"'O Israel, my faithless people, come home to me again, for I am merciful. I will not be angry with you forever. Only acknowledge your guilt. Admit that you rebelled against the Lord your God and committed adultery against him by worshiping idols under every green tree. Confess that you refused to listen to my voice. I, the Lord, have spoken! I thought to myself, 'I would love to treat you as my own children!' I wanted nothing more than to give you this beautiful land – the finest possession in the world. I looked forward to your calling me 'Father,' and I wanted you never to turn from me. But you have been unfaithful to me, you people of Israel! You have been like a faithless wife who leaves her husband.  I, the Lord, have spoken'" (Jer. 3:12-13, 19-20).

The Father-heart of God, the grace of God and the joy of our true identity as his beloved children, have all been emphasized over the past few decades as if these truths were absent from the Old Testament. But here they all are in Jeremiah!

God's anger only remains when we are unwilling to acknowledge our guilt; when we stubbornly and proudly refuse to confess our sins. To "confess" is to "say the same thing" that God says; to agree with him that all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, including us!

These verses describe the Father-heart of God: his longing for us to come home to him; that his anger is short-lived; that he is merciful; that his intense desire is to treat us as his own treasured children and to give us truly valuable gifts and a beautiful homeland; that he is like the father in the parable of the two sons: always loving us not matter what, and always looking out for us to come home when we stray and making himself available to us when we are overcome with self-pity or stroppy.

They also provide us with a role model if our earthly fathers have fallen far short of how God wants and expects fathers to treat their children. There is always healing and freedom from father (and mother) wounds through forgiveness (releasing them from the debt they owed us) and liberating ourselves, by deliberate choice, from their on-going ungodly manipulation and control over us. It really is down to us with the appropriate support of others. Ministry is only part of the solution.