Be Patient

"What He shouted at ..."

IF YOU ONLY see Him as wrath and anger, then you don’t know Him. The Old Testament seems to be filled with stories of God’s anger, and the New Testament with His rescue and love. But knowing Him, as I do, I can tell you He hasn’t changed. He hates sin. He pours out peace. The Old Covenant shows Him as of great patience. He endured the violence of men until only eight righteous souls were left (Genesis 6:8-11). Only eight people made in His image and after His likeness truly reflected it. He cleansed the earth to bring to it a Savior, to provide a way of restoration, so that we’d be whole again, as He made us to be.

What looks like judgment is needed to show man his sins. Modern thought says to accept all ways of thought, but this is not God’s way. God’s way says to love all men, regardless of where and how we disagree (1 Thessalonians 3:12). It does not say to change the rules of godly behavior. What reads as extreme in Old Covenant Law, is extreme in Old Covenant Law. That’s the point of writing it. Israel would be the nation the Messiah was born into, and they had to be the people of God, dedicated to God, and filled with Him. They captured this in part but added hundreds of their laws to God’s laws and so missed the point of the Law (Mark 7:7).

Man minus God makes its own gods, writes its own worship, and all of it is self-serving. Jehovah’s worship served no one. It was written as it was to remove any areas of self-promotion and selfishness. In short, man had nothing to gain from it in personal prestige, in honor among their peers, in substance. It did not elevate the individual but elevates YHWH to where He stands—as the Power and Presence of the universe. He’s all Life and would be seen in it. He’s all knowledge, the very Source of wisdom. He saw the end from the beginning (Isaiah 41:9-10), and so spoke to whom He spoke to and spoke through whom He spoke through in order to place us where we should be in our place in time. He knew when Abraham would live and when Isaac would be born. He showed to him the slavery in Egypt in a vision (Genesis 15:13), and prepared Joseph for Israel’s deliverance in prophetic words regarding his bones (Genesis 50:25). He showed His strength to Pharaoh, displaying His creative power, yet Pharaoh rode right into the middle of the Red Sea still deluded about false gods and witchcraft. Notice Moses and Aaron were not afraid. They kept to the words of God; they stayed to obedience.

What’s my point? That God chose Joseph and Mary, a couple not yet married, to carry His Son. That He blessed wise men from a far country to follow a star many, many miles to find Him, and saw them safely home, out of Herod’s destruction. That He selected Peter and Andrew, James and John, Luke, Matthew, Nathaniel and Phillip, far in advance, knowing who they would be and what they would do for Him. None of it done out of anger and wrath, because of a tempestuous temper. Jesus wept for Judas in the garden at His Father’s feet (Matthew 26:39). He forgave those who crucified Him while hanging on the cross they constructed (Luke 23:34). He promised a convicted thief a life in Paradise, without his having to confess anything or sacrifice anything or quote one Jewish Law (Luke 23:43). The Scripture doesn’t even say he was a Jew. Jesus forgave a woman of Samaria, healed a leper also of Samaria, healed the daughter of a Syrophenician woman, raised from death the daughter of a synagogue leader. What He shouted at was a dead man to come back to life; were self-appointed religious leaders full of arrogance and man’s law codes that God did not ordain; were moneychangers who’d made His Father’s house of prayer, a building that represented His upcoming death, into a market; was a psalm that hearers knew which He, in that moment, fulfilled. Not to show His doubt and fear and anguish, but so they’d see the God of longsuffering had kept His Word.

“And the LORD passed by before him, and proclaimed, The LORD, The LORD God, merciful and gracious, longsuffering, and abundant in goodness and truth,” (Exodus 34:6)

“Or despisest thou the riches of his goodness and forbearance and longsuffering; not knowing that the goodness of God leadeth thee to repentance?” (Romans 2:4)

“Which sometime were disobedient, when once the longsuffering of God waited in the days of Noah, while the ark was a preparing, wherein few, that is, eight souls were saved by water.” (1 Peter 3:20)

“The Lord is not slack concerning his promise, as some men count slackness; but is longsuffering to us-ward, not willing that any should perish, but that all should come to repentance.” (2 Peter 3:9)


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