Blessed Be the Lord, Because He Came

Every morning at ten past six she prays the same thing, and she has prayed it for so long that she can hear her own rhythm in it.

Lord, come and get me out of this.

She does not mean anything dramatic. She means the job that is grinding her down, and a marriage that has gone quiet in a way she cannot describe to anybody, and the low gray feeling that has been sitting on her since about March. She is asking God to come. To turn up. To do something.

And she has been asking so long that the asking has become the whole shape of her life with God: a woman standing at a window watching a road, waiting to see somebody coming.

Here is what she has never noticed, and it is not her fault, because nobody ever put it in front of her.

The verse she was given at her confirmation at fourteen, on a card she still has in a drawer, says something in the past tense.

Blessed be the Lord God of Israel; for he hath visited and redeemed his people.

Hath visited. Past. Done. Somebody already came. And she has spent twenty-nine years at the window asking Him to.

Zacharias sings in the past tense

When John's father gets his voice back after nine months of silence, the first thing he does is bless God, and it is worth noticing what he blesses Him for.

Blessed be the Lord God of Israel; for he hath visited and redeemed his people (Luke 1:68).

Now, at the moment he says that, nothing has visibly happened yet. Jesus has not been born. Nothing has been preached, nobody has been healed, the cross is thirty years away. Zacharias is holding a baby who is not the Messiah and singing in the completed past.

He is not describing the news. He is stating what God has settled, and the tense he chooses is the tense of a thing done.

You are standing inside a rescue that has already happened. Scripture says He has visited and redeemed, and it says it in the perfect tense on purpose, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes a finished thing land on a woman at a window, because He is called the Spirit of truth and the truth here is a date that has already passed.

What twenty-nine years of asking has cost, and what it has not

Let me be careful, because I am not about to tell you those prayers were a waste. They were not.

God heard every one of them. Asking Him to come is not a doctrinal error; it is the cry of half the psalms, and He has never once been irritated by it. If you had spent twenty-nine years silent, that would be a different article.

But here is what it has cost, and I think you can feel it. A woman who is always asking God to arrive is a woman who has never once thanked Him for arriving, and after enough years the relationship has only one direction in it. You know Him as somebody you are waiting for. You do not know Him as somebody who came.

You have already been visited, and the visiting was not a possibility He was considering. The word says while we were yet sinners Christ died for us (Romans 5:8), which is the visiting described in the plainest terms it can be put in, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes a historical fact into a present possession.

Redeemed is a market word

Redeem is not a religious word. It came out of a market, and it means a price was paid to get somebody back who was not free.

Which means when Zacharias blesses God for redemption, he is blessing Him for a transaction, not a mood. Something was paid. Somebody was released. There is a receipt.

That is why he can sing it in the past tense while the baby in his arms is six days old. He is not predicting. He is reading out what God has committed Himself to, in a tense that says: this is not in doubt.

You have been bought back, and the price is not being negotiated. Scripture says you were bought with a price (1 Corinthians 6:20), and the Holy Spirit is called the seal and the deposit on it, which means what happened to you is legal and dated and not pending.

And this site sells nothing, so let me say the hard part plainly. Blessing God for the rescue that came does not tell you what happens to the job or the marriage or the gray feeling since March. I have no word for you about those and I will not invent one. What is settled is that somebody already came, and a woman who blesses God for that prays about her Monday from a completely different position than a woman at a window.