We’ve all heard it, haven’t we? Whether we are a parent asking a child to confirm that they won’t be late coming home, or a student saying they’ll get their homework in on time, or a teenager asking their friend to make sure they turn up on time to an event. “I promise,” is an easy thing to say, but often they are just empty words. The child gets carried away with the excitement of the evening and forgets the time, the student gets distracted by other things and runs out of time to do the homework or the friend takes longer to get ready than you do and turns up over an hour after you! And it’s not just in our social lives that this happens. Political leaders the world over make promises all the time and, more often than not, they fail to live up to them. It can be very frustrating when people break their promises.
Is anything different with God. When He makes a promise, can it be broken. The bible says that He “is not slack concerning his promise”. So, what are the promises that God has made? One important one is here.
Here, God is promising Abraham a number of things: Firstly, that Abraham will inherit a land, secondly his descendants will inherit the land, thirdly that the land would be theirs for ever and fourthly that his descendants will be so numerous they cannot be counted. Has God kept his promise? Well, we can certainly see how Abraham’s descendants (Jews and Arabs) have become too many to number and the Israelites did inherit the land of Canaan.
However, Abraham died before inheriting the land. Does this mean God has broken his promise – certainly not! It just hasn’t happened yet. We can be confident that because some of this promise has been fulfilled, then all of it can. In Hebrews we are told that Abraham is not the only one who hasn’t received the promise yet, but this isn’t a bad thing. This is because God is still calling on people to respond to him. Abraham’s promise of inheriting the land will be kept when his descendant, Jesus, returns to the earth to set up His Kingdom in the land promised to Abraham, and we can be part of that promise too.
