Promises, Promises

I think that we can all agree that promises are easy to make, but hard to keep.  No doubt there are times where we have broken promises that we’ve made, maybe not maliciously, but broken them nonetheless.  I’m sure there have been times where we’ve promised to do something for someone and ran out of time, or experienced a setback that kept us from fulfilling our promise, or maybe even just weren’t capable of carrying out what we promised, though we thought we would be.  Even the most well-intentioned people fail to keep promises from one time or another.  I know I’m guilty of this!  I have great plans to fulfill my promises, but I can get sidetracked so easily and fail.

If we’re honest, our own inability to keep promises is probably one of the reasons it’s so hard to believe promises when others make them to us.  We know we struggle, so I guess we’d only expect someone else to struggle, too!  Maybe this is where “pinky promises” and “cross your heart, hope to die” types of promises came from; they only seek to deepen the importance of a promise, with the hopes that maybe the one making the promise will take it more seriously!

As we come to the Advent Season, we remember that God makes promises.  After Adam and Eve’s fall in to sin, God said to the serpent, “I will put enmity between you and the woman, between your offspring and her offspring; he shall bruise your head and you shall bruise his heel,” (Genesis 3:15).  That one little pronoun (he) points ahead to a conqueror, who would crush the head of the serpent himself.  One theologian wrote, “In the ensuing battle the ‘seed’ of the woman will crush the head of the snake.  Though wounded in the struggle, the woman’s seed will be victorious.”  This victor, the “seed” was a promised Savior who would destroy the serpent forever.  Here, God made a promise.

Throughout the Old Testament, this promise of a “seed,” one who would come to rescue men.  This promise was made to Abraham, Isaac, Jacob and their descendants, pointing ahead to this one child who would come to save us from the brokenness of sin.  In Isaiah 7:14 says, “Therefore the Lord himself will give you a sign.  Behold, the virgin shall conceive and bear a son, and shall call his name Immanuel,” which means “God with us.”  This sign, the virgin birth of a Son (which seems pretty impossible, I might add!) would be how the people would know that God kept His promise.  He doesn’t just give promises; He keeps them, too!

As we celebrate Advent, we celebrate not that God made a promise, but that He kept His promise.  A young virgin named Mary gave birth to a son, the Son of God, born in the flesh to rescue men from their sin.  This Son, Jesus, would live the perfect life that we couldn’t and die a death in our place so that we wouldn’t have to.  On that cross, He crushed the head of the serpent and the power of sin, so that through faith, we might live forever.  God’s promise was fulfilled.

 
And because God keeps His promises, we can joyfully expect His second coming, where He will bring us home to the Kingdom He’s prepared for us.  What hope we have in Christ!  

In Him,
Pastor Evan