God's Promises

How many of you have ever had someone make a promise to you and then go back on that promise? Yeah. Not everybody's raised their hand, but okay. Just about everybody has raised their hand. Probably very disappointed when that happened.

I remember once when I was a young man, early teenager perhaps. Maybe I wasn't even a teen. My birthday was coming up and it was on a Sunday and I looked and saw that there was, in St. Louis, these Cardinals were having a doubleheader that day. And I thought, wow, it'd be great to go to a Cardinals doubleheader on my birthday. And I remember approaching my dad about it and I think he said he did. He said, yeah, we'll do that or we might do that. And somehow in my mind it was a big, resounding yes. And my birthday came and my dad went fishing. And I didn't go to St. Louis to see a Cardinal doubleheader that day. And I remember having a pain of disappointment and thought that he'd been let down. But my life went on. I wasn't warped and I loved my dad and still have good memories of him.

But there will be times when we will experience a broken promise. Divorce is a broken promise to people to promise to each other and before God and witnesses to love, cherish, and obey. And divorce is a broken covenant. People will say something to us that they will do or accomplish and they don't do it. It's part of human condition. I don't know that any of us have probably been 100% perfect in our word. Hopefully we have and I know we all strive for that, but it's a part of life. And sometimes it's one of the realities that you learn growing up is that people will let you down. People will disappoint you. There's a scripture in Romans chapter 3 that has always struck me as kind of a hard scripture. As it speaks about mankind.

Romans chapter 3.

Paul here is writing about the Jews and how they have committed to them the oracles of God. And verse 3 he says, But what if some did not believe? Will their unbelief make the faithfulness of God without effect? Certainly not in verse 4, he says.

Indeed, let God be true, but every man a liar.

Let God be true, but every man a liar. I've always thought, well, that's strong. Every man a liar? Every person? Well, compared to God, I guess that's true. Because no matter how small or great, perhaps all of us have at one time or the other not fulfilled every promise, agreement, covenant that we've ever made. But God, Paul says, let Him be true. You and I stake our life on this promise that God will do what He says He will do. Which is give us eternal life. Bring us into His kingdom. Sons of glory in His family. We stake our lives and everything we do on that belief that God will fulfill His promise. And we believe that He is a righteous God as far as we can see and understand, and that He will fulfill that. How do we know that? A study through the Scriptures of a basic teaching that is strongly held by us is that God will make and fulfill His promises. And certainly the spiritual promise of eternal life is one that we hold to. Now, God has promised that, and we have no choice but to accept it. But how do we build that faith? How do we develop confidence in that and maintain that confidence in God's enduring righteousness? The only word we have, the only way we can approach that is from the Word of God and then proving God in every aspect of it throughout our lives. Let's look this morning at a few Scriptures that help us to understand that, that help us to develop that within our minds, and as a walk of faith before God, that He will fulfill His promise, that He will not back down on it. In Psalm 111, Psalm 111, and verse 3, it says, God has made a covenant with man. He made a covenant with David. He made a covenant with Abraham, with Noah, with the children of Israel. And God fulfilled every aspect of every covenant that we can read about in the Bible with His people. The failure in those covenants, when there was a failure, was with the people, not with God.

This Psalm and many others show us God's enduring righteousness. Look over in Psalm 119, and verse 142. Psalm 119, verse 142, it says, The righteousness of your testimonies is everlasting. Give me understanding, and I shall live. The meaning of this word righteousness is that God is going to be loyal to His covenant, to His agreements. And He has made these to be remembered. He is full of compassion. He will give His promise to all people. And that righteousness is demonstrated in God's faithfulness to fulfill all of the promises that He has made. He cannot lie. God cannot lie. Every man might be a liar, but God will not be. In Hebrews 6, Paul goes through these, and he points to the example of one man, Hebrews 6, verse 13, that says, when God made a promise to Abraham, who is a subject of the book here of Hebrews and Romans and Galatians and some of the heavy teachings that Paul wrote about, when God made a promise to Abraham because he could swear by no greater, He swore by Himself, saying, For after He had patiently endured, He obtained the promise. For men indeed swear by the greater, and an oath for confirmation is for them an end of all dispute. Thus God, determining to show more abundantly to the heirs of promise, the immutability of His counsel, confirmed it by an oath.

So with Abraham here, he made this promise that he would be blessed. He could swear by nothing greater. God can't put His hand on a Bible because He wrote the Bible. He swore by Himself. His word is His bond.

How many people do you know, maybe ask yourself if you are one of these people, whose word is their bond? That if they say it, you know it will be done. As we say, you can bank it. You can take it to the bank. And you don't even need a handshake. You don't need a $20 deposit or a month's rent deposit. You don't need any guarantee, no hostage. They don't need to leave their children with you. They don't have to leave their driver's license with you or an open credit card. When they say they'll do it, they'll do it. How many people do you know like that? And are we like that? Because that's how God is. If God says He will do it, He can swear by no one greater. His word is His bond. And this is the relationship that He made with Abraham. He told Abraham to go out at one point and look up in the stars. He says, I'm going to make your descendants greater than what you can see up there. Abraham was on a very clear night. There wasn't any smog or pollution where he was. Like we have, and other lights just covering up the sky. So I'm sure it was a well-lit up sky with more than he could count. But we know now today that what Abraham saw is only just the tiniest fraction of the stars that are out there. Because now we have telescopes positioned out there, or a telescope called the Hubble Telescope. And as it trains its eye on various sections of the universe, it continues to discover more universes, more stars than we even know are out there. And what it is able to see, and even if an even more powerful telescope were created, it could be positioned even beyond our own galaxy. I'm sure there would be new worlds, new universes, new galaxies discovered that cannot be even seen with their distance today. So what Abraham saw was only a minuscule fraction of what we have seen. And God says, greater than will be your descendants. It's an awesome, awesome promise. You know, when Abraham stood there and he looked at the stars, he was being told his destiny. And that was an unusual event for a man of his age. Because when people in his world, in a day, looked at the stars, they were drawing lines between them and creating deities out of them to worship.

And worshiping those deities, as they were. They worshipped the moon. They worshipped the sun. And they worshipped those stars, the creation rather than the creator. And for Abraham to turn his eyes to the sky and to receive a promise from the creator of those stars, and to believe it was a step out of the culture and the time in which he was raised. Nobody else did that. It was a first. It was a different way of looking at the heavens, what Abraham did there. Because his destiny was not in the stars. His destiny was in the promise God made to him. And he believed that. See, that's the point. Abraham believed that. In Hebrews 11, verse 39, All of these people that are mentioned in the book, all of these having obtained a good testimony through faith, did not receive the promise. God having provided something better for us, that they should not be made perfect apart from us. So they didn't receive all of the promise then. Abraham or any of the others mentioned here in the chapter of faith of Hebrews 11. They received a part of it, but they didn't receive all of it.

The fulfillment of God's promise is to Abraham. And their fullest extent isn't over yet. It's still unfolding. Now, that promise was passed on to Abraham's descendants, Isaac, and it was expanded. Talk about the gate that, you know, your descendants will possess the gates of your enemies. It was passed on to Jacob and to his sons. The same promise. You can record and see that as you step through the book of Genesis. From Genesis 12 forward, these promises were passed on. And then ultimately, the descendants of Jacob, the tribes of Israel, did receive that land, in which Abraham first journeyed and traveled. And they achieved a level of the promise as a nation. But their story ended when they did not fulfill all of the terms of the covenant, and they disobeyed God, and they went into captivity. And we know from that story that as we move through the promises to... and the story of those promises, they were ultimately begun to be fulfilled over 2,500 years later in the descendants of Joseph, Ephraim, and Manasseh. That Genesis 48 speaks to when Jacob crossed his hands over the sons of Joseph, Ephraim and Manasseh, and said one would become a great nation and the other would become a company of nations. Manasseh would become the great nation, and Ephraim would become the company of nations. And a multitude would grow from them. And we understand that story as part of this story of God's faithfulness to Abraham in fulfilling His promise because He was faithful. Abraham's story is an amazing story. Let's just go back to Genesis 12. We're not going to go through all of the various promises here, but Genesis 12 is a good place to begin and at least to talk about because God's promise that He made to him in the relationship here, as He begins to single down or to kind of bring down to the level of one man in His family the work of His plan and His desire to create man in His image to bring sons of glory into the family, centers upon it, this man called Abram, later changed to Abraham, and the relationship that would develop here. It is one of the most fascinating stories in Genesis because it begins the story of Israel and the people of Israel, the descendants there, that fill up the rest of the Old Testament.

But we can never really dwell too long on what it took for Abraham to do what he did. It says, and we understand in these three verses that there are two sides to the promise. There's a spiritual side and there's a physical side. We used to call it in our writings, and I don't know that we've emphasized it so much, but a promise of race and a promise of grace, a physical and a spiritual. The spiritual deals in verse 3 with all the families of the earth being blessed through you and the physical where He says in verse 2, We will make of you a great nation and bless you and your name will be great. And again, the rest of that is fleshed out through the story of Isaac and Jacob and Joseph, sons Ephraim and Manasseh, in terms of the physical side of those blessings, which are important. But the spiritual, ultimately, as we will see, were fulfilled through Jesus Christ, a descendant of Abraham, through the son of Jacob named Judah.

So there are spiritual and physical dimensions to the promises, the fullness of them. And you must understand both if you're going to understand the full promise that God has made to Abraham and to his descendants. Now, for Abraham to do what he did here, because it says Abraham departed in verse 4, he went, as the Lord had spoken to him.

And for him to do that, it's a singular event in history that can't be really fully explained too much. In Abraham's day, most people didn't go much further than, well, we would say today, their county line. There have been people, even in recent decades and parts of, perhaps, the rural south, that never got out of their own county in most of their lifetime, maybe certainly 150 years ago. But in Abraham's day, I probably suspect that most people didn't get any further afield than what would be just a fraction of the size of a modern-day county.

Maybe a township was about as far as they ever traveled from the time they were born to the time they died. They didn't take vacations, excursions. They didn't go to the Feast of Tabernacles. They didn't rack up frequent flyer miles. There was no need to go anywhere else, because it wasn't all that much different, and they didn't know that it was different.

They didn't have the means to do it other than by foot, or maybe on a camel or donkey. And maybe they didn't even own that, a majority of them.

And there was no real incentive to do so, because the religion was pretty well a closed, circular type of religion of the seasons that just kept going round and round and round.

The The The The The The The The The Don't think that you can grow beyond yourselves and actualize yourself.

You are what you are. You're in a cast or you're in a state of life, and nothing will change. That was the philosophy of the time. And so, life was really rather, by our terms, in the modern world, mundane. Maybe they didn't think so.

It's always dangerous for us to apply our values and culture to something that far back in time. But for Abraham to get up and to go at the bidding of this voice, presence, we don't know. How did God speak to Abraham? Was it through an audible voice that he heard?

Was it through a dream or a vision that was so compelling that he had to do it? We don't know. It just says, God said to. I'd personally rather tend to think that somehow he heard that voice. He audibly heard something. And it drove him to his knees or maybe drove him crazy for a while until he got it figured out.

But when he packed up all of his family, and it was a sizable group, and all of his goods, and he had a lot, and he started out on that circular route or circuitous route that would have taken him north out of Ur and eventually then turning west and then south into what we know today as the land of Israel, he did something that people didn't do in this day. He left home. And he did so at the request of God because God said, do it.

And he demonstrated his belief and his faith in what God promised him to do. You say you'll do this to me? All right, I will do as you say. And that defined his relationship from there on. He wasn't perfect in it. Abraham grew into the role of the Father of the Faithful.

You see, Father of the Faithful was Abraham's, if I can say it this way, his critical essence to which he aspired. He made a few mistakes along the way. We read about them in the book of Genesis. But he eventually became the Father of the Faithful because his life was all about faith. And he developed that. And it's a fascinating story as he broke away from his time and listened to God's voice and spoke to him.

Today, you and I don't hear an audible voice, but we do have the written work of God. And it speaks to us. And we develop a relationship with God as we read it, pray, study it, and let it direct our lives. That's how we develop faith in our relationship with God today and become like Abraham, a son of Abraham in that sense, and like him in terms of faith, because we believe that God will fulfill that promise that he made to Abraham, who was the Father of the Faithful.

Let's notice in Romans 4. In verse 11, He received a sign of circumcision, another episode in Abraham's life, a seal of the righteousness of the faith which he had while still uncircumcised, that he might be the Father of all those who believe, though they are uncircumcised, that righteousness might be imputed to them also. The Father of circumcision to those who not only are of the circumcision but who also walk in the steps of the faith which our Father Abraham had while still uncircumcised.

The cutting of Abraham's flesh and the setting of that as a sign of that part of the covenant merely was a sign. Abraham had the faith before he demonstrated that, and the circumcision was merely a sign of that. That's why Paul is saying today you don't have to be circumcised to be a son of Abraham. In Galatians he says that circumcision is of the heart. It's a spiritual circumcision. So we don't have to go through that as a religious act.

And Abraham had the faith while he was still uncircumcised. For the promise in verse 13 that he would be the heir of the world was not to Abraham or to a seed through the law but through the righteousness of faith. For if those who are of the law are heirs, faith is made void and the promise made of no effect. Because the law brings about wrath, for where there is no law there is no transgression. Therefore it is of faith that it might be according to grace.

Abraham was dealt with by the conditions of faith. So that the promise might be sure to all the seed, not only to those who are of the law but also to those who are of the faith of Abraham, who is the Father of us all. And so it is well laid out here in terms of Abraham's faith. It says it is written, I have made you a Father of many nations in the presence of him whom he believed God, who gives life to the dead and calls those things which do not exist as though they did.

And that's how Abraham believed. When God said, I will provide you a son, even though he didn't have a son, Abraham came to the point where he believed that even though it doesn't exist, it will. If God says it, it's as good as done. Sarah took a little longer to come to that point when you look at the story. But Abraham believed that. If he says, when he made that promise, then he'll do it.

Who, contrary to hope, and hope believed. Sometimes all we have to believe is hope. Because every physical sign in front of us tells us it can't be done. It won't happen. We're sunk. No hope. Everyone has abandoned me. And there's only hope to believe in. And sometimes we have to believe contrary to hope. People call you crazy. You call yourself crazy. Why do I do this? Why do I continue in this way?

That's the way of the father of many nations. Because that's how he became, it says, the father of many nations. According to what was spoken, so shall your descendants be. A man who had no descendants, being told that your descendants are going to be bigger and more than the stars that you're looking at right now, has got a whole lot to grapple with because he can't see it.

The math doesn't add up. And that's how faith is. It doesn't add up. Verse 19, and not being weak in faith, he did not consider his own body, already dead, since he was about a hundred years old, and the deadness of Sarah's womb. He did not waver at the promise of God through unbelief, but was strengthened in faith, giving glory to God. And being fully convinced that what he had promised, he was also able to perform.

Fully convinced. Fully convinced. You and I sometimes stalk ourselves into it to be fully convinced. That's fine, if that's what it takes to get to the point where we don't waver in faith. But that's how we walk in the steps of Abraham, the father of the faithful, and look to what he did and what he made available to all of the descendants of Abraham.

God made strong promises to all of the descendants of Abraham, of which we are a very important part. The spiritual side of those promises are very strong and very important as well. In Galatians chapter 3, in verse 8, Paul brings in Abraham. And Abraham, again, he really fills up the Bible.

As I said, from Genesis 12 forward is the story of Abraham and his descendants. And then Paul keeps bringing Abraham up in Romans and in Galatians and in Hebrews when he's getting into some of the heaviest teaching that he did. He keeps bringing up the example of Abraham. The scripture here in chapter 3, verse 8 says, Abraham had the gospel preached to him before saying, Abraham had the gospel preached to him. Notice what it says. The scripture, God preached the gospel to Abraham when he said to him, In you all the nations will be blessed. What is that gospel? Well, that part of the gospel that deals with his seed by whom all nations will be blessed.

That's the spiritual promise. Going on down to verse 14, Notice down in verse 28, There is neither Jew nor Gentile, Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is neither male nor female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus. And if you are Christ's, then you are Abraham's seed, and heirs according to the promise. So what Paul is showing here in these verses, these selective verses that we've read, is that all mankind has salvation available to them, regardless of their physical descent. But the Gentiles, and all other nations outside of those descended from Abraham, have the right and the opportunity to salvation.

It is not a right of birth, it is by grace, and it is a gift from God. That's what Abraham's seed, Jesus Christ, was meant to do. This was the fulfillment of the spiritual promises that were made to Abraham.

That's why the writers of the Gospels, Matthew and Luke especially, took great pains to establish the genealogy of Jesus Christ as of being of the tribe of Judah through his mother Mary, who was a descendant of Abraham. There was no question in regard to that. The birth of Christ was the start of the fulfillment of the spiritual and much more important spiritual aspect of the promises that God made to Abraham. It is making available to all humanity through those promises. Christ shows that that is freely open to all who would come and are descendants of Abraham through faith. So these verses here in Galatians 3 and what we read back in Romans chapter 4 are very, very important in that way.

Now, as you look at the promises here of God, again, I've talked several times that the physical and the spiritual work together and are extremely important. When we see in the Scriptures the fulfillment of the beginning, God beginning to fulfill the spiritual or the physical promises to Abraham's descendants, you can trace that through the children of Israel and through the tribes and through the habitation of the land of Canaan, which was the land, again, over which Abraham walked. You look at Abraham's story and you realize he kind of moved about many different places over that land and did not really settle it.

There was a nomadic existence. He went down into Egypt. But when he really didn't fully inherit it himself, when he died, he didn't even have a plot of land to bury Sarah. He had to bargain for a spot in a cave, the cave of Machpila, in what is today modern Hebron, to bury her. He didn't have a burial plot.

So he had not inherited the whole land. Now Isaac settled it more, and then Jacob, again, they were nomadic herdsmen, if you will, probably expanded and held on to more of it than just did Abraham. But it was not until the Exodus story and Israel going in and taking over the land that it was finally allocated in a permanent status by God and that part of the promise fulfilled. And that story is told from the story of Joshua forward as they made the conquest of the land after the 40 years of wandering in the wilderness. And the story of the kings, Saul, David, Solomon, and all of that through Chronicles and Kings tells us that saga of Israel as a nation, and they did grow and become a great nation in its day, reached its height under Solomon, but then began a long decline that eventually led to the ten tribes going into captivity.

And we trace that story from that point. It leaves the Bible and goes into secular history, and we've made a lifetime study of that. We've had the booklets on the United States and Britain in Bible prophecy. We've had that story told and believed in tracing the migration of the various tribes through the various patterns we can see historically through and into Northwest Europe and the British Isles, and then over to the United States. And that in itself is a fascinating story both of history and of prophecy. And without it, you don't understand the physical dimension, the physical side of the story. What has been our contribution to that story, which many, many others before us in our time in the Church of God understood parts of.

Because what Mr. Armstrong came to understand and preach along that subject of what we have called the US and BC in prophecy, so much of the basis of that material was extant before him. What he did in taking it to, I think, another level was he understood the full dimension of it within the Gospel and the promises to Abraham. And he saw and understood that no single nation, especially the British Empire, was the kingdom of God on the earth. And he understood that without that basis, you cannot understand the prophecies as applying to the nations of American Britain and English-speaking peoples today, and the message of the prophets, how it applies, and the rise of various powers in the time of the end and the fulfillment of Bible prophecy.

That is essential to understand those prophetic aspects. And we can read scriptures in Hosea and Micah and Jeremiah and others that speak to a captivity, that speak to God punishing because of sin, because the knowledge of God is not in the land and the subsequent removal of blessings, because with what we have seen in the American Britain and the English-speaking peoples in our day, are the modern fulfillment of these promises to Abraham in our peoples, which has allowed you and I to grow up in the midst of the most prosperous land on the face of the earth and in human history. The poorest of us among ourselves are rich by comparison to peoples of either past ages or even others in less advantaged parts of today's world.

We live in a fabulously wealthy nation at the most prosperous moment of human experience. And what we have been the receptors of in America and the English-speaking peoples primarily are because of the promises that God made to one man, and that man has said, I will go and do what you said, which is always important to keep in mind as we get involved in our own world and we see things happening to the United States and America especially, that we are able to temper a proper patriotism with the reality that what we are and what we have comes from God, not from ourselves. The idea of American exceptionalism, that we have become great because we are inherently great, and we discovered all of this and created it all ourselves, misses the story of God's blessing because of the promises to Abraham and because of Abraham's faith. We are great because of God fulfilling the promise to Abraham.

And there will be a time when we will not be so great because of the same sins that the descendants of Abraham experienced at an earlier time.

And without that dimension, it's impossible to fully understand the prophetic message of the Scriptures. But I think that that has been a significant contribution that Mr. Armstrong had in the Church to this knowledge, to a certain basic knowledge of the physical side of the promises to Abraham and how they have migrated through the various peoples down into our day and our time. And it helps us to understand not only prophecy but also history and why the modern world is as it is. And there's one other point that we should never forget when it comes to that.

The story of God fulfilling those physical promises to the descendants of Abraham, the sons of Joseph, Ephraim and Manasseh, in our time, is not a racially superior type of story or theory, doctrine or belief. It should never ever be approached that way, even though some people adopt that who are racist, who do believe in a racial superiority. And that's something we've always had to be careful about as we have taught it and preached it over the years because, unfortunately, certain racist groups have adopted the ideas of what might be called British-Israelism or this teaching to their own evil ends.

There's nothing superior about America or Britain, it's just that God fulfilled His promises here. And what's important for all of us to always keep in mind as we see that is that the ultimate fulfillment is spiritual for all peoples, all nations. Not just the spiritual, but ultimately, even through the millennium, as the world is restored to what God intended, mankind will experience physical as well as spiritual blessings and then on into the great Y-thrown judgment. But the fact that we see that done today in our peoples and in our nations to us should be a sign in faith that God has been faithful to the physical side of the sis, and as we see that, it strengthens our faith that He will be faithful to the spiritual side of the promises, to all nations through Jesus Christ.

And that is eternal life, which gets us back to the promise that we all anchor our lives in. The hope of eternal life, the hope of glory, which God has promised. And you believe that and I believe that. And we hope against hope that that will be brought to pass. We've staked our lives on that because of God's Word and He can swear by no greater. And God be true, but every man a liar. And God cannot lie. And we believe that.

God gives us certain indications through the physical side and as we understand it, then that is a sign to us that He will bring to pass His spiritual promises. And we see that as well. And all people will have that hope and have that opportunity. In Hebrews 11, And verse 8, Paul here writes again about Abraham, who says, He had no certain compass, no GPS unit, telling him where he was going. He went out not knowing, but he was beginning to know God.

Do you and I know where we're going? Do we know our path? Do we know our path? In one sense, we have far more to go by than what Abraham did. Maybe God knew that those of us in this age would need a whole lot more. But we have the story of Abraham to teach us. We have the story of many others to teach us faith.

But he went out not knowing. By faith he dwelt in the land of promise as in a foreign country, which he was in. It was not his homeland. Dwelling in tents with Isaac and Jacob, the heirs with him of the same promise. Pilgrims. He heirs to a promise. As I said, he didn't even know, didn't even have land to bury his wife in when she died. Many of us have our own plots already laid out.

I do. I mean, that's the only piece of land in this earth that I fully own is my burial plot. I know it sounds morbid. But when my parents died, there was a space right next to it, and it was cheap. And I said, I'll just take that one right there. It's a nice little hillside there in southeast Missouri. I still own my house.

The bank still owns my house. I'm still paying on that. So I don't even own my house. Hopefully in a few short years I'll have it all paid off, God willing, if we stay around and are there. But in one sense I'm one up on Abraham because he didn't even have a burial plot for Sarah when she died.

He had to go buy it, which is what a lot of people have to do when those things finally come to us. But he was a pilgrim. He was a pilgrim, and he understood it to that degree. For he waited, it says, for a city which has foundations, whose builder and maker is God. By faith Sarah herself also received strength to conceive seed. And she bore a child when she was past the age because she judged him faithful who had promised. She received the strength to conceive seed. That's an interesting phrase to think about. Remember she kind of laughed when she was told she would bear a child because she was past the age. You'd laugh too.

And then somehow she received strength to even go through the motions.

They were probably sleeping in separate tents by that age, by that time, just to get a good, nice rest. So she had to kind of work herself up to even have the strength.

It could be one way to look at that. She got past the laughing stage, but she did judge him to be faithful who had promised. I think Sarah was a calculating woman. She's a fascinating study. I've never read—I've tried to read a few books over the years of these fictional stories of biblical characters. There have been some about Sarah, and I've never really found one that I think really portrayed her. But when you just look at the biblical evidence, she had to have been a calculating woman, to have survived to the point that she did living with Abraham, who himself was a pretty cunning guy. He was no slouch. He was a pretty sharp businessman, and she would have had to have been, I think, a strong woman to have survived with him, and in a world of men at her age. And, of course, that's why she's mentioned and why she's even mentioned it in another reference for women to emulate her. Sarah's an example to emulate. So it is an example to study of a woman who built faith and developed in her age. In an age that was not suited to a woman at all. Therefore, from one man, verse 12 says, and him as good as dead, were born as many as the stars of the sky and multitude, innumerable as the sand which is by the seashore. And so we ourselves look to the creation to believe the promise that God is faithful, that he cannot lie, that every human being might lie, but God can't. Humans will let us down, but God won't. God cannot lie, even though every man is a liar. And because of that, because we can see God's promises, we can take it to the bank, and should, and develop the faith like Abraham, to walk before God, and to be perfect.