Jeremiah 33:14 “The days are coming,” declares the Lord, “when I will fulfill the gracious promise I made to the house of Israel and to the house of Judah.”

Ever wondered about God’s promises? Our experience with his short-term promises may leave us in doubt about the long-term ones. “Don’t worry about food or clothes or necessities of life,” Jesus says. “Your Father in heaven will take care of all that.” But we know Christian people who have faced eviction, bankruptcy, or hunger. Maybe the person you know is yourself.

“If you make the Most High your dwelling–even the Lord, who is my refuge–then no harm will befall you, no disaster will come near your tent. For he will command his angels concerning you to guard you in all your ways…” Psalm 91 promises. There is no asterisk in the text, no small print stating, “Offer excludes Oklahoma tornadoes, Alaskan earthquakes, California wildfires, various car accidents, and other unspecified or man-made catastrophes.”

As a pastor I depend daily on God’s promise in Isaiah 55, “My word will not return to me empty, but will accomplish what I desire and achieve the purpose for which I sent it.” I have shared that word with thousands of people during my ministry. Sometimes it feels like that word is coming back empty.

How do we reconcile these promises with our experience? None of these promises intends to disprove or contradict other things God tells us in his word, like “In this world you will have much trouble,” or “We must go through many hardships to enter the kingdom of God.” Having the necessities to live is not the same thing as never experiencing hunger, poverty, or pain. And God never promises we will live in this world forever. He has to use something to end our lives here and take us home. As for his word, while he wants everyone to be saved, his purpose in any individual case when his word is heard may not necessarily be some person’s conversion.

 For our doubts, we still have the big, world-changing promises like the ones he gives here. The Lord promised to send his people a Deliverer, a Savior, the Messiah. A hundred years before Jeremiah he gave the promise to Isaiah. Three hundred years before Isaiah he had given the promise to King David. In other forms the promise had existed for thousands of years before that.

Then Jesus came. It may have been hundreds, even thousands of years later for some of these men, but he came. The Lord fulfilled “the gracious promise I made to the house of Israel and to the house of Judah,” just as he said. The details of Jesus’ coming fulfill at least 300 prophecies about the circumstances. In 1952 Peter Stoner, Professor of mathematics and astronomy at Westmont College in Santa Barbara, California, worked out the statistical probabilities of one man fulfilling just eight of those prophecies, and the chances are one out of 10 to the seventeenth, or one out of 100 quadrillion. For the believer, of course, the fulfillment of all 300 plus has always been a given, because God keeps his word.

That reassures us as we wait for the next big prophecy, when Jesus comes again. The passing of thousands of years did not prevent the fulfillment of his first coming. We can be confident the Lord will fulfill his promise when we look at the day that is coming, because God keeps his word.