Question: What does evangelism have to do with the covenant of grace?⤒🔗

Regularly you hear people speaking as if evangelism and covenant are quite unrelated. People can have an idea of the covenant that imagines that those inside the gathering of the church don’t need the gospel while those outside of its walls do. Moreover, it is sometimes thought perfectly acceptable to leave in large part the outside world alone because we emphasize the truth that God works in the lines of the generations.

I hope I am overstating the matter somewhat, but it may be helpful to compare these sentiments with Scripture to see what it has to say to them.

Covenant and Worldview←⤒🔗

We are accustomed to emphasizing the covenant of grace as it pertains to the believer and his children, and there is great instruction and encouragement and perspective in that. The covenant is God’s oath-bound promise made to believers, to strengthen them, to comfort them, to assure them. It is precious to believers, like Abraham and those that follow in his footsteps.

What a great difference there was between Abraham and the people of the land in which he lived. The people of this land were people who did not worship the living God. They were concerned with material things, with cities, with prosperity, with business and so on. If you read Genesis 14, you will see that when Abraham was involved in a victory to help his nephew in Sodom, the king of Sodom afterwards in his gratitude comes to Abraham, and he tells him to take all the goods that came out of the victory. He assumed that Abraham was like everybody else. He really wanted to enrich himself and to get on in the world, as we would say, and to his amazement no doubt Abraham said to the king of Sodom (Genesis 14:22 and 23):

I have lift up mine hand unto the LORD, the most high God, the Possessor of heaven and earth, that I will not take from a thread even to a shoe-latchet, and that I will not take anything that is thine, lest thou shouldest say, I have made Abraham rich.

In other words, Abraham was saying to these unbelievers that ‘these are not the things upon which my heart is set. I can live without them. I don’t need you to give them to me, because I am in relationship to God Who is the Possessor of heaven and earth.’ What meant more to Abraham than all those things were the very promises of God.

You know there are people to whom these promises mean nothing at all, sadly also in the professing church. For them, they are just words written in a book. If you are an unbeliever, you hear the very promises of God, and they mean nothing to you – nothing at all. Yet, the scope of the covenant also has in view “those that are afar off” (Acts 2:39). By virtue of the gift and claims of the covenant of grace, God makes believers salt and light in this world. Others see this and together with the spread of the Scripture, the witness of the church, the defense of the truth, and so on, others will and must be brought under the good news of the covenant.

Covenant and Blessing←⤒🔗

For notice that part of the great blessing promised to Abram was that in Abraham “all families of the earth (would) be blessed” (Gen 12:3). That great promise has only one meaning. It is the meaning that Paul tells us in Gal 3:8: “God ... preached before the gospel unto Abraham, saying, In thee all nations shall be blessed.” Here is the promise that the Redeemer, the Savior of the world will come from the very household of Abraham, and that in Jesus Christ all families and nations of the earth will be blessed.

The altar that Abram built in Genesis 12 was connected with that truth. That very land, to which Abraham was led in God’s providence, that strategically placed land, was the very place where the Son of God was to hang on Calvary’s tree. God had purposed it. “Abraham (Jesus says) rejoiced to see My day: and he saw it, and was glad” (Jn 8:56). By faith he looked down the centuries to the coming of the seed in whom all nations would be blessed. And that altar and the burnt sacrifice that was burned on the altar were part of the faith of Abraham the friend of God.

If you have read The Life of John G. Paton, you may agree with me that there is nothing more beautiful in that book than the description that Paton gives of the old cannibal on the Island of Tanna, guilty of unimaginable crimes and sins, who became a new creature in Jesus Christ. John G. Paton gave him a new name. He called him Abraham. That dear Christian man beautifully exemplified on that heathen island everything that was true of Abraham the patriarch. You see, the grace of God is the same in every heart and life.

Covenant and Practice←⤒🔗

What does all this mean practically?

1. We cannot boast about the covenant and not be concerned about the perishing world as well as nominalism in the professing church. It is a mark that we do not understand the covenant if we are unconcerned about the lost.
    
2. We cannot restrict the proclamation of the gospel only to those within Christian families, for God has ordered it quite differently. All creatures must hear of Christ, the fulfillment of covenant, and all that God gives poor sinners through him.
    
3. We must pray that our lives and witness would so reflect the truth of the covenant as the Bible teaches it, that others would, by the power of God’s grace, be drawn to hear the covenant and join themselves to the Lord (Isaiah 44:5).