Hello Guest

Author Topic: Covenant  (Read 523 times)

0 Members and 1 Guest are viewing this topic.

Offline Flyin6

  • Head cook and bottle washer
  • Administrator
  • *****
  • Posts: 34018
    • View Profile
Covenant
« on: January 28, 2017, 09:00:46 AM »
It started some years ago for me. Mike a good friend of mine was so distraught about a separation and divorce he was going through that he would come to church at off times and pray over the situation. Not just pray, but cor, scream out his pain and ask for help and understanding of our king. Other men came around him and after some time this assemblage starting meeting regularly as a prayer warrior team. And over time the requests we prayed over became as wide sweeping as one could imagine. I was drawn into the thing at some point, having learned of good men and women, few in number, but coming from a large church of between one and two thousand. I quickly saw these brothers and sisters as "Real Christians," people of deed and not just word.

One night Mike shared a story about a time when in his police cruiser he was crying out to God over why the covenant of his marriage seemed to be broken and lying in ruin. He noticed at that moment a passing semi truck, none other than Covenant Transport!

What a cool way that God revealed to mike that he is indeed everywhere all the time. I started to look for the trucks and every once in a great while would spy one and immediately feel renewed in the covenant of everlasting life God had established for us through the sacrifice of the human life of his son, Jesus.

Then one day, I want to say it was in April or May of perhaps 2012, I was driving to this prayer meeting which was held at 7 PM every Tuesday. I was in my truck in a heavy rain. It was raining so hard that traffic, had slowed to maybe 30-35MPH. I was sandwiched between two semis, with a third ahead of me. Made me eel like flying trail bird in a tight diamond formation. I was praying for Mike and a good meeting with God along the way, hoping to experience a divine meeting with my creator when I looked out the right passenger window of the Chevy. Perfectly framed in that rain streaked window, not five feet away, was the Covenant Transport symbol of the truck that was sandwiching me in! -True Story!

From that point forward to just yesterday, God has used those Covenant trucks to remind me of his promise to us, and usually when I am not looking for, nor thinking about the trucks, but really just stretching out my spiritual arms toward him, or in angst for something. (Jeremiah 29:13 ►You will seek me and find me when you seek me with all your heart.)

God is SO REAL, and so in-tune with the times, that he uses semis at times to speak to his people


God's Covenant with Man
R. H. Davies, B. A.
Isaiah 42:6
I the LORD have called you in righteousness, and will hold your hand, and will keep you, and give you for a covenant of the people…

We are apt to understand that there are two covenants, respectively called the covenant of works and the covenant of grace.

1. Let us define what a covenant is. In its primary sense it signifies a mutual compact or agreement between two parties. The covenant is kept on the one side by those conditions being ratified in a full and faithful observance of them; on the other side by the conferment of the benefit upon the completion of the conditions.

2. When viewing God and man as the two parties between whom a covenant has been made, we perceive that there have been two covenants entered into; in each the benefit offered by the Father has been the same, viz., eternal life, but the terms or conditions are different.

(1) In the covenant of works, the condition to be accepted and ratified by man was single, that is, obedience to the moral law of God, which law contains within its sanctions not merely an obedience to any positive commands or implied wishes, but an inward heart-observance of a complete holiness, this complete holiness being in fact itself the law, and any deviation whatever from the prescription of a complete holiness being an infraction of the law, and consequently that flaw in the covenanted obedience on man's part, which destroys the covenant altogether, and thus, annulling it, renders it nugatory.

(2) The conditions in the covenant of grace are twofold, repentance and faith, obedience to the law constituting no part of the terms on which God will confer the promised boon, though according to this, He will regulate the degrees of glory to be known and shared in and through the heavenly immortality. For the law of God has never been repealed, and never can be; neither does the covenant of grace at all make void the law, nay, as the apostle says, "it establishes it."

3. An ordinary attention to the constitution of these two covenants will show us that there is between God and man, now (the "now" taking in the position and history of man from the fall, to the finished and ultimate recovery of redemption) but this one covenant of grace. Consider, and this partly by contrasting the two, in what this second or new covenant consists.

(1) It agrees with the first in this,

(a)  that the ultimate object is the same, viz., everlasting life for man;

(b)  that in God's part of the contract the promise attached to it is the same.

(2) It differs from the other in these respects. That a third party is introduced — the Mediator Christ Jesus, the Son of God. That on man's part the conditions are different, repentance and faith being in the stead of obedience.

4. See the vital importance of understanding the truth with respect to the two covenants. There are not two covenants. There never have been two co-existing covenants. When man broke the first, it was at an end. Morally speaking, it could not be re-instituted; because, the nature of man having become sinful, and this sinfulness a necessary entailment on all his children, it was rendered impossible for man to keep a covenant of works. And a covenant broken is no longer a covenant. God, then, in His mercy and love, instituted another covenant, the same as to intent, but differing in its conditions for man, prescribing conditions which he could observe, because of the new provision made in the Mediator Christ Jesus, by whom the law should be inviolably kept, and so a justifying righteousness procured, and by whom a full, perfect, and sufficient sacrifice should be made in the offering of His own spotless body for the sins of the whole world. See how this strikes at the root of all man's pride and self-dependence, and attempts at working out a self-righteousness for his justification. See, too, the surpassing consideration of God for the pour, condemned helpless, sinner. See also the wondrousforce of our text. It was to the dearly-beloved Son that God said, "I, the Lord, have called Thee in righteousness," etc. Because on Him devolved the work of rescue, because He is the Mediator, because He will ensure the final victory, because in Him the new covenant was opened, in Him established, by Him maintained, Himself is called the covenant. To reject Him is to reject the covenant; to look anywhere else for salvation, to attempt any other way to God's favour than by Him, to try any other terms than those of His Gospel, is to reject Him; and that is to reject the covenant of God and to enter into covenant with death.

(R. H. Davies, B. A.)
« Last Edit: January 28, 2017, 09:01:57 AM by Flyin6 »
Site owner    Isaiah 6:8, Psalm 91 
NSDQ      Author of the books: Distant Thunder and Thoren

 

SimplePortal 2.3.6 © 2008-2014, SimplePortal