Today's reading: Ezekiel 36; Colossians 2
It's amazing how much more assurance can be had when God is promising to act for His own sake, rather than in response to human goodness or faithfulness.
I was struck this morning, reading Ezekiel 36, by the multiple times God calls out that He is not going to bring Israel back into the land for their own sake, but for the sake of His name. Israel has been faithless, and they have continued in faithlessness, but in order that His own name might be glorified, both by the Israelites, and among the nations, God is going to bring His faithless people back and reestablish them in the land.
At first this really sounded like an insult, like Ezekiel was calling out that they are so faithless that God has to move despite them. And in one sense, it is that. But the more I thought about it, the more I realized how much more powerful that promise becomes when God is acting for His own glory rather than in response to Israel's repentance and faithfulness. If God is acting in response to them, it's a constant question of, "Where are we at? Have we done enough? Have we been faithful enough? The rest of us have been pretty good, but did Jeremy's sin just ruin it for the rest of us?" The fulfillment of the promise to bring them back to the land would always be in flux. That also means though that the promise might be nothing but powerless, empty words, and when it doesn't come to pass, it can always just be written off as Israel's faithlessness rather than God's impotence. But when God takes it upon Himself to fulfill this promise for His own glory, there is an otherwise impossible level of assurance that it will come to pass, and God is staking His own reputation on it's fulfillment.
And really, this is the same assurance that we now have in Christ. It is not by our own power, effort, goodness, or anything else that we look forward, with assured anticipation, to eternity with the Lord, but by the death, resurrection, and ascension of Jesus. As Paul puts it in Colossians 2 this morning:
"In him also you were circumcised with a circumcision made without hands, by putting off the body of the flesh, by the circumcision of Christ, having been buried with him in baptism, in which you were also raised with him through faith in the powerful working of God, who raised him from the dead. And you, who were dead in your trespasses and the uncircumcision of your flesh, God made alive together with him, having forgiven us all our trespasses, by canceling the record of debt that stood against us with its legal demands. This he set aside, nailing it to the cross. He disarmed the rulers and authorities and put them to open shame, by triumphing over them in him."
It is precisely because our salvation depends on Jesus, and not on ourselves, that we can have assurance. It is not to us that the promises of God are made, but to Christ, and when we, through faith, are baptized into (placed into) Christ, we become partakers in those promises.
The less God's promises depend on us and our performance, the more assured we can be that they will come to pass.
Praise God that all His promises find their "yes" in Him, and not in me!
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