Why Does God Wait?

Eighth Sunday after Pentecost: Proper 11

Wisdom 12:13, 16–19; Psalm 86; Romans 8:18–25; Matthew 13:24–30, 34–43)

There are certain questions we don’t ask when life is easy. We ask them when the diagnosis comes. When the marriage is strained. When our child wanders. When the grave is fresh. When evil seems to flourish and righteousness seems fragile. And one of those questions is this: Why does God wait? Why does He allow evil to remain? Why does suffering continue? Why does He not set everything right immediately?

These are not small questions. And they deserve more than a shallow answer.

God’s Patience Is Not Weakness

Our readings from Scripture do not pretend evil is not evil or suffering is not suffering. Scripture is too honest for that. But they do give us a holy answer: God is patient. And His patience is not weakness. It is not indifference. It is not delay because He has lost control.

The Book of Wisdom — a book of ancient Jewish wisdom literature — gives us a vision of power very different from the world’s. The world associates power with force, domination, speed, and control. But Wisdom tells us that God’s strength is the source of His righteousness. Because God is truly sovereign, He does not need to be frantic. Because He is truly powerful, He does not need to be cruel.

Insecure power overreacts. It must constantly prove itself. It punishes quickly because it fears losing control. But the Lord does not fear. He is not threatened. And because He is God, His patience is not a defect in His justice. His patience belongs to His justice.

God’s patience is not permission to remain unchanged. It is mercy calling us to repentance.

Come Home — Even When You’ve Failed

In Psalm 86, the ancient king David — a man who knew real affliction and real enemies — does not pray from a place of strength. He prays, “Incline your ear, O Lord, and answer me, for I am poor and needy” (Psalm 86:1). That is a good place to begin prayer. Not with performance. Not with pretense. Not with pretending we are stronger than we are.

Some of us are there today. Poor and needy because grief has taken the air out of life. Poor and needy because anxiety keeps circling the same fears. Poor and needy because we are carrying burdens we were never meant to carry alone.

David does not come to God because he has mastered life. He comes because he knows God’s character: “But you, O Lord, are a God merciful and gracious, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness” (Psalm 86:15).

Many Christians know those words in theory but struggle to believe them in practice. We imagine God as perpetually disappointed, irritated, and waiting for us to fail. Yet the God revealed in Scripture is merciful and gracious. A child who knows only rage hides when he has failed. A child who knows mercy comes home.

And that is the invitation of the Gospel. When we are guilty or ashamed — come home. When we are weary of ourselves — come home. When we have sinned again — come home. The patience of God is the reason to return.

Groaning With Hope

In Romans 8:18, the Apostle Paul — a man who knew imprisonment, beatings, danger, and loss — writes: “For I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing with the glory that is to be revealed to us.”

Paul is not minimizing suffering. He is not saying suffering does not hurt. He is saying suffering is not ultimate. There is a great difference.

Paul says creation itself is waiting. The world is not what it once was, nor what it will one day be. Sin did not merely wound private spiritual experience — sin disordered the world itself. Thorns and thistles. Bodies that break. Relationships that fracture. Graves that still receive those we love.

Creation groans. And if we have lived long enough, we know that groaning. It is heard in hospital rooms and empty chairs. It is heard in parents praying for children.

Yet Paul says creation’s groaning is not the groaning of final death. It is the groaning of childbirth. “For we know that the whole creation has been groaning together in the pains of childbirth until now” (Romans 8:22). Childbirth is pain with a future; pain with promise; pain that announces life.

So we wait — not with despair, but with hope. And Paul says, “we wait for it with patience” (Romans 8:25). Not because things are fine, but because glory is coming.

The Mixed Field

Then Jesus tells a parable — a short story meant to reveal a deeper truth in Matthew 13:24–30. A man sows good seed in his field, but an enemy comes and sows weeds among the wheat. When the servants discover it, they ask a reasonable question: “Then do you want us to go and gather them?” (Matthew 13:28). It sounds faithful. Let us fix the problem. Let us clean the field.

But the master says no. “Let both grow together until the harvest” (Matthew 13:30).

We want immediate sorting. We want God to vindicate us now, heal us now, expose evil now, fix everything now. But Jesus says the kingdom in this age grows in a mixed field. The servants are not the Lord of the harvest. Neither are we. That humbles our anger. It humbles our certainty. It humbles our tendency to decide too quickly who is wheat and who is weed.

Yet Jesus does not leave the matter vague. The harvest is coming. The patience of God does not mean evil wins. It does not mean judgment has been canceled. “Then the righteous will shine like the sun in the kingdom of their Father” (Matthew 13:43).

There is mercy now. There is judgment then. And there is glory beyond it.

Putting It Into Practice

So what do we do with all of this?

Stop mistaking God’s patience for God’s absence. Some of us are carrying situations that have gone on so long that the delay itself has become part of the suffering. A grief that still feels raw. A child still far from faith. A burden that has not lifted. The Word of God does not say those things do not matter. It says the field is not abandoned. The Lord is not patient because He has forgotten the harvest. He is patient because He is preparing for it.

Receive God’s patience personally. How many times has the Lord not dealt with us according to our sins? How many times has He given us room to repent? As the Apostle Peter writes in 2 Peter 3:9, “The Lord is not slow to fulfill his promise as some count slowness, but is patient toward you.” His patience is salvation.

Become patient people. If God has been patient with us, then we must become patient people — patient with the slow work of holiness, patient in marriage, patient in parenting, patient with those who grieve, patient with the weak, patient with ourselves. Not in a self-excusing way, but in a gospel way — because God is not finished with us.

Resist both despair and presumption. Despair says, “The weeds are winning.” No — the field belongs to Christ. Presumption says, “There is no harvest.” Oh yes there is. The Judge is at the door.

A farmer understands something the impatient observer does not. In the middle of the season, the field can look confused. Growth is uneven. Threats are hidden. But the farmer does not judge the field by one afternoon in July. He works toward the harvest.

Friends, much of life is one afternoon in July. Do not judge the faithfulness of God by one afternoon in July.

The harvest is coming. And the harvest has already begun in Jesus Christ — who entered this field of sin and death, bore its curse, and rose again. Because He is risen, the groaning of creation will not have the final word.

The Lord is merciful and gracious, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness. The field is mixed. Creation groans. But Christ is risen, and He is coming again to bring the harvest — to make all things new.