God teaches us to wait in times of trial
In the service, we will read a passage from the story of Joseph, the son of Jacob (Genesis 37:1-10), and two verses from the Psalms.
Psalm 105:19 (ESV): ‘Until what he had said came to pass, the word of the LORD tested him (Joseph).’
Psalm 27:13 (New King James): ‘I would have lost heart, unless I had believed that I would see the goodness of the LORD In the land of the living.’
- The challenge of waiting
Maybe you know this experience like me: sitting in the waiting room of a hospital for a long time. And finally, you ask the assistant if they might have forgotten you. You try to awaken, or to alarm the people in charge if the wait takes too long in our eyes. I must confess I am not good at waiting; it challenges my desire to stay in control. I am rather sure that you do better than I!
Waiting is even more difficult if it concerns a loss of strength that cannot be easily recovered. For example when you become so tired that you are on the verge of
burnout and our your and mind refuse do their work. Suddenly you have to let go of what you were so busy with. Your inner battery has run out. It takes a long time to be recharged.
Today, the lives of many, many people around the world are brought to a standstill by a war. Or by an ecological crisis causing a refugee crisis. Innumerable people are severely tested while they desperately wait for a better life. I remember very well the hopelessness of Syrian refugees in the basement of a flat in Lebanon when I visited them in the course of Syrian war. I still see their faces before me – the lack of hope of future touched me greatly. What could I do more than just being with them and listening to them?
- Waiting: God’s gymnasium
Can God use periods of waiting in our life to test us? Or to teach us? If He teaches us to welcome any waiting as an opportunity to realise our helplessness, and to learn humility (Dutch: ootmoed)? Humility, like meekness (Dutch: deemoed) are unpopular words in our language. God may use periods of waiting to let us realise that we aren’tas strong and independent as we tend to think! If we are forced to wait we are more likely to reflect on our limitations. Suddenly we are given time to think, to think about what is truly value in our life, about people who cared for us, about Him in whose hand our times are.
I am rather convinced (and much more after I became sick) that waiting is an important part of God’s gymnasium, the college on which He trains us in humility, in faith and in hope. I want to demonstrate this from the life of Joseph, the son of Jacob.
- Joseph on the school of humility
Few figures in the Bible had to wait so long as Joseph. If anyone could have felt his powerlessness in life’s waiting room, it was he! The book of Genesis devotes several chapters to the unimaginable school of humility he found himself in, after his brothers had sold him into slavery. As a 17 years old boy he came in a totally strange country and culture. He absolutely didn’t know what to expect, except that his life was cut off completely from everything what was dear and familiar to him. How did he endure?
A tip of the veil is lifted in Psalm 105, a poem that sings of the history of the patriarchs and of Israel in Egypt. Together with Psalms 106 and 107 Psalm 105 talks about God’s deads among the generations (toledoth). They also mention the unfaithfulness of these generations. Psalm 105 gives a special attention to the life of Joseph. That he was sold as a slave into Egypt, yes it was the act of his jealous brothers. But we have to see deeper. God’s hand was in it. In all what happened there somehow a heavenly stage director!
- Joseph in the oven of trial
And then the Psalm indicates something remarkable about one of the most difficult periods of Joseph’s life, the long period he was in an Egyptian prison. (Let’s not have any illusions about the inhumane prison regime then – and now – in the Arab world): ‘Until the time His word came to pass, the promise of the Lordpurified him.’
(I prefer the ESV more than the NIV ‘Till what he foretold came to pass, till the word of the Lord proved him true’.)
What do they mean? A promise was made to Joseph during his teenage years that God would use him as the saviour of his family (Genesis 37). Joseph had bold dreams about it, that raise the anger of his brothers and his father. But his father Jacob felt there is something behind (Gen 37: 11 – ‘he kept the matter in mind’). And we may be rather sure that he told his dearest son more about what he himself had heard from the God of Israel: promises of blessing to the ancestors and of salvation from slavery in the future.
God’s wordswent with Joseph to Egypt (although he had no written Bible or even fragments). Even into the darkest dungeon. God’s real presence must have lifted him up, comforted him, and given him courage during this long time of waiting. Did he pray – while facing the loss of any hope? ‘Lord, if You want to reveal something of what You promised in the past, Lord do it! If You still want to use me, in a way I don’t understand, Lord, do it! For Your glory!’
Prison was a profound test for him, and what was being tested, the faith in the words he seemed to have heard from God. The truth of what he dreamt as a young, proud boy. The fire of trial could have burnt it all. If you search for it, you may find many reasons to give up faith. A teenager who faced a difficult time, once said to me: ‘I prayed to God to prove to me that He is there to help me. I gave Him three weeks, but nothing happened. SoI decided that God is not real and Christian faith is a projection of our mind only.’ I am sure that there are better reasons for leaving God than the test of that young boy. Joseph however must have felt: if I give up everything from God what I heard in my father’s house, then it is all lost. So the fire of test worked the other way round, it purified the little faith and made it stronger. He added hope to faith. That is to say: in all what he experienced he kept expecting to see the grace of God in the land of the living.
(Stories from Russia in the time of communism: of Baptist pastors and orthodox priest in a prison, packed together with many prisoners who were real criminals who mocked them. Sometimes they saw ‘light from behind the curtain’ – Christ speaking to Him from heaven.
- Wood or gold in the oven of trial?
It brings us to the question that church father Augustine put to his church: ‘What do you want to be? Do you want to be wood, or straw? Then everything will be burnt in the hour of testing. But if you want to be gold, then the fire will purify and make the gold more precious.’ And the church knew already from him: we are wood and straw if we live for ourselves, independent from God. And we are gold when we submit ourselves to God in love and obedience.
After their father’s death, the pieces of the jig saw puzzle found its place finally. Joseph explained it to his malicious brothers this way: ‘You, indeed, intended evil against me, but God meant it for good, to bring about what is now happening, to keep alive a great nation.’
Sometimes we see pieces of a puzzle in our life, in our study, in family-relationships, and we don’t understand them. We struggle with them. We don’t know where they fit. We should be glad to throw them away, but it is not possible.
But God knows how to use these black pieces that make us wait. He is like a painter that has every colour on his palette. Also black! He is able to use the black (the ugly, the evil, even sin) to make a painting for His glory. He is the only one who is able to do this!
- If I hadn’t believed…(Ps. 27)
The poet of Psalm 27 struggled with these questions. His conclusion was ‘I would have lost heart, unless I had believed that I would see the goodness of the LORD in the land of the living.’ (Ps. 27: 13 New King James). And then he adds: ‘Wait for the Lord; be strong and take heart and wait for the Lord.’ Then ‘waiting’ as a boring and painful experience has been transformed into ‘watching’. ‘Poet, what do you see?’ ‘I see the Lord, my light, my salvation, my stronghold. That’s the refrain. As if he wants to say: in all that I face, in all painful waiting, in all loss I may know something completely different. That I am not my own, but of Him who is my light and my salvation.
- Wounded knowledge – the school of the cross
As many of you know in recent years I had to face a serious illness.
Through illness and loss, through physical and psychological suffering, we gain wounded
knowledge. I myself faced not only my powerlessness, my wounded self, my shame that I was not productive, but God helped me to pay more attention to my soul, to be attentive to the little wonders around me, to be thankful for every little gift. Somebody said: ‘You are called not to add days to your life, but life to our days.’ I will never forget this.
God’s school is not easy, when we experience our helplessness. But His goal is to bring us back to what we easily loose: the joy in Him and the love for people whoever they are.
John Calvin, the sixteenth-century reformer who worked in Geneva, calls suffering the school of the cross. God guides us through adversity to the path of meditatio vitae eternae, the contemplation of eternal life. In his most important book, the Institutes (Education in the Christian Faith), Calvin says that all the good things we enjoy, such as food and drink, friendship, and a safe home, are a gift from God. But times of waiting due to adversity, sorrow, and pain are not beyond His control. Through them, He helps us realize
how much we need Him and our fellow human beings. By ‘wounded knowledge’ God teaches us to loose what we cannot keep on earth. In order to gain what we cannot loose!
- The comfort of Isaiyah
Dear brothers and sisters, God gave me the grace and the strength to complete a book recently and last week it was published.It is about loving, suffering and living (in Dutch it sounds better). Why I mention this, is because during the process of writing I was deeply touched by the book of Isaiyah and the prophetic visions that he received. Isaiyah lived in a traumatic time in the seventh century B.C. But the eternal God showed him that Someone, a Servant of God, an anointed King, would cometo be with us. He would come in the shape of a young child and his name would be Immanuel (God-with-us). A later insight that God gave the prophet and the students of his prophetic school was that this Servant-King would be deeply connected to this suffering world. So much so that His body bore the marks of wounds. His face was scarred. Because of that He was unsightly. He was the One that bore our loneliness and took our suffering upon Himself. He was led like a lamb to the slaughter, because the Lord laid on him the iniquity of us all. ‘By the knowledge of Him My righteous servant will justify many, and He will bear their iniquities’, was the word of God through the mouth of the prophet (Is. 53:11).
- Waiting – watching with attention, yearning and hope
God teaches us to wait, but waiting isn’t the boredom of standing in line at the supermarket or the long wait in the waiting room that I told you at the beginning of this sermon. It’s watching, it requires attention, yearning, and hope (Tish Warren). It’s the loved one, with a bouquet of flowers in her hand, searching for that one face on the naval vessel returning from a mission. It is the pregnant mother, alert for the first signs of her labour. It is the friend pacing back and forth before the room, where his friend undergoes a risky operation.
A.Waiting – keeping the little flame of faith alive
My wife and I once visited the birth village of a good Latin American friend. We slept in a small hut in the pitch darkness of the forest in Suriname, surrounded by strange nighttime sounds. An oil lamp had to be kept burning to keep the vermin at distance. Watching is like that lamp, the small circle of light around our hut in the middle of the jungle.
Focused on our lives: how easily can fear creep into that small circle of light and make the flame of faith flicker? Because of the losses you experienced before. Fear of the unknown, of the darkness of the future: ‘Not one more thing, Lord, do not take that from me!’
B. Waiting – for what Christ has promised
The Lord Jesus teaches us to wait with bated breath for the things He has promised. And what He promises is deeply grounded in what He has done. That is the core of the Gospel. That He has come into the deepest darkness of sin and evil. He teaches us that our deepest hope is focused on what He has done and what He will do. He is able to make this old, gloomy world new!
C. Waiting – we are not alone
Brothers and sisters in waiting we are not alone! We receive help— from brothers and sisters who let us know: we don’t forget you. That is the beauty of the church, the wounded community around the Wounded Healer, Jesus Christ. We receive help from the prayers, the Scripture reading and the sacraments. All this exercises our eyes to perceive the light in the midst of chaos and despair. We get much more help compared to Joseph in Egypt!
D. Waiting – full of hope both for the future and for today
Waiting is closely connected to hope. Hope doesn’t assume that God will prevent all bad things, but it assumes that there will be redemption, beauty, and goodness, no matter what happens in the future. Don’t you think that Joseph believed that?
This hope, this ‘waiting in watchfulness’ helps us not think about the future glory only. It helps us to look at our work, families, nations, and all creation with eyes of grace. Despite all what is ugly and threatening around, it allows us to see uninterrupted beauty, grace, gift after gift every day of our lives. Healthy babies are born every day. Marriages are restored after the greatest challenges. Most of us wake up every day with bodies that function well. We can do good work, make tea, walk, breathe the spring air… People recover from illness. Nature regenerates after anti-pollution measures. These things happen, and they happen because of grace… Learning to receive good things from God is difficult, especially when you’ve experienced pain, when you’re worried about new loss. Through the practice of hope, we learn the risk to keep joy.
And people around notice the radiation of hope and they begin to ask us what the secret is. And we are more than glad to tell them about Him who is the source of all hope. Glory to Him, Jesus, who together with the Father and the Holy Spirit is One, eternal God, should be adored now and forever. Amen
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