Chapter 142—A Mutual Pact
You have recognized the Lord this day as your God; you are to
conform to his ways, to keep his statutes, his commandments, and his
laws, and to obey him. The Lord has recognized you this day as his
special possession, as he promised you, and to keep his
commandments.
Deuteronomy 26:17, 18
, N.E.B.
There must be no withholding on our part, of our service or our means,
if we would fulfill our covenant with God.... The purpose of all God’s
commandments is to reveal man’s duty not only to God, but to his fellow
man. In this late age of the world’s history, we are not, because of the
selfishness of our hearts, to question or dispute the right of God to make
these requirements, or we will deceive ourselves, and rob our souls of the
richest blessings of the grace of God. Heart and mind and soul are to be
merged in the will of God. Then the covenant, framed from the dictates of
infinite wisdom, and made binding by the power and authority of the King
of kings and Lord of lords, will be our pleasure.... It is enough that He has
said that obedience to His statutes and laws is the life and prosperity of His
people.
The blessings of God’s covenant are mutual.... God accepts those who
will work for His name’s glory, to make His name a praise in a world of
apostasy and idolatry. He will be exalted by His commandment-keeping
people that He may make them “high above all nations which he hath made,
in praise, and in name, and in honour” (
Deuteronomy 26:19
).
By our baptismal pledge we avouched and solemnly confessed the Lord
Jehovah as our Ruler. We virtually took a solemn oath, in the name of the
Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost, that henceforth our lives
would be merged into the life of these three great agencies, that the life we
should live in the flesh would be lived in faithful obedience to God’s sacred
law. We declared ourselves dead, and our life hid with Christ in God, that
henceforth we should walk with Him in newness of life, as men and women
having experienced the new birth. We acknowledge God’s covenant with
us, and pledge ourselves to seek those things which are above, where Christ
214