Adam's first day on this earth was a Sabbath day. God created man on the sixth day, and the first complete
day that man had was the Sabbath, and that Sabbath day
becomes the first day for man. Carried over to the New
Testament, where God finishes and perfects His new
creation work in the Lord Jesus, and enters into His rest,
it is God's Sabbath, and there we begin. That is our first
day - God's rest.
We begin in something that is already
perfect. This is the ground of "the everlasting covenant". To grasp the significance of that is to see what the
"eternal covenant" is, to come right in on a perfect ground
and start there. It is not how we regard ourselves or how
we feel about it, but it is God's place for us. The fact is,
beloved, that
in Jesus Christ
you
and I will never be
more perfect than we are now. Those perfections may
be wrought into us progressively, but, so far as the
ground of our acceptance is concerned, we are "accepted in the Beloved One", and He wholly satisfies
the Father; the Father has come to rest in Him. The
work is perfect.
Our acceptance is always on the ground
of God's end reached. Till that is settled, we have no
steadying thing when God begins to work in us. Do not
forget that. If, when God begins to deal with us in
discipline and chastening, in training and moulding and
formation, we begin at any
moment to say, This is all because I am so bad, so
wicked, and the Lord has got to do something
with me in order that I may be acceptable, we have given
our ground away. We shall never be more acceptable,
however much the Lord does in us. We have been
accepted, not on the ground of what we are, however bad
or good that may be, but on the ground of The Beloved. "Accepted in the Beloved One".
We sing - and I wish we
would lay it to heart more and more - that His perfections
are the measure of our own acceptance. That is where
we start. Blessed be God, that is the ground of
confidence, and when the Lord begins to take us in hand
and we begin to feel what wretched creatures we are,
that never implies for a single moment that we are not
accepted. The eternal covenant means here, in the first
place, that we are accepted on the ground of God's
satisfaction with His Son. If we were accepted on our
own ground, where we stand in ourselves, there would
be no eternal covenant, no ground of security at all. It
would be a matter of how we might be tomorrow. But
no, it is not a matter of
how
we are or shall be. The ground is settled in Christ. Now, God is only getting to
work to make good in us what is true in His Son, but it does not change the
ground. Do not let us give our ground away.
First published in "A Witness and A Testimony"
magazine, Mar-Apr 1940, Vol 18-2