I’ve been thinking about waiting for promises.
I was stirred to think of the few hundred years of silence which preceded the arrival of Jesus. The people who lived through these years, lived through a drought of hearing the Word of the Lord. All they had were the ancient scriptures with no sign of life or continued encouragement. It was just generation after generation waiting for a promised Messiah. It would have seemed merely the stuff of legend after a while.
And then He arrived….in the most unexpected of ways and taking on a form not befitting of the military general they had all conjured up in their human imaginations. A baby born in a manger, a carpenter’s son from a questionable town, a friend of the freak-show in the wilderness that was John the Baptist. Appearing at times through his ministry years as a mysterious vigilante type who turned towards the rebels and the rejected….and consistently flipped the tables on the infirmity that was religion and legalism.
It’s no wonder so many didn’t recognise that he was the one they had waited for. Yet in actual fact …in the person of Jesus was the complete fulfilment of the law they so revered and the promise of a saviour they so required.
How often in our own waiting, do we create a picture of the promise that has been formulated and conceived in our own faulted, limited minds? I think it’s part of the human wrestle of faith. Generations before Jesus was even born, Canaan had been the land promised to God’s chosen people once they were liberated from slavery…and it had taken some significant time, laps around the mountain and wilderness whinging to get there. When they finally got to the edge of the land…sure, it was as beautiful as it was described, but the people didn’t expect there to be opposition, they didn’t expect to have to fight for it, let alone fight a people bigger and stronger than they were. That wasn’t in the brochure…milk, honey…and bloodshed.
Unfortunately only two people, Caleb & Joshua, looked at that land and saw the promise in it…and ultimately they were the ones who eventually took possession of it. Our ability to recognise the promise even when it’s not what we expect is the secret to possessing it. There will always be giants in the land we are called to inherit…it is our faith that crosses over before our lives ever do.
How often when our promise is finally before us, do we find ourselves bewildered, unbelieving and unable to recognise the divine hand of God, because it didn’t arrive in the manner or the neatly wrapped package we expected? When we have to fight for it, can we still see Him as faithful?
Sadly, as we saw in the case of the people of Israel - it was the majority that failed to recognise it. And so it was when the arrival of Jesus broke the silence of 400 years…fulfilling the very Word of God that people so religiously clung to, yet rejected by multitudes and received willingly by few.
When faced with this wrestle in my own life…my prayer is that I might be like a man named Simeon who we read about in Luke 2. Simeon was a righteous man, waiting for the promise like everyone else…waiting for the consolation of Israel. He had been promised that he would not die before seeing the Messiah. Moved by the Holy Spirit that was on Him, he saw Jesus being dedicated in the temple as a baby and recognised the promise before his eyes even in this infantile state, saying to God ‘I can die in peace now for I have seen your salvation’.
WHAT?!! Jesus had not yet taken his first steps, spoken his first words, let alone healed anyone, preached any sermons or saved Israel. Yet Simeon saw the fulfilment of the promise in seed form and that was enough for him to consider God faithful. Though it had not yet played out in all of its fullness…Simeon had a spirit filled revelation that allowed him to recognise the faithfulness of God even in the midst of its unexpected, unspectacular appearance. He saw the finished work, even in its beginnings.
Scripture is clear that God's thoughts are higher than ours and His ways are not our own. Then why do we expect the faithfulness of God to His promises to play out the way our minds consider imaginable or able to conceive? After all, which one of us would have imagined that our eternal life, restoration and salvation would be the result of the brutal way of of the cross?
My prayer is that when I look at my life, I would have the faith of Joshua and Caleb, and the eyes of Simeon. That I would be counted in the few that see the promise in the midst of an unexpected battle, and recognise the faithfulness of God even in its infantile state.
Those who do not see through the eyes of faith live as though they are still waiting, when the promise is right before their eyes, waiting to be fought for and embraced even its beginnings.
So, what are you waiting for?