“And her husband Joseph, being a just man and unwilling to put her to shame, resolved to divorce her quietly.” (Matthew 1:19)
After re-reading the Christmas story this year, I realised the Bible records that Joseph wanted to divorce Mary quietly when she got pregnant with Jesus (not knowing yet, of course, who the child was or would be) because he was “a just man” and “unwilling to put her to shame”.
Maybe there are some things we want to “divorce quietly” – when God is actually incubating our biggest blessing inside them.
Sometimes it’s precisely because we are nice decent people trying so hard to make the right decisions that we miss out on what God is doing. Maybe there are some things we want to “divorce quietly” – when God is actually incubating our biggest blessing inside them.
The single most important person to ever be in Joseph’s life lay within the part of it he wanted to forget. Sometimes your destiny is buried within hurt.
Truth be told, Jesus would have been born either way – whether Joseph chose to walk out of the scene or not – which could have very well happened. But God intervened. God wanted to include Joseph. Joseph was about to overlook and reject the move of God, but God did not overlook or reject Joseph.
Instead, He gave him the chance to father His own Son, the Saviour of all humanity … To live for something much larger than himself.
Recently, I heard a sermon on another child in the Bible with a complicated entry into the world: Ishmael. You may know Ishmael as Abraham’s first son, borne out of his wife Sarah’s desire to have a child after a lifetime of barrenness, and conceived with their servant Hagar (Genesis 16).
Contrary to what we might hastily conclude, that Ishmael wasn’t the son promised to them by God years before and therefore a reject, Ishmael was never actually rejected by God – only by Sarah, who quickly grew resentful of her servant, and tried to drive her out more than once.
It’s natural to assume that God has rejected the seeds we sowed that we now regard as mistakes. But God never rejects us or the dreams we hold. God honoured Abraham’s love for Ishmael, and promised on multiple occasions to make him “a great nation”.
“The angel of the Lord found Hagar near a spring in the desert … Then the angel of the Lord told her, ‘Go back to your mistress and submit to her.’ The angel added, ‘I will increase your descendants so much that they will be too numerous to count.'” (Genesis 16:7-10)
As much as Ishmael was a son of compromise, God was still a Father of promise.
When Hagar and Ishmael eventually had to leave, God rescued and provided for them while Abraham mourned. The Bible says that “God was with the boy”. He is a God who stays even when we’ve left the game. He is a master of redemption, and His redemptive plans for all the offspring of Abraham and their covenantal relationship unfold till this day.
As much as Ishmael was a son of compromise, God was still a Father of promise.
For those things we won’t be carrying into the new year for one reason or another, God doesn’t despise us or where we’ve been. Rather, He takes our Ishmaels in and cares for them tenderly. But if we don’t surrender the events of our past to Him, He can’t bring forth greatness from them.
In 2019, there will be some things we must carry to full term and bring forth, and some things we just have to leave in God’s hands. But whatever the case, we learn to lean not on a worldly perspective of what deserves to be despised, and what deserves to be valued.
If 2018 was a year of your compromise, may 2019 be the year you experience the mercy of His promises, which forever remain. This new year isn’t about simply putting things away; it’s about seeing Jesus in your hurt and mistakes. The power to accept is in the knowing that God never rejected you.
