FB Meyer wrote, rightly, “The Bible contains ten thousand promises. It is God’s book of signed checks.”
Yet how many of us find that we have the signed checks collected but not deposited? The deposit is made by God-given faith through prayer in the power of the Holy Spirit. And it is the natural timidity of the flesh to stay away from such prayer, as if we were approaching One who would not want to receive us. The devil, too, plants depressing thoughts and dark circumstances in our path, like storms felling great trees across a road, to block our pathway to such prayers of plenty.
Only cry out to Christ in such times. You neither have to move the tree in the road nor remove the darkness from your life. The truth is you can’t anyway. Yet He did. Christ is the Mediator of the promises in Scripture. There are no Gospel checks signed which were not signed with the blood of the Lamb of God. There is no deposit in heaven through faith without the gift of faith that He brings. There is no transaction of these promises in prayer without Christ in the Prayer.
The Cross of Christ was both agonizing to the human flesh of our Lord and an apparent impasse to His victory: at Golgotha when His will was surrendered at the terrible cost of human suffering never known to Mankind: on the Via Delarosa, where God-in-the-flesh, beaten and battered bore his own cross made by the hands of those creates He had made; when the sinless Son of God was unjustly crucified between two criminals: where His own prophetic cry for the Father shattered the earthly bounds and echoed through dimensions unknown, such a cry and such unresponsiveness must have startled the watching angels, breath-held and stunned, who once beheld Him in pre-incarnate celestial glory beneath the joyful watch of the Father; and the unimaginable—but very real—darkness that covered that wretched, incomprehensible scene, and the deep rumbling of the tectonic plate that grew sick to bear that inscrutable drama—a horrid but necessary drama that marked the covenant sacrifice of that Lord’s Messiah, David’s greater King, Moses’ greater Leader, Abraham’s fullest Promise to the world, and Eve’s long-awaited Redeemer. At the time, the Cross was misunderstood by even the disciples as a sad failure and a diabolically conceived plot that could be nothing but an impassable hindrance to the Promise of salvation by a Messiah and the bleakest event ever conceived. Yet agony became glory and impasse was transformed to a highway to heaven. This is the Gospel.
So, too, are the promises of God undeterred by the devil, the flesh, and the world. The Gospel message is that Christ who has given you the promise will work in you to possess it.
“For all the promises of God find their Yes in him” (2 Cor. 2:20).
So fear not, little flock, to take your physical, spiritual, emotional, and existential bankruptcies to the Father. The promises are there in the Word. The Christ has made a way for you to come.