We have all made promises we were not able to keep. When we made the promise, we probably intended to keep it. But something came up, and we changed our minds. The cost of maintaining our word was too high, so we broke our promise. 

There are other times when we make a promise and should break it. Both the Old and New Testaments give examples of times when promises are made, and God does not want the people who made the promise to keep their word. 

In the NT, Mark describes a custom that existed among the Jews in the first century. We don’t know all the details, but a religious man could make a promise to give his money to the temple—it would be a gift to God (Mark 7:11). That sounds like a good thing to do. The problem was that if the man’s aging parents needed assistance, the man was forbidden to help them because his money had been dedicated to God. The only way the man could help his parents would be to break his previous promise. But that promise violated God’s command to honor your parents. 

In the OT, we see an example of a promise that shouldn’t have been made. After a civil war, the tribes in Israel promised that none of them would allow their daughters to marry the men from a particular tribe (Judg 21:1), because the men of that tribe had done evil things. Again, this sounds like a good promise. Fathers should not want their daughters to marry evil men. 

The problem was that the tribe in question was on the verge of extinction. God did not want that to happen. If the remaining men of the tribe were not allowed to marry Jewish women, the tribe would die out. The other tribes found a way to “keep” their promise. They allowed the two hundred surviving men of the nearly-extinct tribe to kidnap and rape the women from a particular area and make these women their wives. That way, nobody broke their promise—technically, nobody “gave” their daughters to these men. The men kidnapped them (Judg 21:20-23). 

In both these cases, promises were made that should never have been made. To keep the promises, those who made them were required to violate the law of God. It required them to act unjustly and unlovingly. The Lord warned against doing something that appears good while forgetting justice and love (Luke 11:42). In Mark 7, the man who made the promise was unloving toward his parents and did not do right by them. In the case of Judges 21, the men of Israel mistreated two hundred young women. They had no clue about God’s love.    

In both cases, the answer was to not keep such promises. Violating the promises was not the sin; it was the unloving actions that flowed from the promises They should have confessed their sin of making such promises in the first place. Then, they should have done what they promised not to do. 

There are some lessons here. We should think before we make boneheaded promises. Legalistic rule-keeping can lead to terrible consequences.