what God is waiting for

 

Today in the One Year Bible, we are supposed to read from Daniel 8. But I accidentally wrote on that passage LAST night, because when you do your blog at 4am, you sometimes forget which day you're supposed to be writing for. I looked at my computer and it said it was December 1, so I wrote for December 1! But I was supposed to be writing for November 30. So now I am.

Tonight I'm writing on Daniel 7:1-28. In this passage, Daniel sees some terrifying things. They were prophecies about what was going to happen. And God didn't stop sending us prophecies with Daniel. There have been many prophecies given to the church through the years, particularly at Fatima. But the important thing to realize about prophecies is that they don't always tell us EXACTLY what's going to happen. Now what do I mean by that?

Well, let's take Jonah for example. Jonah was given a message from God. He walked around Nineveh (eventually, after trying to run away from his responsibility) yelling, "Nineveh will be destroyed in forty days!" And that's all he said. Not "You better repent!" or "God will destroy this town unless you shape up!" No, he just said, "Nineveh will be destroyed in forty days." The people of Nineveh, including the king himself, heard this message and they DID repent. And because they repented, God did NOT destroy Nineveh forty days later. 

This made Jonah mad because now he looked stupid. He told everyone Nineveh would be destroyed and now God went and changed His mind. 

Any of this sound familiar? Today we see all kinds of evil going on in the world. Just the simple fact that there are more slaves today (in sex trafficking and other forms of slavery) than ever before in history tells you how messed up our world is. Hundreds of ministers from every kind of church, Catholic and Baptist, Methodist and Anglican, are being found out for sexual misconduct. People are leaving California and New York and Chicago in droves because of the horrible conditions in those cities these days. The world seems like it's falling apart and people are turning their backs on God.

So what is He waiting for? Why doesn't He just "come back" and end it all already? "Yet forty days and America will be destroyed", right?

But there is a very powerful verse that answers this question. In 2 Peter 3:9 we find the answer Jonah was looking for. We find the answer to why so many prophecies by saints throughout the ages seem not to have come about the way they thought they would. That verse goes like this: "God is not slow in keeping His promises, as some understand slowness. Instead He is patient with you, not wanting anyone to perish, but everyone to come to repentance."

Listen to those words. He is being patient. With YOU. And with everyone in the whole world. Because He doesn't want ANYONE to perish. He wants EVERYONE to come to repentance!

Is that your prayer? That everyone in the whole world will repent and come back to God? It should be. We should agree in prayer with what God wants, shouldn't we? And this verse tells us VERY CLEARLY that God wants everyone in the world to come back to Him, and not to be destroyed.

God, thanks for being patient. Please teach us to love the whole world like You do.