Will God Eventually Lose His Patience?

I am no fan of the alternative worldview fostered by the Left Behind of Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins. In terms of ability, I realize that I am not fit to sit at the same computer keyboard with either, given their success as authors – but their ability is not my real concern. And, I have no reason to doubt their commitment to God, and again, they stand on all before Jesus, not me – or you (Romans 14:4).
However, based on biblically-based, Christ-centered teaching, the Left Behind series leaves much to be desired. It is but the most recent example of reading the Bible in one hand, and the newspaper in the other. I am intimately acquainted with the product of prophecy-intense study. I lived it. The fictional premises of Left Behind and all of its genetic forefathers feed its followers an unending speculative diet of events that promise the time of the end to be near. Many followers and devotees of “prophecy teaching” respond to each new speculative salvo like sharks in a feeding frenzy. They can’t get enough of it. This end-times stuff is devoured by those caught in its clutches, until by God’s grace, one day some wake up and smell the roses of the full implications of the gospel of Jesus Christ.
It is my experience that those who once relied on speculative prophetic teaching find that hype and fear is not the stuff of the gospel – and often they find it difficult to move from a diet of frantic warnings that “the end is near” to the authentic gospel of Jesus Christ. When people find out that the Left Behind gospel is flawed, they often blame God for the fact that he was misrepresented. Sadly, in terms of the gospel of Jesus Christ, many then do get left behind.
I know many people, many of them dear friends, who have already been left behind, because of the same kind of teachings popularized by the Left Behind series. Some bow out of Christianity altogether, many becoming ambivalent in terms of faith and belief – with some winding up as agnostics and atheists.
I know – I spent 15 years thinking that “the end” could come at virtually any moment. My transition to authentic Christianity was like a walk through the valley of the shadow of death. How could I have been so wrong? How could I have been so mistaken -- and misled? Why didn’t I see how shallow and silly some of the teachings I held so near and dear actually were? How could I have once believed what I did?
Several weeks ago I found myself channel surfing, and there, before my eyes, Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins were being interviewed on NBC’s Dateline. The setting and script was all too familiar: 1) Secular interviewer entices Christian prophecy teacher to tell the world about his or her insights, 2) Prophecy teacher jumps at the opportunity to “reach the world” via secular media, 3) Secular media sees this as great television – a chance to yet again let a Christian demonstrate how unreasonable and preposterous the claims of his or her faith really are, 4) And once again, the world at large is given a stereotype of Christianity, evidenced by one minority view of how some view Bible prophecy.
The interviewer wanted to know why God would rapture believers in such a way so that mass chaos and incalculable suffering would result. After all, Rapture teaching (the pre-suppositional ground- zero of the Left Behind series) posits that believers will suddenly evaporate into thin air, without warning, even while they are engaged in critically important professional capacities such as bus drivers, airline pilots, surgeons and law-enforcement officers. Why would God sponsor such a disaster, resulting in such mayhem for those who, for some reason, are not ready, prepared or qualified for the Rapture? I could not believe the answer offered by the authorship team, the creative genius behind the blockbuster Left Behind series – “there will come a time when God will run out of patience.”
God is going to run out of patience??? That’s not my God. That’s not the God of authentic Christianity. The God who loved us so much that he gave us his Son, so that by believing in him we would not perish but have everlasting life, does not “lose his patience.”God is not sitting (or standing) in heaven, looking out of his huge control room picture-window down at our earth, shaking his head, slowly losing his cool. There will not be some time in the future when God is having a bad day, when his medication can no longer keep his blood pressure in check, when he blows all his fuses, and announces to the heavenly hosts – “All right. That’s it. I’ve had all that I can take. They have finally done it. Now it’s time to go down there and kick some serious ___.”Nothing in the Bible gives us any such idea.
Yes, God was grieved when the children of Israel were worshipping a calf while he was giving Moses the law on Mt. Sinai. But we fail to understand that the only way that the Bible can reveal God to us is through human language and reality. When we read of God’s anger, it is not one and the same as our anger. When we read of God’s wrath, it is not human wrath. When we read of God’s vengeance, it is not human vengeance.
In order for God to reveal himself to us, he condescends to our level, he accommodates his language to our reality, and uses “earth-speak” to reveal himself to us. The mere fact that God uses human language, speaking to us in our reality through our limited and earthbound linguistic symbols, is proof that we do not perfectly understand the nature and attributes of God.
God is not a God who is just like us. His thoughts and ways are not one and the same as ours (Isaiah 55:8). The psalmist quotes God as rebuking us, for “you thought I was altogether like you” (Psalm 50:21). We can give thanks that God is not just like us – upon reflection, which of us would really want him to be just like we are? Isn’t that why he is God and we are not?
Further, the God of the old covenant had an entirely different relationship with Israel, under the terms of the old covenant, than he does with Christians, who experience the new covenant through God’s grace and because of the cross of Christ. God does not lose his cool with us. He is not like us. God’s love is beyond our comprehension, beyond our measurement, beyond our capacity to grasp (Ephesians 3:18-21).
The Bible does speak of God’s love and his anger, but what a huge mistake it is for us to presume that his love and anger is understood, experienced and expressed as human love and anger is. The God of the Bible is not a God who is angry and needs to be appeased. The Cross does not appease an angry Father. That’s paganism – bad theology – even though you hear this in churches . . . Their idea is that the Father created, then we messed up the creation, and now the Father is just really mad, and somebody has to die. He won’t be happy until the Son dies. But hey, the Son’s alright with that. He says, "Well, to deflect the Father’s anger I’ll die for you." So the Son dies, then the Father says, "I’ve got enough blood, now I’m happy." That’s not Christianity. That’s absolute paganism.
Will God eventually lose his patience with you? Regardless of the implied teachings of the fictionalized Left Behind series, the truth is that you need not live in fear that one day God will lose his cool with you. He loves you with a perfect love, a love that is beyond anything we have ever or will ever experience. God is love. Yes, Jesus Christ will judge the world. But exactly how all of that will come about, and what will happen, to whom, when, where and why -- those details are not revealed to us. We do know that “No eye has seen, no ear has heard, no mind has conceived what God has prepared for those who love him” (1 Corinthians 2:9).
Will God eventually lose his patience with other people – people who do not accept Jesus Christ – people who are really bad sinners (not just plain old ordinary sinners like you and me)? No, God is not like us. He doesn’t experience road rage when the freeway commute in heaven is bumper to bumper and he is late for a meeting with the “four living creatures and the twenty-four elders” (Revelation 5:8). God will not lose his patience. Be assured that God doesn’t “lose it” as we humans can and do. After all, if it were possible for God to eventually lose his patience, my history books tell me that there would have been many times when that would have already happened.
Spend some time in prayer and thought considering God’s love for you – and for everyone else. Consider how God will continue to demonstrate his tender mercies to his creation. There is much suffering in our world today, and the pages of history are soaked with bloodshed. The future will bring more of the same. The future is not based, according to my Bible, on God’s losing his patience. The foundation and motivation of God’s Church in this age of grace is the love of God. God’s purpose of love is to save humanity from itself and from all of our lust, greed, envy, intolerance – and yes, lack of patience.

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