The New and Everlasting Covenant

I read an article by Elder Marcus B. Nash from the Seventy this morning on the “new and everlasting covenant” in the Ensign.  The article was extremely helpful to me in broadening my understanding of what that phase really means (see here).  Like many I have generally understood the new and everlasting covenant to be synonymous with celestial marriage, but Elder Nash showed how marriage is a part but not the whole thing: “When the Lord speaks generally of ‘the’ new and everlasting covenant, He is speaking of the fulness of the gospel of Jesus Christ, which embraces all ordinances and covenants necessary for the salvation and exaltation of mankind.  Neither baptism nor eternal marriage is ‘the’ new and everlasting covenant; rather, they are each parts of the whole.”  Perhaps the most convincing scriptural evidence of this is that in a section on baptism (revealed long before the Saints knew about celestial marriage), the Lord referred to the ordinance as “a new and everlasting covenant” (D&C 22:1).  In the revelation on celestial marriage the Lord referred to it as well as “a new and everlasting covenant” (D&C 132:4), confirming Elder Nash’s teaching that neither one is individually the new and everlasting covenant.  

                Several conferences ago Elder Christofferson summed up the new and everlasting covenant in a way that surprised me.  He said, “The scriptures speak of the new and everlasting covenant. The new and everlasting covenant is the gospel of Jesus Christ.  In other words, the doctrines and commandments of the gospel constitute the substance of an everlasting covenant between God and man that is newly restored in each dispensation.  If we were to state the new and everlasting covenant in one sentence it would be this: ‘For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life’” (see here).  This is exactly in line with the scripture that Elder Nash quoted in which the Lord says, “Blessed are you for receiving mine everlasting covenant, even the fulness of my gospel, sent forth unto the children of men” (D&C 66:2).   So the point seems to be that the new and everlasting covenant is not some great secret or have anything to do with plural marriage; rather, it is simply the gospel of Jesus Christ with all that this entails.  It is new because it was restored again in our dispensation, but it is everlasting because the gospel plan has been the same since the beginning.  At its core the new and everlasting covenant, according to Elder Christofferson, is the atonement of Jesus Christ that enables us, though covenants, to return back to our Heavenly Father.  That has always been the plan of the Father and remains the base of everything that we do in the Church.