Acts 7:30-34. Stephen continues: After Moses was in Midian for forty years, God spoke to him from burning bush, saying "I am the God of Abraham and of Isaac and of Jacob." God told Moses to take off his sandals, as he was standing on holy ground. God said that He had seen the ill-treatment of His people in Egypt and was sending Moses to Egypt to deliver them.

In yesterday's reading, Stephen pointed out that Moses was forty years old when he killed the Egyptian and fled to Midian. Now he says that forty years later, God spoke to Moses from a burning bush. We can never put a schedule or a timeline on God, He acts when the time is right, in the "fullness of time," as only He knows it to be. However, there does seem to be some loose cosmological order to when things happen. God points out to Moses that He is the God of Abraham, of Isaac, and of Jacob. To Moses, those men were centuries in the past, just as Jesus is for us, yet, just like us with Jesus, Moses, as a good Jew, read and heard about those men every day. So God is, in some way, showing his timelessness here.

God is order itself, without His constant care all would be chaos, so it is not surprising if the "fullness of time" actually has an order to it as well. This is appealing to my own sense of order. I feel things are reaching a point where God is soon going to act, having seen the perversion of His Word, and the resultant ill-treatment of His people. I don't know when this will be, as I've said multiple times, but I do feel it will be somewhat "soon," not necessarily in my lifetime but perhaps not long thereafter.

It was approximately 2,000 years from the call of Abraham to the birth of Jesus. Perhaps a loose 2,000 years is one of those periods in which time comes to its fullness. Knowing that God sees all and acts when the time is right, and seeing that there appear to be cycles to the time periods of His intervention, makes it easier for me to wait, pray, and trust. He does not have a deadline, but He has invited us all to a wedding feast, and told us to be ready when the Bridegroom arrives. My anticipation of the arrival of the Groom is growing, and I find God's timely interventions another thing that helps me feel that anticipation with joy and hope, rather than impatience.