God's Promises 2-25-24
God’s Promises
Rom 4:13-25; Gen 17:1-7, 15-16
Rom 4:13-25
For the promise that he would inherit the world did not come to Abraham or to his descendants through the law but through the righteousness of faith. If it is the adherents of the law who are to be the heirs, faith is null and the promise is void. For the law brings wrath; but where there is no law, neither is there violation. For this reason it depends on faith, in order that the promise may rest on grace and be guaranteed to all his descendants, not only to the adherents of the law but also to those who share the faith of Abraham (for he is the father of all of us, as it is written, “I have made you the father of many nations”) —in the presence of the God in whom he believed, who gives life to the dead and calls into existence the things that do not exist. Hoping against hope, he believed that he would become “the father of many nations,” according to what was said, “So numerous shall your descendants be.” He did not weaken in faith when he considered his own body, which was already as good as dead (for he was about a hundred years old), or when he considered the barrenness of Sarah’s womb. No distrust made him waver concerning the promise of God, but he grew strong in his faith as he gave glory to God, being fully convinced that God was able to do what he had promised. Therefore his faith “was reckoned to him as righteousness.” Now the words, “it was reckoned to him,” were written not for his sake alone, but for ours also. It will be reckoned to us who believe in him who raised Jesus our Lord from the dead, who was handed over to death for our trespasses and was raised for our justification.
Gen 17:1-17, 15-16
When Abram was ninety-nine years old, the Lord appeared to Abram, and said to him, “I am God Almighty; walk before me, and be blameless. And I will make my covenant between me and you, and will make you exceedingly numerous.” Then Abram fell on his face; and God said to him, “As for me, this is my covenant with you: You shall be the ancestor of a multitude of nations. No longer shall your name be Abram, but your name shall be Abraham; for I have made you the ancestor of a multitude of nations. I will make you exceedingly fruitful; and I will make nations of you, and kings shall come from you. I will establish my covenant between me and you, and your offspring after you throughout their generations, for an everlasting covenant, to be God to you and to your offspring after you. God said to Abraham, “As for Sarai your wife, you shall not call her Sarai, but Sarah shall be her name. I will bless her, and moreover I will give you a son by her. I will bless her, and she shall give rise to nations; kings of peoples shall come from her.”
Prayer – God of promises – we come this morning wondering why so many promises we hear every day seem to be unkept. Sometimes we wonder if you in fact keep your promises. Remind us again this day, as we gather to hear your promises, that your promises are true, we can hold them in our hearts and we can count on your promise to always, always, be our God and that we will indeed be your people – amen.
There’s not a more gracious, good news, gospel sort of story than the one that gathers us this day, the story of God making a covenant, a promise, to Abraham and Sarah. I don’t have time to go into all the gory details, but let’s just say that Abraham wasn’t the best father in the world and that much of the time Abraham’s family was a mess. All sorts of tensions, and divisions, deceit and dirty tricks played upon his own kith and kin. Abraham had failed in so many ways to be a righteous person.
Abraham was no pure, righteous saint. Abraham had his faults. He and his brother Lot squabbled over the family inheritance. When times were tough and Abraham and his wife Sarai were in Egypt, Abraham lied to the Pharaoh, telling him that Sarai wasn’t his wife but was his sister so he could use his own wife to weasel into the Pharaoh’s household. And after Sarai and Abram finally have children, it gets worse with his maltreatment of Hagar, Sarai’s serving woman whom Sarai offers to Abraham as if she were his wife. Then Sarai conspires to kill the child of Hagar when Sarai’s child is finally born. Eventually, Abraham’s grandson is the legendary trickster, Jacob. Lots of scheming and questionable family dealings by Abraham.
And yet, here’s what the church wants you to remember about Abraham: On a starry night, God beckons Abram out of his tent, points his gaze up toward the heavens, and promises that even though he is an old, childless man, he and his wife shall be the progenitors of a vast nation that shall bless all the nations of the world. God makes a promise to Abram and Sarai.
The promise is God’s idea. The promise God made to Abraham and Sarah, is a promise made to you. Remember that gracious, undeserved, unearned promise and don’t ever forget it. The covenant is solely at God’s initiative. Obviously, the covenant is made not on the basis of who Abraham and Sarah are, but on the basis of who God is. The covenant is given, not because of something that Abraham has done for God but as a sign of what God promises to do for Abraham. That’s a great comfort to those of us who are not very righteous saints either.
Yet it was to this man, with all of his faults and flaws, that God came on a starlit night and promised him something he could have never dreamed of having —a future. To old, very old, Abraham and Sarah, a family is given. Maybe even more than that, these undistinguished, undeserving ones are given a promise by God—I’ll be your God and you will be my people. I’ll stick with you no matter what. I’m yours; you are mine.
Do you see how this promise, or as we speak of it in Bible terms, “covenant,” made to Abraham, is our greatest comfort when it comes to our life with God? God is not the one who judges us, corrects us, hammers us for our failures. God is the one who promises to be our God no matter who we are or how far we wander.
This is so important because I suspect that some of you have been told that church is where you come to find out what you need to do to lead a better life or to set some things right that you have, through your sin and error, messed up. No. Church is where you come to be discover who God really is and what God is up to in the world. God isn’t the one who raises the bar so high and says, “Here. Let’s see if you can try hard to chin up to that. Are you worthy of my love or not?” Church is where you come to hear about the promise that God made to Abraham and Sarah. The great-great-great grandparents of everyone here this morning, in more ways than one. Abraham and Sarah, though they were not particularly “good people,” are blessed by God with a promise. That promise? “I’ll be your God and you’ll be mine, no matter what.”
You and I, though we are not particularly “good people,” are here this morning, in church, beneficiaries of the covenant God made with Abraham and Sarah, not because we are good but because, as Jesus, child of the covenant, put it, God is kind to the ungrateful and the selfish (Luke 6:35). We, who did not know how to come to God, were blessed by God coming to us. We who could not keep our promises to God were given steadfast promises by God.
That night, God said to Abraham, in effect, “In spite of who you are and are not, or what you have done or not done, I WILL be your God and you WILL be my people. Even if you have had a tough time doing good things for me, I’ll do a good thing for you. I promise to give you a life you could never give yourself. Though you may stray from me and my way, I’ll never let go of you.” Furthermore, God promises that by giving Abraham and Sarah a family, God will bless all the families of the earth through their family.
That we are here this morning, gathered around this ancient story, is in a way validation that God keeps God’s promises. Abraham’s family, Israel, has indeed blessed all the earth by remembering and retelling this story of God’s covenant. We have been thereby blessed. How would we have ever known that God is love rather than condemnation, that God not only created us but promises always to stick with us and love us, if not for the story of God’s covenant with Abraham?
Eventually, Abraham’s family blessed the world by faithfully bearing Jesus Christ, son of David, great, great grandson of Abraham and Sarah, into the world. Don’t ever again let anybody tell you that the Old Testament is not good news.
Ever asked yourself, “Who is God?” or “Where is God?” More tellingly, have you ever asked yourself, “How does it stand between me and God?” Well, here’s your answer in this Sunday’s good news from the Old Testament. From Genesis, at the very first of human history, in the covenant made to Abraham and Sarah, we have a window into the heart of God, a sure indication of who God is and what God is up to in the world. God is not the one who sits back, disappointed that, time after time, we human beings have failed to live up to God’s intentions for us. God is the one who, time and again, keeps coming to us and giving us good gifts, the chief gift being God’s promise to us: I will be your God and you will be my people. Blessing us eventually in Christ.
That’s how it stands between us and God. That is the basis of our hope, in life, in death, in any life beyond death. The same God who came to Abraham one night and promised, no matter what, to be his God, this same God promises not just to be the true and living God, but to be God for us. That’s probably why, when Jesus was born, we were told to refer to him as Emmanuel, meaning “God with us.” God promising to be God for us, God with us, God keeping God’s promises.
Knowing that our God is the God who promises to be God for us and never to desert us, frees us to be honest, to cease our silly posturing and preening and admit to some of our sin and frailty. We can relax, take off our masks, let go of our play-acting and rest assured that God keeps God’s promises. God’s strong, faithful love enables us, even us, to admit to some of the ways that we betray that love.
What a drama we have before us this Sunday from the first book of the Bible. It’s a drama that has flawed, believably-flawed human, very human characters, Sarah and Abraham. But these two, for all of their interest to us, are not the center of this story. Abraham is neither the chief nor the most interesting actor in this drama. The main protagonist is God, the God who promises to stick with us and make something out of us, despite us.
God is faithful, though we are not. God keeps God’s promises, though we do not. That’s your best hope in life, in death, in any life beyond death. I will be your God, and you will be my people. And as a congregation, in our struggles to survive, to thrive, to have a future, what’s our hope? They we will at last shed our divisions and all begin to work together? That we will discover the one sure-fire, knock-down always right principle for church growth?
No, our hope is the kind of God we’ve got (or should I say, the kind of God who has got us?). It’s God’s promise given to Abraham and Sarah, given to all of us: I will be your God, and you will be my people. Thanks be to God – amen.