A Promise Is A Promise

Genesis 22: Abraham, Isaac, and the Lord Will Provide

Our Old Testament scripture reading is Genesis 22, starting verse one, go through 19. After these things, God tested Abraham and said to him, Abraham. And he said, here I am. He said, take your son, your only son, Isaac, whom you love, and go to the land of Moriah and offer him there as a burnt offering on one of the mountains of which I shall tell you.

So Abraham rose early in the morning, saddled his donkey and took two of his young men with him and his son, Isaac. And he cut wood for the burnt offering and arose and went to the place in which God had told him.

On the third day, Abraham lifted up his eyes and saw the place from afar. Then Abraham said to his young men, stay here with the donkey I and the boy will go over there and worship and come again to you.

And Abraham took the wood of the burnt offering and laid it on his son, Isaac. And he took it and he took in his hand the fire and the knife. So they went both of them together. And Isaac said to his father, Abraham, my father.

And he said, here I am, my son. He said, behold the fire and the wood, but where's the lamb for the burnt offering? Abraham said, God will provide for himself the lamb for the burnt offering, my son. So they went both of them together.

When they came to the place of which God had told him, Abraham built the altar there and laid the wood and bound Isaac, his son, and laid him on the altar on top of the wood. Then Abraham reached out his hand and took the knife to slaughter him, his son.

But the angel of the Lord called to him from heaven and said, Abraham, Abraham. And he said, here I am. And he said, do not lay a hand on the boy or do anything to him. For now I am your father. And I know that you fear God, seeing that you have not withheld your son, your only son from me.

And Abraham lifted up his eyes and looked and behold, behind him was a ram caught in the thicket by his horns. And Abraham went and took the ram and offered it up as a burnt offering instead of the son.

So Abraham called the name of that place, the Lord will provide. And it is said to this day on the Mount of the Lord, it shall be provided. And the angel of the Lord called to Abraham a second time from heaven and said, by myself I have sworn, declares the Lord, because you have done this and have not withheld your son, your only son, I will surely bless you.

I will surely multiply your offspring as the stars of the heaven and in the sand that is in the seashore. And your offspring shall possess the gate of his enemies. And in your offspring shall all the nations of the earth be blessed because you have obeyed my voice.

So Abraham returned to his young men and they rose and went together to Beersheba and Abraham lived at Beersheba.

Titus 1: The God Who Never Lies

The New Testament reading is in Titus chapter one. Paul, a servant of God and an apostle of Jesus Christ for the sake of the faith of God's elect and their knowledge of the truth, which accords with godliness and in the hope of eternal life, which God who never lies promised before the ages began and at the proper time manifested in his word through the preaching with which I have been entrusted by the command of God, our savior.

You may be seated.

Hebrews 5:11-6:20 and the Call to Endure

If you would take your Bibles and turn to Hebrews chapter six. Actually, we'll begin reading in chapter five, verse 11 through the end of chapter six. So you follow along carefully, listen carefully to what God's word says to us.

About this, we have much to say and it is hard to explain since you have become dull of hearing. For though by this time you ought to be teachers, you need someone to teach you again. The basic principles of the oracles of God.

You need milk, not solid food for everyone who lives on milk is unskilled in the word of righteousness since he is a child. But solid food is for the mature, for those who have their powers of discernment trained by constant practice to distinguish good from evil.

Therefore, let us leave the elementary doctrine of Christ and go on to maturity, not laying again a foundation of repentance from dead works and a faith toward God and of instruction about washings, the laying on of hands, the resurrection of the dead and eternal judgment.

And this we will do if God permits, for it is impossible in the case of those who have once been enlightened, who have tasted the heavenly gift and have shared in the Holy Spirit and have tasted the goodness of the word of God and the powers of the age to come and then have fallen away to restore them again to repentance since they are crucifying once again, the son of God to their own harm and holding him up to contempt.

For land that has drunk the rain that often falls on it and produces the crop useful to those for whose sake it is cultivated receives a blessing from God. But if it bears thorns and thistles, it is worthless and near to being cursed and its end is to be burned.

Though we speak in this way, yet in your case, beloved, we feel sure of better things, things that belong to salvation. For God is not unjust so as to overlook your work and the love that you have shown for his name in serving the saints as you still do.

And we desire each one of you to show the same earnestness to have the full assurance of hope until the end so that you may not be sluggish, but imitators of those who through faith and patience inherit the promises.

For when God made a promise to Abraham since he had no one greater by whom to swear, he swore by himself saying, surely I will bless you and multiply you. And thus Abraham, having patiently waited, obtained the promise.

For people swear by something greater than themselves and in all their disputes, an oath is final for confirmation. So when God desired to show more convincingly to the heirs of the promise, the unchangeable character of his purpose, he guaranteed it with an oath so that by two unchangeable things in which it is impossible for God to lie, we who have fled for refuge might have strong encouragement to hold fast to the hope set before us.

We have this as a sure and steadfast anchor of the soul, a hope that enters into the inner place behind the curtain where Jesus has gone as a forerunner on our behalf, having become a high priest forever after the order of Melchizedek.

Let's pray.

Father, now open your word,.

Open our hearts,.

Work so that we will be faithful to you. Give us hope today as we look at your promises and the God who is faithful and we'll thank you for the work that you are doing and have done and will do in Jesus' name, amen.

God’s Promises, Oaths, and the Endurance of Faith

Now, we all make promises, but sometimes we make promises that are so important we have to back them up with something so that everyone really knows that we really intend to keep the promise. You remember as a child, you'd guarantee that you'd keep a promise.

There's the old pinky promise, right? We hook pinkies, that guarantees we'll keep the promise. Or if you were a boy, you'd get your buddies together and you'd form a gang and you would, and one of the boys would write down an oath that you would keep the secrets of the gang and you'd all prick your fingers and sign it in blood.

You're really intent on keeping the promise never to share the secrets. Or more simply, you would say, cross my heart and hope to die, which essentially was saying, if I don't keep my promise, I'll die, right?

That's how serious you are about keeping that promise. If you appear in court, you have to take an oath so that everyone there knows you're serious about telling the truth and you promise to tell the truth and you back it up with an oath.

Well, in our text this morning, we see just how serious God is about his promises because he takes an oath. Now, why would our anonymous Jewish pastor tell us these things? Because he wants to motivate you to endure in your faith.

He wants to motivate you to endure in your faith. Again, we will always face pressure to abandon our faith in Jesus, to take the easy way out rather than to suffer or be ostracized for Jesus. That pressure will always be there and sometimes it'll get greater and sometimes even greater to abandon our walk with Jesus.

And so God, by his word, intends to move you to endurance in your faith, to persevere in that faith. He does it as we've seen earlier. He does it by warning you, by telling you, if you do abandon Jesus, you will face certain judgment.

You must endure, you must endure. But he also motivates you to an enduring faith by assuring you, as we saw last week, that you can endure because of God's work in you, because of God's justice, and because of the hope that God gives you.

You can, not just must, you can endure. And then he tells us in verse 12 that you can endure if you become imitators of those who, through faith and patience, inherit the promises. So he says to us, you can endure if you imitate those who, through patient endurance, who, through the enduring faith that they had, inherited the promises.

And now then, in verse 13, he turns your attention to Abraham, one of those who, through enduring faith, inherited the promise. Now again, he is seeking to motivate you to endure in your faith, and he's going to explain to us how you can do that.

What is the fuel for that? What is the strength that we need in order to endure in our faith when the pressure is on to abandon Jesus because we want to avoid suffering? How then can you endure? Let's look again at our text, verses 13 through 20.

For when God made a promise to Abraham, since he had no one greater by whom to swear, he swore by himself, saying, "'Surely I will bless you and multiply you.'. And thus Abraham, having patiently waited, obtained the promise.

For people swear by something greater than themselves, and in all their disputes, an oath is final for confirmation. So when God desired to show more convincingly to the heirs of the promise the unchangeable character of his purpose, he guaranteed it with an oath, so that by two unchangeable things in which it is impossible for God to lie, we who have fled for refuge might have strong encouragement to hold fast to the hope set before us.

We have this as a sure and steadfast anchor of the soul, a hope that enters into the inner place behind the curtain where Jesus has gone as a forerunner on our behalf, having become a high priest forever after the order of Melchizedek.".

You can endure in faith if you know the key to endurance. You can endure in faith if you know the key to endurance. Now, God made a promise to Abraham, a promise of land, offspring, a nation coming from him, and the fact that his seed would be a blessing to all the nations, but all of that hinged on whether or not he had a son.

All of those promises hinged on Abraham having a son, and when it comes to that promise, our writer looks back to the test, the big test of his faith that Abraham faced when God called Abraham to sacrifice the son of promise, Isaac.

Now, Abraham exhibited an incredible amount of faith there at that altar because even though God had called him to sacrifice his son, he still believed that it was that son who was going to fulfill the promise of God.

Even though God had called him to sacrifice his son, he was convinced that God would keep his promise through that son. And you recall, as you heard today, that God stopped him and provided another sacrifice, but then God did something he had never done before.

He swore an oath. Our text tells us this, or the text of Scripture says this, by myself I have sworn, declares the Lord, because you have done this and have not withheld your son, your only son, I will surely bless you, and I will surely multiply your offspring as the stars of heaven and as the sand that is on the seashore.

And your offspring shall possess the gate of his enemies, and in your offspring shall all the nations of the earth be blessed, because you have obeyed my voice. God wanted Abraham to see just how serious he was about his promise, so he backed it up with an oath.

But on what basis does he affirm that oath? On what basis does he affirm that he's gonna keep those promises? God can't swear by anything that's greater than himself because there is no being in heaven or in earth that's greater than God.

God is the very definition of greatness. No one can surpass him, no one will ever surpass him in greatness, and so he could not swear by anything higher than himself. Get that picture in your mind. God is it.

There's no one higher. If there was something higher than God, it wouldn't be God. He's the highest, he's the greatest being. He could not swear by anything or anyone else but himself. And so he's communicating, God will certainly keep his promise.

Now here's the point. Abraham endured in faith because God's promises are certain. When you read this text, unlike before, he is not saying to us, so you better persevere in faith like Abraham did. No, he's saying Abraham endured because of the certainty of God's promise.

He's saying this is how he could do it. He believed what God had said. Now you remember that Abraham had waited years and years and years before Isaac the promised seed was born. There were the ups and downs of his life, and yet he kept believing God's promise.

He was old, and Sarah was old, too old to bear children, and yet he kept believing God's promise. The circumstances and sufferings of his life made it look like the promise of God was nothing more than a charade.

It was so disconnected from reality,.

Why?

But he kept believing the promises of God. God commanded Isaac's sacrifice, but he kept believing the promise of God. Abraham obtained the promise because, like he says in verse 12, he patiently waited and inherited the promise.

He kept on believing. And why is it that he endured in that faith? He endured in that faith because he was certain that God would keep his promise. I can hang on. God's gonna deliver. He will keep his promise.

Polycarp was the Bishop of Smyrna who died in AD 155. He's one of my heroes. And there's an account written about his death, and I'm gonna read part of that to you. It goes like this. Polycarp was led before the proconsul who urged him, swear by the genius of Caesar, repent, say, away with the Christians, swear, and I will release you, curse the Christ.

Polycarp replied, 86 years I have served him, and he has done me no wrong. How then can I blaspheme my king who saved me? Then the proconsul said, I have wild beasts. If you do not repent, I will throw you to them.

But he said, send for them, for repentance from better to worse is not a change permitted to us. Then the proconsul said again, if you despise the wild beasts, I will consume you by fire if you do not repent.

Polycarp answered, you threaten the fire that burns for an hour and in a little while is quenched. For you do not know of the fire of the judgment to come and the fire of the eternal punishment reserved for the ungodly.

But why do you delay? Bring what you will. Now when the pressure was on to abandon Jesus, why didn't he take the easy way out?

You know why?

Because he was certain of God's judgment, that God had promised that he would judge the wicked and that he would vindicate his people. And the same proconsul who burned him would one day either face the fires of eternal punishment or at the very least would be there at the judgment when Polycarp was vindicated for his faith.

He knew that that guy was gonna be there and that God was gonna keep his promise. And that's how he remained faithful. He did not abandon Jesus because of God's promise. How is it then that you can endure in faith?

When you know that the key to your endurance are the promises of God, the promises of God, when you bank on the promises of God. Now, he doesn't leave it at that. He goes on then, our writer goes on and says, you can endure in faith if you know that the key to endurance is God's inviolable, certain, unbreakable promises.

You see, our writer says now in verse 16, okay, about this oath stuff, let's talk about the oath business here for a second. Let me say something about oaths, okay, so you understand what it's all about.

When men have a dispute, when they're arguing with one another, or when they're at odds legally, and they want to confirm the truthfulness of their statements, they swear by someone who is greater or who is superior, someone who is above them, and that underscores the truthfulness of what they claim.

When you took an oath, you often appealed to a deity, whether it's the true God or another God in those days, whether it is, you would appeal to a deity to witness the truthfulness of what you were saying, or to witness to the commitment you're making in a promise, and you made yourself liable to judgment if you did not tell the truth, or if you did not keep the promise.

To take an oath was to seal it with your life, okay? In other words, you were saying, if what I am saying right now is not the truth, may God judge me by killing me, all right? By the way, that's what's happening in the covenants that are made in the Old Testament.

You remember the covenant, and it's real explicit with Abraham, but you also see a covenant in Genesis 51 between, not Genesis 51, somewhere in Genesis, between Laban and Jacob, and they swear this oath, right?

They make this covenant, and then they kill these animals, all right? And the custom was they would walk between those severed animals. They would hack these animals in half, put them on each side, and both parties would walk through.

Now, why? What they were saying by that is invoking God and saying, may God do to me what happened to these animals if I don't keep this covenant. And so, in that day, in the day when the writer here is talking, you would invoke a deity, or you would invoke God and say, if I'm not telling the truth, may God strike me dead.

My parents never let us say, cross my heart and hope to die. That was spanking stuff, because they were saying, you don't take an oath like that. That oaths are important. But the point is you invoke the deity, you invoke God as a witness and enforcer to the fact that you were telling the truth or that you were determined to keep a promise.

So when God wanted to show the recipients of his promise just how unchangeable his purpose was, how inviolable, how certain, how unbreakable his promise was, he took an oath. That's what God did. So you see, taking an oath is serious business.

He wants to convince the heirs of the promises just how committed he is to keeping his promises. But God can't swear by anyone or anything that's greater than him. And so he can only swear by himself.

Now, this is absolutely remarkable. God doesn't need to take an oath because his word is truth and his promises never fail. You never have to doubt. You never have to entertain the doubt that God will not fulfill his promises.

His word is true. His word is enough. His word is sufficient. You don't need anything else. And yet, God intended by taking an oath to give us great boldness and assurance to us who are heirs of the promise.

Any doubt at all now about inheriting those promises cannot be entertained. It's not only that God's word is sufficient, he even swore an oath, which he doesn't need to do. And so, notice what our writer says.

Because of that, verse 18, so that by two unchangeable things in which it is impossible for God to lie, we who have fled for refuge might have strong encouragement to hold fast to the hope set before us.

Two unchangeable things guarantee that God will keep his promises to you. Number one, God's word, it can never fail. God's word alone is sufficient to tell us that God will not deviate from his promises.

That alone is enough. And yet, God takes an oath, which guarantees what is already guaranteed, if you will. He adds the oath.

Do you get it?

God doesn't have to swear an oath. He doesn't have to swear an oath, but he does it.

Why?

Why?

Why does he do that? It was given for our sake, because it's impossible for God to lie. It's impossible for him to lie, and so he gave it, that oath, for our sake, that we would be, if you will, confident that he would keep his promise.

He tells us here why he did it. Why does God's unalterable determination to keep his promise encourage you to do? What does it encourage you to do? To lay hold to the hope that we have. It gives a strong encouragement, then, to lay hold of the hope, to put everything in one basket, and God's gonna keep his promise.

God's gonna keep his promise. Now, he's not referring here to the hope within you, okay? He's not referring to the hope within you, I hope. He's referring to the hope that's out there.

If you're,.

If you're stranded on a desert island, or stranded on an island in the Pacific somewhere, and you wake up one morning, and suddenly you see a ship going by close to the coastline, what do you see? What do you say?

You say, there's my only hope for getting off this island. That boat, that ship is your hope. Well, what's the hope he's referring to here? The hope is God's gonna keep his promise. That's the hope I have.

God's gonna keep his promise. There it is. There's my hope, and I can hold on to that hope. I can hold on to it. I've had many occasions of sitting with people who are deathly ill, or who are actually dying.

I've sat with people in those situations, and they begin to say things like, God has abandoned me. He says he's accomplishing good, but I don't see it. Where is he? The pain is so much.

Where is God?

And I can respond by saying things like this.

You know what?

You're suffering incredible pain, and you just wanna chuck it all, but God has promised you a new body, right? A body that will never suffer again, that will never experience pain, that will never die.

That body is coming.

Do you believe it?

I've said to folks, God's gonna give you a new body.

Do you believe it?

And millions of years from now, in that new body, you're gonna look back at this now, and what's it going to look like then? And God has said he is working for good. He's made the promise. You can count on it.

Maybe you can't see it right now, but God has promised to work good, and they can endure it all. They can endure in faith because they know that God will do what he says. Do you think that way? Do you think that way?

Do you really believe that God was gonna do what he says? You can endure in faith when you lay hold of the hope that God is going to keep his promises, and they are inviolable, they are certain, they are unbreakable.

The reason why you can endure is you can say, God will keep his promises. That's the kind of God he is. The last thing he tells us here is, you can endure in faith if you know that the key to endurance is God's certain promise-producing hope.

He talks now about this hope, 19 and 20. We have this as a sure and steadfast anchor of the soul, a hope that enters into the inner place behind the curtain where Jesus has gone as a forerunner on our behalf, having become a high priest forever after the order of Melchizedek.

That hope is like an anchor. What does an anchor do? Y 'all know about anchors, right? We've all watched enough pirate movies. We've all seen enough boats. We know what anchors do. When you go fishing in your little thing of a boat, sometimes you even have an anchor and you throw it over the side and what does it do?

It goes down and it either catches onto something, right, and anchors you there, right, forget the word, or it's heavy enough to keep you from what?

To keep you from drifting. To keep you from drifting.

And this anchor, this hope is sure and steadfast. It's firm and secure. Nothing will dislodge it. God will keep his promises and it's an anchor for you. And like an anchor with a ship, this hope serves as an anchor for your faith so that you do not drift away.

As you count on God keeping his promises, that acts like an anchor that keeps you from drifting away. Remember what he said in chapter two, verse one. In the very first warning that he gave us in this book, therefore, we must pay much closer attention to what we have heard, lest we drift away from it.

This will keep you from drifting away. As you bank everything on the fact that God will do what he says, you can endure in faith because hope anchors and steadies you so that you don't drift away and you don't make shipwreck of your faith.

When the pressure intensifies and it looks like abandoning your walk with Jesus is the easy way out, take hold of that anchor, take hold of that anchor. Recall the promises of God. Remember the promises of God and remember that he will certainly deliver.

I remember in all the years I was in Romania, especially in those first few years with the older pastors, some of the guys who had lived under communism and their mentors who lived under communism. I think of these guys who suffered at the hands of the communists, who were sent to labor camps, right?

I'll never forget one pastor, VRL's dad was sent to a labor camp and his brother was taken out into the woods where the secret police bashed in his skull with hammers. What kept them going? What kept them preaching when they would see people taking notes, realizing that some of the people taking notes were secret police who were writing down the things they said?

What kept them preaching? What kept them faithful? Here's what it was, no lie. They would say, we knew that someday we would be resurrected to live forever where there would be no more persecution. We knew that God would keep that promise and that's why we did it, because they could kill us.

They could kill us, but we're gonna live forever. That's what kept them enduring. That's what kept them going.

You see?

I remember one pastor telling about an unusual thing. They actually built a church under the communists. They actually built the church building and they got it done and the next Sunday, the next day was going to be their dedication and that night, they showed up with the bulldozers and wiped out that building, right?

What kept them going? What kept them going was the fact that they knew God would keep his promises, that God would never leave them or forsake them and that he had said glory awaits them. That's the anchor, you see.

That's the anchor. Now, note where that anchor goes. This is really a weird picture. That anchor's not going down, it's going up. It's going up into the very presence of God when he talks about the inner place behind the curtain.

This is a reference to the Holy of Holies. You remember that special room in the tabernacle and in the temple where no one could go, where God manifested his presence and no one could go in there except for the high priest one day of the year on the day of atonement.

He's saying our anchor is in the very presence of God. It's in the very presence of God and the hope of us believers is that our anchor reaches into the very presence of God. In fact, we are there. He hooks that anchor to Jesus who is in the high place, who is holy place, who has gained access for us and we are there because a high priest like Melchizedek, his name is Jesus, has entered that place and we have access to God all the time now because of Jesus and by his blood as we're going to see as we continue, by his blood he secured our access there.

Our anchor is in the most holy place. It is in the most, it is the place where it will never be let go and so when it looks like your faith is failing, when it looks like your faith may not endure, don't look to yourself.

Don't look to your resources. Look to Jesus who because of his death gained us access to God. Look to the God who by the grace he can give us because of Jesus, give us the grace to endure. Don't look at yourself.

Look at the God who keeps his promises. If you can endure in faith, if you hold to the hope that God's promises are sure as your anchor. So, you must endure in faith. Now you've heard that for several weeks now.

When you hear that, how do you respond? Some of you have responded with dread, absolute dread. You say to yourselves, do I have enough strength to persevere, do I have enough strength to remain true to Jesus?

I'm afraid, I don't, I'm afraid, I won't make it. If that's the case, you're looking in the wrong place. You're starting at the wrong place. God says, don't start with you, you start with me and my promises.

You will remain faithful if you always recall that I will remain faithful to my promises. That's where you start. Know the promises of God, know them, know them, and believe, bank on them that God will deliver.

You can stake everything on his promises. Even if you face death, you can remain faithful to God because he will remain faithful to you in his promises. Some of you here today don't know Jesus, you've never bowed the knee to him.

You know what, God makes unbreakable promises to you as well. He says to this, to you, believe in Jesus and I won't judge you. In fact, I'll give you eternal life. I will deliver you from the wrath that you deserve.

That's an unalterable, certain, unbreakable promise. But he also makes an unbreakable promise that if you reject or ignore him, you will most certainly face judgment. You can bank on the promise of God.

If you call out to him in Christ, he will save you. You can count on it. We need to know the promises of God and we need to bank everything on them. And that's how you can endure in your faith. Father, thank you for your word.

Lord, this book is so filled with hope that the only reason why we just can't grab it is because of this corruption of sin that we fight. Lord, so God help us to know the promises of God and to remember that you will most certainly keep every one of them.

Help us, Lord, to hold to the anchor of our hope for your glory and our good.

In Jesus' name.