"Promises, Promises, Promises" (Audio) - Oct 24, 2004 Text: Genesis 11:27 - 12:9
“Promises, Promises, Promises.” Date: October 24, 2004 Scripture: Genesis 11:17-12:9
Series: “The Great Story of Creation and Redemption” Pastor: Larry Kirk
PROMISES, PROMISES, PROMISES
We live in a world in which promises are being made all the time. We're constantly hearing politicians make dramatic pledges that we know they are not always going to be able or even willing to fulfill. We see celebrity marriages publicly documented, and then a few months later we're not surprised when we hear that the wedding vows have been broken and the marriage has ended. And then there is just the everyday advertising that promotes products with promises. One advertisement for a car said: “You can't buy happiness, but now you can lease it.” In a world like this, it's easy to get to where one doesn’t take any promise very seriously.
But we do need to take promises seriously. The Bible is full of promises, and its promises are not just incidental, they are central. A big part of the life and ministry of Jesus Christ had to do with His promises. He promised eternal life to all who turned to Him and trusted in Him. He promised the gift of His indwelling and guiding Spirit. The Bible repeatedly tells us that what we all need the most in life is a relationship with God, but it also tells us that a relationship with God requires our reliance on His promises.
Looking at life around us, we often see a landscape littered with broken promises. What we see in the Bible is different. Yes, we still see a landscape littered with broken promises, man's promises, but we also see promises graciously made by God and faithfully kept by God in spite of disappointing human failures and difficult earthly circumstances.
Sometimes it may seem that God is not keeping His promises, but He is. It's the nature of life that sometimes it appears He is not. But He is, and He will. He wants you to know that. Very early in the Bible the Scripture teaches us this lesson in the story of Abraham.
The story of Abraham begins at the end of Genesis 11 and continues through chapter 25. One thing it teaches us from the very beginning is that . . .
No Matter How Hopeless the Human Situation Seems, God Will Keep His Promises
Genesis 12:1-3 says that when God called Abraham, “the Lord had said to Abram, ‘Leave your country, your people and your father's household and go to the land I will show you. I will make you into a great nation and I will bless you; I will make your name great, and you will be a blessing. I will bless those who bless you, and whoever curses you I will curse; and all peoples on earth will be blessed through you.’” Did you notice certain words that occur repeatedly in those three verses? The words bless, blessing, or blessed occur five times in those verses.
This promise of blessing is pivotal in the story of the Bible. It's connected to the story of Adam and Eve. After the very first humans, Adam and Eve, sinned against God, He came to them with a promise. He told them three things. First, because of the presence of sin in the world, our life will always involve struggle. Second, in spite of the presence of sin in the world, He would create a people who would stand with Him in the struggle. Third, to conquer the presence of sin in the world, God would send a Savior who would crush the serpent, Satan.
Now, in Abraham God chose one man and said, “Your family is going to be the channel through which I fulfill those ancient promises.” God said, “I am going to make of you a people who will stand for Me, and I am going to give you a place, a land, where you can live as My people, and through this chosen people in this promised land will come blessing for the whole world. “
That promise is carried forward through the rest of Scripture. The drama of the Bible is about these promises being fulfilled and their true depth of meaning being revealed throughout history. In the New Testament Scriptures, when the apostle Paul writes to the church at Galatia, he connects all the gifts of God's grace that we enjoy today through faith in Christ to this promise of blessing that God gave to Abraham in Genesis. Galatians 3:14 says: “He [Christ] redeemed us in order that the blessing given to Abraham might come to the Gentiles through Christ Jesus, so that by faith we might receive the promise of the Spirit.”
The family God promised Abraham is revealed in time to include not just Abraham's physical descendants, the Jewish people, but Abraham's spiritual family, all who share his faith and believe in the promised Savior. The promise of the land is expanded to include the promise of the whole world under the rule and reign of Christ as Lord. The blessing includes all of the gifts of grace that come to all of us by faith through the cross of Christ--forgiveness, the new birth, and the Spirit of Christ indwelling and empowering us.
What's so powerful is that at the time these great promises were given, the human situation seemed hopeless. Ever since Adam and Eve, things had spiraled downwards. Adam and Eve had children, and the firstborn son, Cain, murdered his younger brother, Abel. Soon violence, jealousy, sensuality, strife, and selfishness became the order of the day.
The world became so evil in the days of Noah that God decided to judge the world with a cataclysmic flood. He chose and saved one man, Noah, and his extended family to begin again with the human race.
It wasn't long before sin and pride appeared again, at the Tower of Babel. The world population had grown, and nations were formed. They all shared a common language. But in proud defiance of God's wishes, they gathered together to make a name for themselves by building a city and a tower whose top would reach to the heavens. God judged them by confusing their language and scattering them throughout the world
Imagine that you are working on the Tower of Babel, and you turn to the worker next to you and say, “Can I borrow your hammer?” He looks puzzled and says, “No hablo ingles.” Someone else says, “Oi vey.” The next thing you know there is mass confusion.
The pattern that you see in the first chapters of Genesis is that every time God renews His relationship with mankind and restarts the story of humanity, mankind rebels against His authority again. Adam and Eve, the Flood, the Tower of Babel, each incident repeated the story under different circumstances.
When you get to the end of Genesis 11, even the best family on earth has degenerated. The one bright spot in the early chapters of the book had been the family of Seth. The family of Seth was a family that “calls on the name of the Lord.” In the family of Seth, God's promise to create a people who would stand with Him seems to have been kept alive at least in part. Some of the spiritual heroes of the early chapters of Genesis such as Enoch and Noah came from Seth’s family.
But by the end of Genesis 11, all of Abraham's family members, the family of Seth, have names connected with the cult of the moon god that was worshiped in the cities of Ur and Haran, where they lived. Later in the Bible, Joshua 24:2 says outright that Abraham's father, Terah, was an idolater.
Spiritual darkness was settling over the world again.
Not only does Genesis 11 bring us to what looks like a spiritual dead end, but it also brings us to a physical dead end. Verse 30 tells us that “Sarah, Abraham's wife, was barren. She had no children.” Walter Brueggemann, a commentator on the book of Genesis, writes: “The barrenness of Sarah is an effective metaphor for hopelessness. There is no foreseeable future and no human power to invent a future” (Genesis, pp. 116). Human history seems to have hit a dead end.
Do you ever look at circumstances in the world or in your life and think things look hopeless? Well, here is the Bible describing a situation that seemed completely hopeless. The last family of faith left on earth was now spiritually compromised and physically barren. But what happened? God kept His promise.
God sometimes allows things to look hopeless and feel hopeless so that we have to depend on Him in prayer and faith. Too often we grow angry, anxious, or overwhelmed because we think everything depends on what we do and what other people do. We build a sort of Tower of Babel to our own importance and forget that God has made some promises and will keep them.
No matter how hopeless things seem, God will keep His promises.
No Matter How Weak God's People Prove to Be, God Will Keep His Promises
Genesis 15 tells the story of a day when something very important happened in Abraham's life. Verse 18 says, “On that day the Lord made a covenant with Abram.” God's covenant was a dramatically one-sided commitment.
We know from the Bible and archeology the way a covenant was made. Animals would be sacrificed, cut into pieces, and a path made between the halves of the animals. The people making the covenant would walk together between the severed halves. What they were saying symbolically was, “May I be cut in two if I fail to keep this covenant that I make today.”
When God made His covenant with Abraham, He did something unusual. He put Abraham into a kind of trance, and God went between the pieces alone. Abraham did not walk between the pieces. God was saying, “If I fail to keep My promises, I will pay the consequences, and if you fail, I will still pay the penalty, bear the covenant curse, and fulfill the promise.” God said that He alone would be responsible for the fulfillment of His promise.
Imagine someone’s getting married and saying, “I'm not going to exchange vows with you. I'm just going to make vows to you. You aren't going to promise anything. I'm going to make all the promises, and I'm going to keep every one of them no matter what.”
Does that mean that God will keep His promises to us even if we prove weak in our commitments to Him? Yes, it does. But don't misunderstand. God will discipline you when you disobey Him. That's part of His promise to you. He will teach you and test you and purify your life and faith. And if you are happy disobeying Him, and if it is your desire to disobey Him, then you probably don't really know Him at all. Maybe you have never experienced the new birth through faith and repentance that is essential to entering into a covenant relationship with Him. But if you have received Christ as your Lord and Savior, then your weaknesses and failures will not keep God from fulfilling His promises to you. He will fulfill them because they are His promises.
The assurance that God will keep His promises in spite of our weaknesses is crucial because we all stumble.
Abraham was not the hero of this story. God was the hero. Abraham failed over and over again. The Bible is very honest about that.
As Abraham and Sarah traveled, Sarah as a woman was dependent on Abraham's protection. But do you know what Abraham's very first words ever recorded in the Bible are? Genesis 12:11-13 says: “As he was about to enter Egypt, he said to his wife Sarai, ‘I know what a beautiful woman you are. When the Egyptians see you, they will say, “This is his wife.” Then they will kill me but will let you live. Say you are my sister, so that I will be treated well for your sake and my life will be spared because of you.’” As a result of this, Sarah ended up temporarily in Pharaoh's harem. God had to protect her, and God did protect her. Later Abraham did almost the same thing again in the case of another king, Abimelech.
Throughout Abraham’s life, God continually placed him in situations in which he had to trust that God would keep His promises and then resist the temptation to resort to his own schemes and plans.
God had promised Abraham and Sarah a son, but Sarah could not conceive. Abraham desperately wanted a son, and it was through this son and his descendants that God had promised to bless the whole world. So it was important that the son came. But Sarah did not conceive. So she suggested that Abraham sleep with one of her servants, an Egyptian woman named Hagar. Abraham said the equivalent of “OK, honey.” And Abraham and Hagar had a child, but he was not the child God had promised. The child Ishmael proved to have been their plan, not God's plan.
The story of Abraham is not about how strong you have to be for God to keep His promises to you. It's about the fact that God can work in our lives in spite of our weaknesses because of His grace and His faithfulness to His promises. I find that very encouraging. At fifty, I believe I am a better man than I was at twenty-five, but I also see and feel my weaknesses so much more clearly, and with such greater depth of painful understanding, now that I know better how much I need God's grace. What Abraham's story does is remind us is that His grace is there for us--as much as we need it and are willing to receive it.
That, then, is the lesson of the story of Abraham. No matter how hopeless the human situation seems, no matter how weak God's people prove to be, God keeps His promises.
The last major incident in Abraham's life shows us that . . .
No Matter How Difficult It Is to Understand God's Will, You May Be Sure He Will Keep His Promises
I think all of us go through times when it is difficult to understand the will of God.
Abraham certainly did. For many years, he and Sarah couldn't have a child even though God had promised them one. Finally He gave them a son, whom they named Isaac, which means “laughter.”
Then, toward the end of Abraham's life, God tested his faith with the most difficult test of all. Genesis 22:1 says, “Some time later God tested Abraham. He said to him, ‘Abraham!’ ‘Here I am,’ he replied.” Almost every word in the next verse seems intended to push Abraham to the limit, requiring him to trust God with something he could not possibly understand. “God said, ‘Take your son, your only son, Isaac, whom you love, and go to the region of Moriah. Sacrifice him there as a burnt offering on one of the mountains I will tell you about.’” This is the first place in the Bible where the word love occurs. A father who loves his son is asked to sacrifice him.
Sometimes our faith is tested because God asks us to do or endure something that we just do not understand. Adam and Eve didn't understand why they had to leave that one tree and its fruit alone. Abraham did not understand why he had to sacrifice the son whom God had promised to give him. Have you ever felt God was asking you to do something and you just didn't understand why or how it could result in anything good? Maybe it had to do with courageous obedience, or sacrificial giving, or patient endurance. Maybe you are facing something like that right now.
We all need to remind ourselves that the experience of not understanding is a common part of a life in relationship with God. A life of faith means a life in which you are choosing to trust Him with many things you do not understand. God wants us to learn to trust, not in our own understanding but in His promises. If you trust God's promise, you'll see God's faithfulness.
So what happened with Abraham? He gets his son up on the mountain and stands over him with a knife in his hand, ready to sacrifice him, and God stops him. Genesis 22:11-14 says that at the last moment “the angel of the Lord called out to him from heaven, ‘Abraham! Abraham!’ ‘Here I am,’ he replied. ‘Do not lay a hand on the boy,’ he said. ‘Do not do anything to him. Now I know that you fear God, because you have not withheld from me your son, your only son.’”
Can you imagine? God stopped him with a voice from heaven, and then, verse 13 says, when he looked up, “there in a thicket he saw a ram caught by its horns. He went over and took the ram and sacrificed it as a burnt offering instead of his son.” Notice the comment in verse 14: “So Abraham called that place The Lord Will Provide. And to this day it is said, ‘On the mountain of the Lord it will be provided.’"
The phrase "On the mountain of the Lord it will be provided" is intended to be memorable and meaningful. The word “provide” is used twice in verse 14. It is the translation of a Hebrew word that literally means “to see.” In fact to “see” or “to show” is the primary meaning of “provide” here. So verse 14 is saying that God will show you His answer, His provision, when you are on the mountain and not before.
God will reveal the provision when it's time for you to receive the provision. You could translate it: “On the mountain of the Lord it will be revealed, it will become clear.” That is, when you are in the place where your faith is tested and you stand with God in faith and obedience, that's when you will see His provision.
To learn to trust while we wait to see is a crucial lesson. This was the lesson throughout Abraham's life. The story began in Genesis 12 when God said, “Leave your country, your people, and your father's household and go to the land that I will show you.” Where exactly is this land, Lord? God said, “I will show you.”
Abraham was asked to trust God's promise, and the truth is that God didn’t give him a lot of instruction or information. He didn't have a lot that he could explain to Sarah, and wives like to have details about these kinds of things. Imagine the conversation. “Sarah, pack up your belongings. We are moving away from everything and everyone we know.”
“Where are we going?”
“I don't know exactly.”
“How are we going to know when we get there?”
“God will show us.”
This is one of the few trips in history in which the wife might ask her husband, “Where in the world are we?” and he could say, “God only knows,” and it would be the literal truth.
• Later God said, “I will make you a great nation and bless the world through you.” When will you do that, Lord? God said, “I will show you.”
• Later God said: “I will give you a child in your old age through your barren wife.” How can You do that, Lord? “I'll show you.”
• And then God said, “Take your son, your only son, and sacrifice him to Me.” Then how will You fulfill Your promise, Lord? “I will show you.”
Don't say, “Before I respond to this test, I want to know exactly how this is going to work and how God is going to fulfill His promises and in what time frame.” You can't demand that kind of prior knowledge. That's the point. “On the mountain of the Lord it will be revealed and provided.” It's as you obey that the clarity comes. It's as you obey the command that the wisdom is given. It's only as you take the step that the angel appears and the ram is provided, the resurrection takes place, and God reveals the provision of His faithfulness that upholds your trust in Him.
You will not see how God will keep His promise until it happens. Sometimes we find His provision comes in an entirely unexpected way. Sometimes we may find along with Abraham that what we thought we had sacrificed is received back again, purified and marked with a new beauty. “On the mountain of the Lord it will be seen.”
At the end of the story God restates and renews His promises. In verses 17-18 He says, ”I will surely bless you and make your descendants as numerous as the stars in the sky and as the sand on the seashore. Your descendants will take possession of the cities of their enemies, and through your offspring all nations on earth will be blessed, because you have obeyed me."
The New Testament Scriptures explain that God was talking about the blessing of salvation that would come to the whole world through Jesus Christ. Galatians 3:7-8 reads: “Understand, then, that those who believe are children of Abraham. The Scripture foresaw that God would justify the Gentiles by faith, and announced the gospel in advance to Abraham: ‘All nations will be blessed through you.’" The reason all nations will be blessed in and through Abraham is because what Abraham did, as powerful as it was, was simply a picture of something far greater that God Himself would do for all of us through Jesus Christ.
Verse 2 says Abraham was told to sacrifice Isaac in the region of Moriah. Moriah was the ancient name for that little outcropping of hills on which the city of Jerusalem was later built, including the place of the temple and Calvary, the hill where Christ was sacrificed. Centuries after Abraham, in fulfillment of the promise to bless the whole world, Christ walked up those same hills. But when God the Father offered up His only Son for us, there was no lamb to take His place. He Himself was the lamb of God. He was the substitute, the sacrifice, who was taking our place to pay for our sins by His death.
In a landscape littered by man's broken promises, a cross was lifted up and stained with blood. On that cross the promise that God made first in Eden and then to Abraham was kept. If you look beyond the cross, you will see an empty tomb. When the body that was broken on the cross and sealed in the empty tomb came out with life and power on the first Easter, it was in fulfillment of the promises of God. The Resurrection was the ultimate confirmation that you can trust God to keep His promises.
You can trust Him to keep His promises in human history and in your life. He wants you to live by faith and to see Him do things that only He can do. Trust and obey and see His provision.