Pastor’s Thoughts – 10/04/2026

Among all the many attributes of God there is one that is vitally important to every Christian. That attribute is the faithfulness of God. “God is not a man, that He should lie; neither the son of man, that He should repent: hath He said, and shall He not do it, or hath He spoken, and shall He not make it good” (Numbers 23:19)? The faithfulness of God has everything to do with our salvation and hope in Him. Thankfully, He is totally and completely reliable. After the fall of Adam and Eve, which plunged all mankind into sinful natures, God promised to send us a Savior who would crush the head of Satan, and reverse the effects of the fall. The Bible is a prewritten record of how God in His faithfulness is bringing this rescue about. To not recognize this incredible unfolding of God’s work in history is to miss an essential of understanding God’s Word in relation to the history before us.

Many of us formed early opinions of the Bible by how we were brought up and taught in church or Sunday School. I was reared in a conservative major denominational church. I believed the Bible was God’s Word. I thought of it as full of concepts and stories to move a person to accept Jesus and glean insight from its stories and teaching. Certainly, that is true, but each story has a particular purpose that fits within the whole of God’s revealed plan and must be interpreted according to what God Himself is conveying. All the matters of Scripture fit into God’s plan of rescue for those in Jesus Christ.

In my early twenties I was introduced to exegetical teaching which opened a new world of seeing the glory and purpose of God in the Scripture. One of the things that exegetical teaching does is that it examines the whole, and the particulars, and how they relate to one another. The Bible, as one scholar has stated, is “an unfolding drama of God’s redemption of man from sin.” All of the inspired writings, whether history, poetry, prophecy, or instruction, fit in perfection with the whole providing for us everything we need to know to be changed and live by faith.
A significant component of God’s plan to redeem sinners is God working through the Jewish people. We see that God chose Abraham, and then he is told his son of the promise will be Isaac. He was the son given to Abraham and Sarah in their old age and he would be an instrument to carry God’s faithful plan of restoration. In the meantime Abraham attempted to help God’s promise by having a child, Ishmael, through Sarah’s attendant, Hagar. But God’s plan would be through Israel; “’And Abraham said to God, Oh that Ishmael might live before You!’ But God said, “No, but your wife Sarah will bear you a son, and you shall name him Isaac; and I will establish My covenant with him as an everlasting covenant for his descendants after him’” (Gen. 17:18-19). Isaac is the father of Jacob whose name was changed to Israel, and notice the covenant God made is an everlasting covenant. God would later say of Israel, ““For you are a holy people to the Lord your God; the Lord your God has chosen you to be a people for His personal possession out of all the peoples who are on the face of the earth. The Lord did not make you His beloved nor choose you because you were greater in number than any of the peoples, since you were the fewest of all peoples, but because the Lord loved you and kept the oath which He swore to your forefathers” (Deut. 7:6-8).

It is the faithfulness of God that gave us Jesus Christ, the God-Man Savior, out of the nation of Israel, just as God said. Then in God’s plan, Israel rejected their Messiah, which was necessary in fulfilling His role as Redeemer (Acts 2:22-24). Then by using the disobedience of Israel, God raised up a new entity we call the church (Rom. 11:12-25). But, we also know that the promises of God to Israel as an eternal kingdom before God must also be fulfilled. God stated this concerning the nation of Israel and His covenant with them; “He who gives the sun for light by day and the fixed order of the moon and the stars for light by night, who stirs up the sea so that its waves roar— The Lord of armies is His name: ‘If this fixed order departs from Me,’ declares the Lord, ‘Then the descendants of Israel also will cease to be a nation before Me forever.’ This is what the Lord says: ‘If the heavens above can be measured and the foundations of the earth searched out below, Then I will also reject all the descendants of Israel for everything that they have done,’ declares the Lord” (Jeremiah 31:35-37). The power, authority, and the faithfulness of God to do what He says is absolute in this promise.

Today, all these years later, Israel is back in her land, most prominent in the news, and under attack. This past week the Prime Minister of Israel spoke at the United Nations headquarters, and three-fourths of the attending representatives of the nations walked out refusing to listen to what he would say. They have taken the side of the false religion of Islam. Islam seeks to drive Israel from the land God gave them, and ultimately destroy them. This is not possible because of God’s promise. Satan hates God’s covenant and is behind this movement. We can understand our world today by studying God’s Word. We know that before our Lord’s second coming that Israel, as a nation, will recognize that Jesus Christ is their Messiah (Zech. 12:10). And that Christ, upon His coming, will rule the earth from Jerusalem; “Now it will come about that In the last days the mountain of the house of the Lord will be established as the chief of the mountains, and will be raised above the hills; and all the nations will stream to it. And many peoples will come and say, ‘Come, let’s go up to the mountain of the Lord, to the house of the God of Jacob; so that He may teach us about His ways, and that we may walk in His paths. For the law will go out from Zion and the word of the Lord from Jerusalem and He will judge between the nations, and will mediate for many peoples; and they will beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning knives. Nation will not lift up a sword against nation, and never again will they learn war” (Is. 2:2-4). Beloved, do you see the faithfulness of God? It should amaze and give us joy as we watch these things unfolding in the news, and see God’s plan before us! As God is faithful in His promises to Israel, He will be faithful to all who love Him. Praise God for His faithfulness!