Now Sarai, Abram’s wife, had borne him no children. She had a female Egyptian servant whose name was Hagar. And Sarai said to Abram, “Behold now, the Lord has prevented me from bearing children. Go in to my servant; it may be that I shall obtain children by her.” And Abram listened to the voice of Sarai.
Genesis 16:1-2
This isn’t spelled out in Scripture; I’m just speaking from my own understanding of human nature. I know the temptation to look to the right or to the left when things aren’t going as planned, as imagined. We need to be careful about day dreaming about how things could be. We need to not imagine how things could play out. We can come up with our great plan for how things should go, even if based on a true promise of God.
Abraham could have daydreamed about having tons of kids. It didn’t happen. Nothing was happening, so it seemed.
That’s when we’re in danger of trying our own thing. “Well, maybe God wants me to…” and coming up with your own plan to get the thing you wanted, that you had dreamed about. Instead, we’re to wait on God and let Him do the planning and the carrying out. We need to trust Him to move, to be able to move through us, and to speak to us if we need to hear something from Him.
We need to be careful in tribulation not to imagine how things should go. We need to let Him deliver us and not plot our way of escape.
The “mark” may be nothing like we have imagined. The antichrist may be nothing like we imagined. The persecution, the arrests, the deaths may be nothing like we imagined. It doesn’t have to. It is not our job to know exactly what will happen. Our job is to look to Jesus and walk with Him. He’s all we ever need to know.
The Tribulation 