A covenant is an agreement between two or more parties for the accomplishing of a purpose commonly agreed upon. The Bible tells us of a certain covenant called the "everlasting covenant." It is the most important covenant that you and I will ever know anything about. Abraham, Noah, Moses, David, Isaiah, Jeremiah, and other Bible characters recognized and benefited by this covenant of covenants. Christ Jesus' teachings and works were all based on this far-reaching agreement.

Jeremiah refers to it thus: "I will make an everlasting covenant with them, that I will not turn away from them, to do them good. ... Yea. I will rejoice over them to do them good." Never will God turn away from, or be unavailable to, you or me. Forever He rejoices to do only good to His people. Noah saw that the everlasting covenant is God's covenant with "every living creature" (Genesis 9:15). Not one is left out.

The everlasting covenant is a human designation for an eternal fact, even the natural agreement between God and man, between cause and effect. The everlasting covenant is not like a human agreement, often arrived at after discussion between the parties. The everlasting covenant is another name for the eternally existing at-one-ment between Deity and His children. What might be termed its purpose? To assure and to proclaim the certainty of the uninterrupted manifestation of God by man. What are its provisions?

God, eternal Mind, forever constitutes and maintains His son, perpetually provides him with life, health, strength, substance, intelligence, understanding, and all that is essential to man's continuing completeness and perfection. What does man do under the covenant? His part is forever to express in every thought, word, and act the Life, Love, and Mind that is his Soul, his Principle, and his God.

Humanly if one could covenant with the most reliable insurance company in the world to provide him always with a home, an income, and an education, he would, because of the resources and reliability of such a company, have a feeling of complete security that his human needs would be provided for. What was rightly his under such an agreement he would feel sure would always be given him.

But the everlasting covenant is more certain and far reaching than such an agreement. It is with God whose power and resources are limitless, whose love is endless and all-wise. Ponder these incomparable forces that are perpetually supporting God's covenant with you and me. Furthermore, the everlasting covenant provides for man what no human agency can provide—the ability to think spiritually, with resulting health, happiness, holiness, immortality. No human agency can provide these. God can and does, and God protects man in their inalienable possession.

Every day let each one of us thank God that His everlasting covenant is in effect for us and for all. Every hour let us claim the continuing flow of blessings God provides for us if we are doing our part, expressing honestly and consistently the Life and Mind that is good, that is God.

Let us not hesitate to talk to the Father of this, His agreement with His son. First, let us be sure our obligation to our Maker is being fulfilled to the best of our ability, then claim the health, joy, substance and harmony that are ours, the reward for our being what God has made us to be, His manifestation.

The material mind, God's opposite, offers mortals a distorted covenant. It promises, but never consistently fulfills. Life, health, happiness, success it agrees to give mortal man if he will believe in and be enslaved by it. But this negative mind is falsity. Its life ends in death, its health turns into sickness, its temporary happiness to grief and despair, and its success, which it cannot long maintain, surrenders to failure.

Whatever our human need, it is provided for under the everlasting covenant. No need has been neglected. We have our part to do and Christian Science is here to help us do it. It shows us our rights under this living covenant, teaches us consistently to assert them, to accept no encroachment upon them, for God's covenant stands forever. We reap the benefits in proportion to our realization of our spiritual oneness with eternal good, and our separateness from temporal evil.

The ninety-first Psalm and the Sermon on the Mount set forth in impressive words the benefits of this covenant of covenants. If we consciously dwell in the secret place of our oneness with God we find a fortress of unvarying safety, complete protection from evil; no jeopardy, no danger, "for he shall give his angels charge over thee, to keep thee in all thy ways."

If we express the spiritual qualities of thought natural to our real being, enumerated by Jesus in the Beatitudes, we are richly blessed. Comfort, provision, satisfaction, and God's own kingdom are ours under the terms of the covenant. Perhaps the most momentous provision is, "Blessed are the pure in heart: for they shall see God."

The conditions are all exacting, but the rewards are all certain and glorious, beyond all human valuation. They are God's gifts, under the covenant, to His beloved.

Let us thank our Father-Mother for this greatest of all covenants, for its nowness, for its permanence, for its completeness, and for our God-given ability to think, and to live so as to benefit in every way from its beneficence, the beneficence of everlasting Love to its expression, man. Mrs. Eddy saw the eternal continuance of the everlasting covenant when she wrote so simply the eternal truth, "Love is impartial and universal in its adaptation and bestowals" (Science and Health, p. 13). The bountiful bestowals of God, divinely adapted to our every individual need, are prepared and ready for us as we individually think and live in accord with the everlasting covenant. "The Lord will give grace and glory: no good thing will he withhold from them that walk uprightly."

Paul Stark Seeley