Bible Commentaries

THE PATIENT GOD

‘God is a righteous Judge, strong, and patient: and God is provoked every day.’

Psalms 7:12 (Prayer Book Version)

Consider how patience comes, and especially how it arises from a study of the Scriptures, and what the nature of it is.

I. First, patience is a distinctly human quality, for it is a state of waiting, expecting, looking out, and thus implies periods and distinctions of time.—Patience has no place in eternity. As man’s love, and pity, and justice, and truth, and holiness, and wisdom are mere reflections of the corresponding attributes in God, so patience also can only find its perfect archetype in Him. How can we reconcile the facts that God is almighty and yet declines to act; that He is perfectly just, yet leaves His justice still unsatisfied? By what other attribute can we describe Him Who seems to contradict Himself but by the attribute of patience? This thought reconciles the difficulty.

II. Notice illustrations of God’s patience given in Holy Scripture.—(1) Conceive the love of the Almighty manifesting itself in creation. ‘God saw everything that He had made, and, behold, it was very good.’ Then came the disappointment and overthrow of this plan of infinite benevolence, the ordainment of new plans for the punishment of sin, with mercy for the mitigation of pain, for the ultimate recovery of man’s first estate. What a state of waiting, expecting, looking out, is here! (2) Again, imagine the patience which waited from the hour of the first promise of the Saviour, made before the gates of Paradise were shut, until those ‘last days’ when the Eternal Father ‘spoke unto us by His Son.’ (3) Revelation gives us one more signal instance of the patience of the Eternal God: His ‘suffering the manners’ of the Christian world for these eighteen hundred years, during which Christ has waited for the gathering in of His elect.

III. It is by looking into the face of this patience of God that we can become like-minded with Him.—Not only will it make us hate our sins and love Him more, but we shall have grace to be patient also. But indifference is not patience. The patient soul is that which feels acutely, but waits on, expecting the perfect end. The suspense before enjoyment is patience. The bride waits patiently for the bridegroom’s voice, because she has faith and love; she is sure that he is coming. So does the soul look out in patience for that which faith and love anticipate in Christ.

Archdeacon Furse.

Illustrations

(1) ‘Let us seek for the blameless life; let us exercise our conscience daily, that it may be void of offence towards God and man; let our lives be so absolutely blameless and harmless that we may be the sons of God without rebuke, except in so far as it concerns the law of our God; let us live so that if the minutest and most secret of our actions was investigated, we could face the eye of the fiercest day.’

(2) ‘Verses 13–18 most probably refer to the enemy and his assaults. “Persecutors” should be translated “fiery arrows.”’