Our word is rarely good enough.
Where once a promise and a handshake all but ensured compliance, our litigious society has increasingly encumbered us.
Consider your daily experience: we agree to lengthy ‘terms and conditions’ to simply update our smartphones, accept ‘cookies’ to browse a website, and sometimes even sign a release to send our kids down a slide. It’s no surprise then that mortgage agreements are hundreds of pages long. Sadly though, it makes sense in today’s context.
Successful lawsuits over everything from McDonald’s coffee temperature to Subway sandwiches’ length have left both corporations and individuals gun-shy. While it is easy to ascribe blame to our expanded ‘global’ community (us frequently having interactions with those well beyond our locale thanks to the internet and modern means of conveyance), I think the mistrust runs deeper.
All this to say, we are inherently skeptical of promises, but the person making them still plays a factor. For example, a promise from my six-year-old is different than a promise from my spouse. So to add substance to our promises we often invoke some other party as a guarantor of the promise, invoking the almighty, our mothers, or even our own lives to the equation (much like banks do with the FDIC).
All of this leads us to undervalue words and underappreciate the power of God’s word.
“When people make promises, they guranatee them by appeal to some authority above them so that if there is any question that they’ll make good on the promise, the authority will back them up. When God wanted to guarantee his promises, he gave his word, a rock-solid guarantee....”
When we think of words, we think of flimsy and at times emotionally charged statements that have no real bearing outside of their ability to endear or disappoint us. This is where we miss the point on God’s Word. For we errantly think of it like our own words, but the truth is that it holds the weight and power to create worlds. If he is truly the God who ‘spoke’ the world into existence, there is a significance and weight to his words we are failing to appreciate.
Furthermore, it means that when He makes a promise, it is real truth, not just hope. In ancient times they would have known and appreciated this, but we have so devalued promises today that we struggle to ascribe the requisite gravitas to the words He provided.
Maybe it’s time to reexamine how we read and interpret the Bible in light of this context. Our new understanding of the inherent power of His word might change both the story and our response to it.