From the Editor — March 2026

By the time this issue is in your hands, there should be signs that spring is pushing away winter. The hyacinths and crocuses should begin to poke out of the ground as the sun returns to its strength and melts away the snow.

The coming of spring is a reminder of the resurrection, when life sprang out of death through our Lord, who brought to light life and immortality! And spring reminds us of that lovely call of our Beloved to us in the spring of life:

My beloved spake, and said unto me,
Rise up, my love, my fair one, and come away.
For, lo, the winter is past,
The rain is over and gone;
The flowers appear on the earth;
The time of the singing of birds is come,
And the voice of the turtle is heard in our land;
The fig tree putteth forth her green figs,
And the vines with the tender grape give a good smell.
Arise, my love, my fair one, and come away.
(Song of Sol. 2:10–13)

Yes, Christ brought spring for us through his resurrection, and he will come shortly to take us away out of this sin-cursed and wicked world.

In this issue is another translated meditation from Rev. Herman Hoeksema’s series of meditations on the prophecy of Zechariah. Hoeksema penned the meditations in the late 1930s and early 1940s in The Standard Bearer, and we are privileged to translate and print them in our magazine. We hope that the reader profits from them as much as the translator has. The meditations represent Hoeksema at his exegetical best. Zechariah is a difficult book to understand. Hoeksema is our guide, and we gladly follow him.

Reverend Pascual begins a series on Reverend Hoeksema’s covenant conception. Hoeksema more than anything else was a theologian of God’s covenant. He took the Reformed tradition on the covenant, critiqued it, corrected it, and brought the truth of the covenant to a higher state of development. We are the heirs of this invaluable work by our spiritual father. We love him for this and are thankful for the insights that the Spirit of Christ gave to Hoeksema as he led the church into all the truth regarding the covenant.

The covenant of God lies at the heart of the reformation that led to the publication of Sword and Shield and eventually to the formation of the Reformed Protestant Churches. It was the corruption of the truth of the unconditionality of the covenant, especially in the experience of the covenant in the daily life of the believer, that was the issue that led to our reformation. Without using the word condition, and indeed, denying that they teach such a thing, the Protestant Reformed ministers, elders, and theologians teach conditionality and contingency in the covenant especially in the form that the believer’s forgiveness is contingent upon his act of faith and his act of repentance. So we are interested in what Hoeksema said about the covenant. If he erred in some respect, we will critique and correct it. He would not mind. Where he speaks the truth, we follow him and hopefully—the Spirit guiding and God being gracious—the truth of the covenant will be brought to a higher state of development. I believe that one area that already has been developed is the realization of the inseparable connection between the truth of justification by faith alone and the unconditionality of the covenant. Justification by faith alone is the hinge on which the truth of the unconditional covenant turns. If one corrupts in any respect the truth of justification by faith alone—as the Protestant Reformed denomination does with her doctrine of conditional forgiveness and active faith—then one no longer can claim to teach an unconditional covenant. By this test, then, that denomination does not teach an unconditional covenant, which also explains all her cozy relationships with Reformed churches that have long ago corrupted the unconditionality of the covenant.

In Understanding the Times Reverend Ophoff publishes the first half of a lecture given on behalf of the evangelism committee of First Reformed Protestant Church. The lecture proves once again that the Protestant Reformed Churches are a false church and that it was necessary for God to reform his church.

James Jansma in the Running Footmen rubric demonstrates how Prof. Brian Huizinga teaches the readership of The Standard Bearer to measure by degrees their spiritual walks in this life. Don’t slip, or down, down, down you will fall!

The editor continues his series on the end of all things. The night is far spent, and the day is at hand! The Christian must know the time, for the clock of history is in its last hour, and Christ comes quickly.

May the Lord bless the issue in the reading of it.