Faithful

The Lord says,

“Then I will heal you of your faithlessness;

my love will know no bounds,

for my anger will be gone forever.*

Would you notice if I stopped talking to you? How would you respond? would you check to see if something was wrong? or just let me go my own way, assuming that some friends aren't meant to last? what if we had promised that we'd stay in touch regardless of how far and long? what if you tried hard to connect and keep the friendship going, but I ignored you, didn't show up to things, forgot to reply?

Friendships are hard to keep going long term, especially when the situation or environment where we connected is no longer where we are. It's hard to stay focused on what is important, and decide who to invest in and how long to continue working on a one-sided friendship. I have suffered and perpetrated in this dilemma. Staying faithful is really hard!

Amazingly, God wants to be in relationship with me, with all of us humans! He knows what we are like, that we struggle to keep promises we make, that we fail to keep healthy relationships and friendships, that we have short attention spans! Yet He still promised to Abraham to give him land, descendants and blessing, and if God did not do this, he would die. That was the covenant promise that people made in that time, to seal a deal they would walk between the halves of carcasses, symbolising that if they did not do what they said, they would be killed like the animals splayed on the ground.** God went through but did not require Abraham to do the same, God sealed the deal himself, meaning He was and is prepared to die to keep his promises!

Throughout the Old Testament we can read of the people God chose for himself, whom he had made that promise to, rejecting him, going their own way, and only when calamity falls do they remember the LORD and his promises. And God heard their groaning, and he remembered his covenant promise. That he would not destroy them for rejecting him, but rather keep his promise and continue to ensure they had a people, a place and blessing.

I am struck by how often and quickly I forget God, and I am sure I am not alone, the Bible is full of forgetful and faithless people! God asks, through the prophet Jeremiah, that the people of Israel to go and look, go and search in other lands and ask themselves:

"Has any nation ever traded its gods for new ones, even though they are not gods at all? Yet my people have exchanged their glorious God for worthless idols! The heavens are shocked at such a thing and shrink bank in horror and dismay," says the LORD. "For my people have done two evil things: They have abandoned me--- the fountain of living water. And they have dug for themselves cracked cisterns that can hold no water at all!"***

God is not only terribly hurt that we forget him, and reject the friendship he holds out to us. But he is shocked and disappointed in what we chose to replace him with! Things that don't last, that can be stolen and lost, that rust and fail, that grow weak and don't answer, that ignore us and cannot actually help us in any of life's true problems! Eventually, to fulfil his promise to Abraham, he had to make the ultimate sacrifice, and die. The Son of God, on the Place of the Skull in Israel just outside Jerusalem, died the penalty we should have had, for forsaking our side of the covenant that God made with us. Instead, in his great love and mercy, he took that upon himself! So that his anger is gone forever and his love knows no ends! God cannot deny his own promises, He is faithful to himself and faithful to us. Even when we fail to remember God, when we are faithless, he ensures that we can still be in a relationship with him.

The saying is sure: 

If we have died with him, we will also live with him;

if we endure, we shall also reign with him;

if we deny him, he will deny us;

if we are faithless, he remains faithful--

for he cannot deny himself.****

*Hosea 14:4
**Genesis 15

***Jeremiah 2:11-13
****2 Timothy 2:11-13