When we who are Christians, who have trusted in Jesus for our salvation by faith alone, are wronged by other people or feel wronged by events, often our first question to God, or about Him, is why He allowed it at all. Our minds then often ask what He is going to do about it and when. This is true when other people are overtly wronged or suffer adversity, not just ourselves. It has been part of human nature since before Job suffered without knowing that God was allowing Satan to test him. King David asked, "How long, O Lord?", in the Psalms, as did others. After asking God why, we very often ask Him when. Sometimes our view of God as eternal makes us think speed means nothing to Him. God believes in speed, all right. We just need to see it the way He does. In [Luke 18:8], Jesus made a promise about God "avenging His own elect" which is very important: "I tell you that He will avenge them speedily." Like Jesus' statement in [Matthew 24:42] and the implied meaning in [Luke 17:26-33], sometimes He meant that a thing will take place quickly once it has begun, even though it may not yet have happened from the time of His earthly ministry until now. There is a time and a way to name God's promises in His Word and to claim them in prayer. We need to understand God's promises when we claim them because He will fulfill them the way He meant them, so if we attach some other meaning we ask for disappointment. To understand what God the Father meant, or God the Son, the Lord Jesus Christ, "context is king." What does the context of [Luke 18:8] tell us? I believe that the context begins in verse 20 of chapter 17, where the Pharisees asked Jesus when the kingdom of God would come. His answer addressed their limited expectation of a Messiah King, the Son of David, who would avenge Israel's underdog political status as a nation and trample its enemies. To the Pharisees, he could not be the Christ if He did not quickly get down to business and overthrow Rome. The Pharisees had their beginning as a Jewish sect in the time of Antiochus, the Greek warlord conqueror, standing up to his efforts to stamp out Hebraic culture and worship and replace It with Greek culture and its gods. Years of pride in their noble beginning had narrowed their focus. Jesus answered them with the concept that "the kingdom of God is within you," not a political state of affairs where towns and cities and nations were under the rule of God, but a spiritual one. The kingdom of God, he was saying, exists wherever God is acknowledged as King and that begins in your own heart. Jesus then turned to His disciples, who had heard this, to address exactly that concept which He had tried to get the Pharisees to see beyond, namely His physical return. This is where He made His well-known remarks which compared human culture of the time of Noah, and that of Lot, to how it would be at His own return. He said that the unsaved world would be going about its business with no thought of God's judgment coming upon it, which would thus come suddenly. His warning to us who would listen and believe in Him was not to think that, (as Shakespeare wrote in "Macbeth"), "Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow creeps by in its petty pace from day to day," but that something is going to happen which will, once it starts, be so swift as to be impossible to escape - you must be saved already. I believe that the context of Jesus' promise in [Luke 18:8] tells us that it will be fulfilled when Christ comes back in full view of the world after the Great Tribulation. Paul may have been thinking of this promise in his second letter to Thessalonica, in the beginning of which, [II Thess. 1:5-10], he tells them, "Since it is a righteous thing with God to repay with tribulation those who trouble you..." The Lord's promise that God will avenge His elect "speedily" is clearly reflected in what Paul's epistle says will happen, "when the Lord Jesus is revealed from heaven with His mighty angels." Although I also believe that certain Scriptures that are to be fulfilled in the end times have been fulfilled in lesser ways through the years, which sometimes has included this promise, our ability to expect with certainty that this promise will be fulfilled must be based on God's whole Scriptural counsel - His entire Word. God may sometimes vindicate and avenge the wronged Christian in this lifetime. It is only certain, however, that He will completely avenge the world's rejection and persecution of His beloved Bride, His Church, at His final return. God believes in speed. He will use it when He chooses. He has not left us with no way to understand that. The same eternal unchanging God to whom "one day is as a thousand years," [II Peter 3:8], can judge thousands of years of sin in one day. "The Lord is not slack concerning His promise, as some count slackness," Peter then wrote, "but is longsuffering toward us, not willing that any should perish but that all should come to repentance." God's speed is something you don't want to see unless you are saved. If you love those you know, then you don't want to see it unless they are saved also. Trust Him on that - not just me.
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