What Has Been Promised

What Has Been Promised--October 27, 2017

“…and I trust in the Lord that I will also come soon.” [Philippians 2:24]

Okay, I am going to try and tread lightly here.  I do not want to bad-mouth Paul the apostle here at all.  But it is quite possible that he was wrong on this one.

There are a number of reasons to believe that Paul never did get out of Rome to see the Philippians, and that he was put to death by the empire before he could visit them as he had hoped. (We could spend a lot of time going those reasons, but suffice it for now to say that the New Testament book of Acts leaves off the story of Paul with him under house arrest in Rome—and if he had gotten out eventually, you have to wonder why Luke didn’t give us that story. And for that matter, we don’t have evidence from Paul himself that he was out of prison later on and able to write again from other places.)  It just doesn’t seem very likely, based on that alone, that Paul made it out of prison.

That doesn’t mean that the Bible is untrue here if that was the case—Paul really did think that he was going to get out of his imprisonment and go to see the Christians in Philippi. Today’s verse from Philippians accurately and truthfully reflects what Paul honestly believed.

Neither does it mean that Paul’s faith in God was misplaced, if indeed it turned out that he never did get to see Philippi again. 

What it could mean, however, is that we need to be careful to distinguish between what we are wishing for—or even praying and hoping for—and what God has promised.  When it comes to God’s promises, you can bank on them, every day of the week, with complete assurance.  If God says something is so, you can count on it.  You can trust it.  But beyond that, we may, at any given moment, also be asking for God to do other things, things that God has not already promised in the Scriptures to give to us, but things which God may do in answer to our prayer anyway.  And yet God is not obligated to give us things God never promised… even if God sometimes does in fact give to us more than had been promised.

An example:  let’s say I pray for a pony.  I hope for a pony.  I wish on my lucky stars for a pony.  But I get no pony.  Even if I had convinced myself and started telling my friends, “My God is going to get my a pony,” God still wouldn’t be obligated to send me the animal.  I don’t get to cash checks that God didn’t write.  And yet, God is still trustworthy, because the things that God does promise, God does accomplish. 

On the other hand, we sometimes get more from God than we have been promised.  We ask for our daily bread, and we believe God’s promise that our prayers are heard—and yet far beyond just our daily bread, you and I are given more food than we can eat on some days, a roof over our heads, cars to drive, more clothes in our closets than we can wear in a week, and creature comforts that most people in most of human history could hardly even imagine. We have people who love us.

We were not owed these things.  And truth be told, we were not even promised all these things.  They are privileges and bonuses and windfalls.  Remembering that keeps us from falling into the pattern of baptizing my personal wish-list and claiming that just because I want it, God must give it.  And just because I, in my head, start trying to convince myself that God owes me, or that God has to do what I want, well, once again, God isn’t obliged to pay on a check God didn’t write.  There is a difference, in other words, between my self-interested laundry lists of wants, and God's promised future.

Sometimes we make the assumption that God has to do the things that I think will make me “happy.”  Well that can be wrong for a whole bunch of reasons:  first off, we are really not that bright when it comes to what will make us “happy”—after all, we run off after shallow, lesser loves that will not really satisfy.  And second, maybe just “happy” isn’t what God is working on in our lives—maybe God is working on making us into joyful people whose spirits are fed by something deeper than just our endorphins and good feelings. 

I may want to assume that God’s will is for me to get that new job…because I am assuming that the job will make me happy, or that more money is the same as God’s will, or that the Holy Spirit and my gut-feelings are one and the same.  But it might just be that God has something else in mind, or that God is doing something in the life of the other person who does get the job, or that there is some other way I will be called to use my talents and passions and energy.  Or, you know what, we live in a broken and sinful world:  sometimes things happen that are not God’s will—like corruption and cruelty, like violence and abuse and injustice.  If you don’t get the job because of the employer’s prejudices and discrimination, or because of plain old corruption and nepotism, we don’t get to pin that on “God’s will.”  God didn’t promise that you would get the job, even if providing for your employment is the kind of thing God sometimes does, and even if it wouldn’t have been a surprising thing for God to do it.

And the same with Paul.  Truth be told, the apostle was never promised that he would get an easy course in life.  He was never promised that he would leave Rome after his trial.  And while it is true that God had preserved his life in amazing ways already by the time he wrote Philippians, God was not obligated to come to Paul’s rescue on Paul’s terms—to do things the way Paul wanted them to happen or the way Paul assumed they would happen.

So, yeah, it is possible, quite possible, that Paul assumed he was going to get out of prison so he could go visit his friends in Philippi—and it is quite possible that Paul was wrong.

But you don’t stop trusting God when it turns out that your assumptions about God were wrong, not any more than children should stop trusting their parents when they fall off the bike the first time the training wheels fall off, or when they get the chicken pox, even though it is their parents’ job to take care of them when they get sick.

This is the real, difficult challenge of living by faith in a God who is not a genie, and who is not me.  But no other God will keep a promise so fiercely for you, much less give us sometimes even more than he promised.

Lord Jesus, keep us grounded in your promises today, so that we do not stray from them.