Dr. H. Clay Trumbull (1830-1903) studied extensively about the covenants and the covenant mindset, and fortunately, shared the findings with those who would hear. He writes much more eloquently than we are accustomed to these days, but he says the following in essence: When God created man, the one vital ingredient necessary for man’s happiness was “trustful surrender of his whole being to the willing and working of God,” but once sin entered that was destroyed. Consequently, man feared God, tried to hide from Him, no longer knew or trusted God as he had before. From the very beginning, God’s plan has been to share not just the blessings of being in Covenant but Covenant friendship with us. All God wanted was for man to believe in Him, then trust, love, and communication would naturally follow. And it did…until sin came. But man could not effect his own salvation to restore the relationship with God he had known before the fall and it could only be accomplished by faith. From “Covenant God” by Dr. Trumbull:“Salvation could only be by faith: God restoring the life man had lost; man in faith yielding himself to God's work and will. The first great work of God with man was to get him to believe. This work cost God more care and time and patience than we can easily conceive. All the dealings with individual men, and with the people of Israel, had just this one object, to teach men to trust Him. Where He found faith He could do anything. Nothing dishonored and grieved Him so much as unbelief. Unbelief was the root of disobedience and every sin; it made it impossible for God to do His work. The one thing God sought to waken in men by promise and threatening, by mercy and judgment, was faith… Oh that we knew how God longs that we should trust Him, and how surely His every promise must be fulfilled to those who do so! Oh that we knew how it is owing to nothing but our unbelief that we cannot enter into the possession of God's promises, and that God cannot-yes, cannot-do His mighty works in us, and for us, and through us! Oh that we knew how one of the surest remedies for our unbelief-the divinely chosen cure for it-is the Covenant into which God has entered with us!… No wonder that, where that Covenant, with its wonderful promises, is so little thought of, its plea for an abounding and unhesitating confidence in God so little understood, its claim upon the faithfulness of the Omnipotent God so little tested; no wonder that Christian life should miss the joy and the strength, the holiness and the heavenliness which God meant and so clearly promised that it should have.”
