By Chalcedony Williams
All right then, the Lord himself will give you the sign. Look! The virgin will conceive a child! She will give birth to a son and will call him Immanuel (which means ‘God is with us’).
Isaiah 7:14 NLT
All of us, like sheep, have strayed away. We have left God’s paths to follow our own. Yet the Lord laid on him the sins of us all. He was oppressed and treated harshly, yet he never said a word. He was led like a lamb to the slaughter. And as a sheep is silent before the shearers, he did not open his mouth.
Isaiah 53:6-7 NLT
“For the time is coming,” says the Lord, “when I will raise up a righteous descendant from King David’s line. He will be a King who rules with wisdom. He will do what is just and right throughout the land. And this will be his name: ‘The Lord Is Our Righteousness.’ In that day Judah will be saved, and Israel will live in safety.
Jeremiah 23:5-6 NLT
Have you ever longed for something so deeply that the longer you wait, the more agonising it gets and the more doubtful you feel?
There is a Proverb that says, ‘hope deferred makes the heart sick’, and many of us will have seen that in ourselves and those near to us. The longer you hope, the more your hope has an opportunity to be displaced by doubt or bitterness. For people who believe in God, that is often aimed at Him – doubting His goodness, wondering whether He sees or cares, perhaps even wondering whether He is even there.
That heartsickness can have another strange effect in that when you finally receive the thing you long for, sometimes you find it is not what you wanted after all, or it fails to live up to the expectations. That is certainly true of the things of this earth that are temporary and fickle.
When God promises something, He will most certainly fulfil His promise. God does not lie, nor does He change His mind. The length of time it takes for God’s promises to be fulfilled holds no bearing on whether they are true or not, and despite how frustrating trusting God can feel, His timing is impeccable. When God spoke His promises through His prophets to a rebellious and adulterous Israel, were they looking for His help? It is possible they were not. Were they even listening? Possibly not. It is often said that Israel despised the prophets and prophecies of God. But to those who were listening, those who were truly repentant and longing for reunion with God, the promise of a righteous Saviour King from the line of David was filled with hope and anticipation.
God is kind enough to let His people in on His plans and kind enough to give us promises to hold on to amid darkness and uncertainty. God could have left Israel stumbling and wandering around; He could have turned His back on them. Instead, He came close enough to speak to His people, to speak words of comfort, to give them the certainty of a future and the promise of an expected end, even though they deserved the opposite. The King was coming, and He was going to arrive in a specific way at a specific time with a specific task.
It is often said that the prophecies of Christ are like a postal address, unique details that help to pinpoint His exact identity. The prophecies spoke of a King like none other, but it took hundreds of years for Him to arrive. From the moment of His conception, Jesus Christ began to fulfil the prophecies – born of a virgin into the family of King David. But those 700-odd years really took their toll on Israel, and they did not recognise Him when He arrived. Most eventually despised and rejected Him.
Deferred hope certainly infected the hearts of God’s people, but for us in the 21st Century, living on the other side of all the prophecies Jesus fulfilled, we can be encouraged and filled with renewed hope. Our God is real and good, and He cares. He will do everything He said. The invitation for us today is to put our trust in Him and to hold onto hope. The King has come, and no matter what happens in this life, the promise remains that He will, one day, come again.
Ask: Why was it difficult for Israel to recognise Jesus when He arrived?
Seek: Do you feel any doubt or bitterness about something you were once hopeful for?
Knock: Bring your hopes back to God. Ask Him to give you the grace to trust Him and to remind you of your certain hope in King Jesus.
