I see you on the hard days. I am acquainted firsthand with the struggle between faith and sight. I know the look in your eye when your reality does not line up with what you have been taught and what you have embraced and what you know to be true.
We live in a tension.
There is the promise, and there is the waiting. There is
what we can see but also what we cannot. Our days are often a mixture of good
news and hard news. You’ll learn this more and more.
But Abraham still stood before the Lord…
It was in between the good news and the hard news, in the
tension of God’s faithfulness to His gracious promise and His just punishment
of evil. The Lord came, not for the first or second or even third time,
reminding Abraham that what He says, He will bring to pass – a son would be
born, nations would be blessed. Basking in the comfort of that assurance,
Abraham must have felt his heart drop when the Lord looked toward Sodom, when He
said, “I will go down and see,” when the men turned and went toward the city.
Abraham knew what they would find.
But Abraham still stood before the Lord…
Boldness and humility wrapped themselves up in his prayer to
the Judge of all the earth. “Will You indeed sweep away the righteous with the
wicked? Suppose there are fifty righteous within the city…forty-five…forty…thirty…twenty…ten…”
And the Judge of all the earth was not angry but full of compassion. “For the
sake of ten I will not destroy it.” Abraham clung to the promise and hoped.
And Abraham went early in the morning to the place where
he had stood before the Lord…
It was in between the good news and the hard news, in the
tension of God’s faithfulness to His gracious promise and His just punishment
of evil. Abraham had gone to bed knowing that within a year he would be a
father to the child of promise, yet also knowing that the life of his nephew,
whom he loved like a son, hung in the balance in a city full of wickedness.
When he got to the place where he had stood before the Lord, interceding as one
who knew he was but dust and ashes, and looked out over the valley, he saw the
smoke rise and he knew. His prayers had not been answered. His intercession had
not changed the outcome. The city was destroyed. The Lord had not found ten
righteous in Sodom. All was lost.
So it was that, when God destroyed the cities of the
valley, God remembered Abraham…
It was in between the hard news and the truth, the seen and
the unseen. He saw the destruction but he didn’t yet know the relentless mercy
that God demonstrated in Sodom. He saw the smoke but he didn’t yet know that his
Lord had literally pulled Lot and his family out of the city despite their
foolish lingering. He saw that the prayers he had spoken were unrequited, but
he did not yet know that the Judge of all the earth had heard the unspoken cry
of his heart and had moved to answer by rescuing his nephew. He thought Lot was
dead, but he wasn’t.
We live in a tension, but one day we will see not through a
glass dimly but face to face, and know not in part but in full. You will live
through days when your heart is filled with rejoicing in one instant and dread
the next. It is a hard thing to walk by faith, but it is the only way. Trust in
His promise because He is faithful. Know that He is always at work, even when
you can’t see. Boldly approach His throne because He is full of compassion.
Intercede knowing that He hears the cry of your heart. And when smoke fills the
horizon, remember that He is good, and that He remembers you.
