Waiting

“For while we were still weak, at the right time Christ died for the ungodly.” (Romans 5:6, ESV)

On New Year’s Eve I found myself sitting in the hot Sydney sun with a massive crowd of people, waiting. We were waiting for the eventual fireworks to come! There were still many hours to go. Waiting is always difficult. It got me thinking about the way God waits.

Have you ever wondered why God chose to come in human form at that particular point in history – first century Palestine? Why not modern day Australia? Why not Dark Ages Europe? Well, I don’t have the answer (sorry!) but something can be said about the nature of the waiting God did. We’re told in Psalm 90:4 that “A thousand years in your sight are like a day that has just gone by” (NIV). So time flies for God? Hmmm, not really, I think. 2 Peter 3:8 says “with the Lord one day is as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day” (ESV). In other words, God is outside of time and experiences it differently from us. If you’ve seen Interstellar, this might make some sense!

However, this doesn’t mean the pain of waiting, or the reality of suffering, isn’t experienced by God. God experiences real suffering concerning His world! From the beginning of time, God grieved at the state of His world (“The Lord saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth, and that every intention of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually. And the Lord regretted that he had made man on the earth, and it grieved him to his heart.” (Genesis 6:5-6, ESV)). At the cross He experienced a devastating separation within Himself as the Father’s face was turned away from His Son. In between this time, God had to watch His people choose to worship idols made by human hands, give themselves over to idol prostitution and sacrifice, greed tear families apart, neighbour lying to neighbour, humanity choosing to live life as they saw fit and best. Our momentary pleasure-seeking is in fact grievous to a God who made us for more.

So my thought: thousands and thousands of years had to pass before God put His Son in the world. Christian, do you trust God’s timing for all things? If so, do you trust Him with waiting in your own life? We are told that it was “at the right time” that Christ came into the world to die for the ungodly, to mark God’s guarantee to rid the world of evil, a guarantee that will ultimately be fulfilled when He returns. First-century Palestine was no day spa. It was a politically tumultuous, socially unjust, and financially corrupt time. Life was difficult. Jesus’ waiting for 33 years was a time of being misunderstood by the very people who supposedly knew God, rejected by His own hometown, even considered mad by His own earthly family. And yet He knew God’s timing for all things was right and His own deathly mission was God’s plan for His creation’s redemption. He trusted God with waiting in His own life. He knows and can empathise with us, in both our small and big trials of life.

My atheist friends, if Jesus really did exist, as our historians tell us, and He did in fact claim to be God, would it not be grossly ignorant of us to assume that if there were a god, He doesn’t care about humanity’s plight? For in Jesus, we find God’s deep concern for the world and His very personal action come together.