Has someone ever made a promise to you, then broke it? How did that make you feel? It hurts when someone breaks a promise even when it’s something small. But there are also much larger broken promises. When a marriage ends in divorce or when a parent abandons a child, there is obviously a lot of pain associated with that betrayal. Broken promises are painful, and they are all the result of imperfection. We are not perfect people. We are flawed and broken, and because of that brokenness we have the tendency to break promises. We do things we said we would never do again, or we don’t do things we promised with all our heart that we would do. As a people, we have become very experienced at letting others down and failing, time and time again. But there is one who can be trusted, one who will never fail, because He is perfect. We serve a God that has never and will never break a promise. 

Think about that. God has never broken a promise to us. He is incapable of breaking a promise because His very nature is to never lie, to never mislead, to never change, and to never act against His nature. In today’s passage from Genesis, we read about a promise God made which has drastic ramifications for all mankind throughout history and even today. God Himself chose a man named Abram to make a covenant. If you remember, a covenant is another word for a two-way promise or a contract between two people. This contract would change the course of history. 

We know that person today as the biblical character Abraham, who was the father of the Hebrew people. God made a covenant with Abram, that if Abram would be obedient and follow the Lord’s leading, God would bless him, make his name great, cause him to be a blessing to others, bless those who blessed him, and curse whoever curses him. God promised that all people on earth would be blessed through Abraham as long as Abraham stayed true to his side of the agreement and continued to honor and obey God. That is all Abram had to do; stay faithful, stay obedient, and continue to honor God. 

For thousands of years God has been keeping his end of the deal, and for thousands of years we have been breaking our promises to God and letting Him down. But through it all, God is still faithful, still merciful, and still full of grace. God had a great purpose and reason for the covenant. God would use Abraham as a catalyst to enact His will to bring us back to Eden, to allow us to once again be fruitful and multiply, cover the earth, and take dominion over it. We see many things about the nature of God from this Covenant. The first thing is that God chooses to work through people and not apart from people. God didn’t have to bring Abram into any part of this equation. God was and is fully capable of doing everything He said He would do through Abraham on His own. God didn’t need Abraham. He chose to use Abraham. The same is true of us today. God doesn’t need us, our money or our skill or talent. God is already wealthy, and He can do anything He wishes. God chooses to utilize us in His master plan of redemption. That’s a pretty high honor. It’s a privilege to be given a seat at the table with God. 

Another aspect this passage shares with us about the nature of God is that God is a God of multiplication and blessing. God always has a mind to multiply and expand whatever He is involved in. We see this clearly with the very first mandate God gave mankind. He tells us to be fruitful and multiply. God always takes something small and grows it through multiplication. That is His nature, and it is shown through creation; from how a seed becomes a tree to produce thousands more seeds, to how humans procreate and spread out to take dominion over creation. The Devil is a being that is driven by fruitlessness, subtraction, and division, the exact opposite of God’s nature. God is all about fruitfulness, addition and multiplication. God invites us to walk in his nature and be people who also walk in a legacy of multiplication. 

Let's be people who leave a legacy of multiplication instead of division.