God Always Fulfills His Promises

“Every good gift and every perfect gift is from above, and cometh down from the Father of lights, with whom is no variableness, neither shadow of turning.  Of His own will begat He us with the Word of truth, that we should be a kind of firstfruits of His creatures.”  Hebrews 1:17-18

Think about the sun for a moment.  We say at evening that the sun is going down.  In the morning, we say the sun is risen.  However, the sun is stationary.  It doesn’t go anywhere.  It never changes.  We are the ones who are moving as the earth rotates on its axis and revolves around the sun.  Like the sun, which God made and set firmly as the center of the physical universe, God is firmly set as the Almighty, powerful, holy, and sovereign God of all time and space.  He has always existed and will exist forever.  We are created in His image, yet He is far exalted above His creation.  He doesn’t change.  He is “the same yesterday, today, and forever” (Hebrews 13:8).  He will always make good on His promises to the righteous and make good on His warnings to the wicked.  His word is truth.  Everything good that we have comes from Him.  All that we do that is wrong is strictly on us.  Some folks like to think that their success in life was self-made.  They say they “pulled themselves up by their bootstraps”, but without the strength, health, knowledge, and ability that God gave them, they can do nothing (John 15:5).  We humans can take credit for absolutely nothing except our sin.

The day when God allowed His only Son, Jesus Christ, to die on the cross of Calvary must have been a bittersweet day for Him.  It had to have been the most difficult day that God had ever experienced, far worse than when the children of Israel worshipped the golden calf, or when David committed adultery and ordered the murder of Uriah, or when Saul, who later became Paul, was pursuing those who followed Christ.  It was for those sins and the sins of all mankind for which Christ died.  Losing a child to death is just about the worst thing a parent can experience.  I know that for a fact.  So yes, God must have suffered greatly particularly because it was the sins of His creation that brought the need to satisfy payment in order for man to be redeemed.  But that is the sweet part.  Jesus died to set us free from our sins and to bring us back into a relationship with our heavenly Father.  God knew that the sacrifice on the part of His Son would give folks the privilege of being adopted into God’s eternal family.

I thought about my own life.  I was adopted at the age of four months by wonderful Christian parents.  They had lost the only child that they had through stillbirth.  She died, and I was adopted.  I remember telling my mother a long time ago that, if the baby had survived, they would have not adopted me.  She disagreed, saying that God meant for them to have me as their child regardless.  That may be true but nonetheless, the death of their baby girl and the fact that they could physically have no more children was the catalyst that brought them to apply for adoption.  There is much about life that we don’t understand: why did that young man have to die?  Why did that mother of four children get cancer?  Why do bad things happen to good people?  The Apostle Paul made it clear in Romans 8:28 that everything that happens to us is part of God’s plan for our lives.  He doesn’t necessarily orchestrate events, tragedies, or other occurrences in our lives, but uses these things that happen due to living in a sin-cursed world to mold, strengthen, and prepare us for the future.

Paul said that the combination of life’s events work toward the good of those who love Him, those that He has called for His eternal purpose (Romans 8:28).  The outcome is to be a positive upbuilding of our character and our spiritual insight although that is usually not made evident during the midst of our trial.  Later, though, when some time has passed, and we have begun to reflect back and measure from there to where we are now, we might be able to begin to understand God’s working in our lives.  But, of course, there are some things we will never understand until we cross over into our eternal home, but the glories of heaven will make us forget every tear that was shed and every question that we pondered.  In other words, there will be no need to know the whys and wherefores because, I believe, seeing Christ in all His glory and beholding the majesty and magnificence of heaven will take away all the mysteries of life.  The hardships, cruelties, and disappointments of earthly life won’t even be remembered.  Romans 8:18 tells us that what we suffer now can’t even “be compared to the glory which shall be revealed in us”.  I think that death for the believer will be like waking up from a dream or a nightmare, depending upon one’s circumstances in life, and realizing that our earthly life was not our intended life, but it was eternal life, the life for which God intended us to experience all along.