“God is not man, that he should lie, or a son of man, that he should change his mind. Has he said, and will he not do it? Or has he spoken, and will he not fulfill it?” (Numbers 23:19)
This verse comes from an unlikely source — Balaam, a pagan prophet hired to curse Israel, who finds himself unable to speak anything but blessing because that’s what God has decreed. Even someone working against God’s people ends up confirming this about God’s character: he doesn’t lie, and he doesn’t change his mind the way people do.
If you’ve been disappointed by broken promises — a person who said they’d be there and wasn’t, a commitment that quietly dissolved — it’s easy to unconsciously expect the same instability from God. This verse draws a hard line against that assumption. Human promise-breaking usually comes from either dishonesty or a change of heart. God is described here as categorically incapable of both.
That doesn’t mean every prayer gets answered the way you hoped, or on the timeline you wanted. It means when God has actually spoken a promise, the question isn’t whether he’ll keep it. It’s whether you’ll still be trusting him when it comes.
Reflect: Is there a promise of God’s you’ve quietly stopped trusting because of how people have let you down? What would it look like to separate those two things?
Prayer: Lord, you are not like the people who’ve broken promises to me. Help me trust your word specifically, not just generally. Amen.