Waiting in Unbelief: Revisited
Darkness to Light Part 21
And therefore will the Lord wait, that he may be gracious unto you, and therefore will he be exalted, that he may have mercy upon you: for the Lord is a God of judgment: blessed are all they that wait for him.
Isaiah 30:18
God will be gracious to them and will have mercy on them. “He will wait to be gracious (v.18); he will wait till you return to him and seek his face, and then he will be ready to meet you with mercy. He will stir up himself to deliver you…
Matthew Henry - Isaiah 30:18
Waiting is referenced in the Bible 116 times. In my former church, many of those verses were used out of context as excuses for a lack of seeking God. The old adage was “you must wait for the Holy Spirit to work in your heart and apply the preaching,” so you don’t ‘deceive’ yourself. “We cannot presume Christ.” “The Lord must do it.” One must continue to use the means and pray for the Lord to work in their hearts. In the meantime, the preaching really isn’t for us. We hope it will someday be applied to our hearts1. These excuses lead many in that church to sit back comfortably unconverted with no repentance or seeking after God. Many others see salvation as too hard to understand or believe they must attain a certain level of awareness of their sins, or they say it is too easy there must be more we have to do for God to save us, even though they would be the first to admit that salvation is all of God. Others say I am too old… it is too late for me.
Dear reader, as long as today is yet today, there is still time to repent of your sins and believe in the Lord Jesus Christ! No matter how young or old, no matter how sinful you are. You may say, “I don’t actually feel that sinful at all.” No matter, flee to Christ, He will show you your sins and forgive every one of them.
The waiting on the Lord spoken of in the Bible is not an idle waiting. It is a waiting in faith, believing that Jesus paid for all your sins. It is not a sit back and hope God will save me kind of waiting. It is not a lazy waiting.
But you may possibly say, “Must not I first be humbled and convicted to such and such a degree before I come to Christ who is offered to me in the promises of the gospel, and before I may apply that promise to myself?” My answer is that you must be humbled to such as extent that you perceive that Christ could be of use to you, and that you could be helped by Him if He were your portion. If such is the case, I beseech you, for the Lord’s sake, do not stay away from Christ by waiting for a measure of the preparation, for then the law will get such a hold of you that it will not permit you ever to apply the promise of the gospel to yourself. The law will say, “You must first have such and such qualification before you may come to Christ and apply the promise to yourself.” If you then would have such a qualification, the law would speak again, “Give up, for you are a sinner, you must be perfect before you come.” And thus there would never come an end to it. You will never come to Christ if you listen to nothing else but the voice of the law, and to the legalistic inclination and bent which are natural to you. The voice of the gospel says, however, “Let him the heareth say, Come. And let him that is athirst come. And whosoever will, let him take the water of life freely” (Rev. 22:17b). Let him be then whatever he may be, but let him come. Every qualification you need is found in the bosom of the promise. Therefore, come without fear of being brazen, and freely receive what you need.
Ralph Erskine - From the book Salvation Has Become Complicated by Johan Blaauwendraad
In his book ‘The ABC of Faith,’ Alexander Comrie beautifully describes true waiting on God in faith. He quotes Isaiah 40:31a: “ But they that wait upon the Lord shall renew their strength…etc.” He brings up two points:
The subjects of this promise
The promise itself
We will mainly be speaking to the first point.
In the first part, Comrie describes the subjects of the promises as those people who wait upon the Lord. He says,
The object of their ‘waiting’, the Lord Jehovah. They hope not for salvation from the hills, nor from the multitude of mountains, but all their expectation is from the Lord, who has created heaven and earth; in whom also is everything which can afford support to hope and expectation. For He is, as has been said before, the mighty and everlasting God who is able to do it, and the gracious God who is willing to do it, since faithfulness and righteousness are the girdle of His loins.
Comrie goes on to say:
The subjects are described as being ‘waiters’ upon the Lord. Our original word VEKOVEE, of which the root is sometimes rendered ‘to wait’, sometimes ‘to hope’, and also sometimes rendered ‘to wait upon’, as in this text, by our esteemed translators, really denotes ‘a going out after’ something with the very strongest desires of the soul…
Here, Comrie describes Biblical waiting as an action, even as going out or seeking after God. As we will see in the following quotes, he leaves no excuse for the sinner's inaction in seeking God and salvation. He elaborates further on what this waiting or expecting consists of.
As to what constitutes this ‘expecting’ which is spoken of here and in many other places, as though this alone were that in which all godliness consists. It is a sweet thing to observe how graciously and how frequently the Lord mentions this exercise. ‘Wait upon the Lord: be of good courage and He shall strengthen thy heart: wait I say on the Lord’ (Psalm 27:14) ‘Wail on the Lord and keep His way’ (Psalm 37:34); ‘I will look unto the Lord; I will wait for the God of my salvation’ (Micah 7:7); and hundreds of other places…
He continues by telling us two different ways that the waiting upon the Lord does not consist of, and I will end with that.
This expecting:
(A) Will not consist in this, that a man must be unconcerned about God and His precious covenant; natural men lay this at the door of God’s dear children. But O my hearers, as soon as God reveals the glory of His attributes and the preciousness of the Covenant Mediator, and the good things of the covenant, there springs up a loveand an esteem in the soul, so that this loce is as coals of fire, as flames of the Lord which many waters cannot quench; so then rather that display indifference the soul says, ‘How I love thee, O Lord, my stregnth’. Yea, they go further: when under a felt lack of the outflowings of God’s goodness, the righteous say they are ‘sick of love’.
(B) It consists not in idleness, whereby the soul would deny all operations of the second causes and just sit still without turning unto God, as in the awful doctrine of Spinoza and Van Hattem, which would make man totally passive, putting God as the only cause of actions; while the true teaching regards God as the first, but man also as a second cause of all his doings. Such as are unskilled in spiritual truths reproach those Christians who act dependently and speak of ‘waiting’, saying they maintain a state of idleness and deny all second causes; but the opposite is true of all who know the line of demarcation between light and darkness, ‘in whose heart are the ways of them’. True hoping or ‘waiting’ souls cry out under a felt absence of their God, ‘As the hart panteth after the waterbrooks, so panteth my soul after Thee, O God. My soul thirsteth after God, for the living God. O God, thou art my God: early will I seek thee: my soul thirsteth for thee… in a dry and thirsty land when no water is’, which sometimes goes to the extent that they faint for longing.
Dear reader, be very concerned about the state of your soul and do not sit idly by, not caring for the things of God, or even once again saying, “Oh, the Lord must do it…” You're right; He must, and He has. He sent His only son to die on a cross for you! Call upon His name, repent, and believe! Put your faith in Him; He will not turn you away.
Eternity is forever… where will you spend it?
Hyper-Calvinistic Responses to Arminianism and the Marrow of the Gospel P.18