An Everlasting Covenant

Prayer Focus: Mexico

Bible Reading: Ezekiel 13-16

Scripture

"'This is what the Sovereign Lord says: I will deal with you as you deserve, because you have despised my oath by breaking the covenant. Yet I will remember the covenant I made with you in the days of your youth, and I will establish an everlasting covenant with you. Then you will remember your ways and be ashamed when you receive your sisters, both those who are older than you and those who are younger. I will give them to you as daughters, but not on the basis of my covenant with you. So I will establish my covenant with you, and you will know that I am the Lord. Then, when I make atonement for you for all you have done, you will remember and be ashamed and never again open your mouth because of your humiliation, declares the Sovereign Lord.'"  (Ezekiel 16:59-63)

Observation

Today’s reading has four chapters long of God telling the people the shape and form of his wrath.  What he will do, when he will do it, and how many will survive.  At the end of it, in Chapter Sixteen, God says:

“Yet I will remember the covenant I made with you in the days of your youth, and I will establish an everlasting covenant with you.”

So much promise packed into this one sentence.  I wish that he’d unpacked it better for them, especially on the heels of all doom he was pronouncing.  In fact, it’s pretty easy to skim over it, while you are still emotionally throbbing from the terrible things coming.

But I don’t want you to miss it.  Let’s slow it down.

Application

The application for us is contained in that second part of the verse, “and I will establish an everlasting covenant with you.”  There are many places we can go in scripture to explain this covenant.  One of my favorite is here in Ephesians 2:22.  “And in him you too are being built together to become a dwelling in which God lives by his Spirit.”  I couldn’t possibly say it any clearer.

Prayer

Father God, you worked through time and circumstances to reveal your nature to us.  You labored over a faithless nation, and remained faithful in order to show us who you are, and how much you love us.