(Welcome back to my Looking to Advent series! This week we’ll look at God’s promises in scripture. To catch up, here’s part 1, part 2, and part 3.)
Our God is big on making–and keeping–promises to His people. For me, I don’t have to look much further than this little deck of cards that I carry with me everywhere:
I call these my Life Verses, and the majority of them are promises from Scripture that God has spoken to me at different points in my walk with Him. An example is Philippians 1:6 (NIV): “being confident of this that He who began a good work in you will carry it on to completion until the day of Christ Jesus.” I know that God is doing a good work through me. Even when it seems to dry up, He isn’t finished with me yet and He will continue that work until I die or until Jesus comes back for His church. Psalm 46:10 is also in my deck, and several of the other verses that I have cited in this series.
If you look through the Bible, God has made plenty of covenant promises with His people. Consider Noah and the rainbow as a symbol that God promised to never flood the world again. Or Abraham and God’s covenant to make him a father of many. Yet God’s very first promise was found back in Genesis 3, when He cursed the serpent for misleading the woman and bringing sin into the world: “And I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your offspring and hers; he will crush your head, and you will strike his heel.” (v.15, NIV) Advent is actually the anticipation of this promise coming to life: Jesus is the foretold offspring who would come and crush the head of the serpent, who is Satan. All the way back at the Fall, God set in motion a plan for redemption and made a promise that He would make things right.
Another promise of Advent is also found in Isaiah 7:14 and repeated in Matthew 1:23. It should be a very familiar verse to you: “The virgin will be with child and will give birth to a son, and they will call Him Immanuel, which means ‘God with us’.” (NIV) The coming of ‘God with us’ is why we celebrate Christmas every year, and the Advent season is meant to build a sense of anticipation in us as we remember not only His first coming, but also the promise that He will come back and take us home to be with Him.
The Old Testament is full of foreshadowing Jesus’s coming. When you read the Old Testament with an Advent-mindset, you will encounter promise after promise that God planted to point to His plan to send us Jesus. God is a promise maker and a promise keeper. Numbers 23:19 supports this: “God is not human, that He should lie, not a human being, that He should change His mind. Does He speak and then not act? Does He promise and not fulfill?” (NIV)
If He said it, He will do it. While God’s timeline is different from what we in our fragile humanness believe, He is still working behind the scenes on our behalf and one day we will see how every piece of the puzzle fits together and works together for our good.
Because of this, we have hope. “Let us hold unswervingly to the hope we profess, for He who promised is faithful.” This verse (Hebrews 10:23 NIV) brings us to our final word we’ll talk about next week: persevere.
Blessings,
~Lynne
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