Then the Lord said, “My Spirit shall not strive with man forever, because He also is flesh; nevertheless his days shall be one hundred and twenty years.”
Genesis 6: 3
Our culture demands instant gratification; immediate results. The present is the real. To an extent one could point to modern technology and industry as a major contributing cause, for technological development has made the world much faster. When our forefathers needed light as evening fell they had to get up and light a candle. We flick a switch. When our immediate fathers wanted to change a television channel, they had to walk across the room. We sit on the couch and press a button. Channel “surfing” is now a normal part of watching television, leading to more urgent demand gratification.
But technological advances are mere superficial matters. They do not get to the heart of things. We suspect that urgent, immediate gratification is a persistent and abiding characteristic of Unbelief. After all, when the Serpent tempted Adam and Eve, the offer of immediate gratification was prominent: “for in the day you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God . . .” The essence of Unbelief is to want it, and now. That is what gods should be like, right—able to command and deliver.
But a contrary example of non-instant results is given a few chapters along in Genesis. The sixth chapter repeatedly tells us that the world had become so extreme and maturated in evil that the earth could no longer bear it (verses 3, 5—7, 11, 12). God pronounces His judgement upon a world for whom it was already long past due. Yet, a further 120 years was allowed before the judgment fell.
Clearly this tells us much about the abiding mercy and longsuffering of the Lord towards sinners. But it also reveals that God, the creator of time, takes time to bring His plans and purposes to pass. From the time of the promise that the seed of the woman would crush the head of the seed of the serpent to when our Lord actually came forth to crush Satan took over six millennia. Over four centuries elapsed from the time that Joseph and Israel went down to Egypt before they were delivered and inherited the Promised Land. Over three hundred and fifty years elapsed from the times of the final prophets of Israel pronouncing judgment upon Zion to the destruction of Jerusalem in AD70. Even our Lord, when announcing that this judgment upon Israel had now come, yet delayed forty years before its final execution—which is a generation.
Of course the wicked, ever focused upon the present and the immediate, use these long passages of time and delay to “prove” the untruth of God and the Scriptures. It never happens, this judgment of God, they say (II Peter 3:1—12). To a people imprisoned into following their lusts (verse 3), the here and now is all there is, all that matters.
The coming of the Kingdom upon the earth also takes time. God has decreed it so. The great task of discipling all the nations has taken two thousand years thus far, and who knows how long yet to come. Now, of course, the Almighty may have elected to complete this task in ten seconds—since He could command even the rocks to proclaim the Gospel to every creature on the earth. But instead He has chosen the long passage of millennia. By faith, we know that the length of this enterprise will help redound to His greater glory.
God's people must live in the here and now. But the way they live now must be in the light of God's plan of hundreds and thousands of years for the coming of the Kingdom. Because our lives are like a vapour, soon gone, and because we take over into our Christian lives the patterns of urgent gratification of our lusts and desires that belong to Unbelief, all too often we spend our Christian lives in the tyranny of the urgent. Well, actually, it is the idolatry of the urgent. “I am the man! I must do it! Time is short!”
Well, no. Actually while your time upon earth is short, time itself is not short. The Kingdom will not stand or fall by you or me. To be faithful stewards of the Lord we must be thinking about the needs of His servants beyond our lifetimes, and lay appropriate foundations and resources for them. After all, that is what David had to do with respect to the temple, his great ambition and desire for God's Kingdom.
They say that the millstones of God's justice grind slow, but exceedingly fine. The rivers of God's grace are similar. They also flow slow—but exceedingly deep. Those who act to “make” God's grace quick, end up splashing in the shallows, often neglecting the really necessary and important things.
What a difference it will make to the power and grace of the Church when we all learn to measure and set our deeds in terms of whether each will be still influencing and blessing God's people in a hundred years time.
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