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A common Chaldean named Abraham burned his bridges behind him and strode off into his unpredictable future as he gambled on the reliability of a promise uttered by a Presence he had scarcely begun to feel. And so the new possibility for history began.

The romance got going again when Moses tried to get a better fix on the identity of this Presence, this invisible Awesome One, the Ineffable. "What is your name?" he dared to ask. And the answer came (in John Courtney Murray's provocative translation): "I am he who will be there with you" (Exod. 3:14). This was his name. It was all Moses needed to know; maybe it was all he could know. "I am he who will be there with you; count on it."

No one on earth at that time could have predicted the spectacular rise and dismal falls of the people who were created by the promise implicit in God's name. Unpredictable circumstances combined with an uncontrolled compulsion to commit national suicide kept their future in constant doubt. Only the power of the promise kept them together. The One whose name is "I am he who will be there with you" kept coming back to them.

Then, in an unsuspecting setting, a man from Galilee talked to his friends about sealing the ancient promise in his blood and, a day later, he spilled it over God's ground on a mound they called Golgotha. "I am he who will be there with you" was there with us, dying, then rising, and then being there with us to the end of the world.

No one on earth now can predict the future of the natives of planet Earth by any evidential data. What will it be, a cosmic garbage heap? Or will it be a new earth where righteousness has finally taken hold? Not a cosmic heap, says Peter: rather, a new earth. How so? By whose crystal ball? According to what indicators, and from what internal evidence? With no crystal ball and no internal evidence, "We wait according to his promise" (II Peter 3:13). Again, the whole thing hangs on a promise.

The data from our own environment, natural or human, is ambiguous at best. James Gustafson published the first volume of his important work on ethics (Ethics in a Theocentric Perspective, Univ. of Chicago Press, 1982), having given it, he tells us, 30 years of homework. In it he shares his melancholy judgment that nothing in nature assures him that nature is essentially friendly to the human species, and nothing disclosed in history confirms the hope that we are on a track leading to the City of God. We all have a humanoid bias that cosmic odds must be tilted in favor of the human race. But there is nothing solid to buttress the anthropocentric prejudice.

Nothing? Nothing at all—except one thing: a promise made by Someone whose name is "I am he who will be there with you."

Human destiny rests on a promise freely given and reliably remembered. Besides providing a believing basis for hope, this means that whenever you and I make and keep a promise we are as close to being like God as we can ever be. When you say to anyone that you will be there with her, you are only a millimeter beneath the angels.

Whenever a mere human being makes a promise, he stakes a claim on freedom. A promise is a momentous claim that the person who makes it has the power to act freely to bring order and dependability into the unpredictable future. If you fear, as I do, our penchant for promise breaking, consider this: it is almost a miracle that anyone should ever dare to make a promise.

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December (Web-only) 2002, Vol. 46