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Although we often speak of Jehovah as God in covenant with His people, and God as
Creator, we observe that while JEHOVAH said in His heart that He would not smite any
more as He had done, it is GOD who makes the covenant to that effect. For the
dispensational meaning of Jehovah the reader is referred to the article on pp. 40-44 of
Volume 8:
Jehovah being the God of the age, His covenant is called the age covenant (A.V.
everlasting covenant, 9: 16):--
"While the earth remaineth (or while all the days of the earth [continue]), seed-time
and harvest, and cold and heat, and summer and winter, and day and night, shall not
cease."
Day after day since this promise was made the Lord has looked down upon man whose
heart is deceitful above all things and desperately wicked, and has never again interfered
with the universal ordinances here specified. Famine and other judgments there may
have been in places, but never universally, like the flood. The Lord while on earth drew
attention to the fact that the Father "maketh His sun to rise on the evil and the good, and
sendeth rain on the just and on the unjust". The apostle Paul declared that God, while
suffering all nations in time past to walk in their own ways, yet "left not Himself without
witness, doing good, and gave us rain from heaven, and fruitful seasons, filling our hearts
with food and gladness" (Acts 14: 15-17).
The Lord appeals to the unchanging continuance of the ordinance of day and night to
indicate the like character of His covenant with Israel:--
"Thus saith the Lord which giveth the sun for a light by day, and the ordinance of the
moon and of the stars for a light by night. . . . If those ordinances depart from before
Me. . . . then the seed of Israel also shall cease from being a nation before Me all the
days" (Jer. 31: 35, 36).
The A.V. and the R.V. by using here the words, "for ever", instead of "all the days",
commit the Lord to perpetuate Israel as a nation throughout eternity, and also the
ordinances of the sun and moon. Neither of these propositions can be established by
Scripture, and there are some passages which speak of the cessation of the ordinances of
the sun, moon and stars, therefore the earnest student will be careful not to go beyond
what is written. The apostle, as we have seen (Acts 14: 15-17), speaks of these things as
"a witness". Rom. 1: 19, 20 teaches us that the Gentiles by the "things that are made"
might have known the "eternal power and deity of God", and thereby have been deterred
from idolatry. In the same manner these covenanted ordinances are God's witnesses.
The recurring seed-time and harvest are a standing warning to the whole race, apart from
the written revelation. How often the present life with its opportunities is likened to a
seed time, and how many are the warnings and the encouragements in view of the harvest
at the end of the age! The day, too, when man may work, the night that cometh when
man's work is done; the daily miracle of sleeping and awaking is a foreshadowing of that
sleep of death and that morning of resurrection which is so prominent in the N.T.
Scriptures. All these themes the reader can pursue with profit; we can but draw attention