Only Time Will Tell

January 4th, 2009

Reading: Genesis 7-8 and Matthew 3

You have to admire people like Noah and John the Baptist. These men devoted their lives to something, and were not promised any real results.

I always felt it probably would have been easier on Noah when he was building the Ark. After all, an Ark is a construction project where you can see measurable results every day. Maybe not noticeable, but it is there. The Bible doesn't really say if Noah was on some sort of timecrunch to finish his little project, or if God would have held off the rain until the boat was done.

And once the boat was done, it doesn't say that the Lord told Noah how long he would have to wait on it. So there he was, not knowing how long he would have to stay on the big smelly boat. Man, he probably got impatient.

I wonder if John the Baptist ever got impatient with his mission, I mean, he felt led by God to go out and baptize people, but he was not told why. I'm pretty certain he would have felt more led if he knew he was going to be baptizing Jesus, but the Bible doesn't say that this is the case.

Sure, we all know how the story ends, but for these characters, they had no idea. In the same way, there are times where God tells us to do something, and it doesn't look like it is going anywhere. Sometimes, there is a temptation of quitting, especially in the face of opposition.

I would imagine there were tons of Jewish people who were calling John the Baptist a heretic, and he probably wanted to quit. Can you imagine the opposition Noah faced? I mean, if the world really was as evil as the Bible says, then I have no doubt that construction on the Ark was constantly delayed by Vandals and other various evildoers who wanted to stir up trouble.

So, if you are feeling led to do something, and not certain whether you should do it, perhaps you have not considered the possibilities of your actions. Sure, it is easy to do something when you feel that it is going somewhere, but the real test is when you are doing something that appears, on the surface, not to be amounting to anything.

Clearly, we don't know the big picture behind our actions, and sometimes it is necessary to quit something that really is, at its heart, meaningless. However, you might find that the dead-end job that you think you're doing turns out to be slowly building a road over time. Only time will tell.