Long before God laid the foundation of the earth, He anticipated and provided for everything we'd ever need. You just need to give Him an opportunity to prove Himself faithful.

Every divine appointment is preceded by a season of preparation. And if we submit to the preparation, God will fulfill His promise. If we don't, He won't. Why? Because God never sets us up to fail.

Jesus proclaimed the favor of God in His very first sermon. Then He sealed the deal with His death and resurrection. Favor is a function of surrender. If we don't hold out on God, God will not hold out on us.

The Word is so central and so instrumental because the Word of the Lord holds out the object of our faith to us. It presents God's promise to us—from all kinds of individual promises (throughout the Bible) all the way to the great promise, the great hope, the great object of our faith, Christ himself. The Word presents that which we are to believe.

God puts rainbows in the clouds so that each of us — in the dreariest and most dreaded moments — can see a possibility of hope.

The destruction of the Temple by the Babylonians in 587 BC had been the worst possible disaster, indicating that Israel's God had abandoned his house, had left the Temple and city to their long-deserved fate. That was the verdict of Ezekiel, and it is echoed by other writers of the period. But that could not be the end of the story. God had promised to come back. He had promised one final great Passover. One day, when he returned, his people would be free forever.

God's faithfulness to the covenant with Israel, even granted the large-scale failure of Israel as a whole, will result in the rescue of the whole sinful world.

Scripture never looks down on the sufferer, it never mocks his pain, it never turns a deaf ear to his cries, and it never condemns him for his struggle. It presents to the sufferer a God who understands, who cares, who invites us to come to him for help, and who promises one day to end all suffering of any kind once and forever.

You and I never could have started at the fall of Adam and Eve and used reason to predict the coming of Jesus and his death on the cross. Old Testament believers knew that God was going to deal with sin and give new life to his people because God told them that this was what he was going to do. But they did not know that the death of the Son of God would be the means by which this would happen.

God's often-repeated declaration that he will not leave sits on the pages of his Word as a protection against the lies to which suffering makes us susceptible.

This is the account of Noah. Noah was a righteous man, blameless in his generation; Noah walked with God.

And whenever the rainbow appears in the clouds, I will see it and remember the everlasting covenant between God and every living creature of every kind that is on the earth.”