His Word for Our Waiting

Psalm 130:5–6,

5 I wait for the LORD, my soul waits,
and in his word I hope;
6 my soul waits for the Lord
more than watchmen for the morning,
more than watchmen for the morning.

What does it mean to wait for God? What does it mean to wait for anything?

It’s such a common word that we’d never think to look it up in the dictionary, but consider the standard English definition:  

/wāt/ : to stay in place in expectation of.

Conceptually, that’s the same meaning of the Hebrew word in Psalm 130, qavah, which means to “wait for; eagerly wait; expect.”

It requires that we are in a place currently of unfulfilled hope. And it’s a reasonable hope, not a pipe dream. There is a reality we desire, that we even expect, but we don’t have it yet. The ‘in-between’ of recognizing the possibility of such reality and actually experiencing that reality is called waiting.

On a small scale, we do this all the time for all kinds of different things. On a larger scale, this is the Christian life — it has been the life of faith ever since God made for himself a people. It’s the Book of Numbers. The journeying is a waiting.

And Psalm 130:5 clues us in on something vital for the wait. 

“In his word I hope.”

God’s word is for our waiting. We believe the Bible for how to live. As the psalmist says, Psalm 119:105,

Your word is a lamp to my feet
and a light to my path.

This means we’re not waiting in darkness. The world is dark, no doubt. We are surrounded by uncertainty, by threats and opposition, challenges and hardship. It’s the wild! But it’s not dark, because we have God’s word. We can see where to go. Our ultimate path is clear.

We must listen to the Word to live in the wild, as we’re discovering in Numbers.

Or as the Psalms tells us: God’s word is for our waiting.