In The Waiting

"We are uncertain in the waiting, and God wants us to be at rest."

HOW DID Peter live his life well with joy and peace in believing, knowing, all the while, how he would die (John 21:18)? Here was an uneducated fisherman, a rash impetuous man, who’d become wisdom in the church, an apostle to the Jews. Read 1 Peter and 2 Peter and relegate that to someone who couldn’t read and write. When he denied Jesus three times, he was recognized as a Galilean because of his speech patterns (Matthew 14:70). Yet, in Acts 2, we see him preach the sermon of the century to the thousands in Jerusalem. Humbleness is a great portion of why. Peter was quick to repent and to kneel at Jesus’ feet. But from that moment when Jesus told him he would be carried where he didn’t want to go until Peter’s words in 2 Peter 1, where he knew of his soon death, were many years of waiting.

I stumbled across a song that put this thought in my heart. Speaking of Israel, it said, “This might be your sixth time around Jericho … your thirty-nineth year in the wilderness. Just hold on.” And there I stood with them wondering how much longer this lasted. What of Rahab? She was promised protection and given instructions to follow, but closed inside her house on the walls, the city encircled by Israel, there had to have been this moment when doubt stabbed her mind.

We are uncertain in the waiting and God wants us to be at rest. This was also in the lyrics of the song. “Put your hand in the Father’s, He’ll lead you to rest.” There is our strength, not in the fighting, definitely not in the worrying, but in rolling our care over on God and letting Him carry the weight. This is what Jesus did.

The Lyrics to “Jericho” by Behold The Beloved.

As a man, in His humanity, even being sinless, He could not lift up and carry off the weight of the world’s sin (Isaiah 53:4). Especially since He was in so much physical pain and body deterioration. Yet, He’d told His disciples He was at peace (John 14:27). His struggle in the garden, pleading with the Father, was a struggle of love, not of unwillingness. He did not even want to condemn Judas but felt the heaviness of mankind’s sins laid on Him. He stood before His accusers and said nothing. I don’t know of one person alive or dead who could have done that. He was at peace and willing because He was Christ, the Anointed One, clothed in the full power of the Holy Spirit without limit (John 3:34).

Brave men rescue men all the time. World War II soldier Desmond Doss sits in my thinking. Here was a man, gone to war to save, not to fight, who proved braver than all those around him. He stood firm in the midst of a battle on Hacksaw Ridge, dragging injured men to safety, and he never fired a shot. There are those who rescued the Jews, doing what was forbidden of them. Rabbi Meir Solaveichik tells of his grandparents’ rescue by a Japanese businessman, who went against what he was told in order to save as many as possible. There is, in the waiting, a decision to stand or to give up. Having chosen not to give up, you can only push forward. Seeing the path’s hills and valleys, ridges, doesn’t change your decision, just your pace.

Jesus knew He would die. He lived fully, doing the Father’s will until then, for thirty years building up to the three that were what He’d come to do. My daughter is 31. I can’t picture it. Desmond Doss knew men would die if he stopped rescuing them, so he kept going amidst horrifying conditions. That Japanese businessman felt the weight of the Jewish people on his shoulders. To do nothing meant just that, he’d done nothing when he was capable of something. And at the final hours of the walk around Jericho, in those moments even when the walls fell, Rahab found the power of an Almighty God who’d caused all of Jericho to tremble. She believed, and God looked past her profession toward the birth of His Son.

People’s opinions of our waiting doesn’t matter. Caleb, age 80, went buckin’ and rearin’ into Canaan to take over the city he’d eyeballed forty years earlier. While he waited, a generation died. Joshua went in as the replacement for Moses. He waited in the Presence of the Lord for years before being called (Exodus 33:11). In this is the will of God. There’s no way 78 soldiers lived just by one man’s strength, but that it was one man’s strength under God. Who we are as children of God is because of the Spirit of God within us. Why, then, do we live as if absent of Him, using doctrine and argument to negate His power?

Jesus who died was raised, rebirthed, remade physically, when His Father breathed upon Him. It is our example. Of the waiting. Of living. His desire in returning to physical life was to enable us to follow suit. Here is all God is displayed before us, and His hand extended, and His heart in it, and we’re looking at heaven, one day in the future, as the end of our pathway, and missing all the signals and stop signs along the way. The apostle Paul spread the gospel while sitting in prison. Peter faced the future thinking of those his life would inspire (2 Peter 1:13). For Desmond Doss, again, there was a prayer, “Please God, give me one more,” one more rescue, and I believe, in some sense, for him, time stood still.

Time altered for Jesus. He was alive in spirit after death, God victorious. But on the earth, around his mutilated body, the sun shaded dark, and the veil of the temple ripped in two from top to bottom. “This man isn’t like the others,” a Roman centurion said, and He was right. While we’re waiting on Jesus’ return in clouds of glory, we have peace and rest to share with the world. We are not an organism of hatred, spewing violence on each other but the example of love so great sacrifice is normal and miracles abundant and people strong in their trust of an ever-present God who waited thousands of years just for us.

“Verily, verily, I say unto thee, When thou wast young, thou girdedst thyself, and walkedst whither thou wouldest: but when thou shalt be old, thou shalt stretch forth thy hands, and another shall gird thee, and carry thee whither thou wouldest not. This spake he, signifying by what death he should glorify God. And when he had spoken this, he saith unto him, Follow me.” (John 21:18-19 KJV)

“Wherefore I will not be negligent to put you always in remembrance of these things, though ye know them, and be established in the present truth. Yea, I think it meet, as long as I am in this tabernacle, to stir you up by putting you in remembrance; Knowing that shortly I must put off this my tabernacle, even as our Lord Jesus Christ hath shewed me. Moreover I will endeavour that ye may be able after my decease to have these things always in remembrance.” (2 Peter 1:12-15 KJV)

Image by 愚木混株 Cdd20 from Pixabay


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Suzanne D. Williams, Author
www.suzannedwilliams.com
www.feelgoodromance.com