Chapter 2 - God’s Promises for Long-Life

He is our life and the length of our days, and so by drawing close to Him, we draw close to the Source of our life. By LOVING Him and CLINGING to Him in faith, we will draw upon His life, which will lengthen our days. As we trust Him and His promises of life, He is able to impart that life to us.

Psalm 84:11,12: “For the LORD God is a sun (radiating health to us) and a shield (protecting us from sickness); the LORD will give grace and glory. No good thing (including long-life) will He withhold from those who walk uprightly. O LORD of hosts, Blessed is the man who trusts in You!”

Psalm 103:2-5: “Bless the LORD, O my soul, and forget not all His benefits: Who forgives all your iniquities, Who heals all your diseases, Who redeems your life from destruction, Who crowns you with loving-kindness and tender mercies, Who satisfies your mouth with good things, so that your youth is renewed like the eagle’s.”

God’s benefits include forgiveness from all sins, healing from all diseases, deliverance from destruction (early death) and the renewal of our youth (long-life). We are to remember (‘forget not’) all these benefits promised in the Word, by acknowledging them and thanking God for them. Thus we are to take God’s promises of healing and long-life upon our lips and thank God for these promised blessings, saying: “Thank You, Lord for forgiving all my sins, for healing all my sicknesses and for renewing my youth like the eagle.”

Proverbs 3:1,2: "My son, forget not my law; but let your heart keep my commands, for length of days and long life, and peace, shall they add to you." This speaks of both quality and quantity of life. Peace (Shalom) describes good, fruitful days of blessing and wholeness. Length of days and long-life speaks of many days. So this tells us that God wants us to have a full, satisfying and long life, which is possible if we will pay attention to His Word.

Proverbs 3:13-18: “Happy is the man who finds wisdom, and the man who gains understanding; for her proceeds are better than the profits of silver, and her gain than fine gold. She is more precious than rubies, and all the things you may desire cannot compare with her. Length of days is in her right hand. In her left hand riches and honour. Her ways are ways of pleasantness, and all her paths are peace. She is a TREE OF LIFE to those who take hold of her, and happy are all who retain her.”

God’s WISDOM is found in His Word. Here God is motivating us to seek and find His wisdom by promising us that if we find her, and take hold of her and keep her, she will bring life and length of days to us. So again we see His will for us is LONG-LIFE.

Proverbs 4:10: "My son, receive My sayings; and (as a result) the years of your life shall be many." God wants us to have many years of life, through receiving His Word.

Proverbs 9:10,11: "The fear of the LORD (respect and reverence for His authority) is the beginning of wisdom: and knowledge of the Holy is understanding. For by me 

(wisdom) your days shall be multiplied, and the years of your life increased." God wants you to lengthen your life by receiving His wisdom, which will begin to happen when you humble yourself before God and His Word.

Proverbs 10:27: "The fear of the LORD prolongs days: but the years of the wicked shall be shortened." Sin will always bring death, but God wants you to prolong your days.

1Kings 3:14: "If you walk in My ways, and keep My commandments ... then I will lengthen your days."Here God said to Solomon, as He says to us: “if you walk in My ways, I will lengthen your days.”God wants us to live long and gives us the promise of long-life, but it is conditional on us walking with Him. If we walk close to the Source of Life, His Life will rub off on us. 

Exodus 20:12: “Honour your father and your mother, that your days may be long upon the land which the LORD your God is giving you.” This is so important, that God made this one of the 10 Commandments that He wrote with His own Finger in stone! It is the first Commandment with a promise. He promises us that if we respect and honour our parents our days will be long upon the earth. 

Deuteronomy 5:16: “Honour your father and your mother, as the LORD your God has commanded you, that your days may be long, and that it may be well with you in the land which the LORD your God is giving you.” 40 years later God repeated and enhanced the promise of Exodus 20:12 of long-life. Now He promises both quantity and quality of life. Not only will our days on earth be long (many days), but they will also be good days (“it will be well with you”). 

Psalm 34:12,13: “Who is the man who desires life, and loves many days, that he may see good? Keep your tongue from evil, and your lips from speaking deceit.” Here God encourages our desire to see many good days, by giving us a major key to attaining this: keeping our tongue from speaking evil. He promises that if we will guard our tongue we will enjoy a long life and see many good days.

My favourite is from Psalm 91 which is full of promises of how God will preserve and protect our life if we will trust in Him. It concludes with God speaking directly in v14-16: 

"Because he has set his love on Me, I will deliver him: I will set him on high, for he has known My name. He will call on me, and I will answer him: I will be with him in trouble; I will deliver him, and honour him. WITH LONG LIFE WILL I SATISFY HIM, and show (manifest to) him My salvation(preservation from death)."

In Psalm 91:16, God’s promise for the man who lives in the secret place of the Almighty, under the shadow of His wings:“With LONG LIFE will I SATISFY him.” To 'SATISFY' means ' to be full' as in after a good meal. God wants us to be satisfied, for us to go through a full life-cycle and for it not to be cut short. "I give them life, long and full, and show them how I can save" (Jerusalem Bible) That is what God wants to do for us. His best will for us is to be satisfied, so if we are not satisfied with 70 years, then we can go on to 80, 90,100 even 120 until we are satisfied!

Long-life means MANY DAYS, and the fact that we will be SATISFIED with them means that they will also be GOOD DAYS, where we maintain our basic health and soundness of mind. So this is a promise of both quantity and quality of life. 

Of course we cannot live forever in this mortal body, but 
we can live a life full of days, rather than it being cut short. 

The story of KENNETH HAGIN is very instructive to us. He was healed as 17 year old from a terminal blood disease andparalysis by acting on Mark 11:24: “Therefore I say to you, whatever things you ask (including healing), when you pray believe that you receive them, and you will have them.” 

Having been bed-bound for some time, after receiving his healing he was now able to get up and go to breakfast. However naturally he was still weak, so after breakfast he went back to his room to rest, and soon afterwards he heard a deep supernatural audible voice come to his mind saying: 

"What is your life. It is even a vapour that appears for a little while and then vanishes" (James 4:14). "You have been healed but everyone is appointed once to die (Hebrews 9:27) and today your appointed time has come. You shall surely die and not live" (Isaiah 38:1). 

He thought it must be God speaking and quoting scripture! So, he sat down waiting for death. (Something supernatural is not necessarily God. The devil can quote scripture, but it will be twisted and taken out of context and misapplied). 

Then, inside, from his spirit, came bubbling up the words: "With long life will I satisfy him and show him My salvation."He did not even know that was in the Bible. 

Then other voice reasserted itself saying the same thing. Then again come bubbling up on the inside: "With long life will I satisfy him and show him My salvation."

Then he heard the deep voice for a third time. And for a third time he heard the inner voice say: "With long life will I satisfy him and show him My salvation." Then he said: "Who said that?" The inner voice said: "The 91st Psalm" He looked it up and read: "with LOOOOONG life will I satisfy him." He thought: “well, I am only 17, I am not satisfied yet. The Bible promises I will be satisfied with a long life.” But the other voice came back saying: 

"Yes, but that promise was for the Jews, not for the Church. It was an Old Testament blessing." 

So he decided to check all the cross references to see if this promise is repeated in the New Testament for then we could be sure that it applies to us. He soon found Ephesians 6:2,3: "Honour your father and mother (the first commandment with promise): That it may be well with you, and you may live long on the earth" (quoting from Exodus 20:12 and Deuteronomy 5:16). Clearly this promise is in the New Testament and so it still applies to us today. 

He also found 1Peter 3:9,10 in the New Testament: 
"You are called to inherit a blessing. For he who desires life, and loves to see MANY GOOD DAYS, let him refrain his tongue from evil" (from Psalm 34:12-16). We (in the New Covenant) are called to inherit a blessing. What blessing? The blessing of MANY GOOD DAYS!

He also realised that God does not change and that we now we have a New and better Covenant than the Old-Covenant that Israel were under. Hebrews 8:6: “He (Jesus) is also the Mediator of a better Covenant, which was established on better promises.” So if the promise of long life was in the Old-Covenant then surely it applies to us also now, otherwise the New Covenant would be an inferior to the Old Covenant. 

Realising this, Kenneth Hagin knew the first voice was satan impersonating God, trying to make him give up and passively accepting sickness and death as God’s will. So he stood up and declared out loud: "Devil - I'm not going to die today, I'm not going to die tomorrow, I'm not going to die next week, I'm not going to die next year, I'm not going to die in 5 years, I'm not going to die in 10 years, I'm not going to die in 20 years, I'm not going to die in 30, 40, or even 50 years. I will be satisfied with a long life.” And it came to pass that he did live a long and fruitful life before going on to be with the Lord. Likewise we need to establish our faith NOW in God's promises of long-life, as this 17 year old did.

So the promises of long-life are not just in the Old Testament, but they are reaffirmed in the New Testament:

Ephesians 6:2,3: "Honour your father and mother (the first commandment with promise): That it may be well with you, and you may live long on the earth." Again God makes it clear that He wants us to have long life with many good days, but this requires us to honour our parents.

1Peter 3:9,10: "You are called to inherit a blessing. 
What blessing are we called to inherit? If you read on, 
you will see it is the blessing of a long and good life: 
For he who desires life, and loves to see many good days, let him refrain his tongue from evil" (from Psalm 34:12-16) 

In John 10:10, Jesus said that although satan comes to steal, kill and destroy, Jesus has come to give us abundant LIFE, which includes long life on earth and eternal life in heaven. 

2Corinthians 1:20: “All the promises of God (including LONG-LIFE) in Him (Christ) are ‘Yes’, and in Him (we say the)‘Amen’, to the glory (manifestation) of God through us (our faith).” Through the blood of Jesus, God confirms to us that every promise is ours in Christ. But we must know and receive (embrace) the promise for ourselves, adding our ‘Amen’, by confessing the promise as true for us.Then it will surely come to pass to glory of God through us. 

LONG LIFE is God’s will for us. God has promised it to us in the New-Covenant in Christ. So let us believe and receive these promises now and establish our faith in God now for a long and blessed life. We need to know these promises so well that no one could ever talk us out of believing them.

We have seen that an abundant and long-life is God’s Will for us (John 10:10), so much so that Jesus took the curse of an early death for us so that we could have the blessing of a long and full life (Galatians 3:13,14)! Therefore, if we seek to fulfil God’s will and best for our life, we need to believe and pray for His will to be done in our life, which includes living a long-life. As we trust God daily for His abundant life to sustain us in good health, soundness of mind and strength of body throughout a long and full life, we will glorify God and be a witness to His loving care and renewing power. Thus others will be drawn to Him through us.

First of all, let us look at some of these precious Promises 
-to build our faith that God’s will is for us to have a long life. Knowing God's will is the foundation for our faith. We need to establish our faith on God's promises of healing and long life NOW. Don't wait until your body is threatened before you start receiving these promises. Build up your health and immunity to sickness now by meditating on these promises. 

We need to build up our faith for health and long-life now by knowing, believing and speaking out these promises. By faith we need to lay hold of God's provision of LIFE and HEALING for our body daily, for Jesus said that: “Healing is the children’s bread” (Matthew 15:26) and that every day we should pray: “Give us this day our daily bread (our daily healing)” (Matthew 6:11). This way we will be training ourselves so that we will be able to lay hold of God's life and healing when we really need it, and that we will be able to resist sickness and death when it comes against us. 

There are many promises in the Bible that show that God's will for us is to have a long and full life. God gives us these promises, so that our faith is built up to receive this blessing from Him. He also tells us what we need to do in our life inorder for these promises to be fulfilled. 

Let us look at some of these precious Promises: 

In Exodus 23:25,26, God reveals His will for us: "You shall serve the Lord your God, and He will BLESS your bread and water; and I will take sickness away from the midst of you, and the (full) number of your days I will fulfil." His will is to BLESS and His blessing is health and long-life. God wants us to have a full life, rather than it being cut short. 

Deuteronomy 11:18-21: “Therefore you shall lay up these words of mine in your heart and in your soul, and bind them as a sign on your hand, and they shall be as frontlets between your eyes. You shall teach them to your children, speaking of them when you sit in your house, when you walk by the way, when you lie down, and when you rise up. And you shall write them on the doorposts of your house and on your gates, that YOUR DAYS and the days of your children may be MULTIPLIED in the land of which the LORD swore to your fathers to give them, like the DAYS OF HEAVEN ON EARTH.” We see that God’s best for His people is both quantity and quality of life. He wants to multiply our days in the earth and make them like days of heaven on earth (days of love, joy and peace).

Clearly it must be God’s will for us to have long-life! Deuteronomy 30:19,20: “I call heaven and earth as witnesses today against you, that I have set before you LIFE and death, blessing and cursing; therefore choose LIFE, that both you and your descendants may LIVE; that you may LOVE the LORD your God, that you may obey His voice, and that you may CLING to Him, for HE IS YOUR LIFE and the LENGTH of YOUR DAYS.”

God wants us to choose LIFE and He makes that LIFE available to us, so that we can have it, if we make the right decision to choose LIFE (v19). This offer of LIFE clearly includes LENGTH OF DAYS (v20), so this proves that LONG LIFE is His will for us. He also tells us how to make the right choice and receive the long-life that He offers.