A Covenant God
Deuteronomy 7:9
Know therefore that the LORD your God is God, the faithful God who keeps His covenant of loving devotion for a thousand generations of those who love Him and keep His commandments.
Deuteronomy 7:9 KJV
Know therefore that the Lord thy God, He is God, the faithful God, which keepeth covenant and mercy with them that love Him and keep His commandments.
Some advantages of man-made covenants
- an end of enmity or uncertainty
- a statement of services and benefits to be rendered
- as a security for their certain performance
- as a bond of amity and good-will
- as aground for perfect confidence and friendship
… He [God] has consented to bind Himself by covenant, as if He could not be trusted.
Blessed is the man who …
- truly knows God as his Covenant God
- who knows what the Covenant promises him
- what unwavering confidence of expectation it secures, that all its terms will be fulfilled to him
- what a claim and hold it gives him on the Covenant-keeping God Himself
… a true and living faith in it [the Covenant] would mean the transformation of [one’s] whole life. The full knowledge of what God wants to do for [one]; the assurance that it will be done by an Almighty Power; the being drawn to God Himself in personal surrender, and dependence, and waiting to have it done; all this would make the Covenant the very gate of heaven. May the Holy Spirit give us some vision of its glory.
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God’s purpose for creating man in His image and likeness …
- that he (man) might have a life as like His own as it was possible for a creature to live
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How?
- by God Himself living and working all in man.
- man was to yield himself in loving dependence to the wonderful glory of being the recipient, the bearer, the manifestation of a Divine life.
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The secret to man’s happiness was to be …
- a trustful surrender of his whole being to the willing and the working of God (Compare this to Philippians 2:13)
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Sin destroyed this relation to God
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Man cannot save himself from the power of sin
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If man’s redemption was to be effected, God must do it all.
- If God was to do it in harmony with the law of man’s nature
- man must be brought to …
- desire it
- to yield his willing consent
- and entrust himself to God
- man must be brought to …
- If God was to do it in harmony with the law of man’s nature
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All God wants man to do is to believe in Him
What a man believes, moves and rules his whole being, enters into him, and becomes part of his very life.
This quote corresponds with Curry’s teachings.
- Salvation can only be by faith
- God restoring the life man had lost
- man in faith yielding himself to God’s work and will
- The first great work of God with man was to get him to believe
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Where God finds faith, He can do anything
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**Nothing dishonors and grieves God so much as unbelief
- Unbelief is the root of disobedience and every sin
- it makes it impossible for God to do His work
- God sought to effect faith by (and through?) His Covenant
- His Covenant was always a revelation of His purposes, holding out, in definite promise, what God was willing to work in those with whom the Covenant was made.
- It was a divine pattern of the work God intended to do in their behalf, that they might know what to desire and expect, that their faith might nourish itself with the very things, though as yet unseen, which God was working out.
- THEN
- the Covenant was meant to be a security and guarantee as simple and plain and human-like as the Divine glory could make it
- that the very things which God had promised would indeed be brought to pass and wrought out in those with whom He had entered into Covenant.
- Amid all delay and disappointment and apparent failure of the Divine promises, the Covenant was to be the anchor of the soul, pledging the Divine veracity and faithfulness and unchangeableness for the certain performance of what had been promised.
- Above all, the Covenant was to give man a hod upon God, as the Covenant-keeping God, to link him to God Himself in expectation and hope, to bring him to make God Himself alone the portion and the strength of his soul.
Murray’s prayer …
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O that we knew …
- how God longs that we should trust Him, and how surely His every promise must be fulfilled to those who do so!
- how it is owing to nothing but our unbelief that we cannot enter into the possession of God’s promises, and that God cannot — yes, cannot — do His mighty works in us, and for us, and through us!
- how one of the surest remedies for our unbelief — the divinely chosen cure for it — is the Covenant into which God has entered with us!
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The New Covenant lays down and provides for, and secures …
- The whole dispensation of the Spirit
- the whole economy of grace in Christ Jesus
- the whole of our spiritual life
- the whole of the health and growth and strength of the Church
Isaiah 54:10
10 Though the mountains may be removed and the hills may be shaken, My loving devotion will not depart from you, and My covenant of peace will not be broken, says the LORD, who has compassion on you.
Isaiah 54:10 KJV
10 … The mountains shall depart, and the hills be removed; but My kindness shall not depart from three, neither shall My covenant of peace be removed, saith the Lord that hath mercy on thee.
Jeremiah 32:40
40 I will make an everlasting covenant with them: I will never turn away from doing good to them, and I will put My fear in their hearts, so that they will never turn away from Me.
- God undertakes for Himself - He will not turn from us
- God undertakes for us - we shall not turn away from Him
If we will begin to examine into the terms of the Covenant, as the title-deeds of our inheritance, and the riches we are to possess even here on earth; if we will think of the certainty of their fulfillment, more sure than the foundations of the everlasting mountains; if we will turn to the God who has engaged to do all for us, who keepeth covenant forever, our life will become different from what it has been; it can, and will be, all that God would make it. — Andrew Murray
We accept salvation as His gift, and we do not know that the only object of salvation, its chief blessing, is to fit us for, and bring us back to, that close intercourse with God for which we were created, and in which our glory in eternity will be found. — Andrew Murray