Nobody likes to wait.

Not for food, not for service, not at the DMV, not for a lull in the video streaming—not for anything. One of the reasons we hate to wait comes from our culture. We live in a culture in which everything is measured against time. Everything must be better—faster—at virtually any cost. We want what we want, and we want it now. And if we can’t have it now, we demand to know exactly how long it will take in order for us to get it. Hence the rise of the “time guarantee”—whether it’s the delivery of pizza, shipping on a product, or a repair on a kitchen appliance, if we have to wait we want to at least wait with a timetable. It is, after all, our sovereign right as a consumer.

This is problematic for the Christian, though, because we worship a God that doesn’t give timetables.

God is perfectly content to operate in His way, and in His time, and is not obligated to tell us what—much less when—He is going to act. There are, then, many times when we find ourselves believing God will make good on His word, and yet we do not know when.

This is not a new phenomenon, though—because God is the Rock who does not change, He has always operated in this way with His people.

Think of the children of Israel, enslaved for 400 years, trying to hold onto the promise given to their father Abraham that they would have a land of their own, and yet having no timetable on when God would make good on that promise. Or consider Abraham himself who was promised a son that would be the beginning of an entire nation, and yet the decades came and went without God scheduling a baby on Abraham’s calendar. And then there are the promises of the Messiah who would come and deliver the people of God, and yet these promises did not contain a specific date or time in which God must perform this service or the service would be free.

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