Handfuls of Diamonds

I will establish my covenant as an everlasting covenant between me and you and your descendants after you for the generations to come, to be your God and the God of your descendants after you.

Genesis 17.7

Dale Ralph Davis:

When Yahweh says, ‘I will be God to you,’ he is pledging to be all that God should and could and would be to his servant; all that God should be and would be he will be to his people. Once God says this to you, he establishes ‘a caring, protecting relationship which is as permanent as the living God who makes it’ (R. T. France, Matthew, 318). This is a relation that no time can exhaust, no circumstance can change, no disaster destroy, no catastrophe can crush, that no human abandonment can alter. When Yahweh says, ‘I will be God to you,’ you have the world!

 So what? If we have these promises what should we do? Develop a Simeon Lee syndrome. In Hercule Poirot’s Christmas, one of Agatha Christie’s murder mysteries, she relates how Simeon Lee used to go to his wall safe where he had stashed a bunch of uncut diamonds that he had gotten from South Africa. Lee would open the safe, pick up handfuls of the diamonds and let them run through his fingers—for the sheer pleasure of feeling them. That is the task for a covenant believer—repeatedly pick up Yahweh’s promises and let them run through and over one’s mind for the sheer pleasure of feeling their power and assurance.