Waiting for God's Promises

Waiting for God's Promises Introduction In 2005, hedge fund manager Michael Burry began to see trouble in the the US real estate market, and by extension in the bond-markets that sold mortgage-backed securities. He bet against the market by buying insurance contracts, called credit default swaps, that would allow him to collect a payout if the values of certain mortgage-backed securities declined. In the world of financial derivatives, you could insure assets you didn't own. While he waited for the housing meltdown, Burry would have to pay premiums on the policies, but he was sure the meltdown would come within a year or two. His investors didn't share his confidence. The premiums were cheap compared to the payouts, but he bought a lot of them, so holding them caused his hedge fund to loose money. Many of his investors threatened to pull their money, which would force Burry to cancel the policies, before he could collect on them. He invoked a clause in his investment contract that allowed him to hold on to his investors' funds for a period of time, further angering his investors who desperately wanted their money back. But in 2007, the real estate market started to collapse, and Burry was able to sell off his insurance contracts for a massive profit, netting huge returns for the clients who had second-guessed him. Michael Burry made a promise to his investors, but when the return didn't happen on his investors' timetable, and when their experience told them that this sort of bet would be a loser, the lost faith in the fund manager. They should have trusted him, but they didn't. But of course, he's just a canny, but fallible investor. How much more ought we to trust the promises God gives to his people. But when God promises that he will do things that our experiences say isn't likely to happen, or that don't happen on our timetable how do we respond? In today's story from the life of Abraham we see how God is committed to his promises, even when they don't look plausible. Let's look at Genesis 15 1 After this, the word of the Lord came to Abram in a vision: "Do not be afraid, Abram. I am your shield, your very great reward." 2 But Abram said, "Sovereign Lord, what can you give me since I remain childless and the one who will inherit my estate is Eliezer of Damascus?" 3 And Abram said, "You have given me no children; so a servant in my household will be my heir." 4 Then the word of the Lord came to him: "This man will not be your heir, but a son who is your own flesh and blood will be your heir." 5 He took him outside and said, "Look up at the sky and count the stars-if indeed you can count them." Then he said to him, "So shall your offspring be." 6 Abram believed the Lord, and he credited it to him as righteousness. 7 He also said to him, "I am the Lord, who brought you out of Ur of the Chaldeans to give you this land to take possession of it." 8 But Abram said, "Sovereign Lord, how can I know that I will gain possession of it?" 9 So the Lord said to him, "Bring me a heifer, a goat and a ram, each three years old, along with a dove and a young pigeon." 10 Abram brought all these to him, cut them in two and arranged the halves opposite each other; the birds, however, he did not cut in half. 11 Then birds of prey came down on the carcasses, but Abram drove them away. 12 As the sun was setting, Abram fell into a deep sleep, and a thick and dreadful darkness came over him. 13 Then the Lord said to him, "Know for certain that for four hundred years your descendants will be strangers in a country not their own and that they will be enslaved and mistreated there. 14 But I will punish the nation they serve as slaves, and afterward they will come out with great possessions. 15 You, however, will go to your ancestors in peace and be buried at a good old age. 16 In the fourth generation your descendants will come back here, for the sin of the Amorites has not yet reached its full measure." 17 When the sun had set and darkness had fallen, a smoking firepot with a blazing torch appeared and passed between the pieces. 18 On that day the Lord made a covenant with Abram and said, "To your descendants I give this land, from the Wadi of Egypt to the great river, the Euphrates-19 the land of the Kenites, Kenizzites, Kadmonites, 20 Hittites, Perizzites, Rephaites, 21 Amorites, Canaanites, Girgashites and Jebusites." (Genesis 15, NIV) What God shows Abraham in this story is true for us as well: We must wait for God's promises with patient endurance, trusting that he is incapable of faithlessness. 1. Trusting in God's Agency Abraham's Attempt to Make it Happen. Abraham's faith in relocating his family from Harran to Canaan, shows that when God promised to make Abraham into a great Nation, he trusted God to come through. But over time, the fulfillment of the promise starts to look like something that's not going to happen. In response, Abraham really has 3 options: 1. Trust that God will do what he said he will do 2. Give up on the promises, concluding that God is unable or unwilling to make good on his promises, or 3. Conclude that God needs him to help matters along: that he needs to adjust his expectations and take action accordingly. Abraham took option number 3. Eliezer of Damascus is Abraham's heir apparent because Abraham has taken matters into his own hands. In the ancient world, there were no CPP, old age security, or long-term care facilities. Care for the elderly was the responsibility of the elderly person's children. This means that elderly people without surviving children were in a precarious position. If they were poor, there was no one to provide financial support when they were no longer able to work. If they had money (like Abraham) there was still the matter of caring for them in their old age, and giving them appropriate burial rituals. So childless people, if they had means, could adopt adults, who would look after them, and then would receive the estate as payment. This seems to be the arrangement Abraham has made with Eliezer. He's Abraham's slave, who has been promoted to designated son. God had promised to make Abraham into a great nation, but since he didn't have kids, Abraham guesses that God must have meant that it would happen through an adopted slave as his son. This hardly seems like an auspicious beginning to the promised 'great nation,' but what else is Abraham going to do? He took matters into his own hands so that he can have what God promised him as long as you sort of squint and look at it from a strange angle. But God doesn't need Abraham's human effort to make his plan work. In the ancient world, it was a common belief that people were expected to do their part in bringing a god's promise to fulfillment, but that's not how Abraham's God operates. As we can see in the next story, when Abraham fathers a child with a concubine rather than his wife, human efforts to manufacture a fulfillment of God's promise are unnecessary and often counter-productive. God's promise is going to be fulfilled by God's agency. He's going to be the one to get it done. Abraham's job is not to help God along, but to trust that God can do has he says. To his credit, Abraham believes God, when God clarifies that the great nation will be built on Abraham's biological child. Our Attempts to Make it Happen Abraham's attempt to make God's promises happen with his help is a temptation we can face too. God promised that one of David's decedents would sit on the throne forever. But in order to make that happen, Jewish nationalists provoked a war with the Romans who were sitting on the throne at the time. That didn't go well. Today, we can see parents who want to see their children grow into Godly Christians trying to force the issue, using shame and intimidation to scare their kids into the faith. Most of the time, this alienates the kids we're trying to save. Or we know that God has promised that his kingdom will come on earth as it is in heaven, and we try to bring it about through the political process. While legislating morality might feel like we're 'doing something,' rules-no matter how fair or just they might be-do nothing to transform human hearts. God's kingdom isn't about regulating peoples' behaviour, but about renewing their hearts. So God's kingdom is dependent on God's transforming action, not on our political activism. 2. Trusting in God's Timing But we don't just need to trust that God will be the principal actor in keeping his promises, we also have to trust God's timing. Abraham's Difficult Wait Abraham was already 75-years-old when God promised to make him into a great nation. 10 years later, Abraham has acquired great wealth, he's experienced military victory, but he still has no kids and owns no land. And he's pretty raw with God: Everything God has given him is meaningless if God doesn't give him a kid, Now he's an old man with an old wife and he still has no kids. Abraham's complaints suggest he's basically given up hope. "Oh, God, you're back! Remember that time you promised to make me into a great nation? You forgot something: I needed kids for that to happen?! Thanks a lot! Abraham must assume that God was unwilling or unable to do what he had promised. God, for his part, could understandably respond to Abraham's implied accusation with anger, but he doesn't. He understands that the wait has been a tremendous test of Abraham's trust. Abraham probably feels as if God has forgotten the promise So God reaffirms the promise, clarifying a couple of key points. First, He assures Abraham that the plan is not for him to adopt an heir, but to father a child. Second, he explains that Abraham hasn't yet been given the land because the current residents' sin doesn't yet warrant their dispossession. But things are irrevocably headed in that direction. So God hasn't over-promised and underdelivered: rather the promises are happening on a timeline that doesn't match Abraham's expectations. God had promised that certain things would happen eventually. He didn't give a specific timeline. Abraham's own sense of possibility give him a feeling of urgency (He reasonably concludes that a 90-year-old women has had all the children she's ever going to have), but God-who isn't limited by what we think of as possible-has no such sense of urgency, so God expects Abraham to wait. In Abraham's case, the wait is the point. If God had given 75-year-old Abraham and 65-year-old Sarah a baby, it would have been truly remarkable, But when God gives 100-year-old Abraham and 90-year-old Sarah a baby it's not just remarkable, it's downright miraculous. God knows asking Abraham to wait is a difficult situation, but after the miraculous conclusion to the wait, Abraham's faith will be far stronger. Abraham is willing to sacrifice Isaac at God's command only because God's proven track record makes Abraham believe God can even raise Isaac from the dead. Our Difficult Wait God often asks us to wait for his timing so that our faith grows too. When I was a missionary in Hungary, I worked with a discipleship school. Students would arrive for three months of lectures, and then we would go on a two-month outreach to another country. We didn't know what country that would be until we prayed to seek God's direction. What this meant was people came to the school without a clear picture of how much money they would need to complete it. So about six weeks before we were leaving for outreach, we'd have locations and the budgets nailed down and then everyone would start their fundraising pushes. Some people-especially the Americans-had parents that would just send a cheque for the cost. But others, particularly the ones who came from the former communist countries (which at the time were quite poor) didn't have the cash on hand. They wrote to people they knew, or to people connected to the students from richer countries, to get the money. As organizers, we had to buy plane tickets and book hotels, before we knew all the money was going to be there. But in the end, the money always was, but often it involved an uncomfortable wait. In one school, a student got the last few hundred dollars he needed a half hour before it was time to head to the airport. Through the experience of waiting for God, though, we all began to grow in confidence that God could come through. Maybe you have a sense that God's promises aren't happening for you. If God has promised something, he will follow through but sometimes God waits to fulfill the promise because our faith will grow in response. I should point out, that sometimes, we impose promises on God that God never made God never promised the Jews would get revenge their Roman occupiers but many Jews in Jesus' time presumed God would do just that. God never promised to give us a life of health and comfort if we behave but when Job's life fell apart, his friends accused him of misconduct because they assumed God would have protected him if he were righteous. God probably hasn't promised to make you rich or famous, or to save you from all misfortune. If we assume that just because we want something, God has committed to providing it, we've forgotten who is God and who is the servant. 3. Trusting in God's Grace We may trust that God will act to bring his promises to completion and he'll do it in his timing, but we may also wonder if God will honour his commitments when we fall short (for we all do). If God is only on the hook to do his part if we do ours flawlessly, then God need not bother making promises, because he'd never need to keep them. We get some insight into this In the strange account of the covenant ceremony in the final part of the chapter we read. The ceremony seems quite odd, and a bit gruesome to modern readers, but it would have made perfect sense to ancient readers. Normally, two people would make a solemn agreement, and then they would cut animals in half and walk between the pieces together. What this said is, "If I don't follow through on my part of agreement, may I meet the same end as these animals." But in Abraham's case, there's a meaningful difference: rather than both parties passing between the severed animal carcasses, God alone passes through them. God commits himself to fulfill his promises, no matter what Abraham does. In the stories that follow, we see God working with Abraham's descendents, even flawed ones. Jacob the a conman. Moses the murderer. David murderer/adulterer. Ehud was left-handed (Shady!). Saul of Tarsus the self-professed chief of sinners. There are setbacks along the way: 40 years wandering in the desert; The Israel-Judah divorce; the Babylonian Exile; but God never abandons his commitment to bless Abraham's descendents or to bless the nations through them. In fact, God does even better than that In walking through the dismembered animals, God shows that he will suffer a gruesome death if he ever proves unfaithful to his promises. But when Israel proves to be an unfaithful covenant partner, God takes the punishment-the horrible death-onto himself. God himself went through the severed animal carcases because it would be God himself who paid the price for Israel's unfaithfulness. We have entered into this same covenant: grafted into the family of Abraham by faith. As Paul says: 13 Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law by becoming a curse for us, for it is written: "Cursed is everyone who is hung on a pole." 14 He redeemed us in order that the blessing given to Abraham might come to the Gentiles through Christ Jesus, so that by faith we might receive the promise of the Spirit. (Galatians 3:13-14, NIV). We are heirs to Abraham's promise and recipients of God's Spirit because of what God has done for us. While there are consequences when we fall short, God's purposes can never be stopped. He will bless the world through us. And that blessing depends not on our faithfulness, but on his grace So when we are tempted to believe that God's promises don't apply to us because we are sinful, fallen people, we need not worry. God has paid the price for our unfaithfulness: His promises to us remain in effect because God is faithful even when we're not. Conclusion God's promises may seem like they're a long time coming, but let's hold on to them and not doubt. God has promised to be present with us as long as this age lasts (Matthew 28:20). God has promised that faith in Jesus is sufficient to atone for our sins (John 3:16). God has promised that when we seek his kingdom above all, he will provide us with our basic necessities (Matthew 6:33). God has promised that even though we die, in Christ we will live again (John 11:25-26). Though we don't see these things happening, and even though they look impossibly far off, we can trust the God who showed himself faithful to Abraham, continues to show himself faithful today. So let's trust against all odds because it is God in whom we trust.