I Promise

Let me play nerd for a moment here and share this one piece of trivia. Did you know that in Classical Greek, it was always the humans who promised something to the gods, not the other way around?

Don’t ask me to prove this. I never studied Greek. The closest I could get to learning anything remotely Greek is by reading Rick Riordan’s Percy Jackson and the Olympians novels and trust me, all you find there are Americanized view of the Olympus.

I actually got this little trivia from my devotional book this morning and now that I learned this, I realized that indeed, I can’t remember any of the Greek pantheon promising anything to mortals. In fact, the little that I know about them is that they don’t really care about humans, not even the demigods they sired.

I believe this has a significant bearing on the kind of God that we serve. The Egyptians and the Greeks, with all their pantheons of gods, faltered on this one very crucial point. Their gods are NOT able to make a promise, let alone fulfill it.

When Adam and Eve sinned, God made a promise to save humanity. Thousands of years later, Jesus was born in a manger in Bethlehem, a fulfillment of an old promise made by God to His people. As we celebrate Christmas this December, let us be thankful that we serve a promise-keeping God.