When God Says, "Enough!"

By David Hobbs

Isa. 40:2--“Speak comfort to Jerusalem, and cry out to her, that her warfare is ended, that her iniquity is pardoned; for she has received from the Lord’s hand double for all her sins.” 

 As Christians, we are all familiar with the dealings of the Lord in our lives. We get trials that seem to go on forever. We pray and pray for things that in many cases never seem to happen, We might get prophetic words over us of promise for our futures that never seem to materialize, We pray and pray for revival that never seems to come. Instead people write books like Why Revival Tarries.

Personally I have been praying, believing and hoping for revival almost since I was saved 40 years ago, when I came in on the tail end of the Jesus’ Movement. I saw a lot of wondrous and exciting things, but not compared to the stories I heard of what God had been doing only a few years before.

God is patient and long suffering; we know that. God is more concerned about  our development than the trials we might be going through; we know that. God has His own timetable for dealing with na-tions, with His ancient people Israel and the church; we know that. But it can sometimes seem like we’re always in a waiting mode: “keep on keeping on.” So we pray, “Lord, when will revival get here? When will the church wake up? When will this physical infirmity be healed? When will the money come in? When will I get victory over this besetting sin?” When we read the Psalms we realize we are not alone. How many times did the psalmist cry out, “How long, O Lord?”

 There is an end to every trial; there is a fulfillment for every promise; there is a time in God, as long as we keep following Him, when every condition will be met. Therefore it can be comforting to search the Scriptures for the times when God said, “Enough!” Look at the life of Noah. He was doing what God commanded him to do (building the ark) for 100 years through the scorn and ridicule of his neighbors who had never seen it rain. It was a gargantuan task, if you consider how huge the ark was. But there came a day when God said, “Enough! Move into the ark, you and your family, and I will start sending the animals.”

“But Lord, I’m still trying to finish this crown molding and I’ve got a few stalls I want to 'cherry out' with some stained ‘chair-rail’.”

 “ENOUGH!”

“Yea Lord.”

Here is something most people miss. After the flood, and they’ve been on the ark over a year with the stinky animals, they set down on a mountain, Noah takes off the ark’s cover, and sees that the ground is dry. That happens in v. 13 of Genesis 8. In the next verse, God tells him to leave the ark. But if you look at the timeline, v. 14 happems one month and 27 days after v. 13. So apparently Noah had to sit nearly two months cooped up in the ark feeding the restless animals while the earth was beckoning him. He had to remain beached on the mountain two excruciating months for God to say, “Enough! Now you may go.”

 Peter explains it so we can understand the ways of God. In 2 Peter 3:8 he says:

But, beloved, do not forget this one thing, that with the Lord one day is as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day. The Lord is not slack concerning His promise, as some count slackness, but is longsuffering toward us, not willing that any should perish but that all should come to repentance.

 At a thousand years to a day, time moves slowly! But no matter how slowly it passes, the day will still come when God says, “Enough!” and pulls the plug on this wicked world. When that happens, it will be so sudden that it will be too late for the fence-sitters and procrastinators to jump in. The Bible is full of stories of people who weren’t ready and missed out, from the foolish virgins to Esau who “found no place of repentance, though he sought it carefully with tears.” [Heb. 12:17 KJV]

Consider Enoch, one of my heroes. The Bible says Enoch walked with God and God took him so he never tasted death (a picture of the Rapture?). Enoch had the distinction of fathering the man who lived longer than anyone else on earth, Methuselah. After Methuselah was born to Enoch at age 65,  Enoch started walking with God and continued for 300 years until God took him. Think of it: walking with God for 300 years, longer than the U.S. has been a country--from 1715 until now!--until the day God said, “Enough, come home with me now.”

 On the other hand, in Gen. 6:3 God says “My Spirit shall not strive with man forever… yet his days shall be one hundred and twenty years.” God will only deal with man and sin for so long until He likewise says, “Enough!” At the end of that 120 years He sent Noah’s flood and drowned every living creature.

Why do I say all this? To encourage God’s people that there is an end to every trial, every infirmity, every stressful situation, every period of mourning. Though it tarry long, allow God to have His way in your life and take you through it, though you have to slog through a day, an hour, or even one tear at a time. God is faithful. The time must come when He will say, “Enough!”

Jacob, when he thought he lost his son Joseph, said he would go down to the grave mourning for him (Gen. 37:35), but God had a better plan than that. Though it took 20 long years, suddenly Joseph turned up very much alive and in charge of all Egypt! And during that 20 years, Joseph went through some things himself. Though he had done nothing wrong, first he was sold into slavery in Egypt, then, because he feared God and wouldn’t sin with Potiphar’s wife, he was thrown into the dungeon where “they hurt his feet with fetters, he was laid in irons” [Psalm 105:18]. Even the butler who was supposed to help him get out, instead forgot him, adding 2 more years to his incarceration.

But still, the time came when God said, “Enough!” and suddenly, in one day he found himself 2nd in command to the Pharaoh himself! The Bible is full of stories like this: David running for his life from King Saul for 13 years (but then becoming king for 40), Abraham waiting 25 years for the promise of a son to materialize, Isaac and Rebekah waiting 20 years for Jacob and Esau to be born, Israel going through the 400 silent years before John the Baptist appeared, and on and on. Do we see a pattern, here?

 The Bible says in James 1:4 we are to “let patience have its perfect work, that [we] may be perfect and complete, lacking nothing.” And in Heb. 10:7—“For yet a little while, and He who is coming will come and will not tarry.” That “little while” the writer was speaking of has stretched into 2000 years! But it’s still just as true today as it was then. “The Lord is not slack concerning His promise, as some count slackness, but is longsuffering toward us, not willing that any should perish.”