Hearing God S Promise

Hearing God’s Promise

(And Knowing Why It is Important)

Genesis 12:1-3

Preached by L. Going at WACC March 12, 2000

Are you living in the strength of The Promise or in the strength of performance? There is a promise that God has made. It is a promise that now is offered in the Lord Jesus Christ to you even today. But in order to receive The Promise you must abandon a life lived in the strength of your performance. And once you receive The Promise, then you must continue to reject the power of performance so as to live in The Power of the promise. But I am getting ahead of myself. Before I define this Promise an important setting for The Promise needs to be described.

John and Mary are having problems in their marriage. They are constantly arguing and hurting one another. Maggie is coming home from work frustrated to the point of tears because her boss is a tyrant who pours on the work and constantly belittles her efforts. Todd has just been told by the doctors that he has a cancer and will have to undergo radiation treatment if there is any hope he can survive. In each case these people are burdened and bone weary. How can they endure? What do they really need? Maybe John and Mary will see a marriage counselor and get some help in learning how to compromise. Maybe Maggie will just up and quite and find another job. Maybe Todd’s radiation therapy will cure his cancer. But with each “maybe” there is also a “maybe not.” Life is sometime easy and sometime tragic but for most of the time life is lived in the middle. It is not bad but boy it would be nice if it could be better. In Paul Simon’s song “Sound of a Train in the Distance” he has a line that goes “The idea that life can be better is woven indelibly into our hearts and our brains.” This is true but the question of all questions is what is the better life. In the course of these sermons based on the Bible’s account of the life of Abraham, I want to keep this question before us. What is the idea of the “better life” that is woven indelibly into our hearts and our brains?

Let me begin to answer the question by painting the Bible’s answer in broad brushstrokes. Each of you has an echo of sorts etched permanently into your interior life. That echo has two sounds. The first sound has to do with the reality that you are made in the image of God. This means that you were created to reflect who God is in a life of love and worship. The first sound of this echo is a call to worship the true and living God. The second sound of the echo is a drive or a call to make a way for yourself in this life you have been given. In the Book of Genesis the Lord God gave to mankind a mandate to do just this.

"Be fruitful and multiply; fill the earth and subdue it; have dominion over the fish of the sea, over the birds of the air, and over every living thing that moves on the earth." Genesis 1:28

It has to do with making a way, earning a living, finding a meaningful relationship, making a difference, finding fulfillment, contributing to the common good. You are driven to make a way for yourself in this life by seeking a career or vocation, marriage relationship and family. As you do this you will inevitably encounter trouble, hardship, frustration. The longing for the good life always seems to be out of reach. Yet the idea that life can be better is indeed woven indelibly into your heart and your brain. The “better life” however is found not in your performance but in God’s promise of grace. This is what the Bible is all about. This is what the life of Abraham sets before us. The “better life” indeed the “best life” is realized in the Promise of God’s blessing of grace not in our striving, performance, or independence from God. All we find in seeking to pursue “a better life” is continual frustration, anguish, judgment and death.

God has given us this life. Yet in living it we are mis-wired. We do not heed the music of this echo properly. We were never intended to make a way for ourselves by ourselves. But that is what we face. We are here by ourselves and in one way this is what we all prefer. This is our naturally wrong preference. To live on the earth and in the world that God has made being fruitful, filling and subduing it and ruling over it, as a law or rule unto ourselves is how we all begin this life. This is our present condition and plight. Chapters 4-11of the book of Genesis is an ancient history of mankind’s attempt to make things work without bowing in faith to the promise of God. In other words what we all do is to hold on to the dream of “the better life” while running away from the reality that we are made for God and not God for us. We are made to live life God’s way and against this reality we rebel. In other words we hold on to the second sound of the echo, while denying the first sound.

Prior to the Fall our first parents enjoyed face to face fellowship with God. They were headed in a direction of carrying out this wonderful task under the kind and sovereign hand of God. They found delight in working, relating and living for the glory of God. When they rebelled and forged a new alliance with the malevolent power of the tempter, they immersed themselves, their race and the earth under the Divine curse. The mandate was not removed. It was to be carried out but now they would meet resistance and struggle. Yet God did not completely abandon them. He made a promise that a deliverer would come and redeem them from the curse and that redeemer would remain with them. Now the only way to know God and relate to God as they fulfilled the task of living in this world would be by faith in the promise of God’s grace. So God cast them out of visible fellowship with himself and now they had to live by faith in the promise or be left to live by their performance.

The story of Genesis 4-11 is the history of how the peoples of the very ancient world for the most part lived out this God-given drive or inclination in a God-defying self-glorifying way. For the most part mankind lived by the strength of performance not promise. They turned from the promise of grace for they did not want to have any allegiance to the Creator. So we find in the account a graphic depiction of sin shown both toward God and toward one another. Things got so bad that God’s assessment of the men and women of the ancient world was that of great evil. In Genesis 6:5 we read, “Then the LORD saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth, and that every intent of the thoughts of his heart was only evilcontinually.”

So the Lord judged mankind with the great flood but even when He did this he gave them an opportunity to repent and find safety by identifying with the man who was living by faith in the Promise, Noah. But only Noah and his family escaped. Yet even after Noah, when mankind began to increase in number, God had to thwart their attempt to carry out that original mandate apart from humble faith in the promise. The city of Babel and the tower that they were building was done in the strength of their performance for their glory and as a way of asserting ultimate dominion. So God caused them to speak in different languages and thereby prevented them from realizing their dream to build a name for themselves. The real unity of mankind is not accomplished by building a political world empire. Since the fall of Rome there has not emerged a dominant world empire and every attempt to forge one has met with failure.

So here is our dilemma: We have a drive, an inner push to take the stuff of this life and to use it to make a way for ourselves. Yet we are estranged from God and automatically do this for our own glory. To accomplish this we are left (and we naturally prefer this) to live by our own resources and are dependent upon our own performance. This leaves us under the judgment and curse of God, alienated and estranged from our Creator.

So this brings us to Abraham. It is in the person and life of Abram that God begins to sing His own song of Promise to mankind. He sang the first bars of the song to Adam and Eve. He hummed it in the ear of Able and his brother Seth. He sang it as a refrain to Enoch and the chorus was sung to Noah. But with Abram God begins to sing the song again. This time He makes it clear that this song of promise is not going to be just a jingle but he is in fact composing a symphony and the first major movement of the symphony of His Promise is with Abram, the man of faith.

When God begins to sing grace to Abram, well Abram begins to dance. Abram’s dance is really his faith in the grace of God’s promise. God’s Song is the Promise of Grace and Abram’s dance to the Song of Grace is his faith.

We will see that this Promise did not make Abraham’s circumstances better. No, the better life was not found in a better job, happier marriage, and healthier life. In fact by believing and receiving the Promise Abraham’s circumstantial situation became even more tenuous. Abraham learned that living by faith (tapping into the strength) in the Promise also meant that he in one sense had to cut all ties with this life in finding a permanent dwelling or “the better life” here. “By faith he dwelt in the land of promise as in a foreign country, dwelling in tents with Isaac and Jacob, the heirs with him of the same promise; for he waited for the city which has foundations, whose builder and maker is God.” Hebrews 11:9-10

In one sense we can never realize the mandate God has given us in this fallen world and present existence. We remain in the world and by faith in the Promise of God we do our best. But even as we are doing our best as stewards of this life our agenda is to live in the power of the life to come and for the glory of the life to come. Our resources are barren (like Abram’s and Sarah). We are passing through this world that is ours by promise, knowing that only when the Lord Jesus Christ ushers in the new heavens and the new earth will we really ever possess the land. Only then can we really begin to use the resources of creation to build for the glory of God.

Abram’s life is an example to us of the power of God’s promise and therein the potency of faith. We first learn of God’s grace and in this we learn of faith. We study the Biblical narrative of Abraham so that we may discover more about God’s gracious promise and learn to live more readily and joyfully by faith in the strength of the promise and not in the strength of our performance. We learn what it means to live by grace through faith and not by works.

The promise that God gave to Abraham is essentially the promise of salvation. The promise is that He would be Abraham’s God and Abraham would be his son. Abraham in believing the promise began a journey that pointed him to eternity. It was the power of the Promise that enabled him to live a better life between the “maybes and the maybe nots” of this fallen world. Abraham was looking for the city whose builder and maker was God. When that city is finally established then Abraham and all who imitate his faith will finally inherit the land of a new heaven and a new earth. Then we will not longer live between the “maybes and the maybe nots.” We will know the wonder of the Eternal Yes and Amen of God affirmed and guaranteed to us in Christ Jesus.