On divine patience, human suffering, and the hope that history is going somewhere
On the morning of 6 May, I woke up with Revelation 6:9-11 fresh in my mind. Before I had even reached for my Bible, my thoughts jumped instinctively to Genesis 15:16. From opposite shores of Scripture, two texts arrived in the same tide. I knew the Holy Spirit wanted to say something profound to me through them, and I have been pondering that prompting for the last couple of weeks. I share these insights gladly, and I hope they find you at exactly the right moment.
The World We Wake Up To
We live in a world that is simultaneously loud and numb. Scroll through any news feed, and you will find injustice on an industrial scale – wars that grind on for years, the innocent suffering while the powerful manoeuvre, corruption that seems to evade consequence, cruelty that is documented and forgotten within a week. And yet, alongside the global, there is the intensely personal: the diagnosis that came back wrong, the relationship that fractured and hasn’t healed, the prayer that has been prayed ten thousand times and still hangs in the air unanswered.
In moments like these, the human soul asks one of its oldest questions. It is not an academic question. It comes from somewhere deep and honest: Where is God in all of this? Does he see? And if he sees, why doesn’t he do something?
These are not questions that betray weak faith. They are the questions of every honest believer who has ever taken both God’s goodness and the world’s brokenness seriously at the same time. And the Scriptures, remarkably, meet us there.
Two Texts, One Conviction
Nestled within Genesis 15 is a moment that can slip by almost unnoticed. God has just made His covenant with Abram – stars in the sky, a smoking fire pot, a promise as ancient as the night itself. And then, almost as an aside, God tells Abram something strange: his descendants will eventually inherit the land, but not yet. Not for four generations. “… for the iniquity of the Amorites is not yet complete” (Gen. 15:16).
Not yet complete. The Amorites are sinful, yes, but their sin hasn’t reached its measure. God is, in some sense, waiting. Not because He hasn’t noticed, but because He is governing the moral arc of history with a precision that human impatience can barely comprehend.
Fast-forward to the last book of the Bible. The seals are being opened, the world is shaking, and beneath the heavenly altar a crowd of martyred souls cries out: “How long, O Sovereign Lord, holy and true, before you judge and avenge our blood?” (Rev. 6:10). It is one of the most raw, human prayers in all of Scripture. These are not people who have lost their faith. They are people who have died for it, and they want to know when God will do something about it.
The answer they receive is not what we might expect. They are given white robes, told to rest, and informed that they must wait a little longer, until the full number of their fellow servants has been completed.
Until the number is complete
Two texts stand at opposite ends of sacred history: one at the covenant’s birth, the other at its ultimate revelation. And yet they share a single, startling conviction: God governs history through thresholds of completion. He is not waiting passively. He is counting.
The God Who Measures
We live in a culture of instant accountability. We expect responses within hours, verdicts within weeks, justice within a news cycle. When it doesn’t come – when the wicked prosper, when the faithful suffer, when prayers seem to dissolve into silence – we are tempted toward one of two conclusions: either God doesn’t care, or God isn’t there.
Genesis 15 and Revelation 6 refuse both conclusions. They offer something harder and more sustaining: God is present, attentive, and purposeful, but he operates on a moral timeline that transcends our urgency.
The Amorites were not getting away with anything. God saw them. He was simply allowing their rebellion to fill to its measure before judgment fell because His judgments are morally precise, not merely chronological. He doesn’t act when we think He should. He acts when the moment is complete. Paul would later call this the riches of God’s forbearance – a patience designed not to excuse sin but to allow space for repentance (Romans 2:4). When that space is finally exhausted, the response is certain and total.
This is not comfort for the complacent. It is comfort for the suffering and a warning to the unrepentant.
The Cry God Honours
What strikes me most about Revelation 6 is that the martyrs are not rebuked for crying out. “How long?” is not treated as a failure of faith. It stands in a long and honourable tradition, echoing the lament of Psalms 13, 79, and 94, and the anguished cry of Habakkuk: “How long?” God does not answer the martyrs with a theological lecture on His sovereignty. He answers them with a white robe – a symbol of dignity, vindication, and belonging – and with a promise that the waiting has a shape.
There is a number. God knows it. When it is reached, He will act.
This is one of the most quietly sobering truths in the New Testament: more suffering lies ahead. The number is not yet full. But the suffering is not meaningless. Every martyr is known by name. Every act of faithful endurance is being gathered, counted, and held. The question “How long?” is heard, and the answer, though not the one we’d choose, is real: a little longer, and then.
A Word for the Suffering and the Waiting
Whether you think of ancient Israel labouring under Pharaoh, first-century believers dying under Rome, or Christians today facing persecution across the globe, or whether you are simply someone sitting with a private grief that no one else can see. These two texts speak in chorus. And what they say is this:
- Your suffering is seen. The martyred souls in Revelation are not floating in some vague spiritual ether. They are under the altar. The most sacred space, the place nearest to God. Their location is a theological statement: the suffering of the faithful is held in the holiest place in existence. Nothing that happens to you in faithfulness to God is outside His sight or beyond His care.
- Your cry is legitimate. “How long?” is not a prayer God silences. It is a prayer He receives. If you have cried that cry, you are in good company: the Psalmists cried it, the martyrs cried it, and none of them were told to stop. Lament is not the opposite of faith. It is often faith’s most honest expression.
- Your waiting has shape. The hardest thing about waiting is the suspicion that it might never end, that you are simply stuck in an open-ended nowhere. But these texts insist otherwise. The waiting has a telos, a completion point. God has not left the timeline open. There is a number, a threshold, a moment He has already determined. Your waiting is not drifting. It is moving toward something.
- Restraint now does not mean absence. The patience God showed toward the Amorites in Genesis 15 and the patience He asks of the martyrs in Revelation 6 is the same patience – holy, purposeful, and temporary. He is not absent while He waits. He is governing. And the same God who eventually brought Israel into the land and will ultimately vindicate every martyr is the God who is present with you in your particular waiting room right now.
History is not chaos. It is not random suffering punctuated by occasional relief. It is a filling up of sin that will be judged, of faithfulness that will be vindicated. God is counting the Amorites’ iniquity. God is counting the martyrs’ number. And in the same holy, purposeful way, He is counting every tear you have cried in His name.
The count will be complete.
And then He will act.
Blessings
Nico