God's 'Yes' Means 'Yes'

 “Let your ‘yes’ be ‘yes,’ and your ‘no’ be ‘no.’”

     Why do we as human beings need guarantees from God that He’ll do what He says? When He says He will do something, then He will do it. His “yes” is a hard “yes” and one which no power in creation can change, and the same with his “no.” When God says “no,” then it simply will not happen. Period. And no created force or power can make it happen. As He says in Isaiah, “I work and who will reverse it?” And He also says through the errant prophet Balaam, “God is not a human being that He should lie, nor a son of Adam that he should change His mind.”

     When God told Abram he would have a son, he just trusted him right off the bat. Abram didn’t initially ask for a guarantee. He just believed what God said. But it was because of this initial, immediate trust, that God figured it as a state of being observant to do the right thing. It was only later, as God began to explain what else He was going to do for him, that Abram asked for confirmation, and God signed a contract with blood to reassure him. That the contract was signed with blood is simply that this is how contracts were signed in Abram’s culture. This is also why the sacrifices in the Mosaic Law for mistakes were animal sacrifices involving the spilling of blood. It was still that mentality of signing a contract in blood that the mistake wouldn’t be held against the person.

     God understands our weaknesses, and He is okay with giving us reassurances such as covenants and contracts, but even if He doesn’t, if He says something, it will happen. Just the act of Him saying it brings it into existence just like He spoke in Genesis 1 and creation was brought into existence.

     God doesn’t need a signed contract to forgive, and He certainly doesn’t need blood. He didn’t need it from Abram, Isaac, Jacob, Joseph, or any of the fathers of the Jewish people right up until the contract He made with the people of Israel on Mount Sinai. Not once does He demand blood in order to forgive their wrongdoing or mistakes. And even in that contract, such sacrifices are only given for unintentional mistakes. There is no prescriptive sacrifice for intentional wrongdoing. I’ve written this many times. He’s said many times that the person who turns away from his intentional wrongdoing and mistakes will be forgiven and He wouldn’t remember or hold those mistakes and wrongdoing against that person. He went into no uncertain detail about it in Ezekiel 18, and many times in the Old Testament He’s explicit that He doesn’t want more sacrifices or the blood of animals, but what He wants is for people to turn away from their wrongdoing and to do the right thing, whether that is just simply being kind and compassionate to those who can’t defend themselves, or whether it’s people keeping their side of the Mosaic contract. Even David says this in the 51st Psalm when He addresses God and says, “If You wanted a sacrifice I would give it, but burnt offerings don’t please You. What You want is contrition and You won’t make nothing of a contrite heart.” God doesn’t need blood to forgive, or a contract, all He needs is for the person to trust what He says that He will let their wrongdoing go and not remember their mistakes at all if they turn away from that wrongdoing to do the right thing.

     Jesus Christ didn’t go to the cross so that we could be forgiven. He didn’t pour out His blood because God demanded blood for our legal pardon like some brutal Canaanite tribal deity. Jesus Christ went to the cross to join us to Himself in and through His death, burial, and resurrection, to make us one with Him, and as a consequence, one with God Himself in order to provide a solution to our common malfunction and its behaviors and responses. God the Son became human and went to the cross so that human beings could become one thing with God the Son, grafted or grown together, and as such one thing with the Father and the Holy Spirit as well through that union with God the Son.

      When we simply trust what He says and turn away from our wrongdoing to do the right thing, He erases the former wrongdoing. And for us, the right thing is Jesus Christ, to live as He taught, to walk as He walked, to submit to the Spirit of Christ just as He submitted to the Father. It is this sincere, simple trust in what He said which God counts as a right state of being, not trying to keep moral codes or spill blood to atone for mistakes made. It is this simple trust that God will do what He said He would do, that His “yes” and “no” can’t be undone, which God counts as righteousness.