Patience

What is patience in the Bible, where does it begin, and how do God's people learn it when a promise is slow or a neighbor hard to bear? The answer is drawn from the text in order. It opens with the four Hebrew and Greek words and seven key texts from the Law to Revelation. It gives the commands to be patient, its ground in God, and the patience Jesus taught and showed. It names the people who waited, the practice and the haste and anger that stand against it, then the stories of the Bible and the church and the voices that taught it. Ten studies take each part further, and three questions close it.

The psalms and the prophets tell God's people again and again to wait for Him, and the Teacher of Ecclesiastes adds that “a patient spirit is better than a proud one” (Ecclesiastes 7:8).

The letters of the New Testament turn the command toward people as well. James gives both commands in one paragraph. He tells the brothers to be patient until the Lord's coming, and then he says, “Do not complain about one another, brothers, so that you will not be judged” (James 5:9).

The psalms sing this name back to God (Psalm 86:15), and the prayer of Nehemiah 9 pleads it for a people who had refused to listen (Nehemiah 9:17).

The New Testament says why God waits. Peter writes that God waited patiently while the ark was being built (1 Peter 3:20), and he tells his readers that “our Lord’s patience brings salvation” (2 Peter 3:15).

God's patience also has an end. Paul warns that a hard and unrepentant heart is “storing up wrath against yourself for the day of wrath” (Romans 2:5), and Nahum sets slow to anger beside great in power (Nahum 1:3).

In the parable of the sower, the seed on good soil stands for those who hear the word, cling to it, “and by persevering produce a crop” (Luke 8:15). In the parable of the unforgiving servant, a servant begged his master, “Have patience with me,” and was forgiven his debt. He then went out and choked a fellow servant who begged him in the same words (Matthew 18:26 to 29).

He asked an unbelieving generation, “How long must I put up with you?” and then said, “Bring the boy here to Me” (Matthew 17:17). He told His disciples, “By your patient endurance you will gain your souls” (Luke 21:19).

Proverbs sets the patient man against the quick-tempered one, and its Hebrew sets long of nostrils against short of spirit (Proverbs 14:29).

Saul waited seven days at Gilgal for Samuel to come and offer the sacrifice. When Samuel did not come and the troops began to desert, Saul offered the burnt offering himself, and Samuel arrived just as he finished. Samuel told him that he had acted foolishly and that his kingdom would not endure (1 Samuel 13:8 to 14).

Kidd, Palmeri and Aslin (2013) found that 28 children waited longer when the adult had kept an earlier promise. A test in 23 laboratories with 2,141 people found no reliable support for the idea that self-control is used up as it is exercised (Hagger and others, 2016). These studies measure one part of patience, the wait for a larger good.