God The Promise Keeper

Have you ever had someone break a promise they made to you? Have you ever broken a promise you made to someone else?

When I was little, I had a friend who almost every day would say he was going to play with me at recess. Often, though, we would get to the playground and he would leave to do something else with someone else and he would look back and say, “I didn’t promise!” That’s a pretty pitiful picture of a pretty bad friend, isn’t it?

I often think of that friend when I read Jesus’ words in the sermon on the mount, where He says “Again you have heard that it was said to those of old, ‘You shall not swear falsely, but shall perform to the Lord what you have sworn.’ But I say to you, Do not take an oath at all, either by heaven, for it is the throne of God, or by the earth, for it is his footstool, or by Jerusalem, for it is the city of the great King. And do not take an oath by your head, for you cannot make one hair white or black. Let what you say be simply ‘Yes’ or ‘No’; anything more than this comes from evil” (Matthew 5:33-37). Jesus could say something like that because He was the ultimate Truth Teller and Promise Keeper. Even during His trial, when lying or backpedaling would likely have saved His life, He dug into the truth about who He was and where He came from. When pressured to deny who He was or admit to being something He was not, “He was oppressed, and he was afflicted, yet he opened not his mouth; like a lamb that is led to the slaughter, and like a sheep that before its shearers is silent, so he opened not his mouth” (Isaiah 53:7).

This notion of God keeping His promises is something that we consistently see throughout scripture, and that is precisely the point: consistency. Ever since the beginning of time, God has kept His promises, most notably, the 3 major promises made to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob: that their lineage would become an innumerably large nation, they would enter a land flowing with milk and honey, and that through his seed there would come a Savior, through whom “all the nations of the earth” would be “blessed” (Genesis 12:1-3). The Bible shows us exactly how God ends up fulfilling those promises in incredible ways.

Nation – In Genesis 15, God gives Abraham the impossible task of numbering the stars, not so that Abraham would actually be able to report back (as if God does not already know how many stars there are!), but to illustrate just how large his family would end up being. God later uses “the sand of the sea” as a similar analogy, again driving home how many offspring He would have. We know from the book of Exodus that 70 of Abraham’s relatives entered the land of Egypt and 600,000 left, with some estimates putting that closer to 2 million people including women and children. That is already quite the large family! Out of curiosity, I Googled how many Jewish people have lived since Abraham’s time. The result? “It is difficult to determine!” Abraham has had so many offspring, and so much has happened since that time it is literally impossible to know. God keeps His promises!

Land – God also promises the land of Canaan to Abraham in Genesis 15, and even lays out what would come to be hundreds of years of history of how the land would be acquired. We know from the book of Joshua, though, that unfortunately, the Nation of Israel failed to conquer the land. God brought them out of Egypt and into Canaan, but they did not demonstrate the faithful obedience of their grandfather Abraham as they tried and failed to take the land. To be clear: God kept His promise, but the people refused to listen to God faithfully. Do we find ourselves in the same position: relying on God to do everything for us, but not listening to how He wants us to act? The book of Joshua paints a devastating picture of just how cataclysmic a failure to obey God can be. When He outlines punishments for disobedience in Deuteronomy 28 for example, He keeps those promises as well!

Savior – Ephesians 2:4-9 poignantly explains just how Jesus fulfilled God’s promise to Abraham that “all the nations of the earth shall be blessed in him” (Genesis 18:18). Paul writes: “But God, being rich in mercy, because of the great love with which he loved us, even when we were dead in our trespasses, made us alive together with Christ—by grace you have been saved—and raised us up with him and seated us with him in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus, so that in the coming ages he might show the immeasurable riches of his grace in kindness toward us in Christ Jesus. For by grace you have been saved through faith. And this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God, not a result of works, so that no one may boast.” What immeasurable blessings we have in Christ, just as God promised Abraham would be the case!

Now, in the time we live in, Jesus has promised us that He is coming soon (See John 14:1-3). We may be tempted to lose focus on this promise because it was made so long ago from a human perspective, but was we have well established, God always keeps His promises.

May we always remember and take courage from the fact that we serve the Great Promise-Keeper, who is infinitely more reliable than any man could ever be. As Hebrews 10:25? Simply reminds us: “He who promised is faithful…” or as John puts it in Revelation 22:20:

“He who testifies to these things says, ‘Surely I am coming soon.’

Amen. Come, Lord Jesus!”