Promise & Process
It’s All About the Journey

Have you ever grown impatient with God? It often seems as though God is insensitive to our time constraints. Sometimes people will say that He is the God of the eleventh hour. But many times, it seems that He is the God of the thirteenth hour – waiting to take action until after every deadline has already come and gone. If our main concern in life is keeping to the schedule that places us at the scene of the fulfillment of God’s promises in the shortest possible time, our relationship with God can be a very frustrating experience.

That’s because although God loves to keep His promises of blessing, His main concern is the process that results in blessing not the blessing itself. To Him, it’s all about the journey, not the destination.

In the book of Exodus, we have the history of God liberating the Jewish people from slavery in Egypt and the first part of their journey to the Promised Land. In the first leg of the trip, Moses was under direction to bring the people to Mount Sinai. Upon their arrival, God invited Moses to ascend the mountain to acquire the Ten Commandments and other instructions that would transform the physical, social, moral, and spiritual lives of the people of Israel and provide the foundation that would enable them to fully realize all that God had in mind for them.

However, this process took longer than they were comfortable with. During these days of waiting, God was not on vacation. He was accomplishing eternally significant things behind the scenes with Moses. This was going on outside their view and their perspective. All they could think about was that the clock was ticking.

In their minds, the time spent waiting for God to finish whatever he was doing was just delaying them from what really mattered – the fulfillment of their hopes, the satisfying of their anticipations, longings, and desires. They grew impatient with the process.

So, Exodus 32:1 tells us that they decided to take measures into their own hands. They decided to manufacture a short-cut. Aaron went along with them and fashioned for them a golden idol – an image of God that more suited their priorities. If you read the text carefully, it’s clear that they weren’t looking for a different god, they just wanted God to be more responsive to their agenda. They wanted God to say what they wanted to hear and do what they wanted done when they wanted it.

In the aftermath of their idolatry, Exodus 33:1-3 records God’s declaration that He would arrange for all of His promises to be kept, but that He would no longer be personally present among them. God is so good and loves us so much, He will keep His word to us even when we choose the destination over the process that gives the destination meaning. But what an incredibly sad and frightening prospect that is.

Verse 7 of that same chapter shows how Moses understood the indescribable impact of this loss and immediately went into action to appeal to God’s mercy. And in verse 15, he cries out to God, “If Your presence does not go with us, do not bring us up from here.”

In verse 16 he continues his prayer by saying that the only thing that truly defined Israel was God’s presence among them – the process of knowing Him. Experiencing the material blessings of the Promised Land without that context meant nothing.

Verse 17 is a very tender expression of God’s grace and mercy as He declares that He will not withhold the immediate sense of His presence from the people after all.

I’m convinced that we all want to have God’s abiding presence in our lives. However, if we’re honest, sometimes our desires for the by-products of His presence – material and emotional blessings such as a happy family, a rewarding career, good health, financial prosperity, etc – often rise to a place of higher priority. We desire the destination and grow impatient with the journey. This is especially true when the circumstances of our lives seem to impose a deadline.

In those times, let’s be careful not to allow our panic or impatience to drive us to take matters into our own hands – creating a false image of Him in our minds that will provide us cover for our attempts to short cut the process.