and God ran

When he was still a long way off, his father saw him.
His heart pounding, he ran out, embraced him, and kissed him. Luke 15, MSG

And God ran.

I’ve always been blessed by the popular song about the prodigal son with that refrain – “and God ran.”

The scandalizing picture of the dignified father running with his robe flapping wildly in the wind, his heart pounding, tears streaming down his face. What did the son do? Did he stop in his tracks unsure whether he was going to be tackled or embraced? Did he start running towards him? Did he want to turn on his heel and start running away – again? Doesn’t seem to have mattered to the father one way or another. He ran to and embraced his wayward son.

It’s a picture I can’t escape as I read this story in Kings.

The northern kingdom was wayward from start to finish – and there’s plenty of fire and brimstone, blood and mayhem along a journey that ultimately leads to captivity and final destruction. But what strikes me increasingly as I walk through these pages is God’s relentless pursuit of his wayward northern sons.

Ahab is described as one who sold himself to do evil, as the worst of the worst. Despicable me. Yet amidst the pronouncements of judgments, God continues sending prophets to warn him and even to guide him in his strategies and campaigns. And when God pronounces the final doom of his entire household after the murder of Naboth and the seizure of his vineyard, Ahab mourns and walks about in sackcloth…and God takes notice. God more than takes notice, he actually delays the punishment.

I grew up hearing preachers quoting the blind man in John 9 – “now we know that God does not hear sinners” – as gospel fact. But that simply doesn’t square with his dealings with Ahab – or the rest of us, for that matter.

Then there’s the Jehoahaz story in 2 Kings 13. “He did what was evil in the sight of the LORD and followed the sins of Jeroboam the son of Nebat” and so “the anger of the LORD was kindled against Israel, and he gave them continually into the hand of Hazael king of Syria.” Typical judges type scenario setting up. And then, “Then Jehoahaz sought the favor of the LORD, and the LORD listened to him, for he saw the oppression of Israel, how the king of Syria oppressed them.” No indication that Jeroboam’s calf-idols were removed, that the worship at the shrines had stopped, the altars destroyed (it would be a future southern king that would do that). And yet God listens. He hears Jehoahaz when he asks for God’s favor and mercy. And God moves not because he sees efforts at reform in his northern sons, but because he sees the heavy, oppressing hand of Syria upon them. And he sends them a savior – a “Jesus,” a “Joshua,” one who saves. And “nevertheless, they did not depart from the sins of the house of Jeroboam, which he made Israel to sin, but walked in them; and the Asherah also remained in Samaria.”

Yes, God visits the northern kingdom with wrath, just read the rest of the story. But he keeps running after them, running to them at any sign of turning, running to them in endless attempts to inspire a turning. He runs to them in the faces of Elijah and Elisha, the faces of Jonah and Amos and Hosea, and of a host of other and unnamed prophets and saviors.

For nearly two hundred years.

Two hundred years…

How heavily and how naturally we lean into judgment after the barest, most surface exposure to the hearts of others – a leaning often derived from these very stories. And in so doing we remain oblivious to the persistent tipping of the divine hand on these very pages; a hand leaning heavily into a compassion and mercy that runs to wayward sons rather than skewering them on the third strike; a tipping of the divine hand that point us to the full revelation of that hand, pierced and bleeding, that leaves the indelible, blood-smeared final revelation that “mercy triumphs (boasts loudly over, taunts, jumps up and down laughing) over judgment.”