Sunday message · The Bible Together series
Listen to the message
Message Summary
In the first message of The Bible Together, a summer series in which children and adults study the same passage, Pastor Phillip Santillan turns to Genesis 12–17. He recalls a birthday he had promised to make special for his daughter that was upended by a sudden emergency of his own. Most broken promises are like that, he says, not malicious but simply human. So is God any different from us when it comes to promises?
Abram, Phil explains, was an ordinary man in ancient Mesopotamia whose father died before reaching Canaan. His wife Sarai could not have children, and he had no land, no nation and no legacy. Yet in Genesis 12 God makes him seven promises, including that all the peoples of the earth will be blessed through him, before Abram has done anything to earn them. The whole story hangs on one question: will God do what he said he would do?
In Genesis 15, God tells Abram not to be afraid, and Abram asks what God can give him while he remains childless. He is not questioning whether God exists, Phil notes, but God’s timetable, a weariness many of us know. God offers no rebuke, no timeline and no new plan. He simply takes Abram outside to count the stars, because his offspring will be that numerous. Then comes verse 6: Abram believed the Lord, and it was credited to him as righteousness, the sentence Paul builds on in Romans 4 and Galatians 3. “He was declared righteous because he trusted someone,” Phil says.
When Abram asks how he can know the land will be his, God has him cut animals in half. Ancient readers would recognize a self-curse ritual: both parties walked between the pieces, inviting the same fate if they broke the agreement. Yet only a smoking fire pot and a flaming torch pass through. God walked alone, so the covenant rests on his faithfulness, not Abram’s. Sometimes, Phil says, we doubt God’s promises because we think we are the problem, and we wallow in shame instead of turning in repentance. But our hope rests on God’s faithfulness, not ours.
Thirteen years later, in Genesis 17, Abram is ninety-nine and still has no son, yet God renames him Abraham, father of a multitude. God speaks into what is not yet as if it already is. Paul later explains in Galatians that the promise was to Abraham’s offspring, singular, who is Christ. The one who passed through the darkness alone in Genesis 15 walked into the darkness of Calvary, not because he broke the promise but because we did, absorbing the curse so the blessing could reach everyone.
Abraham was far from perfect, Phil notes, and spent most of his story waiting, questioning and doubting. The hero was never Abraham; Abraham is us. The hero is the God who cannot lie, who passes through the darkness and takes the obligation on himself. Because God is faithful, Phil closes, we can trust him even when we cannot yet see what he has promised.
