Waiting on God’s Timing: Is God slow, or am I impatient?
Waiting on God’s timing is a skill we all need to practice to grow our faith. It begs the question: when waiting on God’s timing, is God slow, or am I impatient?
My husband and I were married in 2006, and we moved to a new town a few hours away from both of our parents so that I could go to college. Being in our own place and just starting out on our own, we needed to live simply and with fewer bells and whistles than we may have been used to.
One way that we’ve always saved money through our marriage is never having cable. Back in 2006, this was a bigger deal than it is today. It meant that we had about five channels that we were able to pick up with bunny ears on top of our TV. To add variety to our viewing options, we splurged and got a Netflix account.
For those who may not remember, Netflix started as a DVD mailing service. You would create a list (queue) of movies and TV shows you wanted to watch, and Netflix would mail you the DVDs in order of your queue. Three days later, bing bang boom, you were in business and could watch that movie or TV show. And once you mailed that DVD back, they would send you the next item in your queue.
This was pretty revolutionary at the time. This system was much more cost-effective than renting from Blockbuster, and you didn’t have to take a trip to pick out your DVD. It came to you in the mail!
Fast forward to today. There are countless streaming services available, and you can pretty much instantly watch whatever you feel like. Can you imagine now having to wait three days to watch a movie or TV show?
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Our lives now are so instant, we can sometimes struggle to wait on things, let alone an answer from God. But according to Exodus, waiting on God’s timing is not a new struggle for us humans.
Exodus 32:19-24:
19When Moses approached the camp and saw the calf and the dancing, his anger burned and he threw the tablets out of his hands, breaking them to pieces at the foot of the mountain. 20And he took the calf the people had made and burned it in the fire; then he ground it to powder, scattered it on the water and made the Israelites drink it.
21He said to Aaron, “What did these people do to you, that you led them into such great sin?”
22“Do not be angry, my lord,” Aaron answered. “You know how prone these people are to evil. 23They said to me, ‘Make us gods who will go before us. As for this fellow Moses who brought us up out of Egypt, we don’t know what has happened to him.’ 24So I told them, ‘Whoever has any gold jewelry, take it off.’ Then they gave me the gold, and I threw it into the fire, and out came this calf!”
Waiting on God’s Timing
Upon initial read, it’s easy to become indignant and confused by the Israelites’ reaction to Moses’ absence. The Israelites have just been led out of slavery in Egypt. Before which they witnessed many plagues placed on the nation that they were sheltered and protected from (Exodus 7-12). Then they are freed and allowed to leave, only to be pursued by Egyptian soldiers and blocked by the Red Sea. But then Moses parts the sea by holding up his staff, and they can cross on dry land.
Pharaoh’s soldiers perish in the water, and the people are safe to continue to the promised land (Exodus 14:19-28). From there, God feeds them daily with manna, bread from the sky (Exodus 16:4). These are just a few miracles that these people witnessed, so surely their faith is unfailing and strong.
How could they doubt that the Lord was the true God, taking care of them on this journey?
So when Moses is called to climb Mount Sinai to meet with the Lord, the people witness the descending cloud and hear the rumblings of the mountain.
Unfortunately, with Moses gone, the people became restless and started to waver and question and doubt all that they had witnessed and experienced. Moses was only gone for forty days and nights! (Exodus 24:18)
Remember what God has already done
How could people who had witnessed and experienced so many miracles question God and disobey His commands by building a golden idol to worship instead of God?
But don’t I do the same thing?
How many miracles have I witnessed in my own life? How many situations that I thought were impossible became possible after I gave it to God? How many of my prayers, big and small, have been answered over the years?
And yet, when I’m in a time of waiting on a seemingly quiet God, I have questioned, and I have doubted who God is and what He’s doing in my life.
When I don’t feel that His response is quick enough, I erroneously think that God has abandoned me, or that He doesn’t care about this current situation. So I start to look for my own solutions to problems. I turn to the idols in my life. How can money solve this problem? What can I do, or who can I talk to in order to change my situation?
Waiting on God’s timing can be difficult. And in today’s world, with instant access to any show we want to watch, same-day delivery, and the answers to most of our daily questions just a quick search away, we’re quickly losing our patience and our ability to wait.
If God isn’t as quick as my ability to type my question into my phone, then He must be absent from the equation. At least the Israelites waited 40 days before constructing their calf. Sometimes I can’t even wait 40 minutes for an answer from God!
Take Personal Responsibility
One of the things that I personally find funny about this passage is Aaron’s response to Moses: “Then they gave me the gold, and I threw it into the fire, and out came this calf!”
Aaron presents the situation as if the calf just appeared out of nowhere. As if he didn’t personally take all of the gold, melt it down in the fire, and construct a calf from it.
But if I’m being honest with myself, I’m not any different than Aaron.
Every time I’m impatient on God’s answer and take things into my own hands, I’m building my own golden calf. This isn’t to say that it’s wrong to research things and gain wisdom from multiple sources. Being well-read and knowledgeable on a subject is a good thing! But if I’m finding solutions for my problem and implementing strategies without guidance from the Holy Spirit, then I am telling God that I don’t trust His plans for me and that I prefer to act out of my own will rather than His.
When I do this, I need to take personal responsibility for the outcomes. God can and will use these situations to teach me a lesson, but to grow spiritually, I need to take responsibility for my actions, repent, and turn back to God.
Dear God, I am so grateful that you are always here for me, even in the waiting when I can’t hear you right away.
I pray that you’ll forgive me when I forget the answers to prayers you’ve already provided, and I pray that I will remember to put you first in my life.
To think of you more and myself less. In Jesus’ name, amen.
Thousands of years separate us from Moses’ time, but at the core, we are all human and we face the same internal struggles, regardless of the millennia.
So when I’m waiting on God’s timing, instead of wondering how the Israelites could have turned to themselves for answers instead of toward God, I can recognize how I do the same thing in my own life, and I can ask God to forgive me and help me to remember to always look to Him first and patiently wait for His answer.
Blessings Friend.
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