During this series we will be considering just 4 of the promises of God: His promise to send a Saviour, His promise to bless all nations, His promise of forgiveness and righteousness, and finally, His promise to be a loving Father to His children.
In the opening chapters of the Bible, we see that God is God of promises. Just after Adam and Eve fell into sin, we find the first promise of a Saviour. In Genesis 3:15 is the first promise of the Gospel of Christ, as God says to satan “I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your offspring and her offspring; He shall bruise your head, and you shall bruise His heel.”
This sets the pattern for the rest of the Bible, as God consistently makes covenant promises to His people. In Genesis 6:18 He promises to spare Noah and his family from the Great Flood. “I will establish my covenant with you, and you shall come into the ark, you, your sons, your wife, and your sons’ wives with you.” Later on, in the opening verses of chapter 12, He makes a covenant with Abraham, as He promises to make his descendants a great nation, and that God would bless him and all families of the earth through Abraham. “Go from your country and your kindred and your father’s house to the land that I will show you. And I will make of you a great nation, and I will bless you and make your name great, so that you will be a blessing. I will bless those who bless you, and him who dishonours you I will curse, and in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed.” (Genesis 12:1-3).
There is a common thread that holds all of these promises together. That thread is the hope of a Saviour - the offspring of the woman who is yet to come. The who, what, when, where, and how about the Saviour is the unfolding story of the Old Testament.
And then of course, as we read the New Testament, we begin to see that all of the Old Testament promises of God are fulfilled in Jesus Christ, in His birth, life, death, resurrection and ascension, and it is with great anticipation and bated breath that we await His promised return for His bride, the Church.
As we study the love story we find in the pages of the Bible, what we see in the story of redemption is that the God of the Bible keeps His word. His covenant promises never fail, even though His people fail over and over again. Despite their sin God shows grace to Israel and He brings salvation, not just to the Jewish nation, but to the whole world through the promised Messiah.
As we go back to the Old Testament, God promised to fulfill His promise to Abraham through his son Isaac. Isaac’s son Jacob, later given the name Israel, then had 12 sons that would go on to form what are known as the twelve tribes of Israel.
But as we know, the descendants of Jacob were enslaved by Egypt, and a command from Pharaoh to kill all male infants threatened to wipe out the entire nation of Israel. But God did not abandon His people. Exodus 2:24 says, “God heard their groaning, and God remembered His covenant with Abraham, with Isaac, and with Jacob.”
And God’s response to their misery and suffering in Egypt was to send a deliverer, Moses. Moses led Israel out of slavery and into freedom. Once they had crossed the Red Sea, God led them to Mount Sinai, where once again He made a covenant with His people: the Mosaic Covenant.
In Exodus 20:2, the Lord said, “I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery,” and in the very next verses, after reminding the people who He is, God gave them the written law, what we know as the Ten Commandments.
He had, by His grace, freed His people from captivity in Egypt. Of course, as has been well documented, they remained a sinful and rebellious people, but God continued to show them mercy. Despite their sin, God did not forget the promise He had made to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. This was true for Israel in the Exodus, and it remains true for His people today - those who have chosen to believe in Jesus Christ.
Though we were sinners, God loved us and has freed us from captivity. Not captivity to a foreign political power, but captivity to sin. God bringing His people out of bondage to slavery in Egypt is a picture of how He has rescued us from bondage to sin. Just as He brought His people into the Promised Land in the Old Testament, so He brings His people into the ultimate Promised Land now - the glory of Heaven which awaits all those who trust in Jesus.
Even as far back as the days of the Exodus we see a picture, a type, of God’s plan for salvation. He promised Adam and Eve a Saviour all the way back in Genesis 3, and we see the promise unfolding in the story of the Old Testament.
However, just as with us today, the sin problem remained. Once God had brought the nation of Israel out of Egypt, you would think that they would be so grateful that they would obey, worship and serve Him, but that was not the way of the Israelites then, nor is it the way of sinners today.
The Israelites had personally witnessed the power of God. They had seen the ten plaques in Egypt which eventually persuaded Pharaoh to set them free. When he changed his mind, God parted the Red Sea so they could cross over in safety before God destroyed the most powerful army in the world at that time. They had seen the might and power of God with their own eyes, yet they very quickly deserted Him. While Moses was still on Mount Sinai receiving the law from God, the Israelites created and worshipped the golden calf.
This shows us why God gave them the law in the first place. It was because they could not be trusted to remain faithful to Him, and they needed the law to show them how far short they were falling from God’s expectations of them.
The law was given to them to teach them who God is, what He expects, and how they were to live in response to God’s very nature. Many years later, the apostle Paul wrote in Galatians 3:24, “The law was our guardian until Christ came.”
The law exposed the Israelites. It revealed to them how sinful and rebellious they were. The law was meant to teach God’s people how much they needed His forgiveness and grace, and it serves the same purpose today: It teaches us how desperately we need a Saviour who can obey God perfectly on our behalf, because we have failed so miserably.
As the story unfolds in the Old Testament, this need of the Israelite people is brought into sharper focus. One of the most damning verses in the Old Testament is Judges 21:25. “In those days there was no king in Israel, everyone did what was right in his own eyes.” The Israelites had proven that they were incapable of obeying God, so they mistakenly believed that if they had a king just like all the other pagan nations in those days, this king would teach them and lead them in obedience. But they needed a king who could deal with the sin problem completely. Their need was not for a human king to sit on a throne, but for the King of kings. They needed the promised Saviour.
But, they insisted that they have a king, and so God relented. It all started so well. Saul was the first king of Israel. He was strong, he had the respect of the people and he seemed to be the answer to all their problems. However, his heart was rotten and he did not obey God. And so God rejected him and appointed David as their new king.
Here was a man who loved God and desperately wanted to obey and follow God. As we know, David was far from perfect, but he still loved and feared God, and so it was to David that God made another promise about the coming Saviour.
In the Davidic Covenant God promised, “I will raise up your offspring after you, who shall come from your body, and I will establish His kingdom. I will establish the throne of His kingdom forever.” (2 Samuel 7:12-13) God had promised in Exodus that the Saviour would be the offspring of a woman. In other words, the Saviour would be born as one of us, and here, in 2 Samuel, God reveals that this promised Saviour would be a direct descendant of King David.
But this was still many years in the future. Israel’s pattern of disobedience continued, and it became so bad that just after David’s son Solomon died, the kingdom was split into two parts: Israel in the north, and Judah in the south, and from this point onwards, things went from bad to worse.
In both kingdoms, there was a consistent move away from God. In the southern kingdom of Judah there were some good kings, but the general pattern of disobedience continued, despite the many prophets that God sent to warn the people to repent or they would face the judgment of God. Tragically though, they ignored the warnings of the prophets, and so God’s judgment came. Assyria conquered Israel in the north, while just over a century later the Babylonians invaded the southern kingdom of Judah. God’s people were then forced to leave the Promised Land and live as exiles in foreign countries. It was almost as if they were back where they started - in bondage in Egypt. Yet, even in these dark days in the history of the Israelite nation, when it seemed all hope was lost, God’s promise stood firm.
The New Testament begins with the fulfilment of the Old Testament promise of the Saviour, and Matthew’s gospel begins by tracing the genealogy of Jesus all the way back to Abraham. It is the perfect way to connect the New and Old Testaments, as it tells the same story of the promise of redemption. Matthew 1:17, immediately after the genealogy of Jesus in the preceding verses says, “All the generations from Abraham to David were fourteen generations, and from David to the deportation to Babylon fourteen generations, and from the deportation to Babylon to the Christ fourteen generations.”
The unfolding story of the Bible has as its climax the person and work of Jesus Christ, the descendant of Abraham through whom all nations will be blessed. He is the only one who can and does obey God’s law perfectly. Jesus is the heir of King David, but He takes His royalty to an infinitely higher level. As fully man and fully God, Jesus is the King of kings. He is the perfect eternal king, while at the same time He is also the fulfillment of the promise made all the way back in Genesis 3.
As the eternal God in human flesh, it is Jesus alone who deserved to be praised and rewarded by God for His perfect obedience to the Father.
As Jesus humbled Himself as a man, He willingly surrendered all the rights of His divinity for a season. He did not stop being God. Contrary to some false teachings, He did not come into this world as just a man. He was fully God and fully man as He submitted to the Father by going to the cross to die the death that we deserve for our rebellion and our unfaithfulness to God. Jesus freely offered Himself as an atoning sacrifice on our behalf, as in His death He received and suffered the punishment we deserve.
And then on the third day He defeated death itself in His resurrection. Jesus was crucified in humility, but He is raised in glory. Paul writes in Philippians 2:9-11, “God has highly exalted Him and bestowed on Him the name that is above every name, so that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.”
And now, as we place our faith in Jesus Christ, we become the recipients of God’s covenant promises. We have entrance into God’s Kingdom as His heirs - His beloved children, and our inheritance is the promise of eternal life in the new heavens and the new earth.
Jesus Christ is the fulfillment of all God’s covenant promises. Throughout history and from even before the foundations of the world, God’s eternal plan is one of grace as He brings salvation through Christ not just to His chosen people the Israelites, but to any who believe from all the nations of the earth, which we will take a closer look at next time.