Audio Transcript
Today in the Navigators Bible Reading Plan we read Mark 5:24–34 and meet there a woman with a twelve-year illness — twelve years diseased, twelve years bleeding, twelve years embarrassed, twelve years anemic, twelve years from doctor to doctor to doctor, twelve years of false cures, twelve years that depleted her entire life savings — and then, after twelve years, Jesus walked by within arm’s reach.
Imagine for a moment that you were in control of everything. If you were in sovereign control over this world — over every disease, every pain, every war — how long would it take you to fix her and every other broken thing? A couple days? A week at most? We often wonder, why does our sovereign God take twelve years to heal a suffering woman? Or hundreds of years to fix greater problems as we read the long story of the Old Testament, watching centuries of rulers and judges and kings, some good, many of them rotten, and then the long exile and enduring long disappointments for God’s people? Today on Ask Pastor John: Long sorrows set the stage.
We get there from reading the book of Judges together and a question from Julia, who lives just outside of Philadelphia. “Pastor John, in rereading the book of Judges and in rereading your book Providence, I noticed that you wrote this powerful insight: ‘Reading the book of Judges is like having the insanity of sin rubbed in your face while God returns again and again with mercy, which was repeatedly forgotten’ (126). That text is starred and underlined and highlighted in my book.
“But I’ve been thinking specifically of Judges 2:11–23, where we see the tragic consequences of Israel’s repeated cycle of disobedience and idolatry and compromise with sin. The people of Israel continually sinned, which led to oppression by surrounding nations. Why do you think God allows such long cycles of sorrow to occur when his people compromise with sin? How should this long pattern challenge us to pursue holiness and avoid spiritual complacency in our own relationship with God today?”
This is a difficult question. In fact, I think it’s probably an impossible question to answer; namely, why did God take as long as he took to do what he did in any given period of history (not just the judges)? And the reason it’s difficult, if not impossible, is because there’s no clear correlation in human behavior between quantity of time and the effect of that time on people.
Impossible Judgment
For example, if you want to discipline your child by making him stay in his room as a consequence for speaking harshly to his sister, how long should he stay in the room? And there simply is no clear answer anywhere among humans to the question, “What amount of time correlates with a particular degree of guilt or a change of behavior?”
It’s just of the nature of things that the elapse of time — whether we’re talking about centuries or hours — never has a clear, definite correlation in our human minds between the quantity of time and the nature of the effect of the time going by. And if it’s difficult to know about the correlation between time and effect at the human level, how much more difficult would it be for us to make judgments about God’s decisions to take a century or a thousand years to do something when we might have done it in ten years? How should we make that judgment?
That’s my disclaimer at the beginning here for why I don’t think it’s possible to give a very definite answer to the question, “Why would God decree such long cycles of sin and judgment?” — say, in the period of the judges. But let me say two or three things that might shed some light on the length of redemptive history in its various phases.
Redemptive History
Let’s focus on God’s dealings with Israel. From the time that God chose Abraham (or Abram) to the time of the coming of Jesus, about two thousand years passed. That’s a long time. That included:
- two hundred years of the patriarchal era (I’m rounding off these numbers);
- about four hundred years of sojourning in Egypt;
- forty years in the wilderness;
- four hundred years with the judges;
- one hundred years of the united kingdom under Saul, David, and Solomon;
- about four hundred years of the divided kingdom;
- seventy years in exile in Babylon; and then
- another four hundred years or so after the Old Testament closes until Jesus.
At every point, we could ask, “Why that amount of time?” And I’ve already said why I don’t think that question can be answered with any precision, but I think we can say at least three things to get at the issue.
1. God is outside of time.
In 2 Peter 3:8, it says, “With the Lord one day is as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day.” So, we should never imagine God passing through time as slowly as we do. His judgments, therefore, about how long things should be done are being made from a very unique standpoint.
2. Humans need a savior.
The second observation is that it’s clear, for example, in the book of Judges that the main point is that when there’s no righteous king in the land, people do what’s right in their own eyes, and that winds up with a prevalence of great wickedness in the land (Judges 21:25). So, the point of the book of Judges is that human beings are incurably sinful and need a savior, and that life on earth becomes unlivable where there are no restraints on sin.
God has chosen two ways to make that clear during the period of the judges. One is to describe the depth and horror of the evil that comes out of people’s hearts, like chopping a concubine in pieces (Judges 19:29). And the other is to describe how long this goes on through Othniel, Ehud, Shamgar, Deborah, Gideon, Abimelech, Tola, Jair, Jephthah, Ibzan, Elon, Abdon, and Samson — for centuries. In other words, the measure of sin’s horror and the measure of sin’s duration combine to underline the terrible condition of the human heart.
We may not know why God chose four hundred years as opposed to three hundred or five hundred or whatever, but we can know that it was both the horror of it and the length of it that made the point. Human beings are inveterately sinful and need a savior. No passage of time is going to make them better. We need a savior — a savior who is far better than any of the judges.
3. Jesus is that Savior.
The third thing we can say with regard to the two thousand years of Israel’s history is that Israel was becoming a lesson book for how to understand the nature of God, the nature of redemption, and the way that the Messiah, Jesus, would in fact come and be that redemption.
The way the history of Israel unfolds introduces the reality of the covenant, the reality of law, the reality of God’s revealed will in that law, the reality of substitution in a blood sacrifice, the reality of a priesthood and a kingship, the crucial role of prophecy and the word of God — all those realities that we meet and learn about over time in the history of Israel are essential in the New Testament for understanding the nature and work of Jesus Christ.
We may not know why God took the precise amount of time he took, but we can see what he was doing in redemptive history in the Old Testament to prepare for the fullest understanding of the nature and the work of Christ in the New Testament — because it’s all understood in the light of what the history of Israel was revealing and teaching about God and his plan for salvation.
God’s Kindness
I think one lesson, at least, that God intends for us to see in this history of redemption is the depth and the ugliness of sin, the seriousness of God’s judgment, and the amazing grace that turns up again and again and again. Oh my goodness, my wife and I are reading Hosea right now, and we just read chapter 2 last night. I mean, the horrors of whoredom and prostitution against God, and he just says, “I’m going to woo you back” (see Hosea 2:14). You just almost want to cry at the kindness of God revealed in the book of Hosea, and it’s all pointing to Galatians 4:4–5: “When the fullness of time had come, God sent forth his Son, born of woman, born under the law, to redeem those who were under the law, so that we might receive adoption as sons.” That’s it. That’s where it’s all going.
