R.C. Sproul

I mean, Mary understood her place in church history in terms of fulfillment of a covenant and fulfillment of promises.

Now again, I say that because the hardest thing in the world for the Christian is to live by faith rather than by sight.

It's difficult because we never see God.

We have not been eyewitnesses of the resurrection like the first century apostles were.

You know, we live on the basis of the testimony of those who went before us, and we are to walk by faith, that we are justified by faith, and that means by trusting the Word of God.

And I said it's one thing to believe in God, that there is a God.

That can be an intellectual conclusion that's not very difficult to come to, but it's quite another thing to believe God.

because what faith is, what living faith is, is trusting the promises of God.

That even when everything around us seems to testify to the futility of our lives and would cause us to abandon all hope,

We are people who are in a covenant relationship with God.

We are people who live by trust in His promises.

We break our promises to each other, we break our promises to God, but God never breaks His promises to us.

And that's why in one sense, nothing would be more foolish than not to trust in the promises of God, because God has demonstrated Himself throughout history to be

supremely trustworthy.

Well, let's start now and ask ourselves where the first covenant takes place, and this involves

some inferences drawn from the Scripture, particularly drawn from the New Testament with respect to our understanding of the mission and the purpose and work of Jesus.

Lately, in fact in this whole past year, I've been preaching out of the gospel according to St.

John to our congregation at St.

Andrews in Orlando, and so much of that gospel

gives us the record of the controversies that Jesus had with the Jewish authorities of His day, and so much of that debate between Jesus and the Pharisees and Jesus and the scribes and so on had to do with the origin of Jesus and the basis of His authority.