Trusting God's Promises in a Post-Christian Era

Now the historians of our day have described our time as "The Post-Christian Era," a time where the teaching of Christianity has been deemed increasingly irrelevant, a time when the church is seen as a museum, outdated, outmoded. It's been reduced in certain places of Europe to the role of the mausoleum, indeed the grave site for those who have declared the death of God. And yet there remains in this world today a pulsating group of believing Christian people who still live at this point in time, trusting in promises that were made two thousand years ago. [00:00:48]

And yet, Mary and Zacharias ironically were in virtually the same situation because they were looking back two millennia. They were looking back for two thousand years and blessing God for remembering a promise that He had made to somebody else two thousand years before they lived. And so in a very real sense, Mary and Zacharias represent a similar situation to what we are facing today, and both of these people, under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, celebrated that God remembered something. God remembered His promise. He remembered a promise that was a promise to give mercy, and of course that promise was the promise that He had made two thousand years earlier to the patriarch Abraham. [00:04:11]

But something has happened. Many things have happened, indeed, in the twentieth century to bring a dramatic change to that spirit of skepticism. The late William Foxwell Albright, before he died, made a sharp rebuke of biblical scholars for ignoring the hard evidence of archeological research and allowing philosophical speculation to bring an undue spirit of cynicism and skepticism to the Old Testament texts. And at the heart of this is the story of Abraham. [00:07:55]

In 1929, there was a discovery in Rash Shamra that proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that writing had been developed as early as the second millennium B.C. in the Middle East; because the skeptics of the nineteenth century said there wasn't even any writing in the world at this time, and that the record of Abraham must have come significantly later because writing hadn't even been developed in this part of the world. [00:08:46]

So what we're going to say here at the beginning is that when we look at the story of Abraham, we ought not look at the story of Abraham as an exercise in mythology, but rather as an announcement that comes to us in the sacred Scriptures of something that takes place in real history, in real space, in real time where a real God calls a real individual out of a land of paganism, speaks to him, consecrates Him and makes a promise to him that changes the entire course of history. [00:10:25]

And the way in which this segment of the life of Abraham is captioned is by the words, "Blessed to be a blessing." And I thought that was a marvelous method of succinctly and tersely capturing the very essence of what is going on here in terms of the historical significance of this man Abraham. God does not simply bless him as an individual for his own benefit, but Abraham is blessed so that he might be a vehicle of blessing to manifest multitudes of people who come after him. [00:12:13]

But if we look now at the elements of this promise, we see first of all, that what is going on here is the making of a covenant -- a covenant that is announced here, in chapter twelve, and ratified in an amazing way in chapter fifteen of Genesis that I commend you to study carefully because there, in chapter fifteen of Genesis, God answers the questions of Abraham when Abraham said, "How will I know that these promises that you're making to me will come to pass?" [00:13:15]

And thirdly is the promise that through Abraham and his seed a blessing will come upon the nations -- that through this action the whole world will receive a magnificent blessing. So herein are the three aspects of this covenant promise that God makes to Abraham. Now what really happens if we look through the rest of the period, and we look through the rest of the history of these promises? [00:17:46]

And now as he rejoices in the birth of Isaac, God comes to him and puts him to the supreme test in Genesis twenty-two when He says to Abraham, "Now take your son, your only son, the son whom thou lovest, Isaac, and go to Mount Moriah and there give him to Me. Sacrifice him to Me; kill him." And the supreme test came upon Abraham when he made that dreadful journey to Mount Moriah, which tradition says, is located on the exact spot that later in history is called Mount Calvary, where God took His son, His only Son, the Son whom He loved, Jesus, and went through with the sacrifice and took His life as a substitute for us and for Isaac because Abraham passed the test and Isaac was spared so that Isaac could have a son, and that Isaac's son could have a son, and so through this descendancy the promises of the covenant would come to pass, and through this heritage, through this line, as the apostle Paul said, through the seed of Abraham, all the nations of the world are now given the benefits of exposure of the work of Christ, Abraham's greatest Son. [00:21:11]

But this was not without testing. And the point is it didn't take place immediately. That blessing that was promised to Abraham had to take two thousand years before it was realized, until this little girl heard the announcement of Gabriel, and she is saying, "He remembered." He remembered the mercy. He remembered the promise that He gave to Abraham. And as the Spirit announced to Zacharias that his son would be the forerunner, the herald of the coming Messiah, under the same Holy Spirit, Zachariah said, "He remembered the promise." [00:23:01]

And the whole history of redemption is the working out of that event four thousand years ago. [00:24:01]