Waiting On A Promise

 How long would you wait on a promise? 

It's a question we don't often ask but one I think we should. 

If someone guaranteed you something, how patient would you be until you saw the fulfillment of it? If someone gave you their word or commitment, how long would you be willing to wait and trust them until you witnessed them come through? 

After a few weeks, a few months, a few years, would you start to question them? Would you begin to doubt if they would do what they said they would? 

If that sounds hard to you, try this on for size: try waiting several HUNDRED years to see what you'd long been hoping for! Yet, this is exactly what God asked humanity to do when He said He would one day send a Messiah that would shepherd His people and bring about a redemptive plan. From the beginning, after the fall of Adam and Eve, God issued a promise that He would defeat the Deceiver (Gen. 3:15) and come to set things right and make a way for people to be restored to Himself. But I doubt anyone thought it would take centuries for that to happen. And I certainly don't think anyone would've predicted it would come through a virgin birth in a manger! 

Advent is a reminder to us of the value of waiting - of sitting with our questions and our fears and our unknowns and trusting that God is still on the way... even when He appears to delay and contradict our sense of fairness and timing. It's a season of helping us understand, once again, that Emmanuel is ever with us. He has not gone anywhere and He is not late about anything - even the things we feel are most pressing and urgent and necessary. 

The reality is, with Him, two things are equally true: nothing is predictable and everything is predictable. From a human perspective, it is impossible to know the mind of God - to fully understand what He is after in a situation and where He is working along the way. We cannot begin to fathom the intricacies of His ways and intentions as He spins the story of human history. We are but one tiny part in His greater narrative and sometimes, that sense of not knowing can be troubling. We want to grasp what is going on. We want reasons. We want justice. We want direction. And, from this point of view, things seem unpredictable. God surprises. And sometimes we don't like it. 

But additionally, every aspect of who God is in His nature and His purposes and His works is predictable because He's good in all that He does. Perfection is His specialty. There is nothing about God that can be deemed wrong because if there were, He would fail to be God. He would fail to be true to Himself and His Word. This means that we can hold fast to the fact that God cannot go back on anything He said or promised. He is reliable. He is trustworthy. He is steadfast. 

Psalm 106 tells the story of God's redemption of the Hebrew nation as they were brought through their wilderness wanderings - how God still looked with compassion upon them even as they struggled to submit to Him as Lord and to obey His commands. Even in their failures, He still showed mercy. But verse 24-25 are a sobering wake up call to us as we attempt to wait on God in our own stories: "They despised the pleasant land, having no faith in His promise." God had told them He would give them a land of abundance but they gave up on God's plan because of their unbelief. The Message translation puts it, "They found fault with the life they had and turned a deaf ear to God's voice."

Wow. That sounds harsh, doesn't it? And yet, how many times have we become disgruntled with the life we have and quit on what God was doing? How many times have we given up on hope simply because we concluded God wasn't going to do what He said He would? Numbers 14:11 reads, "How long will they not believe in me, in spite of all the signs that I have done among them?" God is always moving. Always working. God never stops. But we can become blind to the glimpses of His being on the way in our situations by our reluctance to wait upon the Lord. 

The birth of Jesus is our reminder that God keeps His Word. So too, the cross and the resurrection. God said He'd put a plan in place, and He did. It just took a long time to get there. Well... a long time according to us. According to 2 Peter 3:8, "one day is with the Lord as a thousand years, and thousand years as one day." God has His own time. It's not our time. It's not our plan. So, to avoid being constantly disappointed, may I suggest that we do as Psalm 37:7 recommends: "be still before the Lord and wait patiently for Him..." 

As we count down the weeks until we celebrate Christmas, let us ask ourselves if we are missing what God is doing in spite of all the things He's already done for us. Let us confess our unbelief, if we have any, so that we don't find ourselves as did the Hebrews, "having no faith in His promise." God is coming. And we have to keep staying in a ready posture, expectant for what is about to happen next. Why? Because we know, with Him, it will be good. It will be for our benefit and His glory. It may come quietly, humbly. But it will be here. And when it arrives, let's not miss it because we're anticipating something else or because we gave up simply because it felt like God took longer. 

If the promises of God are true and right, then isn't it okay if we don't see the fulfillment of them right away? Even if we don't see their completion in our lifetime, isn't that alright? After all, the Hebrews had no word from God for four hundred years before the Messiah came. But He still did. He always does. And that, my friends, is our hope throughout all time.