“God will surely…”

Have you ever heard anyone make a statement like this? A lot of people have a difficult time hearing anyone say something like this. For some reason, either fear or pride, it just irks people that someone would claim to know what God was going to do. But it is not only unsaved people who feel this way; many Christians have a hard time hearing such statements as well. They believe that since God is sovereign, He can do and does whatever he wants and the idea that we could predict his movements is somehow offensive to them.

But the fact is that in a number of scriptures throughout the Bible, individuals did speak phrases like “The Lord will…” and “God is going to…” and “God will surely…” And in most of these cases, they were right. I don’t believe they were just good guessers, but rather that they understood a very simple spiritual principle – that God will do exactly what he said he would do.

Upon his deathbed Joseph made the following statement to his brothers in Genesis 50:24:

“God will surely take care of you and bring you up from this land to the land which He promised on oath to Abraham, to Isaac and to Jacob.”

With complete confidence Joseph predicted the Israelites’ Exodus from Egypt some 350 years later, and their journey to the promise land. While at first this appears to make Joseph an incredible prophet, the reality of it was, he simply knew that God would do what he said he would do. In Genesis 15:13-14 God had promised Abraham that his descendants would be slaves for 400 years, and then they would be led out with great abundance. Growing up in his father’s house, Joseph and his brothers had almost surely heard this promise from both their father Jacob and their grandfather Isaac, as they in turn had heard it from Abraham himself.

The principle here is as powerful as it is simple, and we really cannot afford to miss it: We can and will speak with confidence what God will do when we know what God has said he would do. We have God’s assurance that,

“God is not a man, that He should lie, nor a son of man, that He should repent; Has He said, and will He not do it? Or has He spoken, and will He not make it good?”

As you read through the Word of God and come across promises He has made to His people you have God’s own guarantee of what he will do. And, like Joseph and many others throughout scripture, you may go out and proclaim confidently with regard to those promises coming to pass in your life, “God will surely…”