You Cannot Judge God by your Calendar

Keller:

Here is another thing we learn from the genealogy: It reminds us that the promise of a Messiah took generations to come to be fulfilled. Jesus was “the son of Abraham.” God said to Abraham that all the peoples of the earth would be blessed through his descendants (Genesis 12:3). Actually, it was even before that, in Genesis 3:15, that God himself prophesied that one would come who would “crush [the] head” of Satan and defeat evil.

But it was centuries, millennia, before the angel came to Mary and told her about the child she was to bear, and she sang, “He has … remember[ed] to be merciful to Abraham … just as he promised our ancestors” (Luke 1:54–55). The promise was a long time in coming! In fact, in the four hundred years before Christ was born no prophets were sent to the people, let alone a messiah. It looked like God had forgotten them. No one was coming, it seemed. But then he came.

 You cannot judge God by your calendar. God may appear to be slow, but he never forgets his promises. He may seem to be working very slowly or even to be forgetting his promises, but when his promises come true (and they will come true), they always burst the banks of what you imagined.

This is one of the main themes of the nativity story, and indeed the Bible. Look at the story of Joseph in the Old Testament. For years it seemed like God was ignoring Joseph’s prayers, letting him experience one disaster after another. But in the end it became clear that every one of those things had to happen in order for all to be saved. Joseph was even able to say to his brothers, who had sold him into slavery, “You intended to harm me, but God intended it for good” (Genesis 50:20). Look at Jesus, being called to heal a fatally ill girl but stopping to deal with someone else instead and allowing Jairus’s daughter to die. His timing seemed completely wrong—until it became clear that it wasn’t (Mark 5:21–43).

God’s grace virtually never operates on our time frame, on a schedule we consider reasonable. He does not follow our agendas or schedules. When Jesus spoke to the despairing father Jairus, whose daughter had just died, he said, “Believe” (Mark 5:36). He was saying, “If you want to impose your time frame on me, you will never feel loved by me, and it will be your fault, because I do love you. I will fulfill my promises.”

 God seems to forget his promises, but he comes through in ways we can’t imagine before it happens. Think of the coming of the promised Messiah. This divine King was born not in a castle but in a feed trough, a manger. He confounded all expectations, but it was only by coming in weakness and dying on the cross that he could save us. God kept his promise.