The Promised One (A 10-week Bible Study)

Our bridegroom will make us beautiful. He will make us pure.

God’s promises to me are not for this life only. In fact they are not primarily for this life, but for an eternity to come.

do you want to know how you can know that you are loved by God? It is not by looking at your circumstances. You must come to this mountain and look up at this cross.

For many, this story of God calling Abraham to offer his son as a sacrifice seems pointless, indiscernible, and cruel. Yet God did not ask Abraham to do anything that he himself would not do.

this story is not recorded for us primarily to inspire us toward sacrificial acts of obedience to God. It is here to paint in vivid colors the sacrifice of God—what God was willing to sacrifice to demonstrate his love for us.

the mountain did not become a monument to Abraham’s obedience but to God’s provision.

The good news of the gospel is that even though we fail in keeping our promises to God, he will keep his promises to us.

Abraham received the promises of God not because he and Sarah worked up enough faith on their own to believe God’s promises and hold on to them. It was grace given to them in spite of their doubt and disbelief. God was faithful to Abraham not because of Abraham’s faithfulness but in spite of Abraham’s faithlessness. God kept all of his promises to Abraham, who did not keep his promises to God.

Seeing God’s power at work in Sarah prepared God’s people to trust that another woman who cannot possibly conceive because she has never even been with a man will in fact conceive by the power of God.

this was the very reason Ishmael was an unsuitable heir. He represented an effort of the flesh, and Abraham was not going to receive the inheritance God promised through his own efforts but through a work of God so that all of the glory would go to God.