God's Promises and the Journey to Fulfillment

I'm going to be talking about Deuteronomy chapter 34. Moses has just given his blessing to the people of Israel, and the blessing that would promise that they would have and sort of predict what God was going to do with them when they got into the land of promise. Now the story that we have is sort of a conclusion. It's a conclusion to a long string of events that God has had taking place. One of the things about following God is the difficulty of reading in the Bible the promises God makes and believing or expecting that they're going to happen in your life or the life of the church. You read these great promises that God makes, but they're thousands of years ago, and all of a sudden we begin to think about them and say, well, that was true for these people in the Bible, but, I mean, it's a long time from the Bible days to now. How can these things really be true for us? But when we read the stories in the Bible, we think of them as events that take place at the moment we read the story. But the reality is that many of these things that were happening are very much like what we go through because the things that were taking place were prophesied many years before. The people of Israel are ready to move into the land of promise, but the promise part of this took place a long time ago. What I want us to understand today is that God's promises are always kept, but they're not always kept the way we think they should be kept. For when God makes a promise for us, say one day you read a scripture and you say, say you have a problem, and you read the scripture and it says God is going to help you solve this problem. He's going to give you the strength or wisdom to deal with this, and you get excited. God is really going to help me with this. And then you get enthused about living for God. And then a day goes by, and two days goes by, and three days goes by, and a week goes by, and a month goes by, and it hasn't been solved yet. And we lose confidence in the promise that we read in the scripture that God was going to give us. So I want you to see the perspective in which the promise of the entrance to the land of promise is set. It starts in the Old Testament when God called Abraham to come up out of the area of Chaldees, and he said to him, I'm going to take you to a land I'm going to show you. And when he took them to this land, he was going to show them. This story is in Genesis chapter 13, 12 is where the call of God came to Abraham. God called him. And then in chapter 12, verse 7, the end of that, verse 6, the Canaanites were in the land. But the Lord appeared to Abraham and said to your offsprings, I will give this land. So he built an altar there to the Lord who had appeared to him. God said, I'm going to give this land where all these people are living here to you. Abraham believed him. So he built an altar, which was a symbol of God's visit with him. God has made a promise. But the promise did not happen soon. In fact, it was postponed a long, long time. The first thing that happened to Abraham as he was living in that land of promise was that he never had any children. He was 75 when God made him the promise. And the years went by, and the years went by. Remember he promised, I'm going to give this to your descendants. He didn't have any. That's an impossible job to give something to someone that doesn't exist. Abraham was 75. Years went by. Years went by. Years went by. No children. 24 years went by, 23 years went by, and no child. God came and said to Abraham, sent some messengers and said, I know you've been waiting a long time, but now's the time within a year you're going to have children. 98 years old. A little difficult to believe. I just think, you know, some of you women here, maybe in your 50s, if you were praying in the morning and God said you're going to have more children, you'd say, Lord, I think you meant the lady next door. I think you got your bifocals on wrong, and this is not going to happen. Well they believed the same thing. They didn't think it was going to happen. Sarah was in the other room, and she laughed. This is the silliest thing I've ever heard. But within a year they had a child. 25 years after the promise, the first child was born to Abraham that would be the one who would receive this promise. It looked like things were difficult, but things happened in the land of promise where they were there that they were promised got so difficult they had to leave. So instead of inheriting that land after the child came, they had to go to Egypt to save their lives. Another postponement. How can we inherit a land that we can't even stay on? They went to Egypt and stayed there a while and came back, and then another time of difficulty came and they had to go back to Egypt. Finally their son got up old enough and God came to Abraham one day and he said, you say you trust me? Here's what I want you to do. I want you to take your son and I want you to offer him as a burnt sacrifice to me. Trust me. I'll take care of everything. I'll do everything I did to give you one. I'll take care of this. What a terrible situation for Abraham to be in. He actually took his son out and was raising the knife ready to slay him to offer him as a sacrifice when God stopped him and gave him a real animal sacrifice to make. But can you imagine the turmoil in Abraham's mind when he was thinking, all this time he's made this promise to me and now he's asking me to remove the very person who had received the promise. A lot of times when God makes promises to you and you're reading the scripture, you'll go through these things. You go through things where you say, there is not one way in the world that this is going to happen. But you remember, these stories are given to us to help us understand that God keeps his promises. So if you read a passage of scripture where God promises something for his children, you just mark that down because God keeps his promises. So this child was rescued and brought back. He grows up. He has children, two of his children, two of his boys, twins, and the older one who should inherit everything didn't seem worthy of that. And normally, I mean, in the law, the oldest one gets the property and the younger one doesn't get anything. But God reversed that and the younger man got the property. They lived for a while in this land and then a terrible tragedy came and drought was so severe. But before that, their son, the son of this man Joseph, Joseph the son of Jacob, was taken to Egypt, sold by his brothers into slavery. And the people were in the land of promise and the drought was so bad they couldn't even have enough food to eat. The son that had been sold into Egypt never lived very much in the promised land, but he became the ruler, the right hand of the ruler of Egypt. They came and got food and then he died and he said to them, when I die, carry my bones back to this land where God promised. And they brought him back, buried him in this land of promise and God was keeping his promise to them. God sent Moses then to get the people of Israel who were in slavery in Egypt and now bring them finally to the land of promise. Some people say, as they look at the Bible, that this was maybe 400 years after the promise before the people of Israel finally got to the land where the promise was going to be received, 400 years. I don't know, maybe seven, eight generations of people, but God never forgot his promise. He didn't say to Abram, I'm going to give your son this. He didn't say he was going to give his grandson this. He said, I'm going to give to your descendants this land. Now Moses has led the people up out of Egypt and they're on the very verge of coming into this land that God promised to them. And what we're seeing in this story is how God fulfills a certainty of his promise. Chapter 34, Moses had already talked about each of the tribes and the role that they're going to play. Verse 31, Then Moses climbed to Mount Nebo, from the plains of Moab to the top of Pisgah, across the Jericho. There the Lord showed him the whole land. This is my audio-visuals. This is what you do. You find a sandwich board somewhere and you put your map on it. Now I have one that's on my TV, or my computer, but Don didn't tell me how to do it. How to make it work. And I'll show you on this map, I should get it, maybe a little closer, where Moses was located. He was located on Mount Nebo, which was in the side over here, away from where the people of Israel, where the promised land was, because Moses was not allowed to go into the land that God had promised to them. And Mount Nebo was a very large mountain that would allow him to be able to look into the land and see what the promised land actually looked like. He would be able to look at it. Mount Nebo is right here, just above the Dead Sea, right across from the first place that they conquered, I forget what it was, Jericho, there's Jericho right here. So he was on this mountain, tall enough to be able to see over into the land of promise. Moses had done something God didn't want him to do. He had acted like, when he came to open the rock for water to come out, that this was something he was doing. He said to the people, you guys have been so bad that now me and my brother are going to have to make rock, this water, come out of this rock. And it was God who was going to make the water come out of the rock. He took the place of God, and God said after this was over, you can't go into the land of promise. But he gave Moses the opportunity to see it. He saw the land of promise before any of the other Israelites could see it. But he could never enter. That's what this is about. Then Moses climbed Mount Nebo from the plains of Moab to the top of Pisgah, across from Jericho. There the Lord showed him the whole land. He got to look at that from the mountain, tallest mountain around. He could see from the north all the way to the south. He could see to the west side of the river, because all the land on the other side where they were was already taken by them. Now the point that the Bible wants to make for us is, no matter how long it takes in any of our lives, God keeps his promise. When you're reading Scripture, and you run across a piece of Scripture, and you say this really fits my circumstance. This fits the problems that I have in my own life. Some of us have problems of insecurity. Some of us have problems of fear. Some of us have problems of making mistakes. Some of us have problems with anger. Some of us have problems with criticizing people. Some of us have different kinds of problems. And when you read an issue in the Bible where it says, I will take care of this problem in your life, and you know, you know because all of a sudden you feel like that's the right thing. That's what you need. You write that down in your Bible. Put a date by it. But don't expect it to happen the next day, even though it might. But you write a date down. You don't have to have a lot of faith in God. If as soon as you ask a prayer of Him, He answers it like that. What takes faith in God is to believe that He doesn't forget what He promised you. And even though there's a delay, He will keep His promise. You have a promise, and you have a date. You begin to look at that, and you see that sometimes God doesn't do it right then. But you keep reading the promise, because it's the issue that God is going to deal with in your life. And you remember that God keeps His promise. This story helps us to understand. There will be setbacks to you being able to get this answer from God. There will even be times when it seems like it's more impossible than it was earlier. There'll even be times when it looks like God has reversed His direction, just like it was in the story of the Bible. But in spite of all these difficulties, God kept His promise. That's what He wants to help us understand. The other part of this story that's very important to us is, sometimes people feel like, well, I know that God is loving and kind and good, but He works these wonderful things in the lives of all these great people around us. You know, if I have a Sunday school teacher that seems very godly, or the preacher that you think is godly, and other people around you that think are good Christian people, you think he's going to answer their needs before mine. After all, I'm kind of at the bottom of the spiritual pole from the way I see it. The Bible helps us understand something very important. There are not very many people in the Bible more godly than Moses. The only place in the Bible where God calls anybody a man of God, but that's what He called Moses, a man of God. He was a guy that could go into a room and talk to God like he was another human being. But God doesn't play favorites. He doesn't say, well, because Moses has been a great man, I'll let him get by with some stuff. Moses violated the very first of the Ten Commandments he'd given. He made people think that he was going to provide for them when only God can do that. That's the most serious thing you can do, is to indicate that you are doing what God alone can do. And because he violated that, he said to Moses, you will not get to experience the fullness of what I had planned for your life. But I'll tell you this, I don't want you to lose everything, so I'm going to get you up on top of the mountain, and I want you to look over there in this land that I promised everybody, and you will be the first one to be able to see the whole thing. So Moses goes to the top of the mountain, and he looks from Dan, that's up the northern side of here, all the way down here, all the way down to here, all the way to that side. Now, they had already seen this side, but he got to see all of the land that was promised to them. Now, we don't know if this vision that Moses, what Moses could be able to see, was only with his eyes, or it was something God had shown him in his mind, a picture of these things. You know how you can get a picture of what something looks like. God may have done something like that, but he got to see a lot of it certainly with his own eyes. It was a long distance from Nebu all the way to the Mediterranean Sea, but he got to see this land. He got to see the promise that God had made. You know what it did for him? It helped him to understand that all the stuff he'd gone through was not wasted. He went to Egypt, through all this combat with the Pharaoh, all this forty years of wandering through the wilderness waiting for this to happen, and now he could see, even though he didn't experience it, he could see that the promise was going to happen, as God said. God does not tolerate our turning aside from obedience to Him. There are consequences to that. From the person that the world might think is the least important person in the Kingdom of God to the greatest. God demands one thing, faithfulness and obedience. Moses was given a greater opportunity to know God than anyone else in Israel, so he was held to greater accountability for what he did. God measures us against what we know, and how much we put into practice what we know. And because of Moses' standing, he knew God, he sat down and talked to Him. They were close friends. He knew everything about this, and yet he turned away from God to do the very most important thing God did not want done. Act like you were God in God's place. The judgment of God falls on everyone who turns away from Him. It's not that Moses went to hell, it's that the promise that God made to everyone else he never got to see. But the people of Israel were standing on the edge of this great promise being fulfilled. Here the Lord showed him the whole land, from Gilead to Dan, all of Naphtali, the territory of Ephraim, Manasseh, all the land of Judah, as far as the western sea, the Negev, and the whole region of the valley of Jericho, the city of Palms, as far as Zohar. Then the Lord said to him, This is the land I promised on oath to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, when I said, I will give it to your descendants. And I have let you see it with your eyes, but you will not cross over to it. Now notice this. This is the land I promised on oath to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. They didn't know anything past Moses of what was taking place, but this is what you can say. When you read a promise in the Bible, you can say this is a promise God made to Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Jesus made it to the twelve disciples, Paul wrote it to the people in the New Testament churches he knew, and he's made it to me. He's kept it with all of these people all throughout history, which proves he means it, which means he can do it, and now he's given it to me. You read the Bible and you find anybody, Sulan, who is filled with anxiety and uncertainty, and you listen to the promise God has made to them, and you see that the promise he made to people who are facing terrible circumstances, he keeps. So you say, he made this promise to his disciples, he made this promise to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, and he makes it to me. And every time you see it fulfilled in the scriptures, you said, and he's going to make it to me. The fact that God repeatedly keeps his promise all throughout history is an encouragement to us. Now, for those people that didn't see the fulfillment of the promise, it wasn't necessarily encouraging during that time, but it does encourage us to let us know that it doesn't always happen in the time frame that we think it will, but God keeps his promise. Would you bow your heads for prayer? I want to ask you to think for a moment what you need in your own life. Maybe you've read the scriptures, and there's been a promise that you've read that fits the circumstances in which you find yourself. A promise like we have talked about, workers, and Jesus said, pray that the Lord of the harvest will push workers into the field. So we talked about needing workers. God made a promise that he would push them into the field if we would pray. So we pray a week, or two weeks, or a month, or two months, and no more workers show up, we give up. Yeah. But he made a promise to us. That's under the promise that you need. If you don't have it from the scriptures, as you read, look for the promise that will fit the circumstance you're in. Write it down, mark the date, and begin to look for God's answer. Forgive us, Father, for not trusting you when you don't act as quickly as we'd like. Forgive us for thinking our problem is so unique that you're not going to be able to solve it. Forgive us for thinking that we can solve problems better than you. We ask for the confidence to not lose trust in you, even when the answer does not come as we'd like. Help us to remember all those people in the past in whose life you have answered these calls, you have fulfilled the promise. And help us to gain from the time that they waited so that we would have confidence that it's not over yet. Help us from making decisions that would cause you not to allow us to see the fullness of everything you want to give us. So make us conscious of being obedient to you. In the name of Christ, we give thanks. Thanks for a God who makes wonderful promises to his followers and keeps them all. Amen.