How many times have you prayed for something and it seems God takes forever to answer? The truth is he does not operate in our timeframe. God is outside of time. That is, time is something that passes for us while God exists in his eternal present. His name is “I Am” not “I Was” or “I Will Be”. This means God’s sense of time is not our sense of time. Peter gets at this idea when he writes that a day with the Lord is as a thousand years. He doesn’t mean simply that for God time passes more slowly for he adds that a thousand years is to the Lord as a day. God’s perception of time is different.
From our perspective, God seems slow. We ask for rescue and God, well, it seems as though he delays. We pray for loved ones and years may go by without any of the changes we’ve prayed for. We lose sight of the fact that from God’s perspective we prayed just moments before. It seems—notice the necessary language of perception—it seems as though God is delaying, that he’s taking his own sweet time. God exists in an eternal present so from his perspective he’s doing everything right now.
In that 2 Peter 3 passage Peter declares God is not slow to fulfill his promise. The context there is the day of the Lord. Peter assures his readers the day will come and without delay, but it will come in God’s time, not ours. This is because God doesn’t perceive time as we do—a day is as a thousand years and a thousand years as a day. The day of the Lord will come and it will come suddenly, even if not immediately.
When we pray and we seek the Lord and we pursue him and wisdom from him and when we cry out to him for deliverance, we do so from our own sense of time. Since the Lord is the same yesterday, today, and forever, and since he was trustworthy yesterday, he is trustworthy still today. When we pray we do so in faith, trusting him to be faithful to us. As Peter tells us, God is not slow to keep his promises. Abraham learned this after waiting just 25 years for his wife Sarah to have a son. Yes, those years seemed long, yet God was faithful to his promise. While Abraham would have preferred to have a son 25 years earlier, he recognized God’s faithfulness.
God is not slow. Except when he is. After the debacle with the golden calf at Mount Sinai, God shows great mercy to Israel and promises to remain with them. In response to this Moses asks God to show him his glory. Moses climbed up Mount Sinai and the Lord descended in a cloud to show him his glory. This is when Moses is hidden in the cleft of the rock. Remember he asked to see God’s glory but what he “sees” is God speak to him! It is what God says that is his glory:
The LORD descended in the cloud and stood with him there, and proclaimed the name of the LORD. The LORD passed before him and proclaimed, “YHWH, YHWH, a God merciful and gracious, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness, keeping steadfast love for thousands, forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin, but who will by no means clear the guilty, visiting the iniquity of the fathers on the children and the children’s children, to the third and the fourth generation.” And Moses quickly bowed his head toward the earth and worshiped.
Exodus 34:5-8 ESV
Moses “sees” God’s glory and his glory is this: he is merciful and gracious, slow to anger, abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness, and is also just. God is, in fact, slow, but the way in which he is slow is in his anger! This is his glory! We see this on display in the exodus from Egypt. In Exodus 4 Moses is in Midian with his wife and family, including his father-in-law Jethro.
The Lord had appeared to Moses and called him to return to Egypt to rescue his people from slavery. Moses is concerned the people won’t believe that he is God’s chosen servant, their deliverer, so God gives him signs to prove to them God has called him: when he casts his staff down it becomes a snake until he picks it up again and when he sticks his hand inside his cloak it will turn white until he does it again and when he pours water from the Nile onto dry ground it will turn to blood. Moses is also to use these signs before Pharaoh, to prove to Pharaoh that the Lord God is speaking through Moses, but he warns Moses that Pharaoh won’t listen.
And the LORD said to Moses, “When you go back to Egypt, see that you do before Pharaoh all the miracles that I have put in your power. But I will harden his heart, so that he will not let the people go. Then you shall say to Pharaoh, ‘Thus says the LORD, Israel is my firstborn son, and I say to you, “Let my son go that he may serve me.” If you refuse to let him go, behold, I will kill your firstborn son.’”
Exodus 4:21-23 ESV
The plague that caused Pharaoh to relent and allow Israel to go free was the death of the firstborn across all Egypt, from Pharaoh’s firstborn son to his lowliest servant’s firstborn son to the firstborn of cattle and sheep and goats and such. The Lord tells Moses this is his nuclear option, his scorched earth policy. Pharaoh is going to resist and God is going to do this great and terrible thing.
You might recognize something is missing here. God tells Moses to return to Egypt and tell Pharaoh to let God’s people go free. Pharaoh will refuse and God will strike down all the firstborn in Egypt, except those, of course, who are covered by the blood of the Passover lambs. In time God does this very thing and Israel exits from Egypt and marches to Mount Sinai where God will make a covenant with them. What’s missing? Nine entire plagues are missing!
God warns Moses that the ultimate curse he will bring on Egypt is the death of Egypt’s firstborn, yet God does not begin with this plague! Why? What is his glory revealed to Moses? What does God say is his glory in Exodus 34? He is merciful and gracious and is slow to anger. In a real sense God was already angry that his people were suffering. From their perspective God had been quite slow to rescue them. From his perspective everything was coming together according to his plans and purposes.
By now we’re all familiar with John Piper’s Rule: God is always doing 10,000 things in your life and you may be aware of three of them. God is at work in Egypt at this time, doing 10,000 things, and Israel might be aware that God is rescuing them from Egypt. What they’re not yet aware of is among those 10,000 things God is doing is he is preparing to rescue various Egyptians and men and women from various people groups who are in Egypt, whether also as slaves or as merchants and laborers living there.
A mixed multitude also went up with them, and very much livestock, both flocks and herds.
Exodus 12:38 ESV
Yes, there will be judgment on Pharaoh’s house and on most of the houses in Egypt. Only those who obeyed the Lord and offered a Passover lamb would be spared from the final plague. How would this mixed multitude who joined Israel in leaving Egypt, who became incorporated into the people of God at Mount Sinai, how would they know to believe and trust the God of Israel? The first nine plagues! God is, indeed, slow to anger! He is merciful and gracious! Everyone in Egypt was free to worship the God of Israel and join the descendants of Abraham as his covenant people. God sent nine plagues before the final judgment of the tenth plague. They had sufficient time and warning to repent and believe in the one true God. God is slow!
God’s timing is perfect. He is infinitely wise, infinitely powerful, infinitely just, infinitely good. This means he cannot make an error in timing. Our problem is we are often hasty in our desires. We ask the Lord for things—even good things!—but we want them now. We cannot see the 9,997 things God is doing, things that account for why he’s taking so long in answering our prayers. Since he’s weaving this extraordinary tapestry of which we can only see a few threads, we cannot know the fullness of it and so, from our perspective, he seems very slow.
What would have happened if God went straight to the tenth plague without revealing himself to all in Egypt through the first nine plagues? How many men and women would not have been part of the mixed multitude who joined Israel in worshiping YHWH God of Israel? What would have appeared to Israelites as God’s slow response (“Let’s get on with it, eh? We’re still suffering here!”), was God actively working in the lives of countless men and women to bring them to faith in him. In other words the delay wasn’t a delay at all, but God working at his steady pace to accomplish all he said he would accomplish!
It’s easy for us to think of God as puttering around his kitchen, oblivious to the needs around him—or at least the urgency of those needs—and then occasionally those needs get his attention and he finally deals with them. This is because our perspective tends to be focused entirely on us, on our wants and our needs. When we pray for our children, for example, we wonder why he’s taking so long or we begin to think he’s not hearing us. From our perspective it may seem as if he’s not moving at all. The truth is he’s often like a duck. When you see a duck swimming in the water the duck seems utterly inactive, calm, serene. The only indication the duck is swimming is you can see the duck is not in the same spot it was a moment ago. The reality is the duck’s feet are paddling furiously. To say this another way, what you see of the duck on the surface is just three of the things the duck is doing while its webbed feet under the surface are the other 9,997 things the duck is doing.
God has orchestrated his plan for you, for your life, for your childrens’ lives, for the life of the church, the life of those in the world, and his orchestration is perfect. He’s not slow. He may seem slow to us, but when we finally see the fullness of his work in the world we will wonder how he was able to do it all. Since we know that is the future, let’s trust him in the present.