God Is A Promise-Making & Promise-Keeping God

The true story is told of a man who was a very qualified TV meteorologist but for some reason he did a terrible job when it came to actually forecasting the weather. In fact, he became something of a local joke when a newspaper began keeping a record of his repeated faulty predictions. They followed up w/ a feature story that showed he had been wrong almost 300 times in a single year. Thanks to all this bad press, the poor meteorologist was fired. After living off his unemployment for a few months he moved to another part of the country & applied for a job as a weather forecaster at another TV station. The job application asked him to state the reason for leaving his previous position so he wrote, "The climate didn't agree with me."

In spite of all our scientific advances in weather forecasting we are still far from perfect when it comes to predicting the weather. Predicting the weather can be a very difficult thing.

We could say the same thing when it comes to predicting other things like: which team will in the championship game or how the New Year will turn out. Dr. Neis Bohr, a noted physicist once commented on this frustrating principle & said, "Prediction is a very difficult art...especially when it involves the future."

There is only 1 person who has gotten every prediction he has made right & that’s God. As you know, Jesus' coming had been predicted for thousands of years. In fact, the OT contains about 300 specific predictions about the Messiah. And God got each 1 of them correct, so it would be ridiculous to say that this was accident. The nature of Jesus' birth, life & death was not some sort of Messianic coincidence. In Lee Strobel's book, “The Case For Christ,” he points out that the probability of just 8 of these predictions being fulfilled in 1 person is 1 in one hundred million billion. And what are the odds of fulfilling 300?

I don't know about you, but for me that goes a long way toward helping me know that the Bible & therefore God is completely trustworthy. No committee of authors could have made this up.

Today we want to look at 1 of these predictions, actually the 1st one. God didn't waste any time telling us that Christmas was coming. He began predicting Jesus' appearance in the very 1st book of the Bible even though in the counsel of the Godhead it has been planned before creation itself. Turn to Genesis 3:15.

So here we have this prediction/promise from God. What I want you to glean from this today is YOU BELONG TO A PROMISE-MAKING & PROMISE-KEEPING GOD! If He has given you a promise in His Word – you can take it to the bank. How He keeps it & the timing of His keeping it may puzzle you, but the fact that He will – you don’t ever have to question. And I would like to illustrate that by shifting our focus off God & onto Satan for the next several minutes. For you see not everyone was enthralled about the Promise that God had made in Genesis 3:15. In fact, Satan was going to do everything in his power to make sure God did not keep that promise.

Adam & Eve destroyed the goodness of God's creation when they sinned in the Garden. But in the midst of a series of curses God pronounced because of their sin, He also gave this promise, made this prediction – that 1 day 1 would come that would destroy the one who had tempted Adam & Eve & make right what had been made wrong. That was great news to Adam & Eve & all mankind, but it was bad news to Satan. And so ever since that day, Satan has tried to overthrow God's plan by:

? 1st by trying to keep Christ's 1st Advent from happening;

? 2ndly after Christ did come, Satan tried to have him killed & eventually succeeded in the crucifixion;

? 3rdly by trying to keep anyone from pledging their allegiance to Christ now;

? 4thly by sometime in the future gathering all the forces of hell to do battle against Christ again in that final

battle.

Today we just want to concern ourselves with the 1st 2 strategies of Satan - his attempt to keep Christ's coming from happening & killing him after He came thus causing God's promise of Gen.3:15 to be broken. Satan, as we will see, is going to do everything in his power to stop God from keeping His promise.

Now there are a lot of different perspectives you can read the OT from.

? You can approach it from the perspective of the story of redemption & note how God is preparing the scene