As Watchers for the morning, we sometimes have to rein in our enthusiasm over perceived fulfillment of God’s purpose and accept the unexpected.
Moses in his prime was convinced that the time had come to deliver Israel, and moreover that he was the promised deliverer. “Moses thought that his own people would realize that God was using him to rescue them, but they did not” (Acts 7:25). It was not God’s time. For the rashness of his abortive coup he had to endure a 40-year exile in Midian, where he “settled as a foreigner and had two sons” (v. 29). Only in God’s good time did Moses receive the the ophany at Mount Sinai and was sent to rescue his people. The long sojourn as a stranger in a strange land meant that, by the time of the Exodus, Joshua and Caleb had been born, and were ready to be spiritual leaders of God’s host.
The apostolic church could never have anticipated the conversion of Saul of Tarsus. They found it very hard to come to terms with it (Acts 9:26). It needed the Son of Encouragement (Barnabas) to reconcile Saul to the apostles (vv. 27, 28).
Some of the Lord Jesus’ closest helpers were odd choices: the wife of a royal steward; a freedom fighter; a Jewish senator; a leper; a foreign woman with a shady past.
Some of the conversions recorded in the Acts must have been equally unexpected: an Ethiopian finance minister; a Roman army officer; a prison warden; the governor of Cyprus; a half-crazed slave girl; one of the palace slaves of Caesar himself.
There are some very unexpected developments in the brotherhood today, with which many of us find it hard to come to terms. Whoever would have dared to imagine as recently as five years ago (never mind forty-two when the Caribbean Pioneer began!) that the two fastest growing Christadelphian communities in the world in 2001 are in a Muslim republic in the remote deserts of Central Asia (Kazakhstan) and in a poor, war-ravaged former Portuguese colony (Mozambique)? There were more than ten times as many Christadelphians baptized in those two countries in the year 2000 than in the whole of the Caribbean!
Maybe we need to recall Jesus’ prophecy: “This gospel of the Kingdom will be preached in the whole world as a testimony to all nations, and then the end will come” (Matt. 24:14).
The Origin of the Organic World – Part One