Our blessings are almost an embarrassment. If we were thankful, it would be okay. Instead, we disgrace ourselves with skimpy gratitude and boldness. We have considerable freedom and security for gathering to worship; it costs us very little. We have our own copies of God’s Word, let alone working eyes and the education to read it. We also have a two-thousand year long hindsight over generations of Christians who settled a foundation of clear and coherent truth for us to stand on.

What amazes and encourages me is that God controls both the course and the pace of our history. That means that He must enjoy, at least in some way, the dramatic suspense of centuries long confusion.

For a few hundred years after Christ came, the early church struggled to explain Christ’s nature. How could He be both fully God and fully man, glorious in humility and even death? Jesus’ own disciples were confused and, though they recorded truth accurately with the help of the Spirit, their disciples still struggled. From our vantage point, we live in the clarity they labored to find.

Again, I’m amazed and encouraged that this was all according to God’s plan. Does He not desire great, global honor for His Son? Does He not want all men to know His Son’s excellent glory? Does He not expect us to see and praise the grace, truth, love, and humility of the eternal Logos? Yes! A thousand times, Yes! And yet the Father was, and is, okay taking His time for the truth to spread.

We benefit from observing this process in at least two ways. First, we can be thankful for God’s gracious placement of us at this bend in the river of history. Second, we can be confident that God will continue to fix the confusion about and overcome the rebellion against His Son as we labor by His strength today. The world knows Jesus more than it did and, according to His Word, it will know more than it does now.