The Lord Remembers His Promises (Psalm 105:1-11)                                                           2009.10.18                                 Pastor Edward Cheng 

Last week we talked about how God remembers His people—in particular, those who don’t deserve to be remembered.  He remembers us in the midst of calamity, and when He remembers us, He always acts on our behalf.  This morning we’ll look at another angle of this idea of remembering: God remembers His promises. 

What do you picture when you think of God?  When we base the reputation of God on the word of God rather than on our daily experiences, we find out that God wants to be known as a God who keeps His promises, who does what He says. 

Turn to Exodus 2, which speaks of the Israelites in slavery in Egypt.  When they cry out for help, v. 23 says that God hears their groaning, and He remembers His covenant.  In Ex. 6:5, we see again that God says, “I have remembered My covenant.”  First of all, what is this covenant?  Secondly, what does it mean to us that God remembers His covenant?

Turn to Psalm 105, which begins with a call for us to sing praise and give thanks to God because of what He has done.  The psalmist prepares us for the thought that God keeps His promises by telling us to think back over all the times that God has been faithful to us.  When we think back, not just in our own lives, but through history, and ask if God has ever not kept a promise, the answer is no. 

A covenant is a contract between two parties, a legal agreement.  A contract usually involves penalties on either side, in case one of the parties doesn’t follow through on their part of it.  With God, however, a covenant takes on the flavor of a promise, rather than a contract.  Look again at Ps 105:9.  The Hebrew poetic device of parallelism, where the second of two similar lines colors the meaning of the first, tells us in this verse that the “oath” is equivalent to the “covenant.”  In a sense, God has promised his loyalty to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob—forever.  We know that this covenant was a promise, with no consequences if Abraham, Isaac, or Jacob were unfaithful (and Genesis tells us that they did mess up, over and over).  In those days, when two people wanted to make a contract, they would cut some animals in half, line up the halves, and walk between them hand in hand.  The idea is, “If I don’t keep my part of the agreement, then let this be what happens to me.”  When God and Abraham first established the covenant, God had him cut up the animals, but then He put Abraham to sleep, and God himself passed between the halves.  By doing that, God established it as a promise, where God must keep the promise while Abraham had nothing to do. 

God reminds us that He will keep the promises He makes forever.  This is important for us because some of the promises are still unfulfilled.  For instance, we have been waiting for a long time for Jesus to return.  It gets to a point where you start to think, “It’s never going to happen,” or “God’s forgotten about it.”  But God reminds us that He remembers His promises forever—meaning for a long, long time, generation after generation, without fail.  He is different from us, because we sometimes fail to keep promises—either because we can’t or because we forget.  When God makes a promise, He will always keep it, because He never makes that promise in haste, out of emotion, or without having full information. 

What is our response to this promise-keeping God?  Look at Gen. 9:15.  God is establishing a covenant with Noah.  He sets the rainbow in the sky as a reminder to Himself of His promise never to flood the earth again.  When God makes a promise to us, He wants us to rest assured that He will do it, to have no fear when the rains come again.  The second way for us to respond we can see in Ex. 32-13:14.  Moses implores God to keep His promise, and in the same way, we can also feel emboldened to pray for God to keep His promises. 

What has God promised us?  Personally, I hold on to a few: “I will never leave you nor forsake you.”  Jesus promised that if I continually seek the Lord and His kingdom first, He will take care of my needs.  Psalm 1 promises that if you live your life according to the Word, you will find success in doing right.  God wants us to think of Him as the best promise-keeper, as one who remembers and keeps His promises forever, particularly when we start to think He’s forgotten.