and hath a healing virtue and a quickening virtue, Ezek. xlvii.,
and a sanctifying virtue, ver. 9-12. Now this is our errand to you, to
invite you to come to these waters. If ye thirst, come to be quenched; if
ye thirst not, ye have so much the more need to come, because your thirst
after things that will not profit you, will destroy you, and your
unsensibleness of your need of this is your greatest misery.

That the words may be more lively unto us, we may call to mind, the
greatest and deepest design that hath been carried on in the world, by the
Maker and Ruler of the world, is the marriage of Christ his Son with the
Church. This was primarily intended, when he made the world, as a palace
to celebrate it in; this was especially aimed at, when he joined Adam and
Eve, in the beginning of time, together in paradise, that the second Adam
should be more solemnly joined to the church, at the end of time, in the
paradise of heaven; and this the apostle draws out as the sampler and
arch-copy of all marriages and conjunctions in the creatures, Eph. v. Now
this being the great design of God, of which all other things done in time
are but the footsteps and low representations, the great question is, how
this shall be brought about, because of the great distance and huge
disproportion of the parties, He "being the brightness of the Father's
glory," and we being wholly eclipsed and darkened since our fall;--He
higher than the heaven of heavens, and we fallen as low as hell into a
dungeon of darkness and misery, led away by sin and Satan, lying in that
abominable posture represented in Ezek. xvi.; not only unsuitable to
engage his love, but fit to procure even the loathing of all that pass by.

Now it being thus, the words do furnish us with the noble resolution of
the Son, about the taking away of the distance, and the royal offer of the
Father, to make the match hold the better, both flowing from infinite
love, in the most free and absolute manner that can be imagined. The Son's
resolution, which is withal the Father's promise, is to come into the
world first to redeem his spouse, and so to marry her; "and the Redeemer
shall come unto Zion," &c. The Father's offer, that he might not be
wanting to help it forward, is to dispone,(297) by an irrevocable
covenant, having the force of an absolute donation, his word and Spirit to
Christ and his seed, to the church, even to the end of the world, (ver.
21). "As for me, this is my covenan