All believers are in covenant with the living God. The covenant of grace, the covenant of salvation, is not made directly between ourselves and Almighty God. It is a covenant between the Father and the Son and the Spirit. And the Father, for his part, undertook in eternity past to give to the eternal Son, the second person of the Trinity, Jesus Christ our Lord; to give to him a people for his eternal possession. According to this covenant, the Son, for his part, will at the agreed time come down from heaven into this world and suffer and die on Calvary's cross to make a substitutionary atonement for all those people who would be his, whom he would save. If the covenant was between the Father and us directly as individuals, there would be no salvation for us, because any terms God imposed upon us to earn his blessing and salvation and eternal heaven, we would surely be unable to keep. Just as Adam fell in the garden of Eden so we would fall, because we are sinners by nature and by choice. So the government is not made between the Father or the Godhead in general and us, but between the Father and the Son. The Son of God, Jesus Christ our Lord, has kept the terms, and lived a perfect, holy life on earth in a mortal body and a human personality, and he has suffered and died to take away the punishment for our sin. He is infallible; he is God, and though he became man, he is infallible and his work is perfect and our salvation rests upon his success, his life of perfect obedience, voluntarily submitting to the Father, and his suffering and death. So the covenant is not made with us and yet we are in it as beneficiaries. Under the wing of Christ as his children, we are in it, and obviously our great desire as born-again people, as saved people, is to do our utmost to honour it, as though it had been made with us. That is the great obligation of the Christian; that is covenant living. We need to understand that Christ has secured for us a covenant relationship with the Father, and there's something for us to honour. We should love the terms and strive for them, and we should be very exercised when we fail them.
There are alternative ways of putting this, but they are not as good as covenant language. For instance, we preacher consecration: that Christians should be consecrated people. Yes, but that sounds like an almost voluntary commitment or duty. We speak of dedication. They are both fine terms, but covenant lays upon us an obligation. Something has been purchased for us, done for us. We have been brought into these privileges. We have been grafted into the family of God's people. We have been purchased and we have a secure everlasting relationship with the Lord, and covenant language brings obligation and duties, and that is why it is precious.
But what we see here is, of course, a typical covenant. The covenant in the Old Testament order was between God and the Jews, and they failed to keep it. And yet, for all the time it existed until Christ came, God was patient, and in spite of their sin he still blessed them and had mercy upon them, and exercised his long-suffering and his patience toward them. Ultimately they were rejected. A remnant were saved and that was incorporated into the church of Jesus Christ, so we are members of the Jewish Gentile church of Jesus Christ. We are the Zion of the word of God. Nevertheless, the fact that God showed such patience towards them, is a wonderful encouragement to us, because it shows us as Christian people who know him and have been converted to him, that even though we sin and fall unworthily, once we are in this covenant and we are truly saved, God’s patience and faithfulness will bring us back. If he has to chastise us, or whatever means he has to adopt, he will not let us go.