Like her ancestor Jacob, Anna the prophetess saw God face to face. And the reason for them both seeing God face to face was the same too. For Jacob it came after years and years of struggling in his relationship with God, and then suddenly coming face to face with the realization that a very real and personal God had known his struggle and been with him all along (Genesis 35:3).
For Anna it came after years and years of struggling with God too, wondering when on earth he was going to come and save their nation and the whole world as promised in the Scriptures, and praying and fasting for that day to come, and then suddenly coming face to face with him in the arms of his parents, and realizing that a very real and personal God had known her struggle and been with her all along too.
Was their experience a foretaste, then, of Jesus knowing we’d have a struggle too, because in John 14:18 he told his disciples, “I will not leave you as orphans; I will come to you” and “you will see me” (19). He also promised to “show myself” to them (21), and along with his Father “make our home” with them (23).
And in 1 Peter 2:19, it sounds like God really appreciates us believing that, “For it is commendable (or to your credit, verse 20) if you bear up under the pain of unjust suffering (or you receive a beating for doing wrong and endure it, verse 20), because you are conscious of God.”
And fortunately it’s God who makes us conscious of him, just as he did for Jacob, so that Jacob could get through the unfair treatment he got at the hands of his uncle Laban – and survive some of the stupid things Jacob did to himself too. God never left Jacob as an “orphan.” Many times he “showed himself” to Jacob to prove that “I (God) am with you and I watch over you wherever you go.…and I will not leave you until I have done what I promised you” (Genesis 28:15).
And God didn’t leave Anna either, keeping her encouraged and hopeful through all those many decades of her not yet seeing the promised Saviour appear. And he does the same for us, that “even though you do not see him now,” 1 Peter 1:8, “you believe in him” – we’re “conscious” of him “shielding us by his power (through our struggles) until the coming of the salvation that is ready to be revealed in the last time” (5) – when we fully see Jesus face to face (1 John 3:2). Which ties in nicely with the next of Jacob’s sons, “Naphtali: where Jesus struggled”….(next blog)
