My great-grandma Amalia was a hoot. She was a feisty old German woman who had raised three daughters on a farm in the Panhandle by herself during the Depression and the Dust Bowl after her husband ran off. Granny was salty, and while she’d laugh louder and longer than anyone at the table, when she said not to do something, you’d better listen to her “suggestion.”
As a typical little boy, I had to learn this the hard way. She took me out to the fence of a cow pasture and pointed to the electric wire that ran along the other side of the fence. “Don’t touch it,” she said simply and bluntly, then walked back to the house. Well, I was curious and wondered if Granny was holding out on me – so I checked to make sure she’d gone back inside, and then I reached out with both hands and grabbed it.
Ahem.
It’s not hard to see why God describes us as sheep, is it? We think we’re pretty bright – more than that, we often think we know better. We think He’s holding out on us. Phillip Keller, in his book, A Shepherd Looks at Psalm 23, describes his frustration with a particular ewe.
She was one of the most attractive sheep that ever belonged to me. Her body was beautifully proportioned. She had a strong constitution and an excellent coat of wool. Her head was clean, alert, well-set with bright eyes. She bore sturdy lambs that matured rapidly.
But in spite of all these attractive attributes, she had one pronounced fault. She was restless – discontented – a fence crawler…
No matter what field or pasture the sheep were in, she would search all along the fences or shoreline (we lived by the sea) looking for a loophole she could crawl through and start to feed on the other side.
It was not that she lacked pasturage. My fields were my joy and delight. No sheep in the district had better grazing. With “Mrs. Gad-about” it was an ingrained habit. She was simply never contented with things as they were. Often when she had forced her way through some such spot in a fence or found a way around the end of the wire at low tide on the beaches, she would end up feeding on bare, brown, burned-up pasturage of a most inferior sort.
This is a pretty good description of how God describes Israel in Hosea… and it’s also not a bad picture of you and me, is it? We always seem to think God is holding out on us, that what He’s given us is not enough – and so we look for alternate providers. But like “Mrs. Gad-about,” all we end up with is burned-up, inferior pasturage.
for my people have committed two evils:
they have forsaken me,
the fountain of living waters,
and hewed out cisterns for themselves,
broken cisterns that can hold no water.
– Jeremiah 2:13
Empty cisterns… burned-up pasturage. We don’t find what we’re looking for on the other side of the fence, do we? But we still get upset at God when he closes doors we really want open (even when we know they’re not what He wants). We kick and yell and rage (mostly on the inside) at the fence He builds. In the Hosea video we saw Sunday, we see the husband taking back his unfaithful wife’s credit cards and cell phone. He won’t pay the bill for her destructive choices, he won’t enable her. This is a great modern illustration of what God does in Hosea 2:
Therefore I will hedge up her way with thorns,
and I will build a wall against her,
so that she cannot find her paths.
She shall pursue her lovers
but not overtake them,
and she shall seek them
but shall not find them.
– Hosea 2:6-7
At first this might seem pretty vindictive or petty – especially to Gomer (Hosea’s wife). And it probably feels that way to us, too, when God “fences us in,” when He closes doors. But given the emptiness, the “burned-up, inferior pasturage” that lies on the other side of the fence, what better picture is there of a loving God than one who would restrain us?
It is God’s stubborn grace, the unrelenting love that will not give up on us that fences us in. Like the painful lesson I learned as a boy, God often allows us just enough pain to change us from “fence-crawlers,” from unfaithful wives constantly looking for love in all the wrong places. Like the husband in the video from Sunday who shows up for every counseling session, hoping to reconcile – even though he knows his wayward wife probably won’t show up.
God is not holding out on us, He is not keeping us from the best. He IS the best… and by His grace, He often limits how much damage we can do to ourselves, because He loves us more than we truly know.
What will it take for you and I to finally be satisfied in Him?
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