Hope Has a Name: With Bible Study FellowshipSampel

Who is Faithful?

Who can you hope in and trust to be faithful always? What defines faithfulness anyway? We often expect others to keep their promises, remain committed, tell the truth, and act with integrity. However, anyone’s daily experiences prove that perfect faithfulness is impossible for people—even for each one of us! Only God is unwaveringly faithful.

As Stephen’s testimony in Acts 7 reveals, Scripture proves God’s eternal faithfulness to His character, His will, and His Word. Stephen emphasizes how God’s vow echoes from Genesis through Revelation: He will deliver His faithful ones. Specifically, Stephen points out when God kept this promise, as recorded in the book of Exodus. God delivered the Israelites from 400 years of slavery in Egypt. He set His people free to worship Him in His Promised Land. (1)

Who is the Passover Lamb?

In the Exodus, God delivered Israel from Egypt through His institution of Passover. He designed Passover to help His people understand more about how He saves sinners. (2) God often uses ceremonies, symbolism, and life experiences to teach deeper truth. Through the background, Stephen provides, we come to Matthew 26 prepared to understand Jesus’s last Passover meal with His disciples in its context – announcing deliverance and freedom through His substitutionary sacrifice.

In Matthew 26, we’ll see Jesus do something new in the panorama of Israel’s history! Matthew’s writing captures Jesus instituting the Lord’s Supper, a practice which believers continue today. This meal of the New Covenant fully reveals what the Passover feast symbolized. As the apostles teach in the New Testament, the Passover lamb points to Jesus, the ultimate Lamb. He delivers all who believe in Him. (3)

Who is Our Only Hope?

Human history reveals numerous attempts to deliver ourselves. Through various methods, people strive through sin to declare freedom from God! No desire could be more tragic for us or less surprising to God. Estimate the magnitude of God’s love as you take in Paul’s declaration in Romans 5:8, “While we were still sinners, Christ died for us.”

Matthew’s Gospel describes how Jesus Christ made reconciliation possible.

- We were hostile to God.

- Yet Jesus gave His life for us.

- By faith, we can live in His righteousness.

- Believers enjoy peace with God forever.

What hope! Despite our waywardness, God faithfully loves us. He keeps every promise He makes. He adopts all who will claim the Son as Savior into His family. The Faithful One calls the naturally unfaithful to faithfulness; not in our human strength, but through His power. Have you heard His call? Do you know, love, and trust Him?

Questions

1. Scan this week’s chapter, focusing on 26:26-29. What is faithfulness, and what examples of it do you discover in these verses?

2. What do your life experiences prove about who or what you can trust completely?

Related Verses

1 Passover in Egypt: Exodus 12

2 Blood sacrifice: Leviticus 17:11; 1 Corinthians 5:7; Hebrews 9:22

3 Jesus, the Lamb of God: Exodus 12:11-13; Isaiah 53:7; 1 Peter 1:18-21