Never Forsaken: Obedience in the Waiting

This image reminded me of Elijah's cloud I write about below

“Therefore, say to the Israelites: ‘I am the Lord, and I will bring you out from under the yoke of the Egyptians. I will free you from being slaves to them, and I will redeem you with an outstretched arm and with mighty acts of judgment. I will take you as my own people, and I will be your God. Then you will know that I am the Lord your God, who brought you out from under the yoke of the Egyptians.’”  Exodus 6:6-7

 How do you react when things don’t go as you expected, when God’s timing is not the same as your own? How do you dwell in the waiting place? I wrote about this last April and then again earlier this year. It’s something we can all identify with and will likely experience more than once in our lives. Lots of people in Biblical history found themselves here and engaged with it in different ways.

 The first person who came to mind for me today was Abraham. When he was middle aged (ok, he was 75 according to Genesis 12:4, but he had a lot of life left), God called him to leave the land he lived in, Haran, and go, “to the land I will show you.” In doing this, God promised Abraham that, “I will make you into a great nation, and I will bless you; I will make your name great, and you will be a blessing.” But as time wore on, and he and his wife passed the child-bearing years, Abraham wondered, and even doubted, how God would bring about this promise. Decades went by without any evidence of this great nation that God was going to bring about through him, and Abraham deferred to his wife’s suggestion that they go about manifesting God’s promise in their own way which, to this day, has caused unspeakable harm. But God, just as He promised and in His own perfect time, did indeed create from him a vast nation. Sources say that the Jewish population currently sits at 15.8 million worldwide, and that is only the descendants from the tribe of Judah, there were 11 other tribes beyond that, not to mention the descendants of Ishmael (Abraham’s son through Hagar) and those of his sons born to his second wife, Keturah. God did, indeed fulfill His promise, although in those decades of waiting it must have felt impossible.

Another figure, whose time of waiting was much shorter, but who engaged with it in a way which encouraged me, is Elijah. Just coming off of an incredible experience of God’s awesome power on Mount Carmel where He exposed the prophets of baal for the charlatans they were, Elijah testifies to the evil king of his day that a storm was coming. This was significant because there had been a drought in the land lasting three and a half years (James 5:17) that Elijah had previously prophesied (1 Kings 17:1).  Elijah went up to the top of the mountain and prayed, but he sent his servant to look for proof of the coming rain, to watch for a storm cloud. Seven times the servant came back and said there was nothing there, and seven times Elijah told him to go look again. You’ve got to figure that servant thought Elijah was nuts, but Elijah knew that God had shown him it would rain and He was going to believe it until he saw it. Sure enough, the seventh time the servant reported back that he saw a cloud as small as a man’s hand rising from the sea. That’s all Elijah needed to tell him that the time had come where God was going to fulfill what had been shown him and he got up and ran, literally ran, all the way to Jezreel because the rain was coming and he didn’t want to get stuck in the mud!

 God had told Moses that He was sending him to Egypt to free His people, but in Moses’ experience so far, he had only made things worse. The people’s oppression had grown exponentially after Moses and Aaron spoke to Pharaoh, and they were not his biggest fans. Moses had been told what God was going to do and promised that he would know it to be true when he and the Israelites worshipped God on Mount Horeb (Exodus 3:12). But here he sat in Egypt, and everything seemed to be going wrong. Now, we know how the story comes out, but in this moment, Moses did not. He had to feel pretty torn.

 I’m in kind of a funny waiting place myself right now. I really feel like God has shown me that something will happen, but there is absolutely no evidence of it yet. In fact, there has been much evidence of the opposite. Nonetheless, I feel like I am supposed to wait and act as though it were a foregone conclusion. I need to make choices that reflect my belief in what I have been shown. Am I making it up in my head? Maybe. That wouldn’t be too far-fetched for me, and I certainly wouldn't say for a fact that God told me this. But still, I have enough conviction about it that I feel like I need to stay the course. Even as I was reading today’s devotional, over and over again I had the impression that I, like Moses, was in a waiting place with this. And so, I wait.

Here’s the Thing: God’s timing is not our timing. A day to Him is like a thousand years (2 Peter 3:8). But when God says it, you can trust it. Even in my situation where I don’t have proof, I don’t know for sure that God told me something, I have enough conviction in my heart about it that I feel like the Holy Spirit is directing me and I need to obey. Maybe what I’m expecting will come to pass exactly as I think it will, maybe it will be totally different, but the important thing is not that I’m right, but that I obey in the waiting.