How to Read a Bible Full of Promises

00:00:00.000 | On occasional Fridays, we talk with Dr. Don Carson about the themes that we see in biblical

00:00:04.480 | theology, essentially the major themes that we see develop through our Bibles, from Genesis

00:00:09.360 | to Revelation. We covered the theme of covenants last time, which is really important. And in total,

00:00:15.040 | there's about 20 major themes that really make sense of the Bible for us. And we have covered

00:00:19.520 | about half of them on the podcast, half of them to go. On occasional Fridays, I call Dr. Carson

00:00:24.640 | as part of our relationship with our friends at The Gospel Coalition. Carson is the co-founder

00:00:28.880 | and president of The Gospel Coalition and also served as editor of the NIV Zondervan Study Bible,

00:00:33.520 | which is a study Bible version of what we're doing in these occasional Friday podcasts.

00:00:37.520 | Closely related to the theme of covenants is the theme of promise. So how do the promises

00:00:43.760 | of Scripture unfold and how does Christ fulfill the biblical promises in the Passover?

00:00:48.480 | I asked Dr. Carson to explain. The Bible makes many, many promises.

00:00:54.880 | There was an old chorus I learned when I was a child in Sunday school, "Every promise in the

00:00:59.760 | book is mine, every chapter, every verse, every line." And of course, that's not true.

00:01:04.000 | There's some promises made to people other than me. And so one must read promises in their context.

00:01:13.120 | But there are many promises that God gives to human beings, generically, all human beings,

00:01:18.880 | and other promises that he gives only to his own blood-bought covenant people. And some promises

00:01:26.240 | that he gives to Israel, and some promises that he gives to individuals, to the Davidic dynasty,

00:01:32.720 | for example. But one of the things that's pretty obvious whenever you start tracking out the theme

00:01:38.320 | of promise is that it is tied to a lot of things. Now, earlier on in this series, I said that one of

00:01:43.520 | the things that's remarkable about biblical theology is that although one way of doing

00:01:48.720 | biblical theology is to track out particular themes across Scripture - temple, and creation,

00:01:55.680 | and sin, and priesthood, and promise, and sacrifice, and so on, and so on, and so on - what

00:02:01.680 | you discover pretty quickly is that they get intertwined. And so that it becomes harder and

00:02:06.800 | harder to talk about one without talking about others. So for the sake of convenience, for the

00:02:12.800 | sake of learning, we might talk about one at a time. But pretty soon it's inevitable that we're

00:02:18.480 | talking about several things at once. And nowhere is that more true than in the theme of promise.

00:02:24.640 | There's a sense in which we can talk about promise and outline what the Bible says in this regard in

00:02:31.040 | five minutes, but one could take 20 hours and still not exhaust the theme at all. So in particular,

00:02:38.480 | promise is often tied to Messiah. It's very often tied to notions of covenant. It's tied to notions

00:02:45.920 | of the Holy Spirit. It's tied to notions of typology, and many other things. And I'll briefly

00:02:52.640 | sidle up to several of those things on the way by today, but the focus is on promise.

00:02:59.520 | The opening round of explicit promise is really in Genesis 3. No sooner has the human race fallen

00:03:06.960 | into sin and rebellion, where there should be only death, you would think, yet instead we find

00:03:16.080 | in Genesis 3.15 what is sometimes called the "protefangelium," that is, the first gospel or

00:03:22.320 | the first announcement of the gospel, where God says, "I will put enmity between you and the woman

00:03:29.680 | (speaking now to the serpent) and between your offspring and hers. He will crush your head,

00:03:35.360 | and you will strike his heel." I don't know how many saw the Mel Gibson film on the crucifixion,

00:03:43.440 | the passion narrative, but there's an opening scene there that is really quite dramatic. At one level,

00:03:49.360 | it's not historical at all, but in visual display, it's got it exactly right. There's Jesus praying

00:03:55.840 | in the garden, drops of bloody sweat coming from him in an agony as he contemplates the cross

00:04:02.640 | and asks his Father, "If it be possible, take this cup from me." And a snake begins to crawl over him.

00:04:08.320 | And then slowly, Jesus stands up and then, "Stop!" He crushes the serpent with his heel. I remember

00:04:17.440 | seeing that in the theater and thinking, "I wonder how many people in this theater know what text

00:04:21.440 | that's alluding to?" So at the very moment that Christ is crushing the head of the serpent with

00:04:27.920 | his heel, yet at the same time, there is one sense, at one level, Satan is striking out to

00:04:35.200 | kill Christ himself. And that offspring promise, enmity between you and the woman and between your

00:04:42.560 | offspring and hers, is remarkable in that Genesis 3.15 is picked up in Romans 16.20, where it's

00:04:50.320 | Christians who are crushing Satan. God will crush Satan under your feet shortly. That is, the church

00:04:57.840 | by its witness to Christ, who has done the supreme crushing, sees Satan increasingly vanquished.

00:05:05.280 | So there's a sense in which a seedbed promise in the first three chapters of Genesis is being

00:05:13.120 | unpacked throughout the rest of the Bible. We've seen that in the creation and fall narrative

00:05:18.560 | before. That is, many, many, many themes are found there in "nuce," as the Latinists say,

00:05:24.960 | in seed form. And then the whole thing grows and expands and becomes a massive theme later on in

00:05:32.320 | Scripture. Well, more promises. In the last session, we looked at covenants, and in particular,

00:05:39.440 | the Abrahamic covenant. The Abrahamic covenant is often referred to as the covenant of promise,

00:05:43.920 | since in this covenant, Genesis 12.15.17, alluded to in Genesis 22, all of which we looked at last

00:05:52.160 | day. He promises, amongst other things, that through Abraham's seed, all the nations of the

00:05:58.480 | earth will be blessed. It's not filled out much more than that, except in the context, there's the

00:06:05.680 | anticipation not only of a direct line from Abraham, which is fulfilled in the birth of Isaac,

00:06:11.840 | and then Isaac's sons, and eventually the patriarchs, and then the entire nation,

00:06:16.720 | until ultimately you come down to Jesus, who is born in the promised line of Abraham,

00:06:24.800 | as the very first verse of the New Testament makes clear. What is remarkable is that Genesis 15 says

00:06:32.320 | that Abraham believed the promise. He believed God's Word. He believed what God said,

00:06:39.440 | and this faith was credited to him as righteousness. And that, of course, is picked up in

00:06:45.680 | the New Testament to demonstrate that Abraham becomes, as it were, the prototype, the

00:06:52.640 | anticipatory pattern of those who are saved by their faith. They receive the promise of God and

00:07:00.160 | respond by faith. It's not as if Abraham earned this promise that in him and in his seed, all the

00:07:07.280 | nations of the earth would be blessed, but rather he received the promise of God. He believed the

00:07:12.480 | promise, even though there were lapses in his faith, as when he slept with Hagar to produce

00:07:18.480 | Ishmael. Nevertheless, the promise itself was firm, and the Abrahamic covenant fulfillment

00:07:27.600 | spelled out in the New Testament in a passage, for example, like Galatians chapter 3, is no less

00:07:34.000 | the fulfillment of promise. In fact, that's one of the words that Paul uses to point out the

00:07:41.600 | importance of the Abrahamic covenant. After the law was given in the time of Moses, many people

00:07:47.360 | thought of the regulatory function of the law as defining the relationship between God and his

00:07:54.640 | covenant people, the Israelites. But one of the things that Paul makes very clear is that the law

00:08:00.800 | was given centuries after the promise, and whatever else the law does, and it does many important

00:08:07.120 | things, whatever else it does, it can't annul the promise. The promise has a certain kind of

00:08:12.240 | priority. Speaking in covenantal terms, the Abrahamic covenant has a certain kind of time-based

00:08:20.480 | and logical priority over the covenant of law. And the distinctive element in the Abrahamic covenant

00:08:28.560 | that Paul points to is the fact that it is a promise which is received by faith, so that those

00:08:36.080 | who share Abraham's faith are sharing with him confidence in the promise of God, the God who

00:08:42.880 | gave the covenant of promise. Well, there are many, many other ties along that line. Let me pick up

00:08:49.440 | a few other promise themes in the Old Testament. This is only a small number of them. There are

00:08:56.720 | some we just don't have time to track out. The promise, for example, that the Israelites would

00:09:02.320 | go in and take over the promised land, that God would win over their enemies, that God would

00:09:09.040 | protect them, and many, many others. Eventually, there is a promise that the Davidic dynasty

00:09:15.840 | would be eternal. The first king of the unified monarchy, Saul, did not last very long, did not

00:09:25.040 | turn out very well. But in 2 Samuel chapter 7, God promises David a dynasty that will not be set

00:09:32.640 | aside. Since David had watched what happened to Saul, he was doubtless thinking that even if he

00:09:39.760 | remained perfectly faithful himself, and he didn't, but even if he had, he couldn't guarantee the

00:09:45.280 | behavior of his son and of his son's son and of his son's son's son. And so he wondered how long

00:09:50.560 | his own dynasty would last. But God promises in 2 Samuel 7 that the dynasty will last, it will be

00:09:57.200 | perpetual. And that theme is then taken up throughout the rest of the Old Testament and all

00:10:03.840 | the way to the New Testament. There is an expectation of a Davidic king. Now, we'll pursue

00:10:10.560 | that one a little more when we look at the theme of kingship in a later recording. But what's

00:10:16.480 | remarkable is that you turn to the very first page of the New Testament, and you read the origins of

00:10:22.960 | Jesus Christ, the son of Abraham, the son of David, and the genealogy then takes you back to David.

00:10:29.840 | So the nature of the promise of God to David, issuing in the entire Davidic kingship,

00:10:36.400 | brings with it a number of other promises, too. Ultimately, that the Redeemer in the Davidic line

00:10:42.800 | would be born in Bethlehem, picked up by the prophet Micah, and taught by the Pharisees to

00:10:50.640 | Herod and the Magi in Matthew chapter 2. So that's another track that runs right through

00:10:56.480 | all of Scripture, until it's very clear that this new David, great David's greater son,

00:11:03.200 | is the King of kings and the Lord of lords. Then other Old Testament promises. Some are along

00:11:10.240 | what might be called typological lines. For example, the institution of Passover as a feast

00:11:16.560 | that looks back on the first Passover, when the angel of death passed over all of the households

00:11:24.240 | that were daubed with the blood of the Lamb. Yet Paul can come along and say in 1 Corinthians 6,

00:11:30.320 | "Christ, our Passover, has been sacrificed for us." So Christ himself is understood by Paul to

00:11:37.200 | be a kind of anti-type, a fulfillment of promise, of that old promise that was not cast specifically

00:11:45.280 | as a promise. There's no text that says, "Understand now that this Passover Lamb that you're sacrificing

00:11:52.080 | is merely a type of a greater sacrifice yet to come." There's no text that says anything quite

00:11:58.960 | as explicit as that. And yet, as the feast is celebrated year after year after year after year

00:12:04.960 | after year after year, inevitably people are thinking back to the first Passover, but they

00:12:10.880 | can't help but think, as it's done again and again and again, "Where is this heading? What pattern is

00:12:15.760 | being tracked out here? Where is this trajectory going?" And you see its ultimate trace in the

00:12:22.400 | ultimate sacrifice of the ultimate Lamb of God, who sacrifices himself once for all to turn aside

00:12:28.080 | the wrath of God from God's own firstborn, as it were. And thus, one sees the nature of the promise

00:12:36.880 | in a pattern that's repeated, a pattern that is sometimes called a type. Now again, we're going

00:12:42.560 | to do something on typology a little later too, but once again we see how these things intertwine.

00:12:47.920 | And there are many, many other promises that we could point to. Promise of priesthood, promise of

00:12:55.600 | God's ability to turn evil into eternal redemptive good, Genesis 50 verse 20, picked up in Romans 8

00:13:03.440 | 28. Promise also for atonement of sin for the people of God, Exodus 30 verse 10, picked up in

00:13:12.960 | Hebrews 9 22. The great commandments to love God with heart and soul and mind and strength,

00:13:20.240 | and your neighbor as yourself, Deuteronomy 6 Leviticus 19. But these things are picked up and

00:13:26.240 | are implanted in the new covenant people of God. So there are many, many ways in which the Old

00:13:32.960 | Testament texts point forward. But perhaps we can focus on two or three in particular.

00:13:40.080 | There are Old Testament texts that promise the coming of the Spirit, Ezekiel 36 25 to 27, God

00:13:46.880 | will wash them, His new covenant people, the language of the new covenant is used, His new

00:13:51.920 | covenant people with clean water and pour out a spirit upon them. And likewise Joel 2, which is

00:13:58.640 | picked up by the Apostle Peter on the day of Pentecost. And those sorts of passages are picked

00:14:06.880 | up explicitly in the New Testament. In Ephesians 1 chapter 1 verse 13, we're told about the Holy

00:14:15.440 | Spirit of promise. That's a locution that really means the promised Holy Spirit. He's the one who

00:14:21.200 | has been promised in the Old Testament and has come in all of the fullness of the expectation

00:14:28.240 | under the terms of the new covenant. Similar language is used in John 7 37 to 39. And in the

00:14:35.040 | entire farewell discourse, John 14 to 16, where the Holy Spirit, sometimes called the Comforter,

00:14:42.160 | the Parakletos, the helper, the one alongside who succeeds Jesus, He comes and is with the

00:14:51.680 | disciples and will be with them. And the Christians after the resurrection are told to wait for the

00:14:58.320 | promised Holy Spirit who will come upon them on the day of Pentecost. So this notion of promise

00:15:05.680 | drives scripture forward. It means that our view of history is not that it goes around and around

00:15:12.480 | and around and around as in a lot of Hindu thought, where you jump on and jump off by reincarnation.

00:15:19.040 | With history not necessarily going anywhere, you're just on another cycle or another spiral,

00:15:24.960 | and you get on for a ride and get off for a ride. And what you hope eventually is that you climb

00:15:30.480 | high enough up on the spiral that you reach some sort of a blessed state. But the biblical view is

00:15:37.200 | really quite different. There is a beginning called creation. There is an end, the new heaven

00:15:42.800 | and the new earth, until we finally get to the last chapter of the Bible, the last chapters. And

00:15:50.000 | there is the new heaven and the new earth, or hell itself. And before the new heaven and the new

00:15:56.720 | earth and hell is the final judgment. And that final judgment is faced by absolutely everyone.

00:16:03.120 | And all of the intervening history between Genesis 1, 2, and 3 on the one hand, and Revelation

00:16:08.960 | 20, 21, 22 on the other, is the unfolding of history under the sovereignty of God to bring

00:16:14.480 | about His purposes in line with the promises of God. So the notion of the promises of God

00:16:20.400 | is tied to our very understanding of history. God fulfills His promises across the trajectory,

00:16:26.880 | the axis of redemptive history. In this connection then, it's worth mentioning one other feature of

00:16:32.240 | Old Testament promise, I think. This was taught me when I was a young man in seminary. I've heard

00:16:39.040 | John Piper say something very similar, that he was taught this when he was in seminary. It doesn't

00:16:43.440 | seem to be mentioned so much these days, but I think it's really a very helpful way of looking

00:16:48.160 | at things. For anyone who has done much hill walking, low mountain hiking, you become aware

00:16:56.800 | very rapidly that you see a hill in front of you and you think that's the height that you've got

00:17:03.520 | to climb. Then when you get to that height, you see more heights beyond you. And if they're far

00:17:10.320 | enough away, you have absolutely no idea of how far those individual peaks are separated.

00:17:18.400 | They all look to be on the same sort of flat plane. And yet as you come to them one by one,

00:17:25.040 | you discover there are ravines and valleys and intervening plateaus and so on between one peak

00:17:31.040 | and the next peak. And a lot of Old Testament prophecy is cast with that vision of sort of

00:17:38.960 | flattened out peaks, so that you can move from promises regarding the return of the people after

00:17:45.360 | the exile to Jerusalem, to promises about a new Jerusalem, indeed a new heaven and a new earth,

00:17:52.640 | all in the context of one chapter. Because from the vista of the prophet who is looking

00:17:58.240 | into the future, they're all flattened out. He can't see how they're separated from one another.

00:18:03.120 | So that we who are much farther along the trek and looking back and are aware of the ravine

00:18:09.520 | sometimes wonder, "Well, that sort of got flattened out, didn't it? Why are they lumped together? Why

00:18:16.320 | doesn't the prophet Isaiah make more of a distinction between the return from the exile

00:18:20.000 | and the ultimate return to the Lord on the last day?" And I think that it's an important element

00:18:28.080 | in the very structure of Old Testament biblical prophecy. It's sometimes called prophetic

00:18:32.560 | foreshortening. I'm not sure that helps anybody or not. But the mountain example helped me a

00:18:37.680 | great deal to recognize what was going on in some of these passages. So Isaiah 65-66 anticipates a

00:18:45.040 | new heaven and a new earth, but it's in a context where there are also more immediate prophecies

00:18:49.600 | that are also being fulfilled. But ultimately, they are all picked up. And even "new heaven and

00:18:55.040 | new earth" language is picked up by 2 Peter, for example. And it's picked up finally in the book

00:19:03.040 | of Revelation 21 and 22. There's one more element of promise that I should mention. This one is a

00:19:10.160 | little more disputed, but in my view, it's pretty important. In Matthew 5, verses 17-20, which is a

00:19:18.080 | paragraph that introduces the so-called antitheses of Matthew 5, "You have heard that it was said,

00:19:24.080 | but I say unto you, you have heard that it was said, but I say unto you." To introduce all of

00:19:28.640 | those antitheses, Jesus says in Matthew 5, 17 and following, "Do not think that I have come to

00:19:34.320 | destroy the law. I have not come to destroy it, but to fulfill it." Now, it's possible, just

00:19:41.040 | barely, to understand "fulfill" there to mean something like "to keep it." But there are lots

00:19:46.400 | of good verbs to use in Greek, as in English, to mean "to keep." "Fulfill" in Matthew, the verb

00:19:53.920 | plaid "ao" - "to fulfill" - is very common. It's used more in Matthew than in any other New

00:19:59.040 | Testament book. And without exception in the other usages in Matthew, the verb "to fulfill" really

00:20:05.680 | means "to fulfill that which was promised." So I'm persuaded that Jesus is not saying something like,

00:20:11.840 | "I have not come to abolish the law, but to keep it." And he's not saying something like,

00:20:16.320 | "I have not come to abolish the law, but to show you its deeper meaning." That's not quite right,

00:20:22.080 | either. But, "I have not come to abolish the law, but to fulfill it." That is, to show all the ways

00:20:31.440 | in which it points forward. And, of course, we're familiar with that already in things like the

00:20:36.560 | Passover law. The Passover law is part of law, and it points forward to the ultimate Passover.

00:20:41.280 | The sacrifices of Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, point forward ultimately to the

00:20:46.720 | ultimate sacrifice. So, in that sense, we're already familiar with the notion that law points forward.

00:20:52.080 | But in the Antipathies, we're dealing with categories that transcend the sacrificial system.

00:20:58.640 | And I think that what Jesus is saying is that even what we commonly call the moral law of God,

00:21:05.920 | given in the Old Covenant Scriptures, itself points forward to the very perfection that is

00:21:12.960 | finally characteristic of the new heaven and the new earth. And that comes under the dawning of

00:21:18.480 | the New Covenant, for the first taste, as it were. The New Covenant which is consummated when Christ

00:21:24.160 | finally returns. But already, Jesus says, "You have heard that it was said, but I'm telling you

00:21:30.080 | this is the way you live now." And what He's demanding is absolute perfection. That's the way

00:21:36.080 | Matthew 5 ends. "Be perfect, even as your heavenly Father is perfect." Because the law ultimately

00:21:42.480 | points forward to the utter perfection that the people of God must have before God, which is met

00:21:51.760 | finally by Christ's sacrifice. But which is finally displayed in them because they are so transformed,

00:21:56.960 | too. There is a sense in which the whole law of God, though it has many, many other functions,

00:22:02.880 | has amongst its functions, the pointing forward to the perfection that is yet to come.

00:22:08.880 | Amen. That is so good and helpful. That's from his home office. That was Dr. Don Carson,

00:22:12.480 | the co-founder and president of the Gospel Coalition, helping us put together one of 20

00:22:17.360 | major themes in the Bible so we can make better sense of the Bible as we read it ourselves from

00:22:21.040 | Genesis to Revelation. And for more on the promises and how they connect to the covenants,

00:22:26.240 | see Paul Williamson's very good essay at the end of the NIV's Undervent Study Bible, edited by Dr.

00:22:31.040 | Don Carson himself. On Monday, we return to talk with John Piper about interracial marriage. Once

00:22:37.120 | again, it's a hot topic on this podcast because there's so many remaining questions about whether

00:22:41.520 | men and women of different races should marry. Can they marry? Is it biblically permissible to marry?

00:22:46.080 | Amazingly, there's a lot of questions still out there, questions we get all the time in the inbox.

00:22:51.040 | My name is Tony Reinke. Thanks for listening to the Ask Pastor John podcast. Have a great

00:22:55.280 | weekend and we will see you on Monday.

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How to Read a Bible Full of Promises

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