as good as it gets?

Some of us are old enough to remember the 1997 movie “As Good as It Gets” with Jack Nicolson and Helen Hunt.  Admittedly, that’s how I sometimes approach the promises of God, which could seem a tad farfetched and outlandish to my limited understanding.  Instead of focusing on God, all too often I see God from a worldly point of view, and I simply don’t get it, I just don’t get Him.  And I look around me, living by sight rather than by faith, and I conclude, “This is as good as it gets.”

Truth be told, in the light of the many amazing promises that God has lavished on ISI (such as Isa. 54 on which our ministry plan is based), I often find it difficult to comprehend the magnitude and scope of God’s vision, or I think of what it’s going to take to get from “my here” to “God’s there”, and I confess to feeling at times deflated and disillusioned.  And I wonder, “This is about as good as it is going to get, right?”  

The story of Abraham is equally about a man who was given at times to thinking, “This is as good as it gets.”  Did Abraham believe God, did he take God’s promises to heart?  You bet!  In Gen. 12, we’re introduced to Abraham (then known as Abram), who, in response to God’s call, left his home country of Mesopotamia for Canaan, even though he didn’t know his exact destination.  Despite taking a few wrong turns, Abraham pretty much hung on to God and His word, he lived an honorable life, faithful and obedient to God, and he began fulfilling, at least in part, the Abrahamic blessing of becoming a blessing to others (Gen. 12:1-3).  In fact, nowhere do we see a more definitive affirmation of Abraham’s relationship with God than in Gen. 15:6, “Abram believed the LORD, and [God] credited it to him as righteousness.”  

And yet life just has a way of wearing us down in the at-times long and wearisome wait for God to fulfill His promises.  Decades after the Lord first spoke His promises over Abraham, we see Abraham, at 100 years old, receiving yet another reminder from God, in Gen. 17: 

“15 God also said to Abraham, ‘As for Sarai your wife, you are no longer to call her Sarai; her name will be Sarah.  16 I will bless her and will surely give you a son by her.  I will bless her so that she will be the mother of nations; kings of peoples will come from her.’  17 Abraham fell facedown; he laughed and said to himself, ‘Will a son be born to a man a hundred years old?  Will Sarah bear a child at the age of ninety?’  18 And Abraham said to God, ‘If only Ishmael might live under your blessing!’” (Gen. 17:15-18, NIV)  

Do we see what happened there?  Abraham, still very much the man of faith but one worn down and ground down by life — he’s a centenarian by this point — but now his perspective is framed, shaped, and limited by the here-and-now, by what he sees, by commonsensical experience.  By commonsense, Abraham knows it’s physically and humanly impossible for him and for Sarah to bear children because of their advanced age.  

And truth be told, there’s a part of me that thinks, hmm ISI is turning 70 next year — we’re not quite as old as Abraham! — but at 70 and having “been there and done that,” we might be forgiven for feeling now and then a tad “ecclesiastical”, as in Eccl. 1:9-10: “What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun.  Is there anything of which one can say, ‘Look!  This is something new’?” (NIV).  It’s that whole “this is as good as it gets” logic again, isn’t it?  By commonsense, Abraham looks around and sees only what is physically visible/tangible and what is empirically verifiable, and what/who does he see standing before him?  Ishmael.  And he reasons: “Sarah, bearing a child at 90 years?  C’mon, God, who are You kidding?  Why not just make Ishmael the child of promise, and be done with it?  Ishmael is as good as it gets!”  

But God clearly had different ideas!  We pick up from where we previously left off in Gen. 17: “Then God said, ‘Yes, but your wife Sarah will bear you a son, and you will call him Isaac.  I will establish my covenant with him as an everlasting covenant for his descendants after him’” (Gen. 17:19 NIV).  (Poor Isaac, who gets his name because his parents laughed in incredulity at God’s ridiculous promise!)  And so, despite all that life has thrown at them, 100-year-old Abraham and 90-year-old Sarah brush aside their doubts and call to mind the goodness and greatness of God.  

The author of Lamentations puts it this way: “19 I remember my affliction and my wandering, the bitterness and the gall.  20 I well remember them, and my soul is downcast within me.  21 Yet this I call to mind and therefore I have hope: 22 Because of the LORD’s great love we are not consumed, for his compassions never fail.  23 They are new every morning; great is your faithfulness.  24 I say to myself, ‘The LORD is my portion; therefore I will wait for him.’  25 The LORD is good to those whose hope is in him, to the one who seeks him; 26 it is good to wait quietly for the salvation of the LORD” (Lam. 3:19-26, NIV).

Despite all the “signs and evidence” around us that scream, “This is as good as it gets!,” we are to recall, literally to dredge up, memories of God’s faithfulness, whose newness and freshness pushes against Ecclesiastes’ “nothing new under the sun” logic, overwhelming it.  It’s not unlike how the father of the demon-possessed son in Mk. 9:24 exclaimed, “I do believe; help me overcome my unbelief!”  

As God might have said to Abraham and Sarah, as He says to us today, “Forget the former things; do not dwell on the past.  See, I am doing a new thing!  Now it springs up; do you not perceive it?” (Isa. 43:18-19, NIV).  And so we get that wonderful affirmation in Heb. 11:11-12: “And by faith even Sarah, who was past childbearing age, was enabled to bear children because she considered him faithful who had made the promise.  And so from this one man [Abraham], and he as good as dead, came descendants as numerous as the stars in the sky and as countless as the sand on the seashore.”  Wow!  And so, too, the outlandish, mind-blowing promises with which God has gifted us.  

Is this as good as it gets?  No, far from it, not as long as God has a say in the matter!

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