Abraham: Faithful Obedience
“I will make you into a great
nation and I will bless you; I will make your name great, and you will be a
blessing. I will bless those who bless
you, and whoever curses you I will curse; and all peoples on earth will be
blessed through you.”
Abram traveled through the land as
far as the site of the great tree of Moreh at Shechem. At that time the Canaanites were living in
the land. The LORD appeared to Abram and said, “To
your offspring I give this land.” So he
built an altar there to the LORD, who had appeared to him.
-Genesis
12:2-3, 6-7
When Abraham received his call from
God, he had no idea what God had in store for him and Sarah. God told him to go, and he went. He trusted God. He trusted that God had a plan, and it would
be revealed to him whenever God chose to reveal it to him. When God told Abraham to leave his country,
his people, and his family (Genesis 12:1) there is no indication that Abraham
questioned God and pushed for an explanation.
We are told, “So Abram left, as the LORD
had told him…” (Genesis 12:4).
Abraham simply picked up and left,
trusting God’s promises from vss.2&3.
Abraham had a lot of reasons to question God, but he did not. Those questions would arise later when God’s
promises were not being fulfilled in Abraham and Sarah’s timing, but initially
Abraham obeyed God’s command and picked up and left trusting God would show him
where he was to settle.
Abraham’s life demonstrates that our
timing is not God’s timing. God revealed
his plan to Abraham. He directed Abraham
throughout his life. But God never told
Abraham the timing of the fulfillment of his greatest promise: The promise of a
son. The son which was necessary for
Abraham to become a great nation and through whom “all nations would be
blessed”. It is reasonable to think that
Abraham would have expected Sarah to conceive shortly after God gave this
promise. After all, they were both
already old and well past the age of having children: Abraham was 75 and Sarah
was 65 and barren.
It was only after Abraham and Sarah
had made several mistakes trying to “help” God fulfill this promise that God
revealed the timing of the fulfillment of the promise, 24 years later. Sarah would give birth to a son one year
later, when Abraham was 100 and she was 90 (Genesis 16,18,21). God’s timing is not our timing.
Abraham began to question God’s
promise because he had placed his own arbitrary timeline and expectation on God
for when this promise should be fulfilled.
This is the same mistake that we so often make. We know that God has promised to care for us
and provide for us, but we want to dictate to him how that promise should be
fulfilled and what the timing of our demanded fulfillment should be. When we place demands on God we display a
lack of faith, and we demonstrate that we do not trust him to live up to his
promises.
Abraham was given an incredible
promise from God. And then he faced
decades of testing before that promise would be truly fulfilled. The time in which Abraham received his call
and promise from God to its fulfillment on Mt. Moriah, where he was in the
process of sacrificing Isaac to God, spanned more than 40 years.
Abraham lived for 175 years. Genesis 12-25:11 tells us about ~60 years of
his life. That is a little more than 1/3
of his life; yet these six decades are clearly the defining years of Abraham’s
life. God’s plan for Abraham did not
play out over days or weeks. It took
decades for everything to come together.
Abraham could only really understand God’s plan at its completion when
he could look back over time and see how God worked everything out. That is how it is for us, as well. When we are in the beginning or middle stages
of carrying out God’s plan, we cannot reasonably expect to know exactly how it
will come together. We just need to
trust that God will bring it all together.
Also, it is foolish to think that
anything in life will come together in a few days, or a few weeks. Even a few months is an unrealistic
expectation in most situations. Any
worthwhile endeavor in life will take years to bring to fruition. It is our responsibility to keep working and
trust that God will bless our efforts and make them work out exactly how they
need to, to bless his church and the world.
God’s timing is not our timing!
