Hey my friends, it's Matt. This is the Ten Minute Bible Hammer Podcast. And have you noticed, as we've been going through the fruit of the Spirit, this list of very good things in Galatians chapter five, have you noticed that all the things on the list that are evidences of God's presence in the life of the Christian, that these are also all things that God is really good at? I mean, that's kind of a silly sounding phrase, I guess, because I mean the very notion of God is that he's the best at everything. But still, I mean the but the fruit of the spirit is just think about this list from the perspective of is God good at these things? The fruit of the spirit is love. Yeah, yeah, God is love. Joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. Yep. These are attributes of God that God is imparting to us. Now, maybe those attributes play out a little bit differently when you're talking about the almighty, perfect, all-knowing being that transcends time and space who is God. These things are going to manifest a little differently if you're that singular being than they do if you're talking about me, some guy who's just trying to get through the Fourth of July weekend and make his internet stuff, but his house got struck by lightning during his Fourth of July party and it fried his internet and he makes internet things for a living and he has to do a podcast, but the internet doesn't work. So how do you actually do that when you can't get internet and there's a backlog and nobody can fix it? Like when you're talking about somebody like that, okay, you know, these things are gonna be a little bit uh sloppier, they're gonna manifest in more mundane ways than maybe love, joy, peace, and patience manifest with the all-knowing, all-powerful God of all things. But the fruit of the spirit is stuff that is God, the stuff that is the attributes of God, that is, that is manifest in us. A while back I was likening all of these things to gold, space rock. It's this foreign, incredibly valuable thing that somehow made its way to earth and it's rare and it's beautiful and it's kind of from beyond. It's sort of the deal here. These attributes they're only inherent to us in that we're made in the image of God, and this stuff is only in the world as we know it, but because God has put them in the world, because God sustains us and sustains all things. So it's cool to think about this, not just as a list, I guess, of good things to do and good principles of good virtues to try to nurture in your life, but as the imprint of God in the world. These are foreign virtues, beautiful things that we all want, but foreign to the fallenness of the world, and they're here because of God. And they're not just here in general, like in the ether in the air, but they're here in Christians. It's just a great list. This has been fun. We've looked at love a lot, then we looked at joy a little bit, then we looked at peace. Now we're gonna talk about patience. And this is the one that really made me think about the whole God is this first, and then that manifests in us in a bunch of different ways. It's just kind of born out of how it manifests in God. So we're gonna do some Bibling here for the next few minutes, and there's going to be a lot of page turning. If you don't have a Bible with you, don't worry. I'm gonna look up these verses, I'm gonna read them to you, and it's gonna be amazing. So, God is patient. What does that look like? Well, the the fact that we're having this conversation means God is patient. If the Bible is to be believed, if the Old Testament is to be believed, then everything just went to crap right from the beginning. It was apparently very quick. God makes all this stuff, and he says it's good, and then it looks like there's some degree of decision-making power given to the crown jewel of his creation, the man and the woman, and they go and choose to disobey God. And we would have chosen the same thing if we were there, according to the story. And then you have this moment of choosing, which really is one of the most underrated, underappreciated moments in the whole Bible, I think. The moment of choosing here, all the way back at the beginning in Genesis, where God shows up in the garden and is like, hey, where'd you guys go? Where Adam, Eve, what are you doing? Because he's God. He, I think he knew right where they were, but he's asking anyway, and they try to hide from God, which is a dorb, and then God asks some questions like, Well, what is what are you doing? What's this that you've done? And the woman's like, Oh, I got tricked and I ate. And then the dude, so everybody's blaming everybody else, like the Spider-Man meme, they're all pointing fingers and everything. And right there, this is Genesis 3, call it like 13, is the moment where the people fess up and they're like, This is what happened. That's the moment where you've got this underappreciated moment of choosing where an impatient God would have been like, huh. Okay, and just reached for the console reset button on the metaphorical 8-bit Nintendo and just been like, Yeah, I don't like the way this run worked out. And reset, everything goes away, all memory of it is annihilated, every created thing just vanishes back into the ones and zeros of the mind of God, and none of it ever existed. There's nobody there to keep a record because God just reset reality because it didn't work out. The people picked bad things, and then maybe God's like, all right, let's do it again. And you know, if God had done that, then you got to wonder, are we on like reality 8 billion 244 million, something something dee something, and 11? And we're hoping this one works out. Well, no, I think there's a real good chance we're on reality number one because God is patient and he demonstrates patience right here in this moment of cosmic choosing. He chooses. I mean, there's not even really a hesitation where God's like, oh, you did, huh? Hang on a minute. I'm gonna go talk with the rest of the Trinity. I think that might be a Trinitarian heresy. I don't even know how to joke about them chatting it up, but I'm gonna go talk with the Trinity. I'm just gonna try it. All right, guys, what do we do? Uh we didn't see this one coming. I really wanted this creation to be good, but they had they ate the fruit again. What? With the fruit? Why do we keep putting that in there? I don't know. I don't know. You said don't do it. I thought it would be a good, I thought this time it would work. I mean, so what should we do, guys? Should we just push the reset button and nuke it? Or should we try to fix this thing? What would most accomplish our purposes? What would most be reflective of our character? None of that is in there. There is no such verse, there is no chit chat, there is no God stroking his chin and being like, uh, maybe nuke, maybe redeem, sweat and hover over both red buttons, which to do. Ha! No, it's just okay, well, that's what's happened. Moving forward, there will be a judgment for this. This is how reality is going to be now. Serpent, you're cursed too in all of this. There's gonna be a lot of pain, there's gonna be a lot of difficult stuff, and then at the end of the whole thing, he's like, Yeah, and eventually, this serpent, there's gonna be one who comes along, the serpent's gonna strike at his heel, but this one who's descended from you, Eve, Adam, this one's gonna crush the head of that serpent, which is representative of the curse and everything that you guys just introduced into the world with what you did wrong. So the moment of choosing comes and goes without us even knowing that that moment of choosing is there. Why? One, I think God's plan was that this would be the build for reality that would most bring glory and exaltation to his name, which if it's you or me and that's how we make decisions, okay. Well, that's pretty arrogant because we're you or me. But if you're God and you really actually are the perfect thing and the best thing, and truth is the best thing, then it would make sense that you would want to point people to that true thing, which just happens to also be you. So I got no problem with God being interested in his own glory. So why do we not even hear about the moment of choosing? Why is there no debate on the part of God in this moment here in Genesis 3? Well, one, because I think he knew that this was the version of existence and reality and history and the cosmos that would most bring glory to his name and most accomplish his purposes. Cool. I think the other reason is because he's inherently patient and he's slow to anger and he's forgiving. And so, not that he probably has knee-jerk reactions to things, because again, he's God and he sees it all, he's surprised by nothing, and he knows that everything's coming. And maybe that's why patience is so easy for him, because he does know everything that's coming. Maybe what to us looks like a character trait is actually just a byproduct of his perfection and unlimitedness, he's infinite. I don't know, whatever the case, it looks like what you and I call patience, and the Bible calls it patience. And I mean, where do we even start here? Dang, we're already at 10 minutes. Now we're still doing this. Uh, in the book of Genesis, a few chapters later, when God's interacting with Abraham, there's a moment that, again, is really underrated. It comes and goes very quickly. But there's a moment where God is making promises to Abraham. I think it's in chapter 15, and God's like, you're gonna go to this land and this is what you're gonna inherit. But there's this weird line in there where he's like, Yeah, but not just yet, Abram, because the wickedness of the Amorites hasn't gone all the way to its full end as yet. We're gonna just let that baste a little bit longer and let them go further down the road of what they are going to be. Huh. What an interesting, patient, long view from God because the Amorites were doing very bad things. And yet in God's calculus, he demonstrates patience in all of that. That's kind of a hint of the behavior that we see from God that is to come. It's not like he's saying, Oh, I don't care that the Amorites are bad. No, he cares that they're bad. It's not like he's saying, like, I don't care that the Ninevites are bad or the Assyrians or the Babylonians are bad throughout the Old Testament. God's like, no, no, no, I see it, and I'm gonna do something about it, and there will be a day of reckoning, a day of the Lord. I will sort all of that stuff out. Don't worry, I'm on it. But it's just you get the impression it's just not gonna be on the timeline that people think on. Wow, I turned almost right to this. Exodus 34, six. This is a principle about God that gets repeated in the Psalms, uh, gets repeated in a prayer of Nehemiah at one point. Exodus 34, six. Now we're gonna start in five. Then the Lord came down in the cloud and stood there with him and proclaimed his name, the Lord, and he passed in front of Moses, proclaiming, the Lord, the Lord, the compassionate and gracious God, slow to anger, abounding in love and faithfulness, maintaining love to thousands, and forgiving wickedness, rebellion, and sin. Yet he does not leave the guilty unpunished, he punishes the children and their children for the sin of their fathers to the third and fourth generation. There's a whole lot to be unpacked there about God dealing with generational evil in these generationally evil people groups, and that gets unpacked throughout the entire Old Testament. But right here, we have this moment between God and Moses where God Himself shows up and is like, hey, uh, this is how I am. See what I did there? It's kind of a pun. Uh I am, and this is how I am. This is the kind of stuff that I do. I see it all. I'm compassionate, I'm gracious, I'm slow to anger, abounding in love and faithfulness. I maintain love to thousands. Also, I see the acts of the wicked, and it will be dealt with. I mentioned a second ago that Nehemiah referenced that. You'll recall if you were here for the season on Nehemiah, that one of Nehemiah's superpowers is he was a dude who knew this story really well. He consistently anticipated the character of God and sort of the rhythms of God, the attributes of God really well. When Nehemiah prayed, he prayed to God in keeping with who God is and what God was up to. Nehemiah was a guy who knew where he fit in the grand story of God. That's maybe one of the most impressive attributes about the guy. Well, in Nehemiah 9:17, Nehemiah and the leaders of the people are praying to God together, and this line is in there. But you are a forgiving God, gracious and compassionate, slow to anger and abounding in love. So this theme of God being like that, it isn't like he just said it once to Moses and then everybody forgot. No, this whole idea that God is patient is something that God, A, spells out for us about Himself, but also B, the fact that the world is the way the world is, that there is evil and brokenness around us, is something that points to the patience and long view of God. I know a lot of people look at that evil and suffering, and at least at some point in your life, probably everybody at some point looks at that and is like, there can't possibly be a God because the world hurts and bad things happen. But there's another way to look at that, and that is there is a God, and as you might expect, his timeline is different than your timeline and my timeline. He is in the process of redeeming this whole giant thing. He's being patient, also justice will happen, and he will not forget. Reason takes us to that picture of an all-powerful God, considered in light of a world that includes pain and suffering, and also the Bible and the overt words of God take us to that picture, that understanding of an all-powerful God against the backdrop of a world that includes pain and suffering. There's this beautiful balance wherein God totally sees it and he's totally gonna deal with it, and it's all gonna get sorted out at some point, but also he's long-suffering and he's compassionate. He's doing two things at once here, and he's gonna do it exactly right. Well, out of that set of characteristics flows this particular fruit of the spirit. And I'm gonna need at least one more day to think about exactly how that patience flows out of the character of God and into us as a fruit of the spirit. So more on all of this tomorrow. I'm Matt. This is a 10-minute Bible hour podcast. Let's do this again soon.