​God Promises You Will Be His

Exodus 6:6c-9 I will redeem you with an outstretched arm and with mighty acts of judgment. 7 I will take you as my own people, and I will be your God. Then you will know that I am the Lord your God, who brought you out from under the yoke of the Egyptians. 8 And I will bring you to the land I swore with uplifted hand to give to Abraham, to Isaac and to Jacob. I will give it to you as a possession. I am the Lord.’”
 
WE continue with the seven promises God declared to Israel in Egypt. The LORD’s third promise reveals he will personally demonstrate his power.
   Number 3) I will redeem you with an outstretched arm and with mighty acts of judgment. We might see two promises in this. God’s outstretched arm is an image of God’s power stretching over Egypt to redeem Israel. To redeem is to purchase. He will purchase them with his unassailable power. Second, God will judge Israel’s enemies. Those judgments are the 10 plagues and the destruction of Egypt’s army in the Red Sea. Both Egypt and Israel needed to know Yahweh is supreme. Egypt needs to know it cannot resist the LORD. Israel needs to know they are following the LORD, who is their personal Redeemer come to save them.
   God then further promised himself to Israel: 4) I will take you as my own people. This should have caused great reverence in Israel’s hearts. The God who made the heavens and the earth has chosen this nation to be my people. Surely they would be eager to worship him as he extended himself to them.
   He adds more to this personal relationship with them with promise number 5) I will be your God. For 400 years God had been silent. The faithful in Israel knew of God’s personal relationships with Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. Through oral traditions, they listened to God’s promises as Moses would later record in Genesis 22:17 I will surely bless you and make your descendants as numerous as the stars in the sky and as the sand on the seashore. Your descendants will take possession of the cities of their enemies. Now God had come to them as he had come to the patriarchs. Surely this was a marvelous thing to consider God was fulfilling his age-old promise in their lifetime!
   God concludes his seven promises pointing to a new home for Israel: 6) I will bring you to the land I swore with uplifted hand to give to Abraham, to Isaac and to Jacob. It’s as if God has raised his right hand to swear to himself he has spoken the truth. God uses this image in Deuteronomy 32:40 “I lift my hand to heaven and declare.” and elsewhere to emphasize his word is true.
   Then is promise 7) I will give it to you as a possession. The LORD promises to lead them to the land and to give it to them. No nation would understand a god giving land to a people. Not even Abraham had much land! Then you could say God signed his promises with the declaration, “I am the Lord.”
   Do you see your Christian life here? Jesus has personally come to redeem you with his arms stretched out on the cross. They are not weak arms under a despot’s control. They are the Savior’s arms extended with love. He extends them in power to gather his people unto himself. He is our personal God, come to fulfill his centuries-old promises, so we will enter into the Kingdom of God. For the wages of sin is death, but the gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord. (Romans 6:23)
   Did Israel believe God’s promises? Do you?