God Waits to Be Gracious

You asked God for something months ago, and nothing has moved. By now the silence has started to sound like a verdict, quietly handed down.

So read this verse for what it is: a description of God, more than an explanation of your case. It says that He waits, which is an amazing thing to say about God, and Isaiah says it plainly: "And therefore will the LORD wait, that he may be gracious unto you." It says He will be "exalted," lifted high, and the reason it gives is mercy, which nobody would have guessed. It calls Him "a God of judgment," which means He puts things in their right order. He will not hand out a kindness on terms that would ruin the person receiving it. Then it ends, "blessed are all they that wait for him." So there is waiting on both sides of this sentence, His and ours.

The word "therefore" at the front points back to something bleak. Three verses earlier God had told them, "In returning and rest shall ye be saved; in quietness and in confidence shall be your strength." Then come a few flat words: "and ye would not." This was a nation that had run out of patience and had gone "down into Egypt" to make its own deal for protection. Yet Isaiah says their refusal did not change what God was doing. He was still waiting to be gracious to the very people who had refused to wait for Him.

That is worth sitting with before you decide anything. There may be an Egypt in your own week: a phone call you are close to making, a compromise you have half decided on, or a relationship you are keeping warm in case God does not come through. You do not have to make that move. This is an invitation, and nobody is ordering you. That matters here, because this whole passage is about people who felt pushed into a decision and made it too fast. The God who waited for them is waiting to be gracious to you as well.

Daily Manna runs on a two-year cycle. The year two reading for day 317 is The Secret Things (Deuteronomy 29:29).

All 365 readings in Daily Manna