Everett's Version: May 2019

Exceeding Great and Precious Promises

I am getting my blog up and running again.

Exceeding Great and Precious Promises

Whereby are given unto us exceeding great and precious promises: that by these ye might be partakers of the divine nature, having escaped the corruption that is in the world through lust. --2 Peter 1:4

I am using the King James version for this text because it is blunt where a euphemism may dodge the point. I also have a text within a text, because Peter does not develop what the exceeding great and precious promises are.

Corruption, or rottenness, is in the world because of human lust, not because God willed it or designed it. Yes, God made the fruit of the tree from which Adam and Eve ate, but they ate it because they didn’t want what God wanted for them--the glorious liberty of the children of God.

But that is nothing but context. I am interested in those exceeding great and precious promises we have been given and how we may escape corruption through them. We do not escape because God makes the promises, but because we keep them. The promises are from God and the power to keep them are also from God. Grace is a summary word for them; It is the standard English translation of the Greek used in the New Testament to translate God’s covenant love.

Blessedness and grace are not precise synonyms, but one may say as a working hypothesis that blessing is the application of grace as it pertains in specific cases--legal, moral, emotional, and so on.

When we try to do that we often make a mess of it, but God in his omnipotence gets it right; all we want or need to know will be revealed on judgment day.

In the meantime, none of us knows much because what we know is distorted by what we feel.

so we cope--humbly, we hope. At least we think we are coping, or pretending we are Christians who have committed themselves to the Bible as the word of God and to the “household of God, which is the church of the living God, the pillar and bulwark of the truth,” as most covenant people claim to do, at least have a starting point in any conversation.

The promises are not bromides, or guideposts, or sentimentalities. Peter said they are the means by which we escape the corruption is in the world through lust. They have great power, but they must be intentionally employed; they do not kick in on their own.

After some seventy years of life as a Christian I have not internalized how much we live on promises, so I have not been disciplined in my stewardship of them--even of the exceeding and great life-saving promises by which we escape the corruption that is in the world through lust. What is that, anyway, more than a preacher’s fancy wordplay?

I’m afraid it is even less than that. Here is my provisional definition: The corruption that is in the world through lust is getting what we want as soon as we want it. So here are some of the exceeding great and precious promises by which we escape the corruption.

There are several passages in the New Testament that list exceeding great and precious promises, but I am going to begin with Philippians 4:8 as one of the most forthright:

Whatever is true, whatever is noble,whatever is right, whatever is pure,

whatever is lovely,whatever is admirable,

if anything is excellent or praiseworthy, think `about such things:

and the God of peace will be with you.