Reformed Church Box Hill

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14 June 2020

The Glory of God’s Patience.

Why does God exercise his patience toward men?

God exercises his patience toward men for the chief end of glorifying himself.  If God hates evil, and He has the power to destroy evildoers, then the question naturally arises: why does He exercise His patience toward mankind?  The singular overarching reason God does anything is to glorify Himself.  God’s glory is His infinite, self-contained excellence, and to glorify God is to display and enjoy God’s infinite excellence.  So then, God exercises His patience so that He may display and enjoy His own infinite excellence.

How is God glorified through the exercise of His patience?

God is glorified through the exercise of His patience in the repentance and restoration of His image in the saints, and by the display of His power in the righteous judgment of the wicked.

In the first sense, God’s patience exercised toward His saints enables the restoration of His image in them.  If God judged us immediately, there would be no opportunity for our restoration, instead we would be instantly destroyed.  In this sense, our salvation rests upon the bedrock of God’s patience.  Each day He patiently bears with us as His image is continually formed in us.  As His image is formed in us, His excellence (glory) increasingly shines through us, until we are fully formed in Christ’s image in the life to come.  In 1 Timothy 1:16 the Apostle Paul thus speaks of his salvation as a display of the “perfect patience” of God, and so it is with all who inherit eternal life.  God’s patience is an indispensable ingredient in our glorification, and thus also in God’s ultimate glorification as realized in our salvation.

Considering the display of God’s power in the judgment of the wicked, let’s remind ourselves of what God’s patience is: the patience of God is His willingness and power to suffer the wrongs of sinners against Himself by temporarily withholding His righteous judgment.  I want you to note particularly the sense in which God’s patience is an exercise of His power.  Romans 9:22 says: “What if God, desiring to show His wrath and to make known His power, has endured with much patience vessels of wrath prepared for destruction.”  The sheer fact of God’s endurance, His capacity to withhold His righteous wrath, is a display of the immensity of His power.  We are most often at the whim of our passions, and to overcome them is harder than capturing a city (Prov 16:32).  The self-control it must require for God to withhold His righteous judgment is quite simply immeasurable!  God hates sin with a perfect hatred, and He loves holiness with a perfect love, and yet His power is so great that He is also able to stay the execution of His justice and exercise patience toward worthless sinners.  Again, too often our own anger is quickly known, and we find ourselves unable to retain it.  Yet God, in His perfect patience, executes His justice at the time of His own choosing, willing to wait patiently even for centuries.  For God, He is in perfect control of his emotions, and thus we see His glory and excellency revealed in the power He has to exercise patience.

Soli Deo Gloria!