God's…promises are not simply random good intentions. Rather, God's promises together point to and delineate a divine plan for history – a plan to rescue a people for the praise of His glory, and to effect that rescue, that salvation, through a judgment that God Himself would bear on our behalf. In other words, history is not cyclical, a 'mere repetition' of archetypal patterns. Rather, history is heading somewhere. It's linear. It's developing and progressing toward an end that God has already prepared.