The Everlasting Covenant.
By Editor
THE great Bible facts concerning God's covenant, in which He brings His children home, is given in a Bible-reading on another page. We hope that our readers will study the words of the Book. The question of the Everlasting Covenant, like that of the Everlasting Gospel, is great and all-inclusive, each in its scope. The Gospel is God's message of salvation to those out of Christ; the Covenant is expressive of their condition in Christ. It includes God's will, God's promise, God's provisions for bringing home all those who come into covenant relationship with Him by the acceptance of the Gospel. It presents before man God's great love and power exercised in his behalf, and assures him that he need have no fear if he will by faith yield to God's plan. The Master's promises will not, can not, fail, and the soul which rests upon them is secure. In the study of this question, as in that of the Gospel, one must be struck with the great fact that it is God's purpose to bring man into harmony with Him and His government. Man by nature is a sinner; God would make him righteous. Man is carnal, and has enmity against God's law; God would make him spiritual and a lover of His law. Man shutting the law without by the closed, selfish heart of unbelief, stands condemned; Christ would enter that heart, take away the condemnation, and write the law within, so that the erstwhile sinner would say, "O how love I Thy law! it is my meditation all the day." Yet it is a strange, sad fact that many who profess the name of Christ chiefly use the covenant question to confuse minds over the duty of obedience to the law of the Most High. They confound the very heart of God's everlasting covenant, His holy law, with the agreement which God made with Israel at Sinai. The law was there made the conditions of the covenant, but it was not that covenant; and Israel's lamentable failure to keep the law—the condition—no more changed or affected in any way that law than the crimes of thieves, robbers, murderers, affect the laws of New York or California. God's law is as eternal as His throne. God's everlasting Gospel is to bring men back to Him, cover all past sins, and place them into covenant relationship with all the beneficent moral forces of the universe, in order that man may perfect a character which the law of Jehovah will not condemn, but upon which is written that law in ineffaceable letters by the Spirit of God. He who preaches a Gospel which does not include this does not preach the everlasting good tidings of God in Jesus Christ. He would lead men to hope for the blessings which the Gospel promises, while at the same time he crucifies afresh the Son of God by dishonoring the law Christ died to vindicate.