This article was quoted by Tim Keller in the video below. Please watch the video to see why Covenant keeping in our marriages models the Gospel of Grace.
Human destiny rests on a promise.
The future of the human family rides the fragile fibers of a promise spoken. One thing assures us that the cosmos will not climax its arduous odyssey turning itself into a stinking garbage heap. Only one thing affirms that the human romance will have a happy ending, and that the earth will be populated one day by a redeemed family living in justice and shalom. The one thread by rich everything hangs is a promise spoken and not forgotten.
A common Chaldean named Abraham burned his bridges behind him and strode off into his unpredictable future as he gambled on the reliability of a promise uttered by a Presence he had scarcely begun to feel. And so the new possibility for history began.
The romance got going again when Moses tried to get a better fix on the identity of this Presence, this invisible Awesome One, the Ineffable. "What is your name?" he dared to ask. And the answer came (in John Courtney Murray's provocative translation): "I am he who will be there with you" (Exod. 3:14). This was his name. It was all Moses needed to know; maybe it was all he could know. "I am he who will be there with you; count on it."
No one on earth at that time could have predicted the spectacular rise and dismal falls of the people who were created by the promise implicit in God's name. Unpredictable circumstances combined with an uncontrolled compulsion to commit national suicide kept their future in constant doubt. Only the power of the promise kept them together. The One whose name is "I am he who will be there with you" kept coming back to them.
Then, in an unsuspecting setting, a man from Galilee talked to his friends about sealing the ancient promise in his blood and, a day later, he spilled it over God's ground on a mound they called Golgotha. "I am he who will be there with you" was there with us, dying, then rising, and then being there with us to the end of the world.
No one on earth now can predict the future of the natives of planet Earth by any evidential data. What will it be, a cosmic garbage heap? Or will it be a new earth where righteousness has finally taken hold? Not a cosmic heap, says Peter: rather, a new earth. How so? By whose crystal ball? According to what indicators, and from what internal evidence? With no crystal ball and no internal evidence, "We wait according to his promise" (II Peter 3:13). Again, the whole thing hangs on a promise.
Human destiny rests on a promise freely given and reliably remembered. Besides providing a believing basis for hope, this means that whenever you and I make and keep a promise we are as close to being like God as we can ever be. When you say to anyone that you will be there with her, you are only a millimeter beneath the angels.
Promise making obviously begins with the intimate communities, and if we fail there, we can forget our covenants to renew the metropolis. Take marriage. When a woman marries, she takes on a new name: "I am she who will be there with you." What sublime arrogance; it sounds like an imitation of God. But we had better imitate the promise-making God. Or else.
When I married my wife, I had hardly a smidgen of sense for what I was getting into with her. How could I know how much she would change over 25 years? How could I know how much I would change? My wife has lived with at least five different men since we were wed—and each of the five has been me. The connecting link with my old self has always been the memory of the name I took on back there: "I am he who will be there with you." When we slough off that name, lose that identity, we can hardly find ourselves again. And the bonds that connect us to others will be frayed to breaking.
Extend marriage to a family. What makes a family? A family must be more than a spillover of two persons' reckless passions. A family must be more than what the census bureau says it is: two or more persons related by blood and living under the same roof. A family has to be even more than a modern management device by which the oldsters are in charge of shuffling the youngsters around to the external experts who do the real rearing. A family must be more. And it is.
A family is a community created by the promise of two people who care for persons they bring into the world until those persons are able to care for themselves. Parents are people of promise. They remember their promise even when the family is a hotbed of anger, grief, and pain—as families tend sometimes to be. The psalmist said that the man who has a quiver full of children is the most happy fellow. I suspect he said it before his own children had reached adolescence. But no matter. A family is created and kept together, not because parenting is so much fun, but because two people dared to make and dared to keep their promise.
But a marriage and family are only the easiest communities to get into focus. All human community, from the ghetto to the global village, depends on the power of promising. Where people no longer have the inner daring to make serious promises or the grit to keep them, human community becomes a combat zone of competing self-maximizers. We are at sea; life is all open-ended, loose-jointed, tossed around in the backwash of unpredictability. Where others cannot assume that I will be there with them as promised, I have helped abolish community.
I oversimplify, of course.
Promises summon the sort of social integrity that lays the ground floor for all community. Life together survives as a human togetherness, not on a diet of warm feelings, but on the tough fibers of promise keeping. It is not easy. There are times when the inner logic and deserving needs of self-fulfillment seduce us to opt for self-maximizing even if to maximize ourselves we need to break promises to others. Promising—and keeping promises—is the toughest social duty of our time but, down the pike, it is the only human, the only redemptive way.
As I search the pages of redemptive history for the moral essence of God's character, what comes to me is this: God is, par excellence, in the character he reveals, the One who creates for us a new past and a new future by forgiving and promising.
This article originally appeared in the January 21, 1983 issue of Christianity Today.
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