What God Has Already Done
Isaiah 51:2 Abraham is your father, so look at him. Look at Sarah, she gave birth to you. Abraham was alone when I called him. Then I blessed him, and he began a great family with many descendants.
Have you ever been at the point of hitting an obstacle and wondered – How am I ever going to get through this? We all end up there eventually, with some humongous, totally immovable obstacle on the road ahead.
And what we’d really like to do is put our trust in God. We know that what is to us, a huge, immovable, impossible blockage, is a mere speck of dust to the God who created the universe.
But as much as we may know the theory of trusting God, actually doing it is a whole bunch harder, because the closer something is, the bigger it looks. This obstacle that’s blocking your way, is so close, that it looks much bigger than God who, often at that point, feels as though He’s a million miles away.
Sure, we know that the obstacle isn’t bigger than God, but right in that moment, right in that place, it feels very much as though it is. It’s an optical illusion, it’s a deception, that we all fall into, when confronted with an apparently insurmountable problem.
Abraham, the father of Israel, was confronted with an absolutely impossible situation. In his old age, when his wife Sarah was well beyond childbearing age, God promised to make him the father of a great multitude. And, after a twenty-five year journey of faith, during which Abraham and Sarah managed to get so many things wrong, God did exactly that.
So, centuries later, at a time in Israel’s history when they’d been slaves, in captivity in Babylon for seventy years, when they couldn’t see a way back to the Promised Land, when the obstacle was so humongous, God chose to remind them of that very thing:
Abraham is your father, so look at him. Look at Sarah, she gave birth to you. Abraham was alone when I called him. Then I blessed him, and he began a great family with many descendants. (Isaiah 51:2)
When I’m confronted with the impossible, what I do – not because I’m a genius or anything, but because all too often I have no other alternative – is that like Israel, I look back along the road already travelled.
And with the benefit of the 20/20 vision that hindsight affords, I see all those humongous obstacles that God’s already cast aside. Some days, that’s what keeps me going.
That’s God’s Word. Fresh … for you … today.
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