When God's
Promises Hurt!
by Martin Schmaltz
"What!"
you may be exclaiming: "That is absurd, when can God's promises hurt?" May I
offer a response - when they do not seem to be coming to pass.
Think
for a moment of the excitement you experience when the Lord gave you a promise.
Maybe it is about your job, finances, loved ones or a particular ministry.
Daily you anticipate its fulfillment. Yet as time passes and the promise does
not seem to materialize, there is a change in our attitude. Excitement now
becomes frustration, maybe even anger as time continues to pass.
This
promise forever alters our paradigm of life: it is always there, sometimes in
the forefront of our thoughts, sometimes just below our consciousness. It places us in a position that we cannot go
back to how we used to think, yet it seems we cannot go forward either. There are
days you wonder if you really heard Him right? Has He forgotten you? Did you
miss it? Did you do something wrong? Questions and emotions can run rampant
causing such mental anguish.
There is a Reason for the
Pain
So
yes the promises of God can hurt. But there is a reason.
Joseph
experienced the same pain, yet God was using it as a process of
development. As a young man, Joseph
received a promise from God. In a dream his family was bowing to him and Joseph
proceeds to tell them of this wonderful promise. Obviously, the family was not
too thrilled. This starts a process of
development in Joseph's life: he is cast into a pit, sold to a slave caravan
and transported to Egypt, re-sold to Potiphar, then cast into prison. Some promise huh! Some pain! Yet there was a
reason for this besides getting him to Egypt.
Until the time that his word came: the word of the LORD tried him. Ps 105:19
Joseph's
promise required a process of preparation. The text above tells us that until
the promise came to pass, Joseph was tried. According to BDB Hebrew Lexicon,
"tried" means "to smelt, to refine, to test." According to TWOT this word "is
primarily used for gold and silversmiths and for the process of refining metals
before they were worked into fine vessels." The time between receiving the
promise and its fulfillment was a refining time for Joseph. Ok, that makes
sense and we can grasp that. So…….
Now
this is what strikes me about this process: it was the "word of the LORD" that
tried him. The very promise given him became his refiner! Think about that. How
many times do we really associate a promise from God as purifying us? Usually
we get excited: we claim His promises, we declare them and we look for them to
come to pass. Yet have we ever stopped to think that His promise could also
become the instrument of our purification?
All
those years as a slave or in prison, Joseph must have been asking God about the
promise. He probably questioned what he heard: wondered if he missed something
or did something wrong. I can imagine there were many nights lying awake
staring into the darkness of despair, wondering: "where is this promise?" Yet
through this, there was a refining going on IN Joseph.
It
was the purification process of the promise that equipped Joseph to fulfill the
promise. Joseph was an immature seventeen-year-old when he received the dream,
what did he know about leadership. Yet it was the pain of the years of
servanthood in Potiphar's house and the prison that equipped him as a leader
and administrator. When It was God's time, Joseph was ready to step into his
promise.
Today,
you may be wondering when will God bring his promise to pass. You are tired,
frustrated and maybe angry. Don't lose hope, if you are here, you are right
where God wants you! You are in a process.
Martin Schmaltz