The Everlasting Covenant

The Promise fulfilled only by the Resurrection

Now let us turn again to some of the words spoken by Stephen when, full of the Holy Ghost, he stood before the Jewish Council. He began his discourse by a positive proof that the resurrection was necessary to the fulfillment of the promise to Abraham; for having repeated the promise, he declared that Abraham had not so much as a foot-breadth of the land that was promised, although God had said that both he and his seed should possess it. EVCO 160.2

Since Abraham died without inheriting it, as did also a vast number of his descendants even those who, like him, had faith, the conclusion was inevitable that the fulfillment could be only through the resurrection. The only reason why so many of the Jews rejected the Gospel was that they persisted in ignoring the plain evidence of the Scriptures, that the promise to Abraham was not temporal, but eternal. Even so at the present time the belief that the promises to Israel convey an earthly and temporal inheritance, is incompatible with a full belief in Christ. EVCO 160.3