A Thousand Generations

Are you disappointed your big dreams don’t seem to be reaching completion in your lifetime? The ones you thought you were put on this earth to accomplish?

Our faith forefathers and mothers can probably relate.

We read about them in Hebrews 11. Faith giants Abel, Enoch, Noah, Abraham, and Sarah watched many impossible things come to pass. Yet verse 13 says, “all died in faith, not having received the promises.” They saw them “afar off were assured of them, embraced them,” but died before the promises arrived.

Wait a minute! How can that be? Isaiah 55:11 says God’s word never returns to Him void and always accomplishes what He sent it to do.

Might it be God’s promises are sometimes too big to finish in one generation? Maybe, when we leave this earth and lay down our baton, someone else is destined to pick it up and carry it toward the finish line. It happened with each of the patriarchs just mentioned. They laid the foundation but it was their descendants who continued the building. Generation after generation, they took the dream farther than their ancestors.

John 4:37–38 hints at this developmental process. “For in this the saying is true: ‘One sows and another reaps.’I sent you to reap that for which you have not labored; others have labored, and you have entered into their labors” (NKJV).

God is not limited by time

We so often think in terms of God’s plan for our lives as beginning only when we’re born and ending at the time of our death. God, however, thinks outside of time. He began planning for our destiny before we appeared. One or more of our biological or spiritual ancestors commenced on some work, some calling, some promise and we stepped onto the path they cleared. We build on foundations already laid, plant crops on fields already plowed, enter into promises already given. Then He freshens and augments them with additional promises to us.

Consider Deuteronomy 7:9. “Therefore know that the Lord your God, He is God, the faithful God who keeps covenant and mercy for a thousand generations with those who love Him and keep His commandments” (NKJV).

A thousand generations! If a generation is even twenty years, that’s 20,000 years He remembers a promise.

You may not be aware of a spiritual heritage in your family line, but if you had an ancestor even hundreds of years ago to whom God promised holy descendants — offspring who would follow hard after the Lord — you may be part of the answer to his or her prayer all these generations later.

If we continue on through the end of Hebrews 11, verses 39–40 finish the litany of faith with these words: “And these all, having obtained a good report through faith, received not the promise: God having provided some better thing for us, that they without us should not be made perfect.”

Now, if God wants to include us in the completion of the patriarchs’ promises, why wouldn’t He want to include some of our biological or spiritual descendants in the completion of ours?

Let’s not lose faith, then. “The Lord is not slow in keeping his promise, as some understand slowness.” The vision may yet be for an appointed time. “At the end it will speak, and it will not lie. Though it tarries, wait for it; because it will surely come, it will not tarry” (2 Peter 3:9 NIV and Habakkuk 2:3 NKJV).