Precious and Very Great Promises

Precious and Very Great Promises

The God of the Law holds out precious promises to His people.

“Hear therefore, O Israel, and be careful to do them, that it may go well with you, and that you may multiply greatly, as the LORD, the God of your fathers, has promised you, in a land flowing with milk and honey.” Deuteronomy 6:3

The impression is sometimes taken that the Law of God was God’s way of leading His people into His favor. If they kept the Law, they would know His favor—His salvation. There is some truth to this—particularly as regards sanctification as an aspect of our salvation—but this view of the Law misses a most important aspect of the worldview contained in the Law. That is that the Law continually reveals and invites us to enjoy the grace of God. Everything about the worldview of the Law emphasizes the grace of God and how God’s people may enjoy more of that bounty.

God Himself is the central feature of the worldview outlined in His Law. He is at the center of the spiritual vision—the vision of unseen things—on which the Law depends for its authority and power. He is a God of grace and redemptive power, and He delivers His people, not by their obedience, but unto it. God “has promised” His people a raft of blessings such as they have never known, and He has determined the way into those blessings. The Law of God is founded on God’s Covenant with the fathers of Israel, and that Covenant is supremely a covenant of promises (Eph. 2:12).

Having “remembered” His Covenant, God redeemed His people to Himself and explained, through Moses, His determination to bring them into the land He was preparing for them, where they would begin to know the fulfillment of His promises in ways they could only imagine. They had never seen such bounty as God held out to them, though they had doubtless reflected often on the “precious and very great” (2 Pet. 1:4) promises God made to Abraham and what those might entail for them.

In redeeming His people from Egypt and renewing and enlarging—because of their great number and changed circumstances—His Covenant with them, God did not set aside the promises made to the fathers, as Paul explained (Gal. 3:17). Rather, God assumed the continuation of His promises and, in order to encourage His people to diligence in obeying His Law, offered them glimpses of the many precious and very great ways they might expect to realize His promises, once they had been settled in their land.

God filled the imaginations of His people with a vista of unseen things, a prospect of lives abundantly blessed, secure, free, and abounding in justice, prosperity, and love before Him. God saved His people by grace. He led them by His promises. And He showed them the way into His promises by the Law He gave them through Moses. As Abraham had gained the promise of a son through faith and obedience (Rom. 4), so Israel, and so all God’s redeemed people, must similarly expect to lay hold on the precious and very great promises of God. The vision of the unseen God and of His promises, yet unseen, is what God uses to move His redeemed ones onto and along the path of righteousness, marked out by His Law.

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In the Gates is a devotional series on the Law of God by Rev. T. M. Moore, editor of the Worldview Church. He serves as dean of the Centurions Program of the Wilberforce Forum and principal of The Fellowship of Ailbe, a spiritual fellowship in the Celtic Christian tradition. He is the author or editor of twenty books, and has contributed chapters to four others. His essays, reviews, articles, papers, and poetry have appeared in dozens of national and international journals, and on a wide range of websites. His most recent books are The Ailbe Psalter and The Ground for Christian Ethics (Waxed Tablet).

Scripture quotations in this article are from The Holy Bible, English Standard Version, (c) copyright 2001, 2007 by Crossway Bibles, a division of Good News Publishers. Used by permission. All rights reserved.