Psalm 33:20

Psalm 33:20

We wait in hope for the Lord; he is our help and our shield.

What are you waiting for today? The sun to come back out? A
delivery to arrive? A child to grow out of a particularly frustrating stage of development? We do a lot of waiting. Yet we're not always very good at it. So often, waiting feels frustrating to us. We think it is time wasted. Wouldn't it be better if what we wanted came sooner?

Waiting is a common theme in the Bible - God's people are a
waiting, hoping people. Why? Because God is a promise-making, promise-keeping God.

If God just did everything immediately, we would never need
to wait. Think back over the stories of the Old Testament. If God had rescued the Israelites from slavery straight away, and deposited them directly in the promised land, it would have saved a whole lot of time and waiting and difficulty - no plagues in Egypt, no Passover, no wandering in the wilderness for 40 years. But then, why wait till they were slaves? Couldn't he have
rescued them BEFORE things got tough?  In fact ... why bother with sending them into Egypt at all? Why not just establish
Abraham in the Promised Land back in Genesis 12? Wouldn't that have been so much better? Instead, God made a promise to Abraham that he, and the generations after him, had to wait hundreds of years to see fulfilled. Why? In the same way, we might ask 'Why can't we just have heaven now? Why all the
waiting?' Well - we're not told directly, so it would be both foolish and arrogant to think that we know God's thinking when he hasn't told us. But I think at least one little bit of the answer is to do with God making and keeping promises. 

God's priority in all his dealings with us is relationship. He's not primarily interested in accomplishing a particular end result in the
most efficient way. He's primarily committed to being in loving relationship with his people, and to enabling us to be in loving relationship with him. Which means that he wants us to know him. To see his character at work and grow in our understanding of what he is like.  We only know that God is a faithful, promise-keeping God because we see him make promises and then keep them, even in the face of significant obstacles. We only know how committed he is to us, his people, because we have a whole Bible full of examples of God working to fulfil his purposes, sometimes over generations.  If God accomplished
everything instantly, how would we ever know anything about his faithfulness, his patience, his unfailing love?

It is for our good, and God's glory, that we get to see him make promises and then keep them. But that requires waiting. There's got to be a gap between the promise and its fulfilment. The longer the gap, the more clearly we see his faithfulness. So, there has to be waiting. But there is also hope. Because the fulfilment ALWAYS comes. Perhaps not as soon as we would have chosen. But always at the right time, according to God's perfect wisdom.

Let's praise God for that today, and ask for his help to be a people who wait in hope.