even as God was testing Abraham, God saw the future. He saw Isaac's life being spared and at the same time God thought of his own Son.

As I meditated on the ram caught in the thicket, (realizing that it was a symbol of the Lamb of God that taketh away the sin of the world), I understood that God, of all people, could empathize with parents everywhere. For even at that very moment when God staid the hand of death upon Isaac, God once again knew the future. At the very moment that Isaac was released, and the ram was offered in his stead, our Heavenly Father was looking into history... looking to the day that he would not stay the hand of death...the day when the angel of the Lord would not intervene and say, "Lay not thy hand upon the lad, neither do thou anything unto him." (Genesis 22:12). On that day that changed the course of history, as God's own Son was offered as a sacrifice at Calvary, there would be no earthly ram to take his place. Only the silence of a Father weeping in the shadows as his Son ...his only Son became the sacrificial lamb for all of mankind.