Joshua 23:14 vs. “Promises”

Maverick City Music feat. Joe L Barnes & Naomi Raine · checked 2026-08-21

This song is checked more than once. Each proof takes it against one passage, so the findings differ. Also checked against Numbers 23:19.

What we checked

PassageJoshua 23:14 chapter ↗

Translation shownBSB (Berean Standard Bible)

Presents itself asinspired-by

Categorynot a quote

AlbumMaverick City Vol. 3 Part 1 · 2020

Words addressed toGod, person unspecified

Teaching or experiencemixed

Graded against the standard

Quotation criteria not graded: this song never presents its words as scripture

Applies to every song the Name held holy · God shown holy · true of God · the standard

✓Reverent treatment

✓ What's good

Never says it is quoting. No chapter, no verse, no translation named, nothing framed as scripture
Grounds its promise language in covenant history by opening with the God of Abraham, which is where scripture itself grounds God's promise-keeping. The publisher's own song page lists Hebrews 6:13-20
What it says about God, scripture says too: that His word does what He sends it to do, that He does not change from age to age, that His word outlasts the earth
The writing is documented and checkable. The official upload names all six writers and the camp, and two published interviews carry the writers' own account of when and why it was finished
The chorus is addressed to God in the second person and keeps His faithfulness, not the singer's experience of it, as the subject
The bridge names Jesus. The "You" of the rest of the song is otherwise unnamed, so this is the one place the address is anchored to a person

⚠ Cautions

The word "promises" is never filled in, and the song's central thesis is about God's record without naming what is on it. Joshua names his: the good promises about the land
Joshua 23:14 does not stop where the encouragement stops. Verses 15 and 16 apply the identical certainty to the covenant's threatened side, and no part of the song reaches that
No reference is cited, so a listener will not learn where this thesis lives in scripture. The publisher's page points at Hebrews 6:13-20, which the song's bridge tracks, but the song itself points nowhere
An independent reviewer who scored the song highly still flags that hearers can take it as a guarantee of outcomes God never named. That is a caution about the hearing, not a fault in the words
Sources disagree about when the song was written. The official upload's description says a Maverick City camp "last year," which puts it in 2019, and Songfacts says 2020. The interviews say the verses and pre-chorus came first, years before the rest

Verse Proof

Joshua 23:14

The text in BSB (Berean Standard Bible)

“Now behold, today I am going the way of all the earth, and you know with all your heart and soul that not one of the good promises the LORD your God made to you has failed. Everything was fulfilled for you; not one promise has failed.”

Joshua is old and says so. He has summoned Israel's elders, heads, judges and officers, and this is his farewell address, spoken after the land has been allotted and the fighting is over. He is not telling them something new. He asks them to certify what they already know from their own lives, that of the good promises God made about this land, not one came up short. The sentence is evidence submitted to witnesses who were there. It is also only half of his paragraph. In the next two verses he turns the same fact around: “But just as every good thing the LORD your God promised you has come to pass, likewise the LORD will bring upon you the calamity He has threatened, until He has destroyed you from this good land He has given you” (Joshua 23:15, BSB), if they transgress the covenant and serve other gods. The kept promises are the premise. The warning is the conclusion drawn from them.

What the song says, described not quoted

The first verse addresses God as the God of Abraham, of covenant and of faithful promises, and says His record shows He does what He says. A pre-chorus answers with the singer's resolve to stand through storm and wind, and to learn that God's spoken word comes about. The chorus is one affirmation of God's faithfulness toward the singer, repeated inside the chorus itself, with a line about praising His name from sunrise to sunset. A second verse says God is the same from age to age, that His word outlasts the earth, and that His track record rules out anything He cannot do. The bridge turns to the third person and names Jesus as the singer's anchor and foundation. The publisher's printed lyric, carried in the official upload's own description, runs to about a dozen distinct lines. No chapter or verse is cited anywhere in the song, and Joshua is never named.

Nothing here is offered as scripture, so nothing has shifted inside a quotation. What the song and the verse share is a thesis about God's record: He has done what He said. Joshua's version of that thesis is bounded on three sides. It names the promises it means, the ones about this land. It names the witnesses, the men standing in front of him. And it names what follows from it, which is a warning. The song keeps the thesis and releases all three bounds. Its promises are unnamed, its witness is the singer's own confidence, and what follows from God's reliability is praise. Praise is a right response to it. It is not the only one Joshua drew.

· Not a quote: The song cites no passage and presents nothing as scripture. What the song says about God's record, Joshua 23:14 also says. But Joshua names which promises he means. In the two verses that follow, he uses the same record as the ground of a warning.

▸ Official upload. Now listen with the proof in mind.

Joshua submits the record of kept promises as evidence, and two verses later he uses that same evidence as a warning.

Why it matters

A record of kept promises is a statement about God's reliability, and reliability is not selective. Joshua 23:15 makes that explicit: the God whose good words all landed will bring the threatened calamity just as surely. That is the same attribute, read in the other direction. A singer who has only the encouraging half has half a doctrine, and the half that is missing is the one that produces the fear of God. Nothing in the song denies it. The song simply does not go there, which is why the passage is worth reading next to it rather than instead of it.

Is it safe to dwell on?

Sung on repeat, this song fixes your attention on God.

This one deserves the repeat test more than most, because repetition is the form the song is built in. The album cut runs 10:46 on a printed lyric of about a dozen distinct lines, and the recording extends it with spontaneous sections beyond what the publisher prints. So the question is not what the words say once. It is what they say the fortieth time.

What they plant is a single sentence about God's faithfulness toward the singer, held long enough to stop being an argument and start being a settled thing. That is a good sentence to have settled, and the words stay on God while they settle. The verses are about Him, the chorus is addressed to Him, and the singer's own lines are responses rather than self-description. A loop of this drills confidence in God's character, not in the singer's performance.

What a loop cannot supply is content. The song's word for what God keeps stays open, so repetition fills it with whatever the singer brought. Sung with the promises scripture actually names in mind, the covenant with Abraham, the anchor of Hebrews 6, God's presence pledged and not withdrawn, the repetition drills those into place. Sung with a particular hoped-for outcome in the blank, the same repetition drills that in with equal force, and the disappointment when it does not arrive will feel like evidence against God rather than against the assumption. Joshua's audit gives the sentence a floor that does not move with the week. It also gives it a second edge, and a person who has sung the first edge four hundred times can afford to read the second one once.

Helpful comparison

The claim in Joshua 23:14 appears three times in this stretch of scripture, and the differences between them are worth seeing. Joshua 21:45 gives it as narration, the writer's summary over the settled land. 1 Kings 8:56 gives it as Solomon's blessing at the temple, tied to what was promised through Moses. Joshua 23:14 is neither. It is sworn testimony from a man who says he is about to die, delivered to leaders he calls as witnesses, and its distinctive move is that he does not ask them to take his word for it. He tells them they know it already, with all their heart and soul. The verse's authority is the hearers' own memory.

That matters for what he does next. Because they cannot dispute the record, they cannot dispute the inference he draws from it in verses 15 and 16. Whether a third party pairing hears Joshua behind this song is a separate question, and one reviewer does: The Berean Test assigns Joshua 21:45 to the song's pre-chorus, alongside Matthew 7:24-27. None of the other pages points at Joshua either. Worship Together, the song-resource platform Capitol CMG Publishing runs, lists Hebrews 6:13-20, the interviewer's closing thoughts at NewReleaseToday pair the song with Romans 8:28, Lamentations 3:22-23, Jeremiah 29:11 and Hebrews 6:19, and the PraiseCharts chart lists themes with no scripture references. The song's own home is the Abraham covenant, not the conquest. Joshua 23:14 is set beside it here because it says the same thing, in a setting the song does not have.

Sources

Maverick City Music, “Promises” (feat. Joe L Barnes & Naomi Raine), official video on TRIBL · (the recording checked for this proof; oEmbed returns author_name “TRIBL”, Maverick City's label channel. The description names all six writers, dates the writing to a Maverick City camp “last year”, places the recording at 1971 Sounds in Atlanta with the Maverick City Music Choir, and prints the section order used here: verse, pre-chorus, chorus, verse, pre-chorus, chorus, bridge. Uploaded 10 April 2020, running 10:49)
Worship Together, “Promises” — Maverick City · (rights-holder side song page: writers Joe L Barnes, Carrington Gaines, Aaron Moses, Dante Bowe, Keila Marin and Lemuel Marin; CCLI 7149439; the listed Scripture Reference is Hebrews 6:13-20, with nothing in Joshua)
PraiseCharts — Promises chord charts · (same six writers; CCLI 7149439; the 2020 copyright line naming Bethel Worship Publishing, Capitol CMG Paragon, ForTheDreamers Publishing, JDW Legacy Publishing, Maverick City Publishing, LK Collective and an Aaron Moses designee; themes listed and no scripture references at all)
Wikipedia — Promises (Maverick City Music song) · (album debut 17 April 2020, video premiere 10 April 2020, radio single 3 May 2021, number one on Hot Christian Songs and Hot Gospel Songs, RIAA Platinum)
Wikipedia — Maverick City Vol. 3 Part 1 · (album released 17 April 2020; the track length of 10:46 used in the repeat test)
Songfacts — Promises by Maverick City Music · (the writing camp, the 10:46 album version against the 4:09 radio adaptation of 3 May 2021, and the chart facts. Dates the camp to 2020, against the official description's “last year”)
NewReleaseToday — Behind the Song #1075, “Promises” · (Aaron Moses and Joe L Barnes began the verses and pre-chorus years earlier and finished the song just before the pandemic; Dante Bowe wrote the bridge; Moses on writing it while living in a trailer with no money, and his line that God has to complete what He starts because God cannot lie; the article's closing scripture pairings, Romans 8:28, Lamentations 3:22-23, Jeremiah 29:11 and Hebrews 6:19 among others, none in Joshua)
The Promise FM — The Story Behind “Promises” · (independent corroboration of the writing timeline and the Moses quotes; pairs the song with Jeremiah 29:11)
The Berean Test — Is “Promises” Biblical? · (a section-by-section passage list that assigns Joshua 21:45 and Matthew 7:24-27 to the pre-chorus and Hebrews 6:19-20 to the bridge; notes the recording's spontaneous sections; scores it 9.5/10 while flagging that hearers can read it as a guarantee of outcomes)
Word to Worship — Promises · (a phrase-matched reference index for the song, listing Matthew 7:25, Lamentations 3:23, Psalm 102:27 and Hebrews 1:12 among others, and nothing in Joshua)
pnwchords — Promises, Maverick City · (second, independent confirmation of the section structure: verse 1, pre-chorus, chorus, verse 2, bridge)

Corrections

2026-09-06 This entry called worshiptogether.com the rights holder, or the song's publisher. It is neither. Capitol CMG Publishing's About page calls Worship Together "Capitol CMG Publishing's outreach to the global church", and the site describes itself as a song discovery and resource platform for worship leaders. It also carries songs Capitol CMG does not publish, so a scripture list on it is the platform's, not the songwriters'. This site already corrected the same wording on the Ephesians 2:4-6 entry on 2026-08-07; these lines were missed then. The finding is unchanged — the reference is still published outside the song and still checkable — only who published it.

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