the long game of God

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[7 minute read]

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I’ve begun rereading Philip Yancey’s Disappointment With God (highly recommend). His writing style has always appealed to me but his daring insights catch me out even more. Try this one on for size:

If you read Genesis in one sitting, you cannot help noticing a change in how God related to his people. At first he stayed close by, walking in the garden with them, punishing their individual sins, speaking to them directly, intervening constantly. Even in Abraham’s day he sent extraterrestrial messengers on house calls. By Jacob’s time, however, the messages were far more ambiguous: a mysterious dream about a ladder, a late-night wrestling match. And toward the end of Genesis, a man named Joseph received guidance in the most unexpected ways.

Genesis slows down when it gets to Joseph, and it shows God working mostly behind the scenes. God spoke to Joseph not through angels, but through such means as the dreams of a despotic Egyptian pharaoh…

…But shift for a moment to the perspective of God the parent. Had he deliberately “pulled back” to allow Joseph’s faith to reach a new level of maturity? And could this be why Genesis devotes more space to Joseph than to any other person? Through all his trials, Joseph learned to trust: not that God would prevent hardship, but that he would redeem even the hardship. Choking back tears, Joseph tried to explain his faith to his murderous brothers: “You intended to harm me, but God intended it for good….

— Philip Yancey, Disappointment With God, 71-72

Yancey really got me thinking about how God goes about his business…and not in the way we would expect. Of course you know this.

For example, the three matriarchs of Israel – Sarah, Rebecca, and Rachel – were each affected with some form of barrenness at one time or another. You would think that God, in inventing a new nation, would have the foresight to choose fertile young women who could pop out babies right and left on a whim to launch his people-project. Not so.

God seems to go about his business in less than flashy style, the hard way. A virgin-born baby in a frontier town. Barren matriarchs who are hardly able to eke out a child or two. The runt of the litter as king of the nation. Even in creation, one of the grandest displays of his majestic purposes, God throws out a little at a time: day one, wait, day two, I’m good, day three, that’s enough for now, and so on. Why not fling everything into being all at once in a monumental great big bang?

He scripted a Church that would stymie the gates of hell… and who did he choose as its first adapters? A handful of rough-and-tumble blue collar types; the foolish, weak, and despised. His M.O. was so frighteningly scandalous he picked the Sanhedrin’s favorite hit man to reform and apostle the growing church toward spiritual maturity.

We know God can dazzle (Matt 17:2) but he specializes in the unnerving manner (to us) of plodding and waiting and delaying. He doesn’t do things the conventional way. He’s not in a hurry and he doesn’t do flashy all that often. We want him to call down fire but he wants us to pray for our enemies. Even when he stepped out of character to curse a fig tree, he walked away from it, leaving it intact… until the next day.

He’s liable to tell us that he has big family plans for us so we get busy preparing the nursery only to have it sit empty for a quarter of a century. My ways are higher than your ways, he reminds us. He’s liable to hear that we are sick unto death then wait four days to show up. By then it’s our funeral, not our sick bed.

Jesus shied away from being coronated too soon and, on other occasions, curiously charged his healed followers to keep it between them and their priest. Turns out, he was playing the long game.

I know how disappointment with God can creep in and lead to discouragement. I’ve been there more times than I care to admit. You might be there yourself. Yancey dedicated his book “For my brother, who is still disappointed.”

A sorely disillusioned Sarah laughed over the prospect of pregnancy in her well-past-due date, and when she did so, exposed a deep well of hurt inside her. Maybe at sixty-five, she sniffed, but not hardly at ninety. God recognized it at once and spoke a sure word into her void: “Is anything impossible for the Lord…?” (Gen 18:14)

Whatever you’re going through, however difficult it seems, just keep on trusting Jesus. Sometimes we’d like it better if God stopped playing the long game and wrapped things up all nice and tidy. Quick like. Allow me to share something with you that has anchored my soul in these recent days.

“As it is, we do not yet see everything subjected to Him. But we do see Jesus…” (Hebrews 2:8-9, CSB)

Read that again. Slowly. Let your soul bathe in those words.

Here’s the thing that mollifies me today. What does the writer of Hebrews emphasize time and again about what Jesus is doing right now? He’s sitting. He’s not pacing and fidgeting; he’s not wringing his hands worrying over how to turn the tide.

Jesus is sitting down.

On a throne.

Reigning like a boss.

Right now we’re in the disquieting realm of “yes, but not yet.” We just had no idea how long not yet was going to last. But right now Jesus is ruling and reigning and interceding. Imagine: the King of the Universe has our names on his heart day in and day out and is working behind the scenes causing chief cupbearers to suddenly remember, giving dreams to Pharaohs, putting you on a different platform, orchestrating famines in other places to bring hungry families to your doorstep, and reconciling and subjecting all things – and persons – to himself. He’s not just “sitting around,” mind you, he’s quite busy making all things new.

The present seems pretty messed up, if we’re being honest. But if we can manage to squint through the fog and gloom of the present “as it is,” and adjust our focus, we’ll see it all coming together — in Christ Jesus — just as God promised long ago.

Don’t lose hope, dear one, long game notwithstanding; I won’t either. See Jesus and, in the comforting words of Julian of Norwich, “All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well.”

Selah, beloved.