Psalm 25 says, “Remember, O Lord, your great mercy and love, for they are from of old” (Psalm 25:6). When God remembers His promise, His blessings are on us. And at its heart, there is but one promise of God. It’s His promise to save, to deliver from death, to rescue from sin and every evil, hidden under the promise to destroy the devil.
In Genesis 3, after our fall into sin, God told Satan: “I will put hostility between you and the woman and between your offspring and her offspring. He will stomp your head, and you will strike his heel.” That’s the Promise around which all the promises of God revolve and draw their meaning.
And so God would work salvation through the Offspring of the woman. He would rescue fallen Adam by that Offspring, a Son, who would get between us and devil, restoring us as children of God. We would no longer be His sin-born enemies. All the other promises of Scripture–including the promises to Noah, Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and to David–serve this one core and central Promise. “For in Christ, every one of God’s promises are ‘Yes’” (2 Corinthians 1:20).
The Old Testament is the history of the Promise. In it, we hear how God worked in, with, and under human history to orchestrate our salvation. The Lord said to Abram, which was Abraham’s name before God changed it:
“Leave your land, your family, and your father’s household for the land that I will show you. I will make you 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 I will curse whoever curses you. Through you, all the families of the earth will be blessed.”
With those words of blessing, God created a chosen people, the people of the Promise, a people through whom He would work the promise of salvation for all people. That was the conception. Israel’s baptism in the Red Sea was the birth.
God chose the most unlikely of vessels to carry out His promise: Abraham, a 75-year-old man. He had a wife but no children. His wife, Sarah, was 65. They had a comfortable home in Haran with servants, sheep, goats, cattle, possessions, and property.
But God took that all away when He told Abraham to move. Abraham lost his land, his people, his household, his identity, even his religion. Abraham only had the Word of God to cling to, the Promise that the Lord would make this 75-year-old man and his 65-year-old wife with no children into an eternity-changing people. They were to have descendants as many as the stars in the sky and as the sand on the seashore.
Abraham could not have known, nor could he have seen, the size of God’s promise. The book of Hebrews says:By faith, Abraham obeyed God when he was called to go out to a place he would later receive as an inheritance. He went out, not knowing where he was going. By faith, he made his home in the Promised Land, as a stranger in a strange country, living in tents, as did Isaac and Jacob, who received the same promise from God. Abraham was looking forward to the city with firm foundations, whose architect and builder is God [Hebrews 11:8-10].
In his lifetime, Abraham didn’t see God fulfill His promise. He never saw the multitude of his descendants. He never saw his name become great. He never saw all the people of the earth blessed through him. Abraham simply believed God. He took God at His Word. He trusted the promise of God, “and it was credited to him as righteousness” (Genesis 15:6).
By faith in the promise of God, Abraham took his wife, his nephew Lot, and all the possessions they had and set out for the land of Canaan. On the way, at Shechem, God again told Abraham, “I will give this land to your offspring.”
In the Old Testament, we learn how God worked through Abraham. But we also learn how He worked through others. Through them, God kept His covenant alive and produced a people who would serve as His instrument for the salvation of all. We see how God took a backwoods, dysfunctional nation called “Israel,” named after Abraham’s grandson, Jacob, who “contended with God.” We learn how God formed and fashioned Israel over the long centuries into the womb that would conceive and deliver His Promise, our Savior, Jesus Christ.
Everything that happened in the Old Testament happened so Jesus, the Messiah, would one day be delivered in Bethlehem, baptized in the Jordan, crucified on the cross of Calvary, and raised from the tomb. Everything that happened, down to the smallest detail, happened “for us and our salvation,” that, in Christ, God would rescue us from death and damnation.
The Old Testament gives us the long view of God’s Promise in Christ. We see God working in human history, laying the groundwork for our salvation. What we are seeing is Christ in action, hidden under ordinary, mundane events of human life and history. And so God chose a people to shape and mold. He claimed land for them. He even identified and isolated a family line. And so Abraham and Sarah moved to a new land.
This was so Jesus would one day be born of the Virgin Mary, grow up in Nazareth, preach in Galilee, die on the cross of death, and rise from the dead. This was so Jesus would send His apostles to preach repentance into the forgiveness of sins, and ascend to the right hand of His Father to intercede for us and be present with us.
Abraham and Sarah had to move from Haran to the land of Canaan, so centuries later, a Jewish man named Nicodemus would sneak around at night to visit Jesus. Nicodemus and all humanity needed to hear how God saves us by giving us new birth from above by water and the Spirit. Nicodemus and all humanity needed to hear how the water of baptism and believing in Jesus go together. “For God loved the world in this way: He gave His one-and-only Son, so that everyone who believes in him will not perish but have eternal life” (John 3:16).
From Abraham’s story, and even all the stories in the Old Testament, we learn that God has been at work in, with, and under all the details of history from all eternity. God was planning, coordinating, and moving people here and there. He was arranging marriages, causing the barren to have children, setting up governments, mobilizing migrations, and bringing about others events in human history.
God did all that to bring about the Word of the Promise. That was so the Gospel of God’s mercy toward sinners in His Son would be fulfilled and preached to all people, even to us. God was at work from all eternity, when by what we would call a sheer coincidence, a curious Jewish man named Nicodemus would become a Christian through faith in Christ.
The connections are mind boggling, if we dare to step back and think about them for a moment. They exceed our most-powerful computers. The possibilities are too countless even to imagine; they exceed our greatest minds. Only God can hold all the seemingly random events of this fallen world and use them for our eternal good.
And yet, because we are fallen beings, we are prone to ask “why?” When tragedy strikes, we wonder why. When a bad turn takes down someone who is “good,” we wonder why. When something bad comes along and crushes us, we wonder why. Such questions may lead us to into doubt and despair. We can become depressed and angry. We can accuse God of having amnesia, as if He has forgotten His promise. We accuse Him of being irrelevant, out of touch, cloistered in heaven, out there somewhere instead of right here with us. “He doesn’t care about me,” we cry.
The answer that comes back from the long view of the Scriptures is that God is in the thick of events. He has been there all along, ordering everything down to the minutest detail toward the goal of our salvation in Christ.
That’s what it means when the Apostle Paul writes in the 8th chapter of Romans: “We know that all things work together for the good of those who love God: those who are called according to his purpose” (Romans 8:28). God’s purpose is salvation through the death and resurrection of Jesus, not your personal convenience, happiness, or pleasure. God’s purpose is your salvation, your rescue from sin, death, devil, the Law’s condemnation, and the wrath of God. That’s what God is doing.
And so, in a real way, we can say that Abraham and Sarah moved from Haran to the land of Canaan so Jesus would reach down from heaven to come to us this morning at Kimberling City to a gathering of His creation around Word and Sacrament. In His Church, Jesus comes to give us His true and living water, bringing eternal life in Holy baptism, His words of Spirit and life bringing forgiveness, His true body and blood for the forgiveness of our sins. He has brought us to this time and place for a reason: to save us, to claim us, to forgive, and to cleanse us.
God remembers His Promise, the promise He made to Abraham and His children. He remembers His promise to you in your baptism. That’s why you belong to Him, and He belongs to you. That’s why Jesus’ death and resurrection and righteousness are yours. He remembers His promise that He will bless you, forgive your sins because of Jesus, and raise you from the dead on the Last Day.
So you many never doubt His promise, fix your eyes on Jesus in the Word and the Sacrament. He is present for you here as surely as He was present for Abraham, and for Nicodemus that night 2,000 years ago. He is the Promise of God and in Him, all of God’s promises are “yes.” That’s why when it comes to Jesus, we can only say, “Amen,” indeed, this is true. Amen.
