In all the provision which has been made for the restoration of man, and in all the promises which have been made to man in presenting to him the fulness of the meaning of the gospel of God's grace, the central figure is Christ, and the central thought is the gift of Christ. The essence of every promise is Christ. The fulfilment of every promise is accomplished through Christ. To lose sight of Christ in the promises of God is to pervert the essential idea of the promise. To expect the fulfilment of the promises of God apart from Christ is to pervert the whole purpose of God, and to frustrate his plan of salvation as revealed in the gospel. When God declared that the seed of the woman should bruise the head of the serpent, he gave the assurance of the union of divinity with humanity in the person of his Son, through whom victory would be gained over Satan and sin; but the power for the fulfilment of this promise in the triumph over evil was not in the flesh. All the power was in the Word who became flesh, and thus provided for the power in the flesh to meet and overcome the enemy. To rest confidence in the flesh, instead of in Christ, the power of God revealed in the flesh, would mean inevitable failure. The flesh is visible, but the power is invisible. The things which are seen do not have in them any power to save and to deliver. The gospel teaches us how to deal with the invisible power of the Eternal, appropriating it for our salvation through the faith which is itself the gift of God. And even when that power is revealed in the flesh, all confidence must be in the invisible power, and not in the flesh. The word of power must be the basis of faith. When God promised Abraham that he would give the land to his seed, there was involved in the promise, and as the essential part of the promise, the whole provision of the gospel for the restoration of man to his place as ruler of the world. The redemption of the earth, the resurrection of the dead, the extinction of evil, and the eternal reign of righteousness, all to be accomplished through the coming of the promised Seed in the flesh, were bound up in the promises made to Abraham. The promise of the land, which as interpreted through the apostle Paul was a promise of the world, the world made new4after the resurrection, as was revealed to Abraham in the announcement of his own death, was the promise of a redeemer of the world who would be born of the flesh in the line of Abraham's family. Only through that redeemer could the redeemed possession be obtained. Only through that redeemer could the redeemed possession be retained even after it had been obtained. The essential thing in the promise was the redeemer, to whom and through whom the land would be given. The faith for the fulfilment of the promise was the faith which laid hold upon the coming Seed, to whom the promise was made. The manner of the birth of Isaac, the child of promise, was a divine object-lesson to teach that there did not reside in the flesh any power to accomplish that which was included in the promise of God. And even when the word of power begins to make visible the results of its working, still faith must rest upon the invisible word of promise rather than upon visible results. This is shown in the test of Abraham's faith. After the word of promise had brought Isaac in the flesh, in whom the seed was to be called, faith must still look to Isaac in the promise, and not to Isaac in the flesh, inasmuch as the promised Seed, the Redeemer, was still in the promise, and not in the flesh. This was Abraham's faith. He rested wholly upon the promise, and not upon any outward appearances, and obeyed God even when that obedience seemed to destroy all hope of the fulfilment of God's promise to him, “being fully persuaded that, what he had promised, he was able also to perform,” and he left the responsibility for its performance wholly with God. Such faith was counted for righteousness. When the Lord promised to David that his seed and his throne should be established forever, it was a promise that death should be destroyed, and that the dominion should be taken from the prince of this world and restored to man. But the power to accomplish this was not in the flesh of David nor in the armies of David. The power was in that blessing of God which was sent to the world in the gift of his eternal Son to become one with the human family, and to bring deliverance from sin and death. And the faith which would bring the accomplishment of this promise must rest wholly in the invisible God and the invisible power of his word, and not in any outward circumstance or appearance. Now as the descendants of Abraham and of David, the heirs of the promises, lost their close connection with God, they turned to the outward and the visible as the ground of their confidence in the fulfilment of those promises, and lost sight of the essential thing, the coming of the Seed. They interpreted their own possession of the land of Canaan to be the meaning of the promise of the land, and they limited the promise to David to be fulfilled in the king on the throne at Jerusalem. In the same way they made their sacrifices and offerings a means of salvation, and thus perverted that which was intended to be a means of revealing Christ to them into a round of fleshly works which hid Christ from their eyes. They turned from the invisible to the visible, they discarded faith for sight, and rested upon their own works for the fulfilment of God's promises to them, rather than upon the faith which Abraham exercised. Thus they laid hold upon the mere shell of the promises, the outward forms, and lost the real kernel of life and power. In this way their connection with heaven was broken, and they shut themselves away from the divine power. Their religious service became a sham, a fleshly performance in which there was no revealing of Christ to the sinner, and sin ran riot in their lives. After his people had refused his reproof and instruction through the prophets, there was only one course left for the divine Instructor to follow in order that he might bring his people back to a simple faith in the power of God and to confidence in the coming of the Seed as the only hope for the fulfilment of the promises,—they must eat of the fruit of their own doings, and reap the results of their own persistent perversion of the truth and of their misplaced confidence in the flesh; and this experience came to them in due time.