How should those united with Christ face the reality of waiting on the Lord? We should wait with acceptance (forbearance). We should wait with confidence (steadfastness). We should wait without anger (patience), because the God of abundant life will not fail us. We should wait with the knowledge that the wait is worth it (hope). We should wait with compassion for those who are also waiting, whether they know it or not (mercy). We should wait with the full realization of what has already been accomplished for us, the blessings that are not waited for but are enjoyed in the present (gratitude).

Waiting has fallen on hard times in the modern world. People are in a hurry in just about every area of life, and what time is spent in waiting is filled with snippets of communication, video clips, memes, and hot takes. Most of the great technological innovations in recent history are conspicuously designed to cut down on the amount of time that we have to wait to get to the desired goal. If we can’t do something online in a matter of minutes, is it worth doing? If a package can’t make it to your door in two days or less, is the product worth ordering? Even movies are getting with the program as they are edited into tighter and tighter story beats. Have you watched a movie from before the year 2000 recently? They are so terribly slow compared to the movies made in the twenty-first century.

No matter how hard we try, we will never eradicate the need to wait, though I do fear that we will become increasingly unhealthy in the way that we spend our hours in the queue.

The thing is, to wait is human. Waiting is a part of being a human made by God for His glory. In fact, the theme of a humanity that waits on God is returned to over and over in Scripture, and here we find the context of our own time spent waiting.

God made time and called us to experience Him in it. One of the incommunicable attributes of God is His aseity, or His independence and self-sufficiency. As the Westminster Shorter Catechism reminds us, God is “infinite, eternal, and unchangeable” in His being (Q&A 4). In other words, while God has created time, He is not bound by it as we are. When God spoke the cosmos into existence, He created it as time-bound, and we are no different. We are dependent on the passage of time and cannot imagine our lives apart from it. Every thought that we produce, every word that we speak, every conscious moment exists in time. That means that waiting is a crucial part of being created in time. It is all around us whether we are aware of it or not, moving unstoppably forward into the future. Contrary to other religions’ claims or instincts, waiting is not an illusion, a trick of the mind, or even a result of humanity’s fall into sin. Waiting is a part of humanity’s creaturely nature. We wait because we are human.

God made us for a story that is not yet complete. Yes, we are time-bound, but time is not a random progression toward no end; it is not, as Macbeth asserts, “a tale told by an idiot, . . . signifying nothing.” The story of human history is the story of God’s creating and redeeming the world, or what John Calvin calls the “theater of divine glory.” Divine glory is complete in the Godhead, but we experience it in time. God is unchangeable, but our experience of His revelation is in time, developing and growing through the ages until its fullness in the new heavens and new earth. This is what we wait for, the divinely desired end toward which all creation is moving, that beatific vision that we see now in part but that we see in the fullest human sense possible when Christ returns.

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