The Preciousness of the Promises
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 hid treasures. They are 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 a surgery, in which the believer will find all manner of
restoratives and blessed elixirs; nor lacks there 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 knoweth 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 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 knoweth how to read them
well, and call them all his own. Yea, they are the jewel room in which
the Christian’s crown treasures are preserved. The regalia are his,
secretly to admire to-day, which he shall openly wear in Paradise
hereafter. He is already privileged as a king with the silver key that
unlocks the strong room; he may even now grasp the sceptre, 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 the tongue of the mightiest of 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. Nay, they who have entered into rest, whose tongues are
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 grace.