God's Faithfulness

Good afternoon, everyone! Welcome to our visitors. I feel special to have my name remembered.

Becomes more important as every week goes by, doesn't it?

I hope everyone had a good week. It's been a beautiful week, weather-wise, hasn't it? It's been nice to have the dry weather after all the rain that we had, and everything is growing like crazy, which is nice to see. It's that time of year.

Well, I had a great and somewhat surprising experience just a couple of weeks ago, going back to the idea of bias. I had a fantastic conversation with a government agency.

Okay, everyone's bias has now been revealed.

But I've been, some of you know, my mom is in memory care now, and she's living out in Oregon.

We moved her within about a half mile of my sister, and so I was working out some insurance and care-related issues and had to speak with some of the insurance-related people with the state of Oregon. And I was blown away. I made probably three or four different calls to different groups within the state government, and probably half of them answered the phone the first time I called, and were pleasant and incredibly helpful, and helped me get a lot of things done. And those who didn't answer, when I left a voicemail, actually called me back. And I had a great discussion, and again, they were incredibly helpful. And you know, it's amazing, when we think about it, how low our expectations kind of get on how faithful people will be in executing their jobs, whatever those jobs might be. And I think we've kind of gotten used to that in the pace of our life these days, that when we need something, when we make a call, whether it's a government agency, I don't want to just pick on government workers. It can happen with large companies. We all deal with it in some form or another. But we're actually kind of surprised when they come through and do what you would normally expect them to do, aren't we?

What do we expect out of life? How faithful do we expect people to be? That's a question I'd like to explore a little bit today, and not so much with regard to people, but with regard to God.

And this probably follows on well from what Alan was talking about in terms of bias, because I think it's very normal if we look through life and through the ages that people's conception of God, what he's like, what he does, how he'll act towards humankind, is very often informed by what people experience in their lives on a day-to-day basis. And whether we want to be that way or not, we tend to have this filter of our lives, of our experiences, and on the things going on within us.

And we overlay that filter on how we view God, and specifically how faithful God is.

Turn with me, if you will, to Psalm 89 verse 8. Psalm 89 verse 8. This Psalm reminds me of a Peanuts cartoon. I'll explain that after I read the verse. I'll give anyone who guesses why a special prize after services. Psalm 89 verse 8. Psalm 89 verse 8. Here the Psalmist writes, Or Lord God of hosts, who is mighty like you, O Lord, your faithfulness also surrounds you.

So we're talking about God here, and the fact that faithfulness is something that's not only in him, it's something that's all around him. How many like to watch or read the Peanuts cartoon back in the day? I'm honestly not even sure if it's in the paper anymore. I know we have a newspaper subscriber here, at least one in the audience, so he reassured me by nodding. So I always think of Pigpen. Do you remember the character Pigpen in Peanuts? Not only was Pigpen all dirty, but what did Pigpen carry with him? There was always this sort of cloud of dust and maybe smell and other things that were coming off of Pigpen. So it wasn't only that he was dirty, he kind of carried this whole cloud of stuff with him. And that's what I think about, actually, when I read this psalm, because it talks not only about the fact that God is faithful, but talks about his faithfulness surrounding him. You know, I don't want to be disrespectful towards God to comparing him to Pigpen, but that image of somebody walking along, and they're so full of this characteristic that it just envelops them, it's around them, you can see it, you can feel it, and you can experience it. So today, what I'd like to do is drill down a little more closely on that, just talk more about the topic of God's faithfulness. How does he demonstrate it? How is it that he's shown it to us over the course of time? And then we'll briefly talk about how we need to mirror that attribute in our relationships with him. So a few ways that God evidences his faithfulness.

The first one I'd like to talk about is nature. Nature. And I think it probably doesn't take long, if any of us have reflected very much on nature, to think about how nature evidences his faithfulness. I'd like to go back to what I mentioned a few minutes ago about kind of that filter of how we can think of God, or if someone's not a Christian, can conceive of a divine being based on what's going on around them. I know we've got a few people out there who enjoy history. One of my favorite classes back in school was Western Civilization. I just love kind of the overview of how Civilization, as we know it, came about. And one of the things that always stuck with me was this idea of the Mesopotamians and the Egyptians, and their different concept of divinity, of God, and how it was driven by what they experienced day-to-day around them. And I just googled very briefly and found a general Western Civilization website that wrote exactly what I remember from class, so I'm glad I'm remembering it accurately. It says here, both ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia were polytheistic, meaning they worshiped more than one God. A major difference in outlook, however, marked the two religions. In Mesopotamia, the forces of nature were more chaotic, more likely to cause catastrophes, such as disastrous flooding. As a result, the gods were seen as unpredictable beings of extraordinary power who had to be kept content by priests. People were at the mercy of the gods, so the job of humanity was to carry out their wills and to try to make them happy. In Egypt, where nature was less destructive, the gods were seen as kind and generous and generally well-disposed towards humanity. And you might remember in Egypt, the Nile could be counted on to flood every year, like clockwork. The floods would come up, the waters would go out over the land, they'd leave behind all of this fertile soil, and so the crops could be grown. And so what these people experienced, even though they all conceived of false gods that were different than the god that we know, they conceived of God in a way that was informed by their experience on a day-to-day basis. And the way they understood God, how to act towards God, and how God acted towards mankind, was all interpreted through that filter of what they saw and experienced around them. Now, we've ended up in a situation today where interaction with nature is largely replaced by interaction with technology or other man-made things.

So, very few of us, we might have gardens as a hobby, but there are very few of us when it comes time to make dinner that we think about, you know, when's the last time we went hunting or fishing?

When's the last time we harvested? Going down to our storerooms and perhaps, as the pioneers would, late in the winter, seeing the storerooms start to look pretty bare and empty as spring is approaching and hoping that the days count down right. We just don't experience that, do we? It's usually, man, it's been two days and the Amazon truck isn't here yet.

They were supposed to be here this morning and it's 1130 and they haven't gotten here yet.

So, we experience things very differently. I thought a lot about it and, you know, yes, we need to be more closely connected to nature, but I don't know that the digital world is necessarily all bad in terms of our concept of God either, because when you think about it, the digital world is founded on the basics of engineering. And as we look even at living things, plants that have been built, incredible data structures that live within plants and things that God's created. There are even movements out there to use living things as ways to store computer memory because of what they're capable of. And so, basing our lives on technology, I don't think, is all bad. And when we think about it, we get down to the basis of it, the technology is based on rules and laws and ways of doing things and creating that God set in motion a long time ago. Besides the topic for today, but if you're looking for something to think on during the week, there's something good to think about for a bit. Let's turn to Romans 1.20. The idea that the Bible, the idea that creation is a demonstration of God's nature, is very much a biblical concept. Romans 1.20 is probably a verse that most of us have stumbled across at some point in time or seen even on a poster somewhere. Romans 1.20, for since the creation of the world, his invisible attributes, speaking of course of God, are clearly seen being understood by the things that are made, even his eternal power and Godhead, so that they are without excuse. And so what Paul's saying in this passage to the Romans is the fact that we see the things that are made out there in the world. It's hard to deny, we really can't deny, there's no excuse for denying that there's a God. We see everything that's out there in creation.

Turn with me to Psalm 19. We'll read verses 1 through 6. Another probably familiar passage. If you're looking for something inspiring this afternoon, you can Google, the heavens are telling the glory of God, and search for music under that topic. You'll find incredible works of classical music that are out there. I know things that tunes come to my mind as soon as I start reading this scripture. There's some more contemporary music that's been put out around this theme. It's been used a lot. Psalm 19, we'll start in verse 1. The heavens proclaim the glory of God. The skies display as craftsmanship. Day after day, they continue to speak. Night after night, they make him known. They speak without a sound or a word. Their voice is never heard. Yet their message has gone out throughout the earth, and their words to all the world. God has made a home in the heavens for the sun. It bursts forth like a radiant bridegroom after his wedding. It rejoices like a great athlete eager to run the race. The sun rises at one end of the heavens, and it follows its course to that other end. Nothing can hide from its heat. What does this passage tell you about God and about his faithfulness?

It doesn't necessarily tie it together, but over and over it's talking here about the cycles that God has put in place. When it talks about the sun, they talk talks about day after day, night after night. Talking about how the sun rises at one end of the heavens and follows its course, the reliability that God has built into nature, things that we probably take for granted that the sun is going to rise the next morning, that the seasons are going to change as the years go in and out. Let's turn to one more passage to think about what it is that God's creation has to say to us, and we'll turn for this to Lamentations 3, verses 22 and 23. Lamentations 3, verses 22 and 23. I'll read this one from the New Living Translation.

Here the prophet writes in Lamentations 3, verse 22, The faithful love of the Lord never ends, His mercies never cease, Great is his faithfulness, His mercies begin afresh each morning. And so what's being laid out here again is this illusion, this reference to nature. Just like every morning comes, God's faithfulness is refreshed every single day. And one of the ways that God has evidenced Himself and characteristics about Himself are the things that we see in nature, and underlying that is reliability. You know, I'm always amazed when I look back at times, centuries back, you know, we're amazed sometimes when we think about the moon landing, and Apollo 11, I think it was, right, where they had the accident and they had to recalculate, figure out how to use the moon as a slingshot, essentially, and get themselves back to earth. And they did it with slide rules. They did it essentially with less computing power than most of us have in our pockets today with our iPhones. And that seems amazing. But then you go back centuries, you look at the things that were built, you look at the things that people did and voyaging across the world, and what did they rely on? They relied on that faithfulness of God's creation that was put in place. What was the original way to navigate across the seas?

By using the stars, right? See the ancient sextants where you would take a reading. I have no idea how to use one. They figured it out by observing the movement of the stars in the sky, and how reliable they were, the north star that you could guide by. And they were able to move all across the world by sea many, many centuries before any of the technology that we have today ever existed by relying on that faithfulness of God's creation, the predictability of it, that they could know exactly where they were and where they were going based on the readings they were able to take in the sky. I remember when we lived in Europe, we were visiting actually one of my wife's relatives once, and we toured a castle. An incredible castle was built sometime in the middle ages. I don't remember exactly when. It was built on top of a rock, and it was made to be essentially impregnable because to get into this castle, there was a hole that was probably about six or seven feet high in the ground, and you actually had to climb up through this hole to access the castle itself. And then they dug a well, and this well was amazing too, because you had to dig first through about 50 or 60 feet of rock before you ever got to ground level. And then once you got to ground level, you had to go even deeper to get to the water level.

And what these people found as they started to dig down was they found they were having a hard time breathing. And what amazed me was, at this time, again, hundreds of years ago, they knew enough about nature. They'd figured out the laws that God had put into place that they knew what they could do was build a fire or have a large candle of some sort down in this pit, and they could cause convection. If any of you remember high school science experiments, you put two holes somewhere, you put a candle under one, the hot air rises, it pulls cold air down through the other chamber. And they created a convection in this well that they were building by putting a fire down there, and it drew fresh air downwards so they could have oxygen and breathe, and be able to continue to dig that well as deep as they needed to dig it. And it's just amazing when you think back, you dig into these laws of nature that God has put into place, the way His creation functions. And every bit of it just screams faithfulness, reliability, knowing what it is that we can count on.

Some of these things are referred to in the scriptures. We're not going to turn to all of these. But Malachi 3 verse 6, Malachi writes about God, I am the Lord and I change not. That predictability that God put in place, again, that we can see through nature.

Matthew 6 in the Sermon on the Mount, Matthew records how Jesus talked about why do we have anxious thoughts and cares? God clothes the lilies of the field, makes them look better than any of us could look. He feeds the birds in the sky. That reliability, the cycle of nature that He's put into place, that sustains His creation. Again, talking to them about what it is we can learn about God, and specifically His faithfulness to us through His creation. I think a lot about it in the mornings. Probably most of us, hopefully most, if not all of us, get up in the morning. We take a little bit of time to reflect, to think about God and His way, and to pray. And I always think in the morning about, you know, it's a fresh start and I'm biased. Again, bias comes out. I'm a morning person. I love the morning. I wake up and I feel ready to go. I want to attack things. I want to get things done. I want to dig in and do things. And I wake up in the morning feeling I've gotten a fresh start. There are things that happened yesterday that, you know, I'm not proud of. There are things that I could have, should have, would have done better. But I also know, as I come before God in the morning, that the morning is a fresh start. Just like we see the sun rising in the morning, we have a new day of life. We have a new beginning. We can come before God. We can ask Him for forgiveness. We can ask Him to administer us His grace. And we can start that new day, and we can take off just like the sun rising. And that day can be a different thing than it was yesterday, in terms of what we are as people, how we act, and what we do. That faithfulness, that reliability that God put in, that demonstrates the fact that He gives us forgiveness. He gives us a fresh start. He gives us the opportunity to begin again. So, as we conclude this first section, thinking about God's faithfulness and what He describes, it shows us in nature. Psalm 19 really is an anchor point, telling us that the creation proclaims the glory of God, and it sends a message to the world and to us. And that message screams that God is faithful, and we know it because of these things that He's put into place. Let's look, secondly, then, at God's faithfulness in how He's dealt with people. God's faithfulness in how He's dealt with people. It's easy for us, again, because of the experiences we go through, because of the things that we suffer, frankly, in life, to question whether God is actually faithful to us. And the challenge we have, and we'll come back to this a little bit later as well, is that we tend to make our judgments based on points in time, and it's natural for us as human beings. How do we feel after we've had a bad day?

How often do we finish a bad day? And do we say we have a bad day, or do we say, life is just awful? Maybe we say that a little more succinctly in words that we won't use in church.

But after a bad day, we tend to generalize what happened in that day to everything about life, don't we? But in reality, when we look at life, there's a long trend line. Our lives, in some measures, are short, but when we look at the decades of time that we live through, we can see the trends that happen. And likewise, we can see how God has dealt with human beings over a period of time. And I would say that's the right way to measure things, just like you wouldn't measure a chart, whether you're looking at the stock market or you're looking at a COVID graph, you wouldn't measure a trend by what happened over the course of two or three days.

Any statistician looks at trends over a longer time period, because that tells the full story of what's happening. One of the longest-standing relationships that God has had with members of mankind is with the nation of Israel. So we can think back to how God called Abraham, and he made promises to Abraham. He made a covenant with Abraham. That covenant then expanded, and there was another promise and covenant made with the children of Israel, descendants of Abraham, as they were before Mount Sinai. And God made certain promises in that covenant as well. And then when we get to the end of the wanderings in the wilderness in Deuteronomy, there's another pause point between God and the children of Israel, where that covenant is essentially renewed or recommitted. And that happens in Deuteronomy 29. And God continues on these promises, and there's a lot of consistency in the promises that he made through these covenants. And there's one that I want to focus on here, because I think it's incredibly important, one that we see in all the ways that God dealt with mankind, and I think very importantly to note, not just after Jesus Christ, how he dealt with mankind long before Jesus Christ ever came to the earth as a human being. Let's read Deuteronomy 3 verses 1 through 6, because there's a promise here that's not unique to this passage, and that carries its way throughout the Old Testament into the New, and it's one of faithfulness, the faithfulness of God, even when human beings are unfaithful.

Deuteronomy 30, we'll start in verse 1.

Now it shall come to pass, talking to the children of Israel, when all of these things come upon you, the blessing and the curse which I have set before you, and you call them to mind among all the nations where the Lord your God drives you, and you return to the Lord your God and obey his voice. He's talking about, in the beginning here, things that would happen when the children of Israel disobeyed. I think we're familiar with some of those things that God says. They'll be driven from the land, they'll be taken away, they'll lose their inheritance. But in verse 2 then he says, and you return to the Lord and obey his voice according to all I command you, you and your children with your heart and with your soul. In verse 3 he says, the Lord your God will bring you back from captivity and have compassion on you and gather you again from all the nations where the Lord your God has scattered you. If any of you are driven out to the farthest parts under heaven, from there the Lord your God will gather you and from there he will bring you. Then the Lord your God will bring you to the land which your father's possessed and you'll possess it. He'll prosper you and multiply you more than your father's. And the Lord God will circumcise your heart and the heart of your descendants to love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul that you may live. There's a lot bound up here in these promises and it's a promise of faithfulness that God makes that when his people Israel will repent and turn themselves back to him that he will have compassion on them. Unlike a lot of us as human beings, you know, we can probably count up. It's probably a little bit hard to quantify but I would guess that there's some limit to how many times somebody can wrong us individually before we say, you know what, I am just done with you.

I've seen this movie before. I'm not going to go see the sequel again. God says without limit, if you turn back to me, I will be faithful. I made this promise and I will be faithful. We'll look shortly at just to what almost in human terms unreasonable lengths God has gone to show this.

You know, we often think of Israel's story purely through the lens of their disobedience.

You know, what followed this time, of course, was that Israel inherited the land, they disobeyed God by not throwing out all of the inhabitants of the land, and then their story went forward. And we get into the time that we refer to as the time of the judges. They didn't really have a kingship at that point in time and different judges would rise up and rule and give them some level of structure to how they lived their lives. And we know that followed kind of this up and down where they would have all kinds of problems. They'd turn away from God, they'd get in real trouble, and then they would turn back to God. And things would go good again. And we think of that cycle so often, we think of it through it's an example of human beings without God's Holy Spirit. It's an example of how we cannot be faithful as humans. And yes, that's true. But what about those up cycles? What is that a proof of? It's a proof of God's faithfulness, that even in that down cycle, when the children of Israel had hit the very bottom in terms of disobeying God, in terms of their depravity, He was looking for a way to extend mercy to them. And if they came back to Him, He would do it. Let's turn to Judges 1. We'll see one passage that talks a little bit about this.

I think it's important to just flip that a little bit and think about that history, not only through how bad the Israelites were in continuing to sin, frankly, like any of us as human beings, but how faithful God was to continue to take them back.

Judges 1, verse 18. And when the Lord raised up judges for them, the Lord was with the judge and delivered them out of the hand of their enemies all the days of the judge. For the Lord was moved to pity by their groaning because of those who oppressed them and harassed them. God wasn't done with them. God didn't give up on them. Why? He'd made a promise to them.

I think that's incredibly important for us to reflect on. God made a promise to them, and He was going to fulfill that promise. And that promise included the fact that no matter where they went, if they turned back to Him, if they repented, that He was going to gather them back and accept them. And this cycle goes out and out. We can look at Samson, we could look at Deborah, we could look at Gideon. I'm not going to turn to all of those passages, but if you want to look more closely, those are things you could look at. You can go forward into the times of the kings, David, and the prosperity that Israel had under David that carried on into his son Solomon. And then even after Solomon had all the problems that he had, the kingdom was split between Jeroboam and Rheoboam, and the nation of Judah was only a small subset. We later later have kings like Hezekiah, and we see how when they turned the nation back towards God, God was there, and He was ready to help them, to have a relationship with them, and take them forward. And it doesn't even stop there. Let's turn to Romans, because even after the coming of Jesus Christ, even after the new covenant established through Jesus Christ and His sacrifice, God is still committed to a promise that He made to a physical nation of Israel. And we know that even some of the millennial prophecies go all the way into Revelation. It talks about the nation of Israel, because God doesn't just say, well, Jesus Christ came, we wiped all that clean, and I don't need to worry about that covenant that I made with Israel, my promise to Him. Because what we see all the way through the end is, God is going to fulfill, He's going to remain faithful to that promise that He made to the children of Israel as a physical people as well, just as He's willing to extend grace and forgiveness to all of mankind through Jesus Christ, who came out of the seat of Abraham.

Romans 11. We'll start in verse 25. Romans 11, 25, For I do not desire, brethren, that you should be ignorant of this mystery, lest you should be wise in your own opinion, that blindness in part has happened to Israel until the fullness of the Gentiles has come in. And verse 26, And so all Israel will be saved, as it is written, The deliverer will come out of Zion, he will turn away the ungodliness from Jacob, for this is my covenant with them when I take away their sins.

So even after Jesus Christ came to open up the way to salvation to everybody, regardless of physical lineage, race, ethnicity, or anything else, He also remains faithful to the promises that He made to Israel as a physical nation. Let's look at a couple of other sections, and I'm not going to read these because I don't want to take the time to do that, but if you're interested in doing some reading during the week, more evidence of the way that God views the promises that He made and His faithfulness towards those. One is the prophet of Hosea. Now, if you haven't read the book of Hosea lately, I encourage you to turn back to it. I'll warn you ahead of time, it's pretty jarring through modern eyes what God asked Hosea to do. For those of you who don't remember the story, Hosea was a prophet, and God called him, and He asked him to go out and marry a harlot, to marry a prostitute, and to have a family with her. And after that happened, she became unfaithful and left him and went back to her old ways. And God at that point said, go find her, pay off her debts, and take her back to be your wife. Now, I don't know about you, but through any modern eyes, any of us as married men, it seems almost inconceivable to even think about doing something like that. I mean, the level of forgiveness, the level of concern for the other person, it doesn't even seem reasonable to human mind to do those things. But yet, God called Hosea as a prophet to model out this behavior, because he was sending a message to Israel of that generation in time. He wanted them to know what he was doing with them, and the fact that he was staying faithful to them, even when they were doing the things that they were, turning to other gods, was being modeled out by Hosea in this relationship with this woman. And we can learn from this as well, because it's God showing that attribute of how undying his faithfulness is, how he takes that so incredibly seriously. Another example is King Manasseh. I used this example in a sermon about a year ago, so I'm not going to dive deep into it here. If you want to read about King Manasseh, a couple sections to read would be 2 Kings 21 and 2 Chronicles 33. 2 Kings 21 and 2 Chronicles 33. Now, Manasseh was the son of King Hezekiah, who's known as one of the most righteous rulers of Judah, the southern nation of Judah. And Manasseh grew up, didn't learn God's way or didn't heed when he was taught God's way, and he led Judah into all kinds of incredible depravity in what he was doing. His father had rebuilt the temple, gotten rid of high places. Manasseh brought in all of the idols and started idol worship again within the borders of Judah. He set up idols right in the temple of God. He was that blatant in how he was turning himself against God. He instituted child sacrifice to idols and even sacrificed his own son to a pagan idol.

So Manasseh, through and through, had rejected God and turned to other ways of worship that were clearly wrong. He is also believed to be the one who had the prophet Isaiah sawn in two and executed through that brutal method. He was eventually taken captive by the Assyrians and led away with hooks and fetters to rot in a dungeon. People would speculate that they might have actually put like a hook through his nose and basically dragged him on foot back to captivity, where he ended up in an Assyrian dungeon. We'll turn to one verse, though, and that 2 Chronicles 33, actually two verses, verses 12 and 13. 2 Chronicles 33, 12 and 13. Because what would you expect that God's going to do with Manasseh? I mean, after all those things that he did, you'd figure he's done for. He's lucky he didn't get a lightning bolt and he's suffering exactly like he deserves to.

2 Chronicles 33 verse 12, Manasseh was an affliction. That's probably an understatement, given all the things that had happened to him at that point. He implored the Lord his God, and he humbled himself greatly before the God of his fathers, and he prayed to him. And God received his entreaty, heard his supplication, and brought him back to Jerusalem and into his kingdom.

Then Manasseh knew that the Lord was God. And he lived a number of years after that, and he lived as a righteous king. Who would even believe it and think that?

God's amazing faithfulness. He took somebody who'd brought that much depravity and destruction to his nation, and when he turned back and repented, he heard his prayer and he restored him.

It's amazing the level of faithfulness that God has to his promise. And these promises go all the way back to what we were reading in Deuteronomy 29, even before that, in terms of how God would deal with his physical nation. All of this, again, happened centuries before Jesus Christ ever came to walk the earth. God demonstrating a part of his character, his way of being, his faithfulness, long before Jesus Christ came. And of course we know when Jesus Christ came, everything that Jesus Christ did for us personifies these exact same elements, doesn't it? The faithfulness, the grace, the willingness to forgive if we repent. In conclusion, let's turn to 1 John 1 and verse 9. Conclusion of this section, just to be clear, got a little farther to go.

So in concluding this section, let's read 1 John 1.9, which I think is a good summation of this section. 1 John 1.9, if we confess our sins, God is faithful and just to forgive our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness. He is faithful. When we read that word, let's think about all these other things that we've rehearsed here in terms of the forgiveness of sins, the promises that God has made, and how he showed through those centuries his faithfulness to those promises. This isn't just a throwaway line that John is writing here when he says that he is faithful to forgive. This is something that's been held up through centuries of experience. You think in terms of a trend line, the data that's there to gather, it tells the complete story. There's an undeniable record of faithfulness from God in keeping his promises to his people.

Thirdly, let's look at God's faithfulness in fulfilling his plan. Now we know, we believe, and understand that God has a plan that's much larger than this physical creation, just like his plan for mankind was bigger than his plan for the physical nation of Israel.

Likewise, his plan for humanity as a whole is much larger than anything we can see or know, just in this short time that we live on the earth. He's working on a plan that ultimately he hopes will result in the salvation of all of mankind. And we sit at an interesting point in human history, the time when a portion of God's plan has been completed and a portion still remains to be completed. Of course, I think we know we look at the seven holy days that God laid out as we read them in Leviticus 23 as an outline for his plan. Each of those holy days have a meaning in terms of God's redemption for mankind and ultimately bringing his kingdom. And we sit at the point of fulfillment of many of those. And that's a point I make for a reason, because it's easy for us to read the Bible looking back. We'll read the Gospels, we can read the things that are written in the Gospels, we say, oh yeah, let's talk about Jesus Christ. We can go back to Isaiah, where it says, you know, until you a child is born, until your son is given, and you shall call his name Emmanuel. We say, oh yeah, Isaiah was talking about Jesus Christ. Did Isaiah know that? Did Isaiah know that? Did he realize it when he was writing that prophecy? Turn with me to Ephesians 3. I think there's good reason to believe that Isaiah, as well as many of the other prophets, didn't fully understand what it was they were writing about. They were writing as they were inspired by God. They were sending a message. They were leaving a record for us who would come later. But they didn't understand everything fully that they were saying and writing. Paul lays this out in his letter to the Ephesians. Ephesians 3, starting in verse 1. For this reason I, Paul, the prisoner of Jesus Christ, for you Gentiles, if indeed you have heard of the dispensation of the grace of God which is given to me for you, how that by revelation he made known to me the mystery, as I've briefly written already, by which when you read you may understand my knowledge in the mystery of Christ. And in verse 5 he says, which in other ages was not made known to the sons of men, as it has now been revealed by the Spirit to his holy apostles and prophets. So Paul was clearly stating that there were things that were revealed to him in his time, a time that he came decades after the death of Jesus Christ, that no one before had really understood. And there wasn't an ability to understand that at that point in time. So we have the ability now, living even centuries later, to have that hindsight to understand so many things based on history that's happened, that people who were writing, especially in Old Testament times, would not have had the full ability to understand. They wouldn't have even known about Jesus Christ and his coming in the sense that we do, and the fact that he walked the earth as a human being.

So let's look briefly at a few of the holy days that are laid out, these observances and how they've been fulfilled. I think for many of us this will be relatively familiar, but turn with me, if you will, to 1 Corinthians 5 verse 7. 1 Corinthians 5 verse 7. Of course, we know the Passover is the first of the holy days that's laid out, and in the Old Testament it had to do with the blood of lambs and painting the door post and the death angel passing over. And in 1 Corinthians 5, 7, as Paul writes to Corinthians about this holy day time, he says, therefore purge out the old leaven that you may be a new lump, since you truly are unleavened. For indeed, Christ, our Passover, was sacrificed for us. So what Paul is pointing out is that Jesus Christ came to be sacrificed, as we all know, and Christianity as a whole accepts that for our sins, and he connects it back and says he is our Passover. So we've seen a fulfillment in this sense of the first holy day in God's plan through the coming of Jesus Christ and through his sacrifice. So, one out of seven holy days that promise has been fulfilled. We can look back and we can know in a way that people who live before Jesus Christ couldn't even have conceived that the first step of his plan has been completed. Let's read on in verse 8, because we know Leviticus 23 talks about the days of unleavened bread with two holy days and the first day and the last, where in ancient Israel they put leavening out as a symbol of sin. And in 1 Corinthians 5, 8, Paul writes to Corinthians and says, therefore let us keep the feast, talking about the feast of unleavened bread, not with old leaven, nor with the leaven of malice and wickedness. It's clear in context in the words he's using about leaven, what he's referring to as a festival, but with the unleavened bread of sincerity and truth.

So what he's saying is that through Jesus Christ, through the forgiveness of our sins and the new life that we live in Jesus Christ, we are able to fulfill what is pictured in the days of unleavened bread as a sinful life, a sinless life, excuse me. A sinful life isn't hard for a human being to fulfill, but a sinless life through Jesus Christ. In that sense, that second and third holy day, the days of unleavened bread, are fulfilled in terms of the sinless lives that we can live. We can be unleavened spiritually speaking through Jesus Christ and the forgiveness that comes from it.

Of course, we know after that comes Pentecost, and I don't think any of us have to think too hard to attach Acts 2 verses 1 through 4, the coming of the Holy Spirit to the day of Pentecost. Again, a very powerful fulfillment, again, of something that was pictured by that holy day. Let's read Acts 2 verses 1 through 4. Here Luke, who wrote the book of Acts, he writes, When the day of Pentecost had fully come, they were all with one accord in one place.

We have no doubt of the timing here. He tells us specifically. And suddenly there came a sound from heaven, as of a rushing mighty wind, that had filled the whole house where they were sitting. And then there appeared to them divided tongues as of fire, and one sat upon each of them. And they were all filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak with other tongues, as the Spirit gave them utterance. So here on the day of Pentecost, an incredible manifestation showing that the Holy Spirit had now been granted.

And it wasn't a one-time event, because we see as the apostles went out, as they spoke with people, what did they do? They baptized them, and they laid on hands. As they laid hands on people, the Holy Spirit came to them. A fulfillment of the Holy Day of Pentecost and what's promised through that part of the plan.

Now, we've heard reference to the fact that the fall Holy Days start in just a few weeks' time, less than two months away from now. And of course, we know that picture is events that we're still looking forward to in the future. The return of Jesus Christ, the establishment of God's kingdom on earth, and eventually the ability for all people who've ever lived to be able to understand God and to be able to make a commitment to Him. Let's turn to Philippians 1 verse 6. In looking at that culmination, the completion of the rest of the plan, that hasn't happened historically at this point in time.

Philippians 1 verse 6. Paul writing to the Philippians, incredibly confident of the faithfulness of God. Being confident of this very thing, that He who has begun a good work in you will complete it until the day of Jesus Christ. Of course, talking there about the return of Jesus Christ and the fact that all of the people who God had called, there was a commitment that God wanted to fulfill His plan in them and see them inherit salvation and eternal life in His family.

So, concluding this section of God's plan for mankind and how it shows His faithfulness, as we look at the Holy Days and we can see what's already been fulfilled in a large number of the Holy Days, it can give us that much more confidence in the remainder of His plan being completed and knowing that God isn't going to cut things off halfway. As maybe a keynote to end this section, let's turn to Isaiah 46. Isaiah 46, and we'll read verses 8 through 10. Of course, we know Isaiah wrote a lot of prophecies of that time to come, that coming kingdom and what it would be like. Isaiah 46, and we'll read verses 8 through 10.

Remember this, Isaiah writes, and show yourselves men. Recall to mind, O you transgressors, remember the former things of old. For I am God, and there is no other. I am God, and there is none like me, declaring the end from the beginning and from ancient times things that are not yet done, saying, my counsel shall stand, and I will do all my pleasure.

So we see three incredible signs, things we can look at, that help us to understand God's faithfulness. How does that come through now to our lives and what it is that we do? I'm not going to turn to Galatians 5 verses 22 and 23. I think we know that that's a passage in those couple of verses where the fruit of God's Holy Spirit is laid out. And knowing how much faithfulness is something that's not only part of God, but something that fully surrounds Him, it shouldn't surprise us that one of the fruits of the Holy Spirit, an outcome of the Holy Spirit living in someone, is faithfulness.

How is it that we're developing that and exercising it in our lives? To what extent are we, as people, faithful? Especially faithful to God, because that's the source of where all of it starts.

We show our faithfulness by living by the Holy Spirit. And if we go back and we look at the example of the children of Israel, we look at that sort of trend line, they constantly made mistakes, they turned back to God when they were in trouble, and God came and helped them.

Faithfulness, as we show it in our lives, when we have God's Holy Spirit in us, again, if we think of that trend line, should be something that's always leading upwards as we grow and we develop as Christians. There might be failings that we've had, weaknesses as human beings, weaknesses of faith, things that we've just not been able to do or purge out of our thoughts. And as time goes on, if we're letting God's Spirit work within us, as we're continuing to turn back towards Him and to repent to Him, we should see that trend line of our own faithfulness to Him moving upwards, as our relationship with Him strengthens, as more and more of His mind comes in us. And so, like so many things in Christianity, is a matter of the heart. Turn with me, if you will, to Hebrews 3, and it lays this out. Whether it's turning back and thinking about Philippians and things that we take into our minds, the way that we interact with other people, always looking for ways to pull things into our lives that will lead us closer to God, that will cause us to compare our ways to Him, to repent, and to ask Him to lead us forward. Hebrews 3 will start in verse 7. Therefore, as the Holy Spirit says, today if you will hear His voice, do not harden your hearts as in the rebellion. That's the phrase I want to focus on, because if we want to continue moving forward in faithfulness, we need to continue to examine our hearts and continue to turn those hearts back to God. Don't harden your hearts in verse 8, as in the rebellion in the day of trial in the wilderness, where your fathers tested me, tried me, and saw my works for forty years. Therefore, I was angry with that generation and said they always go astray in their heart, and they have not known my ways. So I swore in my wrath that they shall not enter my rest. Beware, brethren, lest there be in any of you an evil heart of unbelief in departing from the living God. But exhort one another daily, while it's called today, lest any of you be hardened through the deceitfulness of sin. For we have become partakers of Christ if we hold the beginning of our confidence steadfast to the end. So we see this, what's coming here, and what's being talked about, is guarding our hearts, making sure that we're continually turning ourselves back to God, not becoming hardened, not to becoming used to certain things. Well, I just do it that way. God will have to live with it.

That's not the end. That's the hardness that's being talked about here. But rather, struggling with those things, taking them on, understanding the ways that our lives need to change, our attitudes, the things that we do need to change, to become more like God.

So that takes us back again in this section to the Children of Israel. You know, we reflect on this passage in Hebrews. God is, again, comparing us, people have been called out, through Jesus Christ, what's happening in our hearts, comparing it to what happened to Israel back in that time. And so we have to make sure that we're remaining on that road towards faithfulness, continuing to grow in that characteristic as we go forward. So as we conclude this last section, we're called to a life of continuing and growing faithfulness to God. It's a characteristic of His Spirit, and we should see it continuing to grow in our own lives. It's not going to be perfect every day, just like, again, like a stock market chart, like a COVID chart, if we've been watching those over the last year and a half. If you look from day to day, they've got blips. But if you look long-term, trend lines become very clear, don't they? And that's what we need to look at in our lives, as we're continuing to grow in faithfulness to God. So to wrap up the message, God is faithful, and beyond talking about it, He's proven it. We look today through three different ways that God's proven His faithfulness to mankind and to us. One through His creation. Secondly, through His interaction with mankind, especially Israel, who He called out and how He worked with them. And then, thirdly, through fulfilled promises, especially in His Holy Day plan for mankind. So as we start looking forward to this fall Holy Day season, it's time to reflect not only on God's plan, but on His faithfulness and to think about how that attribute is growing in our own lives.

Turn with me, if you will, for final scripture of 1 Thessalonians.

We'll read 1 Thessalonians 5 and verses 23 and 24.

1 Thessalonians 5 and verse 23, Now may the God of peace himself sanctify you completely, and may your whole spirit, soul, and body be preserved blameless at the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ.

He who called you is faithful, who also will do it.