Father is pleased with your progress. You humans are all the same you know. You’re always refusing just to enjoy the moment you’re in when you don’t understand things. You know just because you don’t understand something doesn’t mean you can’t enjoy it. Father gave you all this for a gift. Have fun a little. You are at a royal affair. Maybe you should lighten up.” Really? My life was on hold and an angel was complaining to me that I needed to kick back and relax. Did an angel just tell me to lighten up?

As I look hard at the Bible, however, and at the two thousand years of church history since the Bible's completion, it seems evident that God has accommodated himself over and over to the weakness and even the sin of human beings. He also has called his faithful ones to a similar accommodation. The 'already but not yet' tension is clear not only with the coming of Christ but also throughout the Old Testament story of redemption. God chooses a people as a vehicle for global salvation and then works with them in a convoluted trajectory of obedience and blessing, disobedience and punishment, first this way and then that way. God puts up with a compromised plan for the conquest of Canaan, blesses a monarchy he did not want, forestalls the prophesied judgment on both northern and southern kingdoms for generations, and even then preserves a remnant and reestablishes it in Jerusalem. God works not only through Israel but also through the empires of Egypt, Assyria, Persia, and Rome. God works not only through prophets and saints but also through Joseph's brothers, Balaam and his donkey, Nebuchadnezzar and Darius, Caiaphas and Pilate.