Hurry Up and Wait
Pause:
Before you start reading this devotional, take a moment to stop what you’re doing, slow down and focus on Jesus.
Pray and ask him to open your eyes to see as you read the scriptures, and to open your ears to hear as you wait on the leading of the Spirit.
Read:
Hebrews 6:13-15: "For when God made a promise to Abraham, since he had no one greater to swear by, he swore by himself: I will indeed bless you, and I will greatly multiply you. And so, after waiting patiently, Abraham obtained the promise."
Going Deeper:
The story of Abraham is remarkable. It can become a bit familiar if you’ve been part of the church for a while and lose some of its' bite. Let’s recover it.
In his book “Charis,” bible scholar Preston Sprinkle describes Abraham like this: ”When God first meets Abraham, he is a pagan idolater. Abraham is bowing down to idols, offering sacrifices to different gods, and having sex with temple prostitutes so that a moon god named Nanna will show him favor.” That was Abraham’s world as archeologists have uncovered it. We have no reason to think he wasn’t engaged with the cultural practices.
Why bring this up? I think it’s important to place Abraham in his cultural context in case the Sunday school version of him sterilizes his story in our hearts. Abraham was from a rough culture and he was a rough dude himself. Yet, listen to these promises from God to Abraham (Gen. 12:2-3):
“I will make you into a great nation,
I will bless you,
I will make your name great,
and you will be a blessing…
and all the peoples on earth
will be blessed through you.”
This is how God speaks to a 75-year-old idolator who lies and uses his wife Sarah as a shield to protect himself when he feels a bit nervous about a situation. Somehow, he’s going to have children and many of them, assuming of course he doesn’t get his wife killed first.
We see, then, that story of Abraham unfolds as a series of ups-and-downs that rival anything you’ve probably seen in your church. Habitual lying, paralyzing fear, world-class hospitality (to angelic visitors), serious marital strife, armed combat, cynicism, scheming, treating people like Hagar as possessions, powerful intercession, doubt, and eventually a trust that we still marvel at today. I’ll expand on that last part in a bit.
Why would God make such promises to this guy? Hopefully this is encouragement for us as we think about our own culture and past. God works with people as they are and where they are. This can give us hope that God’s promises and desire to bless the world rests on His goodness, not ours.
With that said, Abraham, the childless septuagenarian, received an essentially impossible promise from God to have a line of children through whom He would bless the world. Over the next 25 years, Abraham both trusted God’s promise and was declared righteous before God for it and also struggled so badly with waiting for it that he and Sarah took matters into their own hands and had a child through Hagar, their Egyptian slave.
It’s as big a mess as you imagine. Hagar has a son, Ishmael, and her relationship with Sarah breaks down to such a degree that Hagar just runs away. Ishmael is not the child of promise, however. The child of promise must come through Sarah who is a barren, sinful, and yet a chosen vessel. The promise therefore looks lost, humanly speaking, but is secure from a divine perspective.
Eventually, God tells Sarah His promise stands (even as she nears 90) and will soon come to pass. Sarah just laughs at Him, secretly of course, and God calls her out in an amusing exchange where Sarah denies it. “Oh, but you did laugh, Sarah.” You can’t make this up, folks.
Of course, God gets the last laugh as Sarah gets pregnant and has Isaac, the promised child. God’s impossible promise came true despite Abraham and Sarah’s ridiculous and dangerous ways. God is stubbornly committed to bless them and through this sinful couple to bless the entire world.
That’d be a cool story I think if it ended there. It doesn’t. Years later, God tests Abraham and asks him to take his young son, Isaac, and sacrifice him. It’s utterly heartbreaking to read this story, but it’s not an endorsement of child sacrifice - God condemns that elsewhere (Deut. 12:29-32). Abraham did much evil to get a child - he lied, cheated, took advantage of people, and seemingly the only thing he didn’t do was kill to make the promise come true. Now, he’s being asked to do just that and give up the child he had wanted more than maybe anything.
If track record means anything, we might expect Abraham to respond to God’s command by running away scared, or making up another lie, or using Sarah as a shield again. Yet, Abraham didn’t do any of those things. What changed? Not God or His promises, but Abraham did over time.
He took what God had told him before, “Fear not, Abram, I am your shield; your reward shall be very great,” to its' logical conclusion. There’s no more need to hide behind Sarah, lie, or scheme. God will deliver on His promises so even if he sacrificed Isaac, God would bring Isaac back from the dead (Heb. 11:19). He trusted God’s promise and no longer had any need to sinfully protect himself or his interests. All that was left was to trust Him in the toughest moment and receive the promises.
How does God respond to Abraham’s trust in offering Isaac? “God provides an alternative sacrifice so Isaac is spared and then takes an oath to confirm the promises: "I will indeed bless you, and I will greatly multiply you. And so, after waiting patiently, Abraham obtained the promise.”
What does this all mean for us? The same as it meant for the original readers of the letter to the Hebrews: God has made incredible promises to us, they are true, and we can have strong encouragement to keep going and not give up until we’ve grabbed hold of them.
We now have Jesus, who is ultimately the promised child of Abraham who has come to bless the world. Through Him, God has come back to reign over His people! Not only that, Jesus is our high priest who sacrificed His life to forgive us because we who have been given incredible promises also take matters into our own hands like Abraham and Sarah did. We have a hard time waiting too and take shortcuts to get what we want.
In Jesus, we have an inheritance in the new creation and will reign with Him. We grow as we wait with patience and endurance for these promises to come true, especially when things get hard. What we stand to receive is far greater than anything we lose in this life on account of trusting Him (Heb. 10:34). We can therefore endure anything for the sake of Him who has promised us a kingdom that can’t be shaken.
Together, we are called to trust God’s promises and patiently wait for Him to fulfill them in His time. In this season in which we’ve lost much, it’s easy to forget what we already have and the rich inheritance that awaits us. May God grow us in such a way that “trust overrides our instincts,” as I recently heard, and may we imitate those who inherit the promises through faith and perseverance.
Pray:
Respond to God in prayer by speaking to Him about what stood out to you from this passage this morning.
Listen:
What is the Holy Spirit saying to you this morning?
Apply:
What are you going to do in response to what God is saying to you from the text and by the Spirit?