The Covenant of Promise
The covenant of Abraham is a covenant of Promise. God’s call to Abraham is an invitation to “come” to the land I will show you, “come” to me and I will make you what I have designed for you to become, and “come” and I will bless you and you will become a blessing. God’s call to Abraham was “come out” of your country, “come out” of your father’s house, and “come out” your way of life, and live the life I will show you. It is an invitation to experience God’s blessings based upon God’s promises. The call of God for those who have ears to hear is to believe the promises of the covenant God invites us to partake of.
Is this not the same invitation wisdom cries out daily, at the heights along the way, at the city gates, and at every intersection where men and women pass in their daily routines? “She has sent out her maids, and she calls from the highest point in the city. Let all who are simple come in here! She says to those who lack judgment. Come eat my food and drink the wine I have mixed. Leave your simple ways and you will live; walk in the way of understanding.” Wisdom’s cry is a constant invitation of promise to a way of life the simple and those who lack judgment are blind to.
This same call is echoed again in the invitation of our Lord Jesus. “Come unto Me all ye who are weary and heavy laden, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you and learn of Me, for I am meek and lowly of heart and you shall find rest for your souls.” His call is the promise to give rest unto the souls of men who are wearied and burdened from going their own ways. He promises that those who receive Him will have the abundant life He came to give all men.
Peter, filled with the Holy Spirit, sums up his message to those gathered outside the upper room with this call – “For the promise is to you and to your children, and to all who are far off, as many as the Lord our God will call.” He explained to those astonished onlookers that what they were witnessing was “the promise of the Holy Spirit” being poured out, and he called them to partake of the promise by coming out of the corrupt generation that they were living with.
Paul also received a great revelation of the promises of God we are called to. In his 2nd letter to Corinth he wrote “For all the promises of God in Him are Yes, and in Him Amen, to the glory of God through us.” Later in the same letter, he pleaded “Therefore, having these promises, beloved, let us cleanse ourselves from all filthiness of the flesh and spirit, perfecting holiness in the fear of the Lord.” Paul’s personal quest and his equally fervent desire for every believer was to fully experience every promise of God in Christ Jesus.
The call of both the Spirit and the bride is the invitation to come and partake of the promise of eternal life – “And the Spirit and the bride say, Come! And let him who hears say come! And let him who thirsts come. Whoever desires, let him take the water of life freely.” God’s desire to redeem men from the curse of sin and death has always gone forth in a call to come and partake of the promise of His goodness. He takes no delight in the punishment of the wicked, but delights to show mercy to those who have heard the invitation and responded in faith to partake of the promises. God did not send His Son into the world to condemn the world, but those who refuse to His invitation to come and be saved, forfeit all hope of experiencing His promises.
Peter’s own understanding of the promises God were the basis of his call to those of like precious faith to give all diligence to add to their faith. “As His divine power has given to us all things that pertain to life and godliness through the knowledge of Him who called us by glory and virtue, by which have been given exceedingly great and precious promises, that through these you may be partakers of the divine nature, having escaped the corruption that is in the world through lust.” It is in the light of these exceedingly great and precious promises that Peter concludes – “But also for this very reason, giving all diligence to add to your faith virtue, to virtue knowledge, to knowledge self-control, to self-control godliness, to godliness brotherly kindness, and to brotherly kindness love.”
The promises of God are the sole reason for giving all diligence. This is what compelled Paul to strain towards what lay ahead. The believer who has lost sight of God’s promises loses the motivation to give all diligence. The promises of God are only realized through the full knowledge of Christ Jesus, therefore this is where the heart and mind of a believer aware of these promises is set. Those who minds are set upon “earthly” things have lost their spiritual focus and become “near sighted” and “blind” to the promises set before them. God has already blessed us in the heavenly realm with “every spiritual blessing in Christ Jesus”, and those with the greatest awareness of these spiritual blessing are pressing toward the mark of fully knowing Christ. Their hearts and minds are not set upon things on earth, because the treasure they are pursuing is not earthly, but heavenly, not carnal but spiritual. They are aware that the tradition handed down to them by their earthly fathers is an empty way of life without promise, leading to destruction. They have come to understand that living to satisfy the lusts of their flesh is spiritual death.
The god of this world has one aim, to blind the minds of the unbelieving so that they cannot see the light of the good news (promises) of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ. Satan does this much in the same way as the foreign Europeans used “trinkets” to persuade the Native Americans to give up their real treasure. His strategy is to occupy our minds with trinkets of present pleasures to obscure the promised spiritual treasures God has given us in Christ Jesus.
Those who continue in the words of Jesus are the only ones who become true disciples; they alone fully come to know the truth of the promises of eternal life; knowing this truth sets them free from being enslaved by Satan’s trinkets. All of these disciples share a common passion; they are all on a quest to fully discover the riches of the treasures God has promised them in Christ Jesus. Their lives are a diligent pursuit to lay hold of eternal life and their message to others is the same message that are hearing themselves – COME! Leave your simple ways and you will live. Let him who has ears to hear – let him COME! Let everyone who is thirsty COME! God has promised and He is faithful, COME! let us return to the Lord.
makrothumia
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