The Pace Belongs to God
God's governance of timing in Ezekiel 36, Habakkuk 2, and 2 Peter 3
For years I preached election, argued for predestination, and rested in divine decree while giving too little thought to the sovereignty of God over timing. God governs timing as fully as He governs outcome, and He governs the pace of sanctification in His people.
Around 2019 the resistance surfaced. It began as grief. I watched professing believers ignore plain commands of Scripture. Discipline was neglected. Covenant faithfulness was treated as severity. The Word was clear, and I expected clarity to produce obedience.
When obedience did not follow, grief turned to anger. The anger ran toward people first and toward God beneath them. I resented His governance. I sinned from a heart that was both exhausted and defiant. If obedience seemed optional in practice, I asked myself what difference it made.
The season carried real suffering. Pressure reveals sin already in the heart; it does not produce it. Mine was revealed.
God refused to excuse me. He corrected me. He restored me. He uncovered the sin in others, and He uncovered mine first. My anger carried self-righteousness I had refused to see. My impatience exposed how much I wanted visible vindication.
The Lord has pressed the lesson inward.
I can repent of specific sins. I can name harsh words, wrong assumptions, and misdirected tone. I can ask forgiveness when I speak too quickly or press too hard.
Patience and passivity can appear similar for a time. Patience submits to God while continuing in the duty He has assigned. Passivity uses the language of waiting to excuse disobedience or avoidance.
The deeper temptation runs beneath all of this. I want to complete what God has not yet completed in others. The pace of His work strikes me as too slow for the urgency Scripture names. I want obedience visible now, misunderstanding corrected, and sanctification proportionate to the texts I read.
Ezekiel 36 speaks directly into that demand. The oracle is given to exiles, and every verb is God’s. “I will take you from the nations… I will sprinkle clean water on you… I will give you a new heart… I will put My Spirit within you and cause you to walk in My statutes” (Ezekiel 36:24–27 LSB). The Lord names a sequence: regathering, cleansing, new heart, new Spirit, caused obedience, restored covenant, agricultural fruitfulness, and finally the people’s recognition of their own past sin. The promise is monergistic and staged. God Himself builds duration into the work He pledges. The chapter opens and closes with the reason: “It is not for your sake, O house of Israel, that I am about to act, but for My holy name, which you have profaned among the nations, to which you have come” (Ezekiel 36:22 LSB). God acts on His own timetable because He acts for His own glory. Even the moment when His people loathe their former sin is His to give, and He gives it last in the order. To demand the pace is to ask the Lord to act for my sake instead of His name.
Habakkuk had the same impatience. The prophet stood at his watchpost after crying out against the violence and lawlessness in Judah, and the Lord answered: “For the vision is yet for the appointed time; It pants toward its end, and it will not lie. Though it tarries, wait for it; for it will certainly come, it will not delay” (Habakkuk 2:3 LSB). The Hebrew names an appointed time. The fulfillment is fixed to a moment God has set. What appears as slowness to the prophet is appointment from above. The text offers Habakkuk no faster pace; it commands him to wait under the schedule already set. The same word that comforts him also rebukes him. The vision is on time. The impatience belongs to the prophet, not to the Lord.
Peter takes the same doctrine into the church’s longest waiting. Scoffers had begun to mock the delay of Christ’s return. Peter answers them: “But do not let this one fact escape your notice, beloved, that with the Lord one day is like a thousand years, and a thousand years like one day. The Lord is not slow about His promise, as some consider slowness, but is patient toward you, not willing for any to perish but for all to come to repentance” (2 Peter 3:8–9 LSB). The apostle distinguishes God’s relationship to time from the creature’s. The metric of “delay” presupposes a timetable God does not inhabit. The apparent slowness is patience, and the patience has a saving purpose: the gathering of those who will yet repent. The same mercy that has held me up extends time over the brother whose obedience I am tracking. When I demand a faster pace from him, I ask the Lord to spend on me a patience He withholds from others.
The three texts converge. Ezekiel shows the Lord owning every step of the work, including its order. In Habakkuk, what looks like delay is appointment. Peter calls the apparent slowness mercy in mid-action that gathers the elect. Sovereignty includes process. Sanctification moves through layers, setbacks, and exposures on a schedule the Lord sets. He may work slowly. The Lord has given me no right to demand a faster work than the one His wisdom has appointed.
My endurance has not always flowed from love. Pride has been mixed in. So has fear of being dismissed and the need to be right. Zeal for holiness becomes self-serving when it demands immediate results.
God has been patient with me. That fact alone should quiet me.
I will keep proclaiming what Scripture teaches and repent quickly where I sin. The pace of transformation belongs to God. He finishes what He begins. "He has made everything beautiful in its time" (Ecclesiastes 3:11 LSB).