Topical Studies
What the Bible says about
The Overlooked Work
(From Forerunner Commentary)
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Genesis 12:1-4
Waiting is a foundational aspect of faith, hope, and love, and it is sometimes one of the hardest works of all. The life of Abraham has several poignant examples of waiting, beginning with his calling by God. It is not immediately apparent from these verses, but Abraham did some waiting that was not "waiting on God." Verses 1-3 relate what God previously "had said," and verse 4 takes place sometime later. Genesis 11:31-32 shows Terah taking Abraham, Sarah, and Lot out of Ur and dwelling in Haran, where Terah died. However, Stephen's account in Acts 7:2 shows that Genesis 12:1-3 actually took place while Abraham was in Ur (Mesopotamia), but Abraham did not leave Haran and his father's house until after his father had died. This means there is a gap between what God told Abraham in verses 1-3 in Ur and his leaving Haran in verse 4. God told him to leave his family and his father's house, but he waited until his father died before he left. Here, at the beginning, God actually had to wait on him! There is an important lesson here. Not all waiting is actually "waiting on God." It could be procrastination. It could be outright laziness. It could be dragging our feet because we are fearful, uncomfortable, or, like Jonah, we just flat out do not want to do what God wants us to do. We might convince ourselves that we are waiting on God when He is really waiting for us. We might think Abraham and Jonah had it easy because God spoke to them directly. We can read the accounts, and it seems pretty clear to us what these men should have done and when they should have acted—right away! On the other hand, we have a whole book full of God's instructions, yet we also tend to want to wait until the circumstances are more to our liking before acting. So we wait of our own volition, not because God requires us to. This shows that a distinction exists between God's promises and instructions. Generally, the time to wait on God is not when He gives instructions (including instructions written millennia ago). When that happens, He expects us to act on them. Instead, the time to wait on God is when He promises to do something or states that something will happen. He may give us a glimpse of the future, but we must wait for Him to bring it to pass. That waiting is work because it takes discipline, restraint, patience, and focus. It is work to sit on our hands. The alternative is to go out and try to bring God's will to pass ourselves, and as we will see, that never ends well. In Genesis 12:2, God tells Abraham that he will be a great nation, which implies he will have children. Later, when Abraham is in Canaan, God again appears to him, and he brings up his childlessness (Genesis 15:1-3). God tells him he will have an heir and makes a covenant with him (verses 4-20). But we know how the story goes—Abraham and Sarah decided to cause this to happen themselves rather than waiting on God (Genesis 16:1-2). So, they came up with a "brilliant" plan that everybody agreed to—except God—and carried it out. Immediately, bad fruit began to be borne: strife and division. Nobody was happy with how things turned out—not Hagar, not Sarah; and if the womenfolk were not happy, we can be sure Abraham was not either. Abraham and Sarah took it upon themselves to "help" God fulfill His promise rather than doing the real work of waiting on Him.
David C. Grabbe
The Overlooked Work (Part Two)
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1 Corinthians 13:13
For nearly all of us, waiting is uncomfortable. Because of life's frantic pace, we get frustrated if it takes thirty seconds for a traffic light to turn green. Handwritten letters are slow, and in the last decade or so, they have been largely replaced by email. Now, however, sometimes even email is too slow, so we text so we can communicate without having to wait. Any device or technique that eliminates waiting will always grab our attention and often our pocketbook. Most of our lives are spent in such high gear that our frustration often comes boiling forth whenever we have to wait. Living only three-score-and-ten years or perhaps fourscore, we all have a degree of time-sickness—an obsessive belief that time is slipping away, that there is not enough of it, and if everything is not sorted out right now, it may just be the end of the world. The fact is, we hate waiting—yet Scripture says so much about it, especially waiting on God. Consider the three great virtues of faith, hope, and love. Waiting on God stands at the core of biblical hope (Romans 8:23-25). The Bible uses the word "hope" not as a vague wish but as a confident trust in a future event. We do not just wish for our future redemption and adoption; we know and trust that it will happen at our resurrection. But until that hope is realized and fulfilled, we wait. In like manner, faith and waiting are also closely linked. Our faith in God is often manifested by waiting on Him. If we trust Him—if we have faith in Him—we wait for Him to work things out that we cannot (or should not) do on our own. The "love chapter" of I Corinthians 13 demonstrates the waiting aspect of love when it describes agape love as suffering long (verse 4). Love requires waiting while it "bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things" (verse 7). Though it may sound incongruous at first, waiting is actually a work. One's actions—or lack thereof—demonstrate what is in one's heart. Waiting on God is a work that demonstrates faith in Him, just as much as any example of law-keeping or other Christian deed. In fact, it is often one of the most difficult of all works. The Bible contains many stories of great "waiters"—not those who wait on us in restaurants but the men and women who wait on God. They demonstrated their trust in God by waiting years—even decades—for a promise to be fulfilled or to see what God was doing in their lives. It seems that all of God's servants go through a time of waiting. Consider that Noah preached and built the ark for over a century. While he certainly was not idle then, think about how much of his life was taken up by waiting for God to act and finally make the world right—even after being personally given divine instruction. Hebrews 11 highlights Joseph's faith in terms of the instructions he gave on his deathbed, but before that, he had plenty of waiting to do as a slave and then as a prisoner. It took over two decades for his visions of his family bowing to him to come to pass. After he was raised to second-in-command of Egypt, he could have sent either an army or an ambassador to his family—either to settle the score or to make amends. Because of those dreams, he knew he would see his family again, yet he did not attempt to make it happen, even though he had nearly supreme authority in the local world. Instead, Joseph waited on God, who not only fulfilled his visions, but did it so that repentance and reconciliation also occurred. No amount of human will or authority can cause that. Joseph understood the power and wisdom in waiting on God. Then there is Moses. It is probable that early on, Moses had some idea about the part he would play in delivering Israel, but he first had to experience forty years of preparation in Pharaoh's palace. Maybe after forty years, he thought the time was right for him to step into his destiny, yet in taking matters into his own hands by killing an Egyptian, he acted too soon by half. He had to endure another forty years in the desert, watching over dumb sheep. God's working through him did not even begin until he was eighty years old! Even then, he had to wait yet another forty years for his job to be complete—and at the end, he was not able to see the fulfillment because he had acted rashly way back in his youthful eighties. All of these "waiters" endured long periods of time, during which it probably appeared that nothing of significance was happening. Yet they remained faithful to God during those waits and kept waiting long after most people would have given up on God. They waited after others would have concluded either that He was not there or that they needed to take matters into their own hands. But the waiters had the wisdom to keep walking with God and to remain faithful until the time was perfect for God to bring His will to pass.
David C. Grabbe
The Overlooked Work (Part One)
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Hebrews 11:17-19
Abraham concluded that God was able to resurrect Isaac. But there is no record of a resurrection up to that point. It is possible that Abraham reasoned that God would immediately resurrect Isaac. However, it is also possible that Abraham was willing to wait for the resurrection—the one that happens when Jesus Christ returns—for the promises to be fulfilled. In John 8:56, Jesus tells the Jews, "Your father Abraham rejoiced that he would see my day. He saw it and was glad." Abraham must have had a glimpse of the Kingdom of God, which includes the resurrection. So, by faith, he concluded that God could resurrect his son. But part of that conclusion would have been that he was willing to wait the remainder of his days without his son, as well as all the millennia in the sleep of death, for God to fulfill His promises. But that was not the extent of his waiting: "By faith he dwelt in the land of promise as in a foreign country, dwelling in tents with Isaac and Jacob, the heirs with him of the same promise; for he waited for the city which has foundations, whose builder and maker is God" (Hebrews 11:9-10). Although exceedingly rich, Abraham lived in tents without foundations—without permanence—while waiting for a city with eternal foundations. God called him out of the highly developed city of Ur, and he never lived in a city again. Content to be a pilgrim, he left Haran at age 75 and lived in tents for the next century. The whole time, he was not merely existing; he was waiting. He had seen some of God's promises fulfilled, and he was waiting for the remainder. Notice that the city that he was waiting for is not physical Jerusalem, but the New Jerusalem, the city whose builder and maker is God. Even though Jerusalem will be Christ's abode when He returns, it is not until after the Millennium that the New Jerusalem comes down from heaven. For the last hundred years of his life, Abraham was waiting, not just for his own resurrection and Jesus' day, but he was looking a thousand years beyond that for the fulfillment of Revelation 21:2. This man understood waiting! The heroes of faith saw God's promises afar off and were willing to wait on God and His perfect timing. God's promises stood at the forefront of their minds, but if their minds were anything like ours today, it took tremendous work to remain focused on what God said and not grow weary, give up, or try to work out God's promises on their own. The next time we find ourselves waiting for that email that is long in coming, waiting for the phone to vibrate, or waiting for the driver who is "well-advanced in years" either to speed up or move over—or the next time you find yourself waiting for a resolution to a problem that you have taken to God because it is out of your power to bring about—remember the great "waiters" of the Bible. Waiting on God was one of their greatest works, and it is also one of the hardest works that we will ever do.
David C. Grabbe
The Overlooked Work (Part Two)
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