Great Faith Comes from a Great Promise

Genesis 12:1-8

Second Sunday in Lent  -  12 March 2017

Rev. John Derme

If I ask you to move to a country that you've never been to before, will you go? No. You won't go without having a very good reason to move. So I'll give you a reason. If you move to this foreign country, I'll give that country to you, and it will belong to you. Now will you go? Of course not! You know that I don't have the ability to give you a country. No matter how many times I promise you that I have that ability, you have no reason to trust that I can actually do what I said. Without some kind of proof, it would be foolish of you to trust my promise.

A lot of people think that faith means believing something for which there is no proof. You hear that from non-Christians who want to discount what we believe. They talk about the difference between science, which is based on evidence, and faith, which has no evidence at all. You hear this from well-meaning Christians, too. They don't know how to explain why we can be certain about who God is and why the Bible is true, so they say that it can't be explained and that there are no reasons; it is just a matter of faith.

Both of those people, the non-Christian and the Christian, are wrong. Rather than being something that has no basis, faith cannot exist without a basis. If there is no evidence for something, but you believe it anyway, that is not faith. That is superstition. This is why you would not believe me if I would say that I will give you a country if you move there. If I had a well-known history of giving countries to people, then you might be able to accept my offer. There has to be a reason to believe.

Our First Lesson tells us about a man who was willing to move to a new country, because someone asked him to do it. The man's name was Abram, and the someone who asked him was the Lord. We often think of Abram – or Abraham, as he was later known after the Lord changed his name – as a man of great faith. Sometimes his faith didn't show itself to be so strong. But sometimes it did, which is what we see in the beginning of Genesis 12.

The Lord spoke to Abram and said, "Leave your country, your relatives, and your father's house, and move to a new land that I will show you." God didn't just ask him to go, though. He made seven great promises to Abram.

First he said, "I will make you a great nation." When the Lord spoke this promise, Abram was already 75-years-old. He didn’t have any children. His wife was barren. But the Lord was promising that he would have a child and his descendants would be successful, grow, and flourish.

The Lord would not only bless his descendants. His second promise was, "I will bless you." If Abram was about to set out to a foreign land, he would need the Lord's blessing.

Third, the Lord said, "I will make your name great." If you've ever wanted to be famous, you like the sound of that promise. But the Lord was promising better fame than being in movies or a sports star. Those people are famous for a while, but soon are forgotten. Abraham is legitimately one of the best-known people in the history of the world. He will never be forgotten. He is remembered for something far greater than being on television. His name is great because of what God did through him to accomplish the plan of salvation.

Fourth, the Lord said, "You will be a blessing." Abram would be a blessing to many people during his life. He would help people, even sacrificing his own safety to save people's lives. But he would be a blessing to many even after his life on earth was over.

Fifth, the Lord said, "I will bless those who bless you." And the sixth promise is related: "Whoever curses you, I will curse." "Your friends will be my friends and your enemies, my enemies. If people treat you well, I will reward them. But if they treat you poorly, it won't have any effect on you. They will suffer for it." What a strong guarantee of safety and security!

The final promise was the greatest: "All peoples of the earth will be blessed through you." How could all nations be blessed through Abram? It is not as though he was the Savior! No, but with these words, the Lord was promising that the Savior of all nations would come from his family.

The Lord didn't say, "You will accomplish these things." He said, "I will do these things for you." They were great promises. Can you imagine what it would be like for the Lord to speak them to you? Through these promises, the Lord worked in Abram the faith to believe and obey. He didn't even know where God wanted him to go, but he went without hesitation.

So when he was 75-years-old, at an age when you would probably like to be settled comfortably into retirement, Abram, his wife, and his nephew Lot moved to a new place. And they settled in the land where the Canaanites lived.

When they got there, the Lord appeared to Abram. I imagine that Abram and his wife Sarai were probably nervous about living in this new place. How would the people there treat them? Would they find a place to stay? The Lord's appearance took their fears away. And the Lord brought Abram another great promise: "I will give this land to your descendants." Abram was now living in the land that would become known as Israel, where his descendants would be a great nation and where the promised Savior would come. In that place Abram built an altar and offered a sacrifice in worship to the Lord.

Even though they now lived in the land, Abram and Sarai never really settled. They lived the rest of their lives as nomads in tents. But wherever Abram pitched his tent, he built an altar. He publicly proclaimed the Lord's name to the people in the land around him. He displayed the faith that the Lord worked in him.

So you can see why Abraham has this reputation of great faith, can't you? He trusted in the promise of blessings that must have seemed too good to be true. He obeyed, even when what the Lord asked him was life-disrupting and difficult. But Abram doesn't get all the credit for what he did. He couldn't have obeyed without the Lord's promises. He couldn't have believed unless the Lord had the ability to fulfill his promises. Great faith comes from a great promise!

Would you have trusted like he did? Those were some great promises. If I had been in Abram's position, I don't know what I would have done. For me, the greater a promise that somebody makes to me, the less likely I am to believe it. Maybe that is because I've seen so many businesses and politicians make great promises that they had no way of keeping. For example, if a restaurant promises me that it will serve me a satisfying meal, I may be willing to believe that and give them a try. But if a restaurant promises me the best meal of my life, I'm going to be skeptical. Are you like me in that way?

Sometimes that skepticism also affects the way we respond to the Lord's promises. You may not be Abram, but the Lord has made some great promises to you. The Savior whom he promised to send through Abram has come! He blesses you with the free gift of eternal life! But not everybody believes those promises. In fact, most people don't.

For many people, those promises are too good to be true. They believe that they have to save themselves by doing what is right. They may even believe that Jesus died to give them a second chance to live a good life. But that Jesus has done it all, and there is absolutely nothing that they have to do or can do to be saved? That's too much! So they hold on to the idea that they have to play some part in being saved. If you have to do something to save yourself, though, then you don't really need God after all. Therefore many people abandon faith in God completely, thinking that they can live a good life without him.

There really isn't any difference between believing that you can save yourself with God's help and believing that you don't need God at all. Either way, a person does not believe the Lord's promises. Because we do what is wrong, we can't save ourselves with or without his help. The Lord doesn't give us any way to be saved other than through his promises. If we reject his promises, we reject the salvation that he gives to us through Jesus' life and death, and we choose not to have eternal life in heaven, but rather to suffer eternal death in hell.

The Lord's promise is not too good to be true. It is exactly what we need. Because we do what is wrong, we need a Savior who only does what is right. Jesus did live a completely righteous life for us. Because we do what is wrong, we need a Savior who suffered the death and hell we deserve. Jesus suffered it all for us. Because we do what is wrong, we cannot earn forgiveness from God. But the Lord gives us the benefits of what Jesus did for free through faith.

Faith is not the same thing as a wish or hope or superstition. Faith is trust in what Jesus actually did. Jesus was actually born. He actually walked this earth. He actually lived and died. He also rose again from the dead. These are not things that I would like to be true. These are historically verified facts. The facts of Jesus' life, death, and resurrection are just as true as any other facts you have ever learned. Yet the facts about Jesus are so much more important. They don't just make you smart in this life. They tell you what you need to know for eternal life.

Knowledge of the facts is part of faith. Believing that they are true is another. But that's not all. Ultimately, faith is the confidence that what Jesus did, he did for you. Faith is certain that God's promises are true. Not maybe true. One hundred percent true. You are forgiven. Eternal life in heaven is yours. We have the same Savior that Abram had! The blessings that the Lord promised would come to all nations through Abram are ours!

There is one more important thing that we learn about faith from Abram's response to God's promises. It is God's gift to us. We would never believe God's promises on our own, but the Lord works faith in us to believe it. He forgives us for the times we have doubted, and he will make us certain of those promises forever. Not only has the Lord accomplished our salvation. He delivers it, too. So you see that he really has done it all.

So if God asks you to move to a new place and promises to give you the country in which you live, you do it. Unlike me, he has demonstrated that he can do it and he does fulfill his promises. Of course, you aren't Abram, so he isn't asking you to do what Abram did. But he does call you to believe his promises of eternal life in heaven through faith in Abram's descendant Jesus. This is a great promise. Can you have great faith? Oh, yes you can! Great faith comes from a great promise!