I’m Standing On The Promises Of God

Everything you are about to read in this book rests on one question: Can God be trusted?

That question is not abstract. It gets asked in the middle of a hospital waiting room. It gets asked when a marriage falls apart or a bank account hits zero. It gets asked at three in the morning when the fear is louder than any sermon you have ever heard. Before we can stand on any promise God has made, we have to settle this question at the foundation. We have to know, with certainty, who is making the promises.

The Core Promise

Numbers 23:19 gives us our foundation: "God is not a man, that He should lie, nor a son of man, that He should change His mind. Does He speak and then not act? Does He promise and not fulfill?"

Read that again slowly. This is not a verse about a specific blessing or a particular outcome. It is a verse about God's nature. It tells us what God is made of. And what He is made of is the very opposite of human inconsistency. Men make promises they cannot keep. Men change their minds when circumstances shift. Men say one thing and do another. God does none of these things. His word, once spoken, stands.

This single verse is the foundation on which every other promise in this book is built. If God can lie, then nothing He has said matters. But if God cannot lie, then every word He has ever spoken carries the full weight of His eternal character behind it. Numbers 23:19 is not just a verse. It is the lock that secures the vault.

The Story Behind the Words

To understand why these words were written, we need to go back to the context. The Israelites were in the wilderness, camped on the plains of Moab after decades of wandering. A Moabite king named Balak was terrified of them. He had watched Israel defeat the Amorites, and he knew his army was no match for this people. So he hired a prophet named Balaam and gave him one job: curse Israel.

Balaam was a complicated figure, but he knew one thing clearly. He told Balak from the start: I can only say what God gives me to say. And every time Balaam opened his mouth, what came out was a blessing, not a curse. Balak was furious. He moved Balaam to a different hill, thinking a new vantage point might produce a different result. It didn't. He moved him again. Still nothing but blessing.

It was in this moment, standing before a frustrated king, that Balaam delivered the line that has anchored believers for three thousand years: God is not a man that He should lie. Balak could not buy a curse. He could not manipulate the outcome. God had spoken over Israel, and no amount of money or political pressure could change that word.

The Israelites needed to hear this. They had been wandering. They had complained, rebelled, and doubted. But God's covenant with them had not wavered. His word over their lives was not dependent on their performance. It rested entirely on His character. That was the reassurance the wilderness generation needed, and it is the same reassurance we need today.

What Immutability Actually Means

Theologians use the word immutability to describe this quality of God. It simply means that God does not change. His nature does not evolve. His values do not shift with the cultural moment. His love does not grow cold when we fail Him. He does not have good days and bad days. He does not make promises in a moment of generosity and then quietly walk them back when the cost gets high.

This matters enormously when we come to the promises in this book. When God told Abraham he would be the father of many nations, that word was not subject to revision. When God told Joshua that every place the sole of his foot would tread was given to him, that promise did not expire. When Jesus said He would never leave or forsake His followers, He was not speaking in the language of human sentiment that fades. He was speaking out of an immutable nature that is the same yesterday, today, and forever.

Our feelings, by contrast, are wildly inconsistent. We feel close to God on Sunday morning and abandoned by Tuesday night. We feel certain of His love after a breakthrough and doubtful of it after a setback. The great danger is when we use our feelings as a measuring stick for His faithfulness. Feelings are real, but they are not reliable. God's character is the only reliable anchor we have.

Sarah's Story

Sarah had built her business over eleven years. It was more than a source of income; it was her identity, her calling, the thing she believed God had placed in her hands. Then the contracts fell through, the partner she trusted walked away with her client list, and within eight months, it was gone. She had to sell her car. She moved back into her parents' house at forty-two years old.

She told me later that the hardest part was not the financial loss. The hardest part was the silence. She had prayed for that business. She had given, served, and believed. And now it was gone. Her faith felt like a transaction that had failed.

One night, sitting on the floor of her childhood bedroom, she opened her Bible and landed on Numbers 23:19. She had read it before, but this time something broke open. She realized she had been measuring God's faithfulness by the condition of her business. She had been treating His love as a variable that went up when things were good and down when they weren't. But the verse told her something different. God had not changed. His love for her on the night everything collapsed was identical to His love for her on the best day she had ever had.

That realization did not bring her business back. But it gave her something more stable than a business: a God she could actually trust. Over the following two years, Sarah rebuilt, not just financially, but from the inside out. She says now that losing the business was the event that finally forced her to separate God's character from her circumstances. That separation saved her faith.

The Consistency Journal Exercise

Here is a practical exercise for this week. Get a journal or open a blank document, and draw two columns on a page.

In the first column, write down three things in your life that have changed recently. This could be a relationship, a job, a living situation, your health, your financial standing, or even your own confidence and sense of self. Be honest. Change is unsettling, and acknowledging it is the first step.

In the second column, write down three attributes of God that do not change. Consider His faithfulness, His love, His power, His knowledge of you, His mercy. For each one, find a verse that confirms it. Look at Psalm 136, where the phrase "His love endures forever" appears twenty-six times. Look at Malachi 3:6, where God says plainly, "I the Lord do not change."

The goal of this exercise is not to minimize the things in column one. Your losses and transitions are real. The goal is to place them next to column two and let the contrast do its work. When you see your shifting circumstances alongside God's unchanging character, you begin to build the mental and spiritual habit of grounding your trust in something that cannot move.

Keep this journal page. Return to it when the next wave of uncertainty hits. Let it remind you of what you already discovered about the God who holds steady when everything else does not.

A Prayer for the Shifting Seasons

Close this chapter by praying these words, or letting them guide your own:

Father, I come to You in the middle of a world that changes faster than I can keep up with. Relationships shift, circumstances turn, and even my own heart is inconsistent. But You are not. You are the same God who spoke over Israel in the wilderness, the same God who has kept every promise You have ever made. I confess that I have sometimes measured Your love by my circumstances, and I have come up short. Forgive me for that. Today I choose to anchor my trust in Your character, not in how things feel. Be the steady ground under my feet when everything else is shaking. I trust You. Amen.

D.L. Moody once said that God never made a promise that was too good to be true. He was right. But before we can receive those promises, we have to know the One making them. That is what this chapter is about. Every promise in the pages ahead is only as strong as the character of the God behind it. And as Numbers 23:19 makes clear, that character is rock solid.

Write that verse on a card. Put it on your bathroom mirror. Read it every morning for one week. Let it recalibrate the way you start your day. Let it remind you, before the emails and the news and the pressure of the hours ahead, that you serve a God who does not lie and does not change his mind. Everything else in this book flows from that truth.