Wait upon the Lord

Russian icon of Abraham
mid-1600s

The Lord appears to Abram when he is 99 years old and says, "I will make my covenant between me and you and will multiply you exceedingly" (Gen 17:1-2). Those following along in Genesis know that God has been talking to Abram for a long time already. About 24 years previously, the Lord first called him and told him that he would make of him a great nation and in him bless all the families of the Earth (Gen 12:1-4).

As Christians, we know who it is in Abram who blesses all the families of the Earth – it is uniquely Jesus Christ, the son of Abraham, who blesses and offers life and salvation to all people (cf. Gal 3:16). "In Christ Jesus, the blessing of Abraham comes upon the Gentiles, that we might receive the promise of the Spirit through faith" (Gal 3:14). So in hearing the story of Abram, we ought to feel as keenly as he does the urgency of his having children. Because it is through the children of Abraham that God becomes Man – that the Word becomes flesh and dwells among us.

But Abram was already 75 years old and childless when the Lord first called him. Even in those days, most people were having children quite a bit younger than this. True, Abram's father Terah had had him when he was 70, but for seven generations back all the other ancestors of Abram had begun having children in their twenties or thirties – rather like today (Gen 11:12-26). And, more to the point, Abram's wife Sarai would have been about 66 years old. So this business of having a child was already at this point a bit out of reach. Nonetheless, Abram believed the Lord and obeyed his commands.

Still, he had no child. He built an altar to the Lord and called upon the name of the Lord and the Lord was with him through many adventures. He got rich in Egypt, thanks to his beautiful wife Sarai. He rescued his nephew Lot from captivity. He met Melchizedek. All the while, he worshipped the Lord and the Lord looked after him and spoke to him. But still, he had no child.

Eventually, Abram complains to the Lord about his childlessness (Gen 15:2). And the Lord repeats and intensifies his promise saying, "Look toward heaven and number the stars if you are able... So shall your descendants be." And again Abram believes the Lord. But still, he has no child.

Therefore Sarai determines, I suppose, that it's time they take matters into their own hands – and she gives her maid Hagar to Abram. By this means Abraham finally has a child – Ishmael – but still, this polygamous solution, which was common in the ancient Near East, was not what the Lord had in mind. Still, Abram does not have the promised child. It is not through Ishmael that Jesus Christ is born. It is not through Ishmael that the Word becomes flesh and dwells among us. It not through Ishmael that God becomes Man.

After all this, the Lord God Almighty again appears to Abram and again promises to multiply him exceedingly – now changing his name to Abraham, meaning father of a multitude, rather than Abram, which means exalted father. All the while, Abram has believed, despite having no child until he was 86 – and that by his wife's maid rather than by his wife.

How faithless and impatient we are! Behold the faithfulness and patience of Abraham. He believed the Lord and the Lord reckoned it to him as righteousness (15:6). Can we be faithful when things don't go our way?

Oftentimes, things don't go our way in life. Maybe we get dumped just when we think our relationship is going so well. Maybe someone we thought was our friend betrays us and talks about us behind our back. Maybe we think we deserve a promotion at work and instead we get fired. Maybe we want a child and haven't been able to have a child. Abram wanted a child – was even promised a child by the Lord – and yet a child, it seemed, was not forthcoming from his wife – at least not according to the apparent laws of nature. Yet, he continued in relationship with the Lord and waited upon the Lord and did not despair. He complained to the Lord, yes, but he did not despair.

I recommend complaining to the Lord. It's important to be honest with God. It's not like he doesn't know how we feel. Trying to hide it from him or cut him off or deceive him isn’t going to work. Abram's complaint to the Lord about his childlessness resulted in the Lord cutting his covenant with him (15:2-3,10,17-18). So go ahead and complain to the Lord but do not despair or turn away from him just because he does not do your will. May his will be done and not our will.

The Lord God does not obey our will but he always does what is good for us. He is not the author of any evil that we endure. Many times, he opposes our will for our good. This does not make him our enemy. Of course, many of us don’t know what an enemy is. We think anyone opposed to our will is our enemy. This couldn’t be further from the truth. The Lord, like a true friend, often opposes our will for our own good. It takes faith, like the faith of Abraham, to see this.

Even Abraham’s faith may waiver a bit when it becomes clear that his will of fulfilling the Lord’s promise through Ishmael is not the Lord’s will and that the Lord intends, rather, to fulfill his promise through Sarah, who is already 90 years old. Abraham falls on his face and laughs when he hears this (Gen 17:17). ROFL.

Yet the will of the Lord is good and surpasses all expectations. And through Sarah is born Isaac, named for the laughter of his father and mother (17:19; 18:12), and through Isaac, one day, comes Jesus Christ into the world and unites our humanity to his divinity, saving us and overcoming every contradiction. He accomplishes not our will, but our good – our greatest, ultimate, and lasting good. Let us wait upon the Lord with expectant hope, with faithfulness, and patience and without despair.

Pour out your complaints before the cross.

painting by William Blake

"As Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of Man be lifted up, that whoever believes in him may have eternal life" (John 3: 14).

What a strange thing to say! – if we don't have context. If we are not deeply grounded in the Old Testament, much of the New Testament loses its meaning for us. It becomes decontextualized – because the context of the New Testament is the Old Testament

Perhaps many of us already know of the serpent here referred to by Jesus – the one that Moses lifts up in the wilderness – and that's good. But perhaps many of us don't know what he's talking about – and then this sounds very strange. What does lifting up a serpent have to do with life? And how can Jesus be lifted up like a serpent?

How can we identify Jesus our Lord with a serpent? The serpent reminds us more of the devil, doesn't it? Even those of us less familiar with the Old Testament probably know the beginning of Genesis better than we do the middle of Numbers. Who wants to read a book called Numbers? Could we have given this a duller name? So we know Genesis better and we know the snake in Genesis better. Anyway, that snake and this snake are not unrelated, in my opinion, so hold on to that thought.

But I promise the Book of Numbers is not all lists of numbers - though that's in there, too. It also has some pretty good stories. Here's one:

"The people spoke against God and against Moses, 'Why have you brought us up out of Egypt to die in the wilderness? For there is no bread and no water and we loathe this worthless bread" (Num 21:5)

By the way, I just have to interject here, I just love the way they say there is no bread and then they say the bread is worthless. Really, there is bread – but they don't like it - and so they say at first there is no bread. Maybe they felt like that was true but they knew it wasn't really true and so then they adjusted their complaint a little bit. Because remember the Lord had given them manna to eat, so they couldn't honestly say there was no bread.

Manna was not a gourmet dish – “[it] was like coriander seed, it looked like gum resin… and it tasted like cakes baked with oil" (Num 11:7-8). Sounds like it was not bad but pretty plain and something that maybe people would get sick of after decades of eating little else. It was nothing as good as the fleshpots of Egypt, for example. Yet it is better to eat bread in freedom with the Lord than pots of meat while in slavery to our passions.

But we often forget this and long to again indulge our passions even at the price of enslaving ourselves to them – all for the brief taste of something that seems good to us in the moment. And while we are deprived of some seemingly good thing, we complain about the truly good things we do have and we even deny that we have them. Well-fed with food we've lost our taste for, we complain that we have no food.

This is the way we complain. It's not that we don't have something to complain about legitimately – maybe we do – but when we complain it's like we want to make it seem even worse than it is, don't we? And so we exaggerate the difficulty of our situation. It's bad, but we say it's worse than it really is. When something's difficult, we say it's impossible. When something hurts, we say it's killing us. When we don't like the food, we say there's nothing to eat. This doesn't really help, by the way. It's okay to complain to the Lord. The Psalms are full of complaint. Be honest with God and with your neighbor and your family and your friends about what you suffer. But be honest. Be truthful. And never lose sight of the good that is also there. Never be ungrateful for the good you've been given while you honestly complain about the bad. When we begin with gratitude for the good I promise our honest complaint about the bad will be more readily heard and answered.

Anyway, the people were complaining, "'There is no food and we loathe this worthless food.' And so then the Lord sent fiery serpents among the people, and they bit the people so that many sons of Israel died. And the people came to Moses, and said, 'We have sinned, for we have spoken against the Lord and against you; pray to the Lord, that he take away the serpents from us.' So Moses prayed for the people. And the Lord said to Moses, 'Make a fiery serpent, and set it up as a sign; and everyone who is bitten, when he sees it, shall live.' So Moses made a bronze serpent, and set it up as a sign: And if a serpent bit any man, he would look at the bronze serpent and live" (Num 21:5-9).

So, you see, the Lord hears this second complaint of the people. It's different than the first because instead of beginning with a distortion of the truth, it begins with honesty and humility. The people say in repentance, "We have sinned. We have spoken against the Lord and against Moses." This is the truth. They're beginning with the truth this time - instead of with the lie - "we have no food." The complaint that was founded in dishonesty and ingratitude was not heard by the Lord. Instead, they were given something to complain about. And complain they did, but this time with humility and honesty, and so the Lord does hear them and does give them a way to healing.

It's interesting though. They ask for the Lord to send the serpents away. "Take away the serpents from us," they say. I'm reminded of St Patrick chasing the snakes out of Ireland. Anyway, this is not what the Lord does. He doesn't send the serpents away. Instead, he instructs Moses to make another serpent and to lift it up on high. The people still get bitten by the serpents. But now, when they are bitten, they can look at the bronze serpent that Moses has made and lifted up and looking upon it they are healed. The venom does not kill them anymore. The Lord delivers them from the venom of the serpents, through another serpent, a bronze serpent.

Well, it is helpful to know all of this when we hear Jesus say, "As Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of Man be lifted up, that whoever believes in him may have eternal life" (John 3: 14).

Those infected with the venom of the serpent who looked upon the bronze serpent lifted up by Moses were healed and did not die. Now, all of us infected with the venom of death due to sin who look with faith upon Jesus Christ whom we have pierced upon the cross will have eternal life. And so the bronze serpent is a type of the cross – a prophecy of the way the Lord delivers us from death.

We may cry out to the Lord to simply eradicate death just as the Israelites in the wilderness before us cried out to the Lord to simply drive away all the snakes. But instead of driving away all the snakes, the Lord instructs Moses to make another snake and through that snake to heal the people suffering from snake bites. By a snake, he heals snake bites. Likewise, the Lord does not simply eradicate death, but rather he becomes a man like us and dies himself and through his death (and our own deaths united to his death) we are healed of death and brought to everlasting life. By death, he tramples death.

Now remember that first snake in Genesis. By listening to him, Adam and Eve bring death into the world. So a snake here is a source of death, yet later through Moses a snake becomes a means of healing. This is like the cross – a means and symbol of death that through Jesus Christ gives us eternal life.

It's okay and even good for us to complain about all our sufferings and injustices to the Lord. Let us just make sure that we address all our complaints to Jesus Christ crucified. The cross gives perspective to every suffering and injustice. Because it is in the mystery and the paradox of the cross that every suffering is healed and every injustice righted.