Metropolitan Tabernacle Pulpit · Sermon No. 435
“Who through faith obtained promises.” Hebrews 11:33. THE promises of God are to the Believer an inexhaustible mine of wealth. Happy is it for him if he knows how to search out their secret veins and enrich himself with their hidden treasures. They are to him an armory containing all manner of offensive and defensive weapons. Blessed is he who has learned to enter into the sacred arsenal, to put on the breastplate, and the helmet, and to lay his hand to the spear and to the sword. They are to the Believer a surgery in which he will find all manner of restoratives and blessed elixirs. He shall find in them an ointment for every wound, a cordial for every faintness, a remedy for every disease. Blessed is he who is well skilled in heavenly pharmacy and knows how to lay hold on the healing virtues of the promises of God! The promises are to the Christian a storehouse of food. They are as the granaries which Joseph built in Egypt, or as the golden pot wherein the fresh manna was preserved. Blessed is he who can take the five barley loaves and fishes of promise and break them till his five thousand necessities shall all be supplied, and he is able to gather up baskets full of fragments. The promises are the Christian’s Magna Charta of liberty—they are the title deeds of his heavenly estate. Happy is he who knows how to read them well and call them all his own. Yes, they are the jewel room in which the Christian’s crown-treasures are preserved—the regalia—secretly his today, but which he shall openly wear in Paradise. He is already a king who has the silver key with which to unlock the strong room. He may even now grasp the scepter, wear the crown and put upon his shoulders the imperial mantle. O how unutterably rich are the promises of our faithful, Covenant-keeping God! If we had here the tongue of the mightiest of human orators, and if that tongue could be touched with a live coal from off the altar, yet still it could not utter a tenth of the praises of the exceeding great and precious promises of God! No, they who have entered into rest and have had their tongues attuned to the lofty and rapturous eloquence of cherubim and seraphim—even they can never tell the height and depth, the length and breadth of the unsearchable riches of Christ which are stored up in the treasure house of God—the promises of the Covenant of His Divine Grace. See, then, my Brethren, how necessary it is that you and I should know the heavenly art of, by faith, “obtaining promises.” Furthermore, all things under the Covenant of Grace are by promise. The Law had blessings for works. What shall I say? It had only curses for transgressors, since the blessings were never obtained by any who were under the Law. But the Covenant of Grace says not, “Do this and live,” but it says, “I will,” and “you shall.” It says not, “He that does these things shall live by them,” but, “at such-and-such a time will I visit you and you shall be blessed.”
Mention anything you will which is contained in the Covenant and I will show it is by promise. Do we speak of adoption? “Now we, Brethren, as Isaac was, are the children of promise.” “They which are the children of the flesh, these are not the children of God: but the children of the promise, these are counted for the seed.” Do you speak of inheritance? Then, “God gave it to Abraham by promise,” we are the “heirs of promise.” “And this is the promise that He has promised us, even eternal life.” The Covenants are described by Paul as being, the “Covenants of promise.”
Even the Gospel, itself, is in the first chapter of the Romans, at the second verse, spoken of as “the Gospel of God, which He had promised afore by His Prophets in the Holy Scriptures.” Life eternal is described as the “promise of eternal life.” We, Brethren, look for the “promise of His coming.” And after that, we, “according to His promise look for new heavens and a new earth wherein dwells righteousness.” If we should begin at the beginning and run on till we come to the close of the catalog of Divine blessings which are bestowed upon us through Grace, we might say of them all, “These are promised Covenant mercies.”
How necessary then—in what a tenfold degree is it absolutely necessary that you and I should know how to obtain the promises and see them fulfilled. For if not, failing to obtain the promises, we have lost all things and are of all men the most miserable.
I would try, this morning to explain the text, understanding it in two senses. First, some reader might think it means obtaining the promises in themselves. Perhaps, a more thoughtful reader would perceive that it may be better understood as obtaining the fulfillment of the promises. The phrase means certainly both, but we think that the mind of the Spirit is most fully expressed by the second sense.
I. It is certain that holy men of old, and that good men now, do BY FAITH, OBTAIN PROMISES.