There are very few things harder to bear, or more often handles of Satan, than those strangely protracted intervals which so frequently come in between prayers and their answers, between promises and their fulfilments, between good desires and their attainments, between the best-laid schemes and their reasonable success. The truth which I wish to press is this: that the space which intervenes in all these cases, and which seems to us so needless, so severe, is as much settled and predetermined by God as the prayer we offer, or the means we use, or the event itself for which we are looking. The two are parts of the same thing; both are ordained, both are covenanted. The time is an appointed one not loose definite; and the one is as certain as the other. Consider one or two of the reasons of God's mysterious painful dealing about intervals.
I. God will always be a sovereign not to be questioned, independent of man's opinions, infinitely beyond man's judgment, and always crossing the hands of man's expectations.
II. In heaven there is no time. It is impossible for us to conceive, much less to pronounce on, the action of one to whom all time is one perpetual now. In God's mind there is never any intermediate period. The prayer, the time after the prayer, the answer, when it comes, are all one He sees them perfectly identified.
III. It is a rule of God's government, which you will find pervading every part of it, that everything is made matter of faith before it is made matter of enjoyment.
IV. The discipline is very good and necessary, for it addresses itself to two of our weakest points our impatience and our pride. The man who wishes to have answers to prayer, must be a man who recognises that God is very kind and that he is very little he must be a child content to tarry his Father's leisure and the sooner, perhaps, that lesson is learnt the sooner will the Father give His child what He has been keeping from him just till he can say it.
J. Vaughan, Fifty Sermons,7th series, p. 174.
References: Daniel 10:11. G. T. Coster, Christian World Pulpit,vol. xviii., p. 170; W. M. Taylor, Daniel the Beloved,p. 251.Daniel 10:18. Spurgeon, Sermons,vol. xxii., No. 1295.