'If those ordinances depart from before Me, saith the Lord, then the
seed of Israel also shall cease from being a nation before Me for
ever.'--JER. xxxi. 36.
This is the seal of the new covenant, which is to be made in days
future to the prophet and his contemporaries, with the house of Israel
and of Judah. That new covenant is referred to in Hebrews as the
fundamental law of Christ's kingdom. Therefore we have the right to
take to ourselves the promises which it contains, and to think of 'the
house of Israel' and 'the seed of Jacob' as including us, 'though
Abraham be ignorant of us.'
The covenant and its pledge are equally grand. The very idea of a
covenant as applied to God is wonderful. It is meant to teach us that,
from all the infinite modes of action possible to Him, He has chosen
One; that He has, as it were, marked out a path for Himself, and
confined the freedom of His will and the manifold omnipotences of His
power to prescribed limits, that He has determined the course of His
future action. It is meant to teach us, too, the other grand thought
that He has declared to us what that course is, not leaving us to learn
it piecemeal by slow building up of conclusions about His mind from His
actions as they come forth, but inversely telling us His mind and
purpose in articulate and authentic words by which we are to interpret
each successive work of His. He makes known His purposes. 'Before they
spring forth I tell you of them.'
It is meant to teach us, too, that He regards Himself as bound by the
declaration which He has made, so that we may rest secure on this
strong foundation of His faithfulness and His truth, and for all doubts
and fears find the sufficient cure in His own declaration: 'My covenant
will I not break nor alter the thing that is gone out of My lips.' No
wonder that the dying king found the strength of his failing heart in
the thought, 'He hath made with me an everlasting covenant, ordered in
all things and sure.'
The weighty promises of this solemn bond of God's cover the whole
ground of our spiritual necessities--forgiveness of sins, true,
personal, direct acquaintance with God, an intercommunion of mutual
possession between Him who is ours and us who are His, and an inward
sanctification by which His precepts shall coincide with our desires.
These are the blessings which He binds Himself to bestow.
And of this transcendent pact, the seal and guarantee is worthy. God
descends to ratify a bond with man. By it He binds Himself to give all
possible good for the soul. And to confirm it heaven and earth are
called in. He points us to all that is august, stable, immense,
inscrutable in the works of His hands, and bids us see there His pledge
that He will be a faithful, covenant-keeping God. Sun, moon and stars,
heaven, earth and sea--'ye are My witnesses,' saith the Lord.
God's unchangeable love is the true lesson from the stable regularity
of the universe. The tone in which Scripture speaks of external nature
in all its parts is very remarkable, altogether peculiar. It does not
take the aesthetic or the scientific, but the purely religious point of
view.
I. The facts. All nature is directly the effect of God's will and
power. 'He giveth,' 'He divideth' (v. 35).
The physical universe presents a spectacle of stable regularity.
This regularity is the consequence of sovereign, divine will. These
ordinances are not laws of _nature_, but of God.