God is very patient with men.

Let us ponder the fact that it took God 4000 years from the beginning of Creation to get Jesus, the Mediator between God and man, the eternal Sacrifice for the sins for all men, into the earth. (If you believe there were more years since creation, then it took more time.) Why did it take so long?

God has a plan. It is a long range plan. He is patient and long-suffering as He brings that plan to pass. God operates by the laws He Himself instituted. He will not break them. What He put into effect in the earth (read Genesis 1-3), He will not change or alter. He put laws into place that even He obeys. If He ever broke just one little bit of His word, the universe, the world, and all that is in it would collapse into destruction. Men lie, but He cannot lie. God needs men to cooperate with Him to get His plan into the earth.

This is what we need to realize. People say, “Why doesn’t God just do this or do that? He could do it.” Well that’s sort of true. God has the power to do anything, but does He have the authority or the right to do it? The answer is no, because He has limited Himself to act by His word alone. Do you give your word to someone and never break it? No? That’s where we are different from God. He cannot, He will not, take back His word because all of creation is depending upon it. Hebrews 1:3 says He is “…upholding all things by the word of His power.”

Hebrews 1:3, speaking of Jesus, says “…who being the brightness of His glory and the express image of His person, and upholding all things by the word of His power, when He had by Himself purged our sins, sat down at the right hand of the Majesty on high…”

An examination of the first few chapters of Genesis is helpful to understanding what happened at the beginning. That is where we find that God chose to give dominion over the earth to man, his crowning achievement, the creature made in His image. 

Psalms 8:3-8 says, “When I consider Your heavens, the work of Your fingers, The moon and the stars, which You have ordained, What is man that You are mindful of him, And the son of man that You visit him? For You have made him a little lower than the angels, And You have crowned him with glory and honor. You have made him to have dominion over the works of Your hands; You have put all things under his feet, All sheep and oxen—Even the beasts of the field, The birds of the air, And the fish of the sea That pass through the paths of the seas.“

Psalms 115:16 “The heaven, even the heavens, are the LORD’s; But the earth He has given to the children of men.”

The earth He has given to the sons of men… to rule over, subdue it, to have dominion. But through the disobedience of Adam and Eve, man gave that great privilege of ruling over the earth to a disembodied spirit named satan. This act essentially shut God out of the earth. Man had been given free will, authority, and the right to exercise both, but he gave it away to satan and in so doing, became a slave to satan, who has no good plans for men and for the earth. His only intent is to destroy God’s creation, and this is obvious.

Everything looked lost…unless God could get a man to cooperate with Him instead of with satan. You see, satan and his demons get men to cooperate with them by deception and lies. God does not use those tactics. He uses truth and love to draw men to Himself. Has His love drawn you to Him?

The reason God needs man’s cooperation to do things in the earth is because He set it up that way. We tend to think God can do anything, but in reality, He was the One Who limited Himself by giving man rulership of the earth. He put mankind in charge. After the fall of Adam, God began to partner with man so that he could get His kingdom into the earth and nullify the works of the evil one. Men began to call upon the Lord. They began to seek Him. He made blood covenants with different ones, Noah, Abraham, and Moses.

Yes, my friend, God is very patient with men. “He knows our frame; He remembers that we are dust.” Psalms 103:14. Even though mankind was made essentially from dirt, he contains the image of God. Therefore he is of great value to God. You are of great value to God.

God set apart a nation, a people, called the Hebrews to be His own. He took care of them, gave them His rules and what was required of them to stay close to God. They rebelled and would not believe and obey Him. But God kept working with and speaking to that same group. He had made promises to them and He would not break those promises. He spoke to them through men called prophets and the prophets kept writing down what God said. Today we have a compilation of the miraculous stories of God’s work in the earth, all contained in the Bible. It is a rich history of God’s work with men in the earth from the very beginning. Praise God for the Hebrews and their contributions to history and to the work of God.

Men born after Adam are willful, obstinate, rebellious, proud, and stiff-necked. Their understanding is darkened by the prince of the power of the air, satan. Men who refuse to acknowledge God eventually become like an animal, acting on emotion and instinct with no self-control, no rationality. They are unable to see truth or reality because they have been lied to and have accepted the lies. Men have much pride in their intellectualism, in how smart they think they are. They do not realize their condition. They do not realize they are nothing and that they know nothing without their Creator.

Isaiah 57:16 says, “For I will not contend forever, Nor will I always be angry; For the spirit (of man) would fail before Me, And the souls which I have made.”

Psalms 103:9-10 “He will not always strive with us, Nor will He keep His anger forever. He has not dealt with us according to our sins, Nor punished us according to our iniquities.”

When Jesus finally arrived here in the earth, His death on the cross satisfied the wrath of God against every sin ever committed and those of the future. In the Old Testament, there was no mediator between God and man other than the priest in the tabernacle, who was required to continually offer the blood of animals to cover sin. Now God’s wrath against sin is satisfied. Man can freely relate to God because of Jesus’s sacrifice.

Romans 2:4 “Or do you despise the riches of His goodness, forbearance, and longsuffering, not knowing that the goodness of God leads you to repentance?”

2 Peter 3:9 “The Lord is not slack concerning His promise, as some count slackness, but is longsuffering toward us, not willing that any should perish but that all should come to repentance.”

Yes, friend, God is very patient with men. He desires that all men come to repentance and be saved. And He remembers that we are but dust.