Obtaining Promises

Obtaining Promises

Excerpted from “Obtaining Promises”

Sermon #435

Delivered on Sunday morning, February 16, 1862, at the Metropolitan Tabernacle, Newington

God has placed longings inside each human heart, longings for God and for Heaven and for a resurrected life on a resurrected Earth. We often confuse these as longings for something less. But our deepest desire is for precisely what God has promised us: to live as complete and righteous people, with the person we’re made for, in the place we’re made for.

Time would fail me to tell of Gideon, Barak, Samson, Jephthah, of David and Samuel and the prophets—who through faith conquered kingdoms, enforced justice, obtained promises, stopped the mouths of lions, quenched the power of fire, escaped the edge of the sword, were made strong out of weakness, became mighty in war, put foreign armies to flight. Hebrews 11:32-34

Spurgeon • The promises of God are to the believer an inexhaustible mine of wealth. Happy is it for him if he knows how to search out their secret veins and enrich himself with their hidden treasures. They are to him an armory containing all manner of offensive and defensive weapons. Blessed is he who has learned to enter into the sacred arsenal, to put on the breastplate and the helmet, and to lay his hand to the spear and the sword.

The promises are the Christian’s Magna Carta of liberty; they are the title deeds of his heavenly estate. Happy is he who knows how to read them well and call them all his own. Yes, they are the jewel room in which the Christian’s crown treasures are preserved—the regalia, secretly his today, but which he shall openly wear in Paradise. He is already a king who has the silver key with which to unlock the treasury. He may even now grasp the scepter, wear the crown, and put upon his shoulders the imperial mantle.

Oh, how unutterably rich are the promises of our faithful, covenant-keeping God! See, then, my brothers and sisters, how necessary it is that you and I should know the heavenly art of obtaining promises by faith (Hebrews 11:33).

Life eternal is described as the promise of eternal life (1 John 2:25). We, brothers, look for the promise of his coming, and after that “according to his promise we are waiting for new heavens and a new earth in which righteousness dwells” (2 Peter 3:13, emphasis added).

It is certain that holy men of old and good men now do by faith obtain promises.

Obedient to the divine command, Abraham prepares to offer up his son Isaac, his only son on whom his hope of posterity depended, counting that God was able either to raise up children of stones or to raise up Isaac again from the dead.

Brothers and sisters, if you would obtain a promise, your faith must be accompanied by action. When you have made some sacrifice for God, and have been willing in the teeth of human reason to do God’s Word as God bids you, you shall then stand in a place from which you may reach another and a higher promise than as yet you have ever been able to grasp in the hand of your faith.

I think it is Martin Luther who says that some passages of Scripture are like trees which bear fruit but the fruit does not easily drop. You must get hold of the tree and shake it again and again, and sometimes you will need to exhaust all your strength. But at the last shake, down drops the luscious fruit. So you do with the promise—shake it to and fro by meditation, and the apples of gold will fall.

To doubt an honest man is to cast a slur upon him. But to doubt God, who cannot lie, who has sworn by an oath, is to make God a liar or even a perjurer! Our souls shrink back from infamy so cursed. Did ever fiend in Hell commit a more detestable sin than that of doubting the truthfulness of a God of perfection and truth? Come, soul, there is the promise; there it stands before you.

You say, “I dare not believe it.” But I say, “How dare you doubt it? Where did you get your arrogance from? How can you speak so exceeding proudly as thus to think of God and say of him, that he has promised what he cannot or what he will not perform?”

And you! Saints of God, look to your noble ancestors. What a pedigree you have! Through what a host of martyrs, confessors, prophets, and apostles has our blood descended, and all these bear their testimony that not one good thing has failed of all that the Lord God has promised. Among them all there is no exception. Not one of them will question the truthfulness of God. They tried him on the rack, in the gloomy dungeon, and at the stake. They tried him in the Roman amphitheater, when their bones were cracking between the jaws of lions.

They tried him in Nero’s garden,^a when the pitch smeared on them was flaming up, an awful sacrifice to God. They tried him when then they lay in moldy dungeons rotting or burning with fever. They tried him in the tracks of the wild goats, when they wandered about in sheepskins and goatskins, destitute, afflicted, tormented.

They tried him in the bitterness of life and in the agonies of death, and they all say to you, “Trust in the Lord; believe in him. So shall he bring it to pass, and you shall attain the promise. Falter not, hesitate not, waver not, but with the unstaggering faith of Abraham, say, ‘He that has promised is able also to perform,’ and you shall see it with your eyes and you shall eat thereof. You shall have his presence and blessing in this world, and in the world to come life everlasting.” God help us so to do for Jesus’ sake. Amen.

Alcorn • What God made us to desire, and therefore what we do desire if only we recognize it, is exactly what he promises to those who follow Jesus Christ: a resurrected life in a resurrected body, with the resurrected Christ on a resurrected Earth. Desiring something doesn’t make it true or false. But because the God who put desires in us determined to correspond them to his plans, they do in fact find their fulfillment in the very things God has promised us.

Paul doesn’t just say that if there’s no Heaven, the Christian life is futile. He says that if there’s no resurrection of the dead, the hope of Christianity is an illusion, and we’re to be pitied for placing our faith in Christ (1 Corinthians 15:17-19). Ultimately, there is no Heaven for human spirits unless Heaven is also for human bodies.

Our deep longing for a resurrected life is not based on wishful thinking. Rather, it is a longing placed in our hearts by God himself, precisely because he intends for us to be raised to new life on the New Earth. It is God who “set eternity in the human heart” (Ecclesiastes 3:11, NIV). It is God who designed us to live on Earth and to desire not only spiritual fulfillment but also the earthly life. And it is our bodily resurrection that will allow us to return to an earthly life—this time freed from sin and the Curse.

“If anyone is in Christ, the new creation has come: The old has gone, the new is here!” (2 Corinthians 5:17, NIV). That’s a promise!

If we are tempted to doubt such a promise, Spurgeon asks a question as pertinent to us as it was to his audience in 1862: “How dare you doubt it? Where did you get your arrogance from? How can you speak so exceeding proudly as thus to think of God and say of him, that he has promised what he cannot or what he will not perform?”

^a Nero was Rome’s emperor, AD 54–68. He soaked Christians in oil, attached them to poles, and then ignited them for use as torches to light his garden at night.