To Encourage You

2 Peter 3:9 “The Lord is not slow to fulfill his promise as some count slowness, but is patient toward you, not wishing that any should perish, but that all should reach repentance.”

Patience: it’s something I wish I had a lot more of, and in particular patience for people, such as my own wife.  Too often I have none – and that’s a sin!  I pray about it, but then I’m tested, and so often I fail – miserably.  And then I look at Scriptures like the one above and see the very great contrast between how God is and how I am, and I can only keep praying that He will change me to be even a little bit more like Him. 

God’s patience is an awesome thing.  When I look at His patience towards me over the many years when I professed to know Him but lived like one who did not, I am humbled, and grateful beyond words. Why He didn’t strike me down for my rebelliousness and sin when He had every reason to is an awesome lesson to me of His great grace. 

God is  sooo patient towards people.  While He is also just, and will punish all sin in His time, He is patient towards sinners with a power that shows He is God.  While we can be so quick to seek retribution for a wrong done to us, God so often waits.  He demonstrates this over and over in His Word.  In Genesis 15 God made His great promise to Abraham that His progeny would inherit the land of what is now Israel.  But listen to the way He makes this promise: “Know for certain that your offspring will be sojourners in a land that is not theirs and will be servants there, and they will be afflicted for four hundred years. But I will bring judgment on the nation that they serve, and afterward they shall come out with great possessions. As for you, you shall go to your fathers in peace; you shall be buried in a good old age. And they shall come back here in the fourth generation, for the iniquity of the Amorites is not yet complete.” 

Here in this promise God promises that He will provide this land to Abraham’s progeny by judging the wickedness of the people who at that time lived there.  But He tells Abraham that that judgment would not occur for over 400 years. And why the wait?  Because “the iniquity of the Amorites is not yet complete.”  Incredibly, He waited for 400 years to judge those who had rejected Him and served other gods. 

God also showed patience in the days of Noah at a time when “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” (Genesis 6:5).  It was at that time that He told Noah to build an ark for He was going to destroy the world with a great flood for its unbelievable wickedness. Yet He waited while Noah, “a preacher of righteousness” (2 Peter 2:5) built the ark – a time period of approximately 120 years!   

In the New Testament we have the incredible example of Jesus, Who, while hanging on a cross as the result of the rejection by His own nation, pleads with God “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do” (Luke 23:34). And while the Scriptures are clear that Jesus will come back someday to be “revealed from heaven with his mighty angels in flaming fire, inflicting vengeance on those who do not know God and on those who do not obey the gospel of our Lord Jesus” (2 Thessalonians 1:7-9), He has waited for over 2,000 years since that time, giving people in one generation after another an opportunity to repent.  To think that Jesus could have called “12 legions of angels” (Matthew 26:53) to defend Him and destroy the world at the time of the crucifixion, yet He did not, for such was the incredible power of His patience. 

May God help us to not presume upon the patience of this great God who is so longsuffering toward those who, with impunity, sin against Him. And may He give us (and me, especially) even a little bit of the great patience that He over and over demonstrates towards us.