Therefore the Lord longs to be gracious to you, and therefore He waits on high to have compassion on you. For the Lord is a God of justice; how blessed are all those who long for Him.

      Isaiah 30:18

…who (God) desires all men (mankind) to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth. 

    1 Timothy 2:4

The Bible tells us much about what God desires. As we work through the Old and the New Testaments of scripture, pay very close attention to what is being said when it comes to what God desires and the cooperation, or lack of, from mankind. Let’s begin with a passage from Isaiah: “The Lord longs to be gracious to you.” God’s desire is to be gracious to us. This passage was written to the people of Israel but scripture teaches us that God’s desire is to show grace to anyone who will call on His name (Romans 10:13). Consider Paul’s words: “…who (God) desires all men to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth.” The word “men,” used in this passage, is not gender specific rather it can be translated “mankind” and literally means “humans.” God desires your salvation and He longs to be gracious to you but just like the people of Israel, God waits for a response. For the people of Israel, they had turned to idols. If we are honest about our lives, in this modern world, we can also find ourselves chasing after things that are temporal in nature and are only designed to serve us in this life. This too can be a turning away from God and the life that Christ died for us to receive. So the first thing that we need to understand is that God is longing to be gracious to us. 

Secondly, consider what else we find in Isaiah: “He (God) waits on high to have compassion on you.” God is patient and “waits” to have compassion on us. And the prophet Isaiah reminds us that His reason for desiring to show us grace and compassion is that God is a “God of justice.” But this is not the only place where we read about God’s desire toward us. Consider the words of Jesus as He looked over the city of Jerusalem:

Jerusalem, Jerusalem, who kills the prophets and stones those who are sent to her! How often I wanted to gather your children together, the way a hen gathers her chicks under her wings, and you were unwilling.

          Matthew 23:37

Look at the way Jesus describes the behavior of the people. These people were intolerant of the truth. They are designated, by Jesus, as a people “who kills the prophets and stones those who are sent to her!” Yet, in spite of this spiritual depravity, what was God’s desire for them? “How often I wanted to gather your children together, the way a hen gathers her chicks under her wings…” God still wanted to show them compassion and to gather them up and protect them, “the way a hen gathers her chicks under her wings…” Amazing! God wasn’t seeking their destruction rather He wanted to gather them up. So what was the problem? “How often I wanted to gather your children together, the way a hen gathers her chicks under her wings, and you were unwilling.” The people were unwilling! It wasn’t that God wanted to see their destruction yet, continued disobedience, lack of repentance, and a turning to false gods would indeed lead to that very destruction. But the point is that this clearly was not Jesus’ desire for these people. 

But let’s consider Jesus’ earthly ministry as well. Here are two parallel passages dealing with Jesus’ return to His hometown of Nazareth. 

And He could do no miracle there except that He laid His hands on a few sick people and healed them. And He wondered at their unbelief.

      Mark 6:5-6

And He did not do many miracles there because of their unbelief.

    Matthew 13:58

Jesus did not perform many miracles in His hometown and among the people who had watched Him grow up from childhood. Why? It was “because of their unbelief.” Again, it wasn’t that Jesus was uninterested in performing miracles there or addressing the issues of the people of Nazareth. No, it wasn’t God’s desire to see His hometown go without seeing miracles rather it was because of “their unbelief.” This lack of seeing the activity of God wasn’t because God was uninterested. It was the hearts of the people that limited this response from Christ.  

Looking at the Mark reference, we see that Jesus “wondered at their unbelief.” This word “wondered” is usually connected to the activity of humans when being faced with the Divine. Consider the definition of this word in the original text:

Wondered “often describes the reaction of people to the miraculous works and teachings of Jesus Christ. It can also denote a sense of admiration or surprise at something unexpected or extraordinary.” 

To “wonder” is to be surprised. Jesus was surprised at the unbelief of the people. Instead of referring to a human response to the Divine, we see Jesus expressing the same thing going the other way. Jesus’ reaction to the unbelief of people is expressed as one of amazement. 

Again, we see the desire of God and we see the response of the people. In the Isaiah passage, we see God’s desire to be gracious and have compassion on the people. In the 1 Timothy passage, we see God’s desire for all of mankind to be saved. As Jesus looked over Jerusalem, we see God’s desire to compassionately and graciously “gather them up.” And in Jesus’ return to His hometown, we see His desire to minister to them yet it was the unbelief of the people that restricted this response. 

But perhaps the best illustration that we have about God’s desire and the stubbornness of people is found in the account of the people of Israel refusing to go into the land that God had promised to give them (Numbers 13-14). The following is a very short but powerful and informative verse about how our response to God is consequential:

Now I desire to remind you, though you know all things once for all, that the Lord, after saving a people out of the land of Egypt, subsequently destroyed those who did not believe. 

          Jude 1:5

Did you catch the problem? It wasn’t that God did not want the people to enter…that reality is obvious in the historical account (Numbers 13-14). God’s desire was for the people to enter and claim the land in faith. But, unfortunately for the people of Israel in that generation, they allowed unbelief to dictate their response to God, His instructions, and His promises. We read the same instruction and warning in Hebrews:

Therefore, let us fear if, while a promise remains of entering His rest, any one of you may seem to have come short of it. For indeed we have had good news preached to us, just as they also; but the word they heard did not profit them, because it was not united by faith in those who heard.

          Hebrews 4:1-2

It was the unbelief of the people in Nazareth that kept Jesus from performing many miracles there (Matthew 13:58). It was the unbelief of the people of Israel that kept an entire generation out of the Promised Land (Jude 1:5). And it is our unbelief that keeps us from receiving God’s offer of salvation (Hebrews 4:1-2). 

God desires your salvation but that desire must be met with a heart of humility, repentance, and a willingness to believe. Then, after we have receive this amazing offer of salvation, God will come and live on the inside of our hearts, guiding us throughout our lives as we serve Him. But we need to understand the difference between what God desires, as a benevolent, loving, gracious, and compassionate God, and the outcome that results from either an unbelieving heart, stuck in rebellion or a humble one, desiring and seeking the Lord.