Too good to be false.

In preparing to preach on Revelation 22 tomorrow, I was thinking about how we are trained to think that if something sounds too good to be true, then it is almost certainly too good to be true.

It is, of course, a dangerous half truth.
Things are too good to be true when the promise seems not to match the reality of who is promising it.

For Jesus, the Risen Lord, who is God and man, who has paid for all our sin, who has conquered death, who reigns with his Father, and who has prepared a place for us with him, if the promises he made were anything short of perfection, they would not fit the one who promised them. They would be too bad to be true. And yet, as his perfect promises fit with his perfect person and his perfect work, they are indeed too good to be false.

When we think we are protecting ourselves from placing too high a hope in these promises we will hold back from selling all that we have in order to buy this pearl of great price.