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Hickory Grove Presbyterian Church
[Sunday School] Was There a Covenant Between God and Adam in the Garden? (WSC 11)
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Heavenly Father, thank you for bringing us here together this morning to study your word. Lord, thank you for the great and precious truths it reveals to us. Thank you for the ministry of Westminster that helps us to distill biblical truths and doctrines. Help us this morning as we consider that special act of providence that where you entered into a covenant of light with Adam and the garden, a covenant, a relationship that would set the stage for all that is to follow. Thank you, Father, for the second Adam, for the last Adam, who comes to succeed with the first fail, who fulfills and upholds that covenant on our behalf so that we can enjoy its reward. Help us to see him in all that we do and all that we discussed this morning. We pray in Jesus' name. Amen. Alright, so last time we talked about providence. God's works of providence are his most holy, wise, and powerful, preserving and governing all his creatures and all their actions. And today we talk about what the catechism calls that special act of providence with respect to our original human parents. And that sets the stage for God's relationship with human beings. So what is that special act? Question 12, what special act of providence did God exercise toward man in the estate wherein he was created? When God had created man, he entered into a covenant of life with him upon condition of perfect obedience, forbidding him to eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil upon the pain of death. So that's that's the special act of providence. That's the covenant. And to start our conversation about it, I want you to open to Genesis 2. We're going to read verses 15 through 17. Copious amounts of flipping to get there. Can somebody read that for us? What verses? Genesis 2, 15 through 17.
SPEAKER_04And the Lord God took the man and put oh, that's the KGG, we don't do that for me anymore.
SPEAKER_05It's okay, you can do that. I like that.
SPEAKER_04The Lord God took the man and the Garden of Eden to work it and keep it. And the Lord God commanded the man, saying, You may surely eat of every tree of the garden, but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in that day that you eat of it, you shall surely die.
SPEAKER_05Amen. So that that text is the main proof text that's provided for this shorter catechism question and answer. But let me ask you the question. Where do you find the word covenant in that text?
SPEAKER_04You don't.
SPEAKER_05You don't. Where do you find the word covenant in the creation account at all? You don't. You find it the same place you find Trinity in the Bible. Alright? The word Trinity is not in the Bible, and yet it is a summary word for a whole compendium of biblical doctrine. And the word covenant does similar work. There's evidence in Scripture, right? The word isn't here, but you see evidence in Scripture that what's going on here is construed as a covenant. Hosea 6 7. Like Adam, they transgressed the covenant, talking about God's people. There they dealt faithlessly with me. So looking back to the creation account, looking back to Adam, and saying there was a covenant in place there, and there was a transgression of that covenant, and using that as a model for future faithlessness, future disobedience. So this isn't the only time that we see a covenantal arrangement described in Scripture without the actual word covenant being used. 2 Samuel 7, the Davidic covenant, where God makes his promise, you know, David wants to build a house for God, and God says, no, no, no, I'm gonna make you a house. And he's talking about a dynasty and gives him this promise that a son is going to come from him, and that son will ultimately sit upon the throne forever. That's the Davidic covenant. And it's reflected on in Psalm 89 as a covenant. But in 2 Samuel 7 it doesn't use the word covenant. It's one of those things where it's like covenant is such a dominant framework in the world of the Bible, it's such a, it's just kind of it's in the air they breathe. So you can have covenants, you can have things written in covenantal ways without the word actually being used. It's kind of an assumed sort of thing. So, right, in Genesis, we have a covenant. Now thinking a little bit about covenants biblically, a covenant is a bilateral sort of thing. Amongst humans, it's a 50-50 proposition. It's it's kind of like a contract, but it's less like the contract that you sign with your phone company and more like the contract that you enter into in a marriage. Between human beings, right? Between God and human beings, it's a unilateral sort of thing. Uh the some of the ancient context for this is at the time of the writing of the Bible, you had the Hittites, and they would enter into treaties. And the treaties would basically be the great king entering into a relationship with the lesser king, uh, with the vassal, with the servant. And they even took a certain form. You would have uh a rehearsal of what the great king did for the lesser king. You would have uh stipulations, you would have promises of blessing, you would have promises of curse, you would have covenant ratification rituals, you would also have other rituals showing what happens when you break the covenant. And that's all stuff that we find in like Genesis 12, 15, 17, God enters into a relationship a covenant with Abraham. Uh, we find it in the statement of the Ten Commandments in Exodus 20. We also find it in the overall shape of Deuteronomy. Deuteronomy actually takes that shape where you have historical prologues, you have sanctions, you have stipulations, you have curses, you have blessings, all that sort of thing. Alright, so thinking about the covenant that, as it exists on kind of like the vertical plane, God Himself entering into a covenant with us, it's different from human covenants because it is entirely unilateral. God doesn't, you know, we don't initiate the covenant with God. God initiates the covenant with us. And we read about this uh in a very vivid kind of way in the in the can in the confession, in chapter seven, paragraph one. It says, the distance between God and the creature is so great that although reasonable creatures do owe obedience to him as their creator, yet they could never have any fruition of him as their blessedness and reward, but by some voluntary condescension on God's part, which he has been pleased to express by way of covenant. Voluntary condescension. That's the key here. As our creator, God is exalted above us. He made us, and so we owe him everything, but he owes us nothing. And so he makes a free choice to condescend and enter into a relationship with us. And so when you have in the covenant of works, right, when you have God, and we'll get more into this, when you have God offering out the promise of blessing and the promise of curse and the covenant of works, all of that depends on God's prior condescension. It's not that he's written into the fabric of creation that people who do well are rewarded. He actually creates that relationship, he creates that dynamic.
SPEAKER_04The beginning of that is, in my opinion, real important too. The distance there. Like if we don't understand and fathom the distance that's between us and him, where he's at and where we are, and who he is and who we are, we can't really appreciate the con the creator creation distinction that we've been talking about, especially when we talk about creation and providence.
SPEAKER_05Right? That's fundamental, that's baseline. So Isaiah 40, 13 through 17, who has measured the spirit of the Lord? And what man shows him his counsel? Whom did he consult, and who did who made him understand? Who taught him the path of justice and taught him knowledge and showed him the way of understanding? Behold, the nations are like a drop from a bucket, and are accounted as dust on the scales. Behold, he takes up the coastlands like fine dust. Lebanon would not suffice for fuel, nor are its beasts enough for a burnt offering. All the nations are as nothing before him. They are counted by him as less than nothing and emptiness. So that helps us to understand a little bit of that distance. Even the greatest among us are as nothing before God. And that's not because God devalues the things that He has made. It's because God is so infinitely exalted above us that there's just no comparison. There's literally no comparison. That's what it means to call God holy, holy, holy.
SPEAKER_06And and to the point that while we're still sinners, right? Yeah, we were that dust. Yeah. And yet the second person of the Holy Trinity was nailed on the cross for that nothingness. Come on. Without hesitation. Without hesitation.
SPEAKER_05Yeah, sin actually makes us less than nothing.
SPEAKER_09I was reading a book about John Calvin, Ingenieva So it's run out of all places. And it said Calvin's idea of the righteousness of God compared to us is if you imagine the big bang that got the murder started compared to striking a match. You know, the difference between that. Yeah, the power and the majesty and the you know, and not only not only that he got it started, but it keeps it gulping too. He keeps the spheres rolling, yeah. And the match just goes out poof like that.
SPEAKER_05Yeah. Yeah.
SPEAKER_09And so images or metaphors to help us imagine.
SPEAKER_05Yeah.
SPEAKER_09Yeah.
SPEAKER_05Yeah.
SPEAKER_09I thought that was pretty cool.
SPEAKER_05It is, and even that one falls short. Because it's even greater than that, right? Yeah.
SPEAKER_02It moves on to the next one.
SPEAKER_05Yeah.
SPEAKER_00Something you said just a second ago unbelievably profound. It makes us less than nothing. Because nothing has no real emotion, you know. Nothing is nothing. And you're below that. Yeah. And that's unbelievable. That's what's all.
SPEAKER_09I think we need to be careful though. You know me, I'm always introducing these because I work with college students, and many of them struggle with self-hate and depression and anxiety. And Paul warns us that the sorrow of the world will destroy us, leads to destruction. I think this is the second framework. But the sorrow that the Holy Spirit brings us leads to redemption and restoration. So there is a whatever, whatever is godly, our enemy makes a parody of it. Yeah. That is hateful and destructive. And I look at these students, I hate me, you know, I'm thinking, okay, you don't know how bad you are about to do anything anymore. But going that way is not the way to finding the Lord.
SPEAKER_05Yeah.
SPEAKER_04Yeah, it's not the degrade or devalue, it's really to level set pride. A disposition of privilege and blessing, of understanding that we were created in this image of likeness, right? We should just be honored and privileged to have that. Understand the value of that, but the you know, the nothingness and the lowliness is uh is a pride leveler. It's a humble.
SPEAKER_05Yeah, yeah, I should say, like in our sin and rebellion, we're worse than nothing. Uh common grace abides. Right? So we're never as bad as we can be. Our talk, our to our doctrine of total depravity, which we'll come to eventually, I think it's in the 20s, uh, is such that human beings are sinful in every conceivable way, but that doesn't mean that we're as bad as we could be. Because God never fully releases the reins. He never fully leaves us to the you know the epitome of our sinfulness.
SPEAKER_02And the mercy's all the presence.
SPEAKER_05Yeah. Yeah, even if even if it's not a saving mercy or a saving grace, there still is common grace.
SPEAKER_06The Lord does use the word covenant, though, right?
SPEAKER_05At the beginning. Oh, yeah. Throughout. Yeah, yeah, throughout the Old Testament, just not here. So sometimes sometimes people will take issue with using the word covenant to describe God's relationship with Adam in the garden because the word's not used. Yes. But again, the thing I'm trying to make sure we emphasize is that uh, yeah, the way we do theology is that you know, biblical words, you don't just do a concordance or a Bible word study and look for the word and all you pile up all the instances of that word and then you get some kind of doctrine having to do with it. Uh sometimes the Bible will talk explicitly using language, like particular doctrinal language. Other times it'll talk using concepts, right, that touch on the same thing without using the word. And if you limit yourself to ever just the times that a particular word is mentioned, you're gonna miss out on the whole dimensions of what the Bible is actually teaching.
SPEAKER_08So, Evan, tell us about this covenant of life. So, this covenant of life, a couple of different names for it. The catechism um calls it the covenant of life. Um, more typically, though, in our reform circles, you'll hear the phrase covenant of works. Um, that kind of better captions of what it is. And so, you know, um, if you remember what Kenny said about these uh Hittite treaties, pretty much there are certain elements that these treaties or these covenants the greater king would make with the lesser king. Um and we're gonna kind of look at a couple of those in this covenant of works. Um and so one of the aspects of a covenant is you have to have parties, right? We already said that that the covenant of works it's parties, our first God, and he makes that with Adam. But he doesn't make it with only Adam. He makes it with Adam as a federal head. So when you hear that language, federal headship, what first comes to your mind?
SPEAKER_03Imputation.
SPEAKER_08Okay, well that's what comes to your mind. Yes, okay. Yes, good. Explain. We'll get to that, I think, in the next time kind of weights.
SPEAKER_04Well, that's the foundation and the groundwork for amputation, right? Um that Adam was privileged with the honor of representing this his um his uh of mankind, right? And who was going to be generated from him, right? Um as a preacher. Well, he was going to represent them, um, and his nature, he was going to then in that generation pass down.
SPEAKER_08Um yeah, and he passed down a sinful nature, right? I mean, when when the covenant was first made, we talked about this a week or two ago. Adam and Eve, they were in a state of original righteousness. There was no sin with them yet. They had the potential to sin, but they were not yet sinful. Um, and so, yes, uh definitely, you know, imputation is one of the things specifically with federal headship that our sin has been imputed. There's this double imputation of us and the covenant of grace, and who have faith, our sin is imputed to our federal head, Jesus Christ, and his righteousness is imputed or is given, not given, but when God looks at us, he sees the righteousness of Christ. And when God looks at Jesus, he sees our sin. Because our sin was nailed to the cross. So, yes, uh, imputation is definitely one of them. What else? When you think of the word like federal headship. What about the US government? Yes, so the US government actually is basically kind of a covenantal arrangement, right? Um I mean, it's not the perfect analogy, right? Um, but so the um US government is a it's not just a democracy, it's a democratic republic. We're not solely a democracy, it is a republic too. And so we have these people that we elect, right? And so your local representatives, those are your federal headships, right? Um I don't know any people in the local area, municipalities or government, but whoever they are, you have elected them, or you voted to not, but they're there now. You have elected them to be your federal representative. So what they vote on, what they do, that represents who you are as a person. Um and so a federal government, it is a government by representation. Again, we don't all vote on what our government does, but our elect our elected representatives vote for them so that when when they are acting, we are kind of acting along with them from our vote. So that's kind of what federal headship or federal representatives mean. What they do is attributed kind of to us. Excuse me. Yes?
SPEAKER_09We're sitting here on this land because our government made a covenant many generations ago with I think it was the Cherokee over here. And so we are enjoying, we are beneficiaries of that covenant that was made multiple generations ago by having this property, by getting to enjoy this building on this property. Yeah. Now there's that was a complicated thing, and I know all about the Trail of Tears, and it makes me want to cry too. But regardless, we're here on this spot of earth because of the covenant that was made with our government and another group of people.
SPEAKER_08Yeah, that's a great uh analogy. Because, like, so a lot of the time our federal representatives, right, they benefit us. We weren't here when we decided to go out west and expand our country, right? But we benefit from it, right? But also a lot of the time, our federal representatives they do stuff that is not good, right? So don't want to talk anything about touchy here, but I think it's important to understand that our representatives can also do things wrong. Um, specifically, we think of um of uh I think one of the more common things that bothers this world is racism. And so we look at the history of the PCA. There are race, there were racist people, the PCA itself is not racist, but there were people in the history of Presbyterian in the South who were racist people. Now, before you think I'm saying anything crazy, what was it, 2016, 2017? The PCA, they did a public confession of repentance for the sins of their forefathers. Whoa, liberal, right? Oh, nope, look at Daniel 9, look at Nehemiah. Daniel and Nehemiah both make both make a confession for the sins of their federal representatives. And so we have to, yes, we are blessed a lot of the time by those who represent us, but also we are also cursed. We are doomed by some of the sins that our forefathers also commit. And we see this exact thing in Romans 5, um, verses 12 to 14. Paul writes, Therefore, just as sin came into the world through one man, and death through sin, so death spread to all men because all sinned. For sin indeed was in the world before the law was given, but sin is not counted where there is no law. Yet death reigned from Adam to Moses, even over those whose sinning was not like the transgression of Adam, who was the type of the one to come. Or in 1 Corinthians 15, 21 to 22, Paul writes, For as by a man came death, by a man has also come the resurrection of the dead. For as in Adam all die, so also in Christ all shall be made alive. We have this picture here of the federal headship of Adam and also the federal headship of Jesus Christ. We're going to talk more about that later, but now we're focusing upon the federal headship of Adam. So those that's the party is God and Adam or God and man. And then you also have the stipulations or the requirements. It says in the confession upon condition of perfect and perpetual obedience, and in our catechism question, it says uh perfect obedience. And so there's a sense where, and that's why it's called a covenant of works. You'll get the blessing if you fulfill the works. And what is that work? Can you read it earlier?
SPEAKER_09Don't eat of the tree of the knowledge of the good evil.
SPEAKER_08Don't eat of the tree, the knowledge of good and evil. So, again, we're talking about the state of Eden here when Adam and Eve had yet to sin. The covenant of works, all they had to do was to not eat of the tree the knowledge of good and of good and evil. But what did they do?
SPEAKER_04Not follow the positive precept of Adam Eva.
SPEAKER_08Yes, or they yeah, yes. They ate of the tree, the knowledge of good and evil. It's kind of like when you tell a kid to not do something, what do they want to go and do?
SPEAKER_05Oh my god.
SPEAKER_08I don't know, I don't understand this illustration.
SPEAKER_02No one.
SPEAKER_08Yeah, so I mean, it's they had one commandment that they had to obey and they failed. They ate of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. And the consequence.
SPEAKER_09They were tricked into that partly. Partly true. Eve was tricked, Adam not so much, but they had, they just didn't say, oh, well, let's go eat of this tree. They there was a whole series of. Yes, yeah.
SPEAKER_08But yeah, it was, it's that is true, but it's interesting going back to the going back to the federal hedgehog. Uh the verses we just read, it wasn't the serpent or Eve that is our head, it's Adam. The scriptures almost unanimously portray it as Adam being our federal head. Um, so it's interesting to like look at that from that point. Um, but they did not do it, right? They failed to obey the covenant of works, they failed to not need to tree the knowledge of good and evil, and so what was the curse? You had one job. Yes, and they could not do it. What what happened because they could not do it? They were cast out of the garden. They were cast out of the garden, there's a whole bunch of lists, right? There's judges three, there's work yep. Yep. What about something eternal?
SPEAKER_09Yeah, I think they there was something about Adam and Eve that died on the spot, and that was on the day you eat of it, on the day you shall die. So there was something in them that was alive that after they eat that was dead.
SPEAKER_08Yeah, could be that righteousness.
SPEAKER_09Yeah, all of us are dead peeping around until the Lord revives us.
SPEAKER_08Without the Holy Spirit, we are valid bones. Yeah. So because they failed to obey the code of the words, they were essentially the curse was death. The curse was sin and death and um misery. Now, had they not eaten of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, there's good reason to think that they also that they would have been granted the gift of eternal life by eating the other tree, which is the tree of life. Um because the promise that we see here in the Code of Works is that if you obey, if you fulfill the works, you will get eternal life. If you do not fulfill the works, you will get eternal death. And so we see this kind of thing going throughout scripture, um, all the way through it. We see this principle of living by works and also dying by works. We see this in um real quick, I don't want to miss something.
SPEAKER_05You're good to sell, you know, where do we get that idea? Because God explicitly says the negative sanction, eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, you'll die. It actually doesn't positively state, but if you don't, you'll live. We see it actually in the context of the curse. Because why? Why specifically in Genesis 3 does it say that Adam and Eve are ejected from the garden?
SPEAKER_10So they wouldn't eat of the tree of life.
SPEAKER_05So they wouldn't eat of the tree of life. Because what would have happened if they ate from the tree of life?
SPEAKER_02That would have been the state they were in.
SPEAKER_05They would have continued to live, yet live in their state of alienation after having sinned against God. So what do you call it to live forever, literally forever, eternally, in a state of alienation against God? Hell. Hell. That's what hell is. Revelation says that they will suffer in the presence of the Lamb and of his angels, and that the smoke will go of their torment will go up forever. It's a common evangelical misconception that hell is absence from God. Actually, it's not. God is present in hell. God is present to the suffering in hell. And that's actually what makes it hell.
SPEAKER_01So it would have been fixed on holiness. What's that? It would have been fixed on holiness.
SPEAKER_04Yes.
SPEAKER_09How I imagine that, I'm sorry you're talking too much, it's only the demon possessed bring when Jesus came around.
SPEAKER_10Yeah.
SPEAKER_09They just bring it. The presence of the Lord Jesus was torture to those of possessed people.
unknownHave you come to torture us before?
SPEAKER_09So that's the presence of God to the unrepentant and to God prepared for the devil.
SPEAKER_06Yeah. And that's like that's the famous dash. Genesis 3 23. Moses, the Lord just stopped Moses' will or whatever he was working with. Now let you reach out his hand. So 3 22, then the Lord God said, Behold, a man has become like one of us and knowing good and evil. Now, lest he reach out his hand and take also the tree of life and eat and live forever. Dash. And there's another dash Moses used later on. I was freaking out telling the story, I was like, he used the dash again. So that that strikes me. I I just didn't do that. Stop that. Yeah, it just stopped. And and Moses was to period. He drew that.
SPEAKER_05No, he didn't draw a dash. It's our convention for showing, because they didn't have punctuation like that. Right. But he did the functional equivalent. This is like when you see a break off like that, a lot of time it's oath language. So it's kind of like it's an if-then clause where you state the if and the then is implied. So it's just a kind of like, you know, if my you know if my kid's about to do something stupid, right? If you do that, enough said. I didn't have to say anything else. But it's it's that kind of thing.
SPEAKER_06But it's the enough said.
SPEAKER_08Right. That would have been their gift had they obeyed eternal life.
SPEAKER_06In our group, too. But the fact that the Holy Spirit didn't want it walked out, right? That's what blows me away. Yeah. He didn't want it walked out further.
SPEAKER_08Yeah. Definitely could have been fully written, like fully written out. Would have been helpful. I mean.
SPEAKER_06That's right. And so when when I see that and I saw that, it really stopped me in my tracks, like, whoa, there's an opportunity here to meditate. There's an opportunity here for prayer and scripture and meditation. Whoa, you should stop it.
SPEAKER_02Is that similar? It's the same term like in Psalms where it's salah. You stop and ponder.
SPEAKER_05Stop and think. I think that's the best explanation of Selah, but I think there are like 27 different explanations of what Salah might mean. Not quite that much, but it's it's one of those enigmatic things. But I think it's essentially stop and think.
SPEAKER_08Alright, so going back to this, the covenant of works, right? Upon obedience, they get eternal death, upon um, or the eternal life, upon disobedience, they get eternal death. We see this throughout scripture. Um, the paradigmatic verse is Leviticus 8 and 5. Moses writes, You shall therefore keep, this is the word of the Lord, you shall therefore keep my statutes and my rules. If a person does them, he shall live by them, for I am the Lord. And there's so many verses that echo this or cite this even in the New Testament of how the economy of salvation is, if you do this, you will be saved. But what is the problem for us?
SPEAKER_00We don't keep the promise.
SPEAKER_08We don't keep the promise, partially because, why? We can't, right? Even if we try, we cannot do it. What's that devilish word, three letters?
SPEAKER_02Sin.
SPEAKER_08Sin. Yes, it is a thing. Our sin, or not only our nature of sin, but because our desires are wholly unthwarted against God and the Spirit saves us. We can never ever fulfill the covenant of works. And so that leads to a question. Um, and I want to ask this. What would you say to the to the question, why does our faith in Jesus Christ actually save us? You can say what Tyler said earlier, imputation. Part of it.
SPEAKER_02Because those works are fulfilled in Christ.
SPEAKER_08Yes, because those works are fulfilled in Jesus Christ. Um a lot of people, and this is this is true, but we we can go further. We are saved by Jesus Christ when we have faith in him. That is true. But there's so much more depth to the work and to the death of our Savior that really does help us just glorify him and worship him more. So we are saved because that covenant of works, that principle of doing the works, of living a perfect life, fully obedient to the Lord, is all throughout Scripture. It's still active today in a sense. And so when Jesus, did Jesus sin? No. He lived a perfect and obedient life, and then he died on the cross. When Jesus Christ died on the cross, the covenant of works was fulfilled in Christ. The promise of someone living a perfect and obedient life, giving eternal life, that was now fulfilled. That had now come true through the work of Jesus Christ. And so, and Kenny, if you don't like this, feel free to, you know, cancel me. In a sense, we are saved. Chattanooga. Yeah. Send me this to Chattanooga. In a sense, we are saved by works. But we are not saved by our own works. We are saved by the works of our Savior Jesus Christ and our faith in him. It's not just this death that happened of this one person who saved us. No, it's back that this Son of God who condescended to earth, who skipped the nature of sin by being born of the virgin birth and lived a perfect and obedient life, died on the cross, fulfilling the covenant of works that God granted eternal life for the blessing of a covenant of works. And so, and one important note here, um, because Jesus Christ, he died having been perfect, the blessing of eternal life was given to all who have faith. Our confession points to this as we're, I don't think we're we'll talk about this later, so I'm gonna mention it now. This gift of salvation to those who have faith in Christ through the covenant works by Jesus' works, it is retroactively applied to everyone who came before Jesus. Um a lot of the questions are like, wait, how were people in the Old Testament safe? They didn't have Jesus yet, right? Well, our con uh the Westminster Confession, uh, chapter 8, paragraph 6 says, although the work of redemption was not actually brought by Christ till after his incarnation, the virtue, efficacy, and benefits thereof were communicated unto the elect in all ages successively, from the beginning of the world, in and by those promises, types, and sacrifices, wherein he, Jesus Christ, was revealed and signified to be the seed of the woman which bruised the serpent's head, and the lamb slain from the beginning of the world, being yesterday and today the same and forever. From the beginning of time, salvation has always been through the work of Jesus Christ. Although it happened at one moment in time, the salvation, that is the only way of salvation from the beginning to the end of history.
SPEAKER_06Abraham. I mean, Abraham's you know, faith was credited as righteousness right there.
SPEAKER_08And yeah, so yeah, so it's important. Abraham didn't have the knowledge of, hey, I believe in Jesus Christ, right? But he had the knowledge of I believe in God, and I have faith in him. It's it was it's a type, right, of the Old Testament of what was to come in Jesus Christ. So yeah.
SPEAKER_06And he was a pagan. You know, Genesis just is it's chewed me up. It's wonderful. You know, that the that Abram was a pagan, you know, worshiping pagan gods, and then out of the blue, curveball, and the Lord said to Abram, you know, you're like, whoa, wait, where did that come from? You know, and that's us, right? That's all of us. And the Lord said to James, and and regenerated me, woke me, grabbed me from death, you know, sit on that for a little bit, man.
SPEAKER_08So Abram's life is so Abram's life is such a it's it's us in a lot of the ways, right? Yes. He follows, he has immense faith. He binds his son, knowing it what we read earlier, he he does this knowing that that the Lord will provide him a goat. Yes. And as he reaches back to kill his son, hides it, and an angel of the Lord appears to him and says, No, here's a goat in the bushes.
SPEAKER_07Yes.
SPEAKER_08But also, he had immense struggles, right? What did he do when he got uh when him when him and Sarah got to Abimelech? It's my sister. It's my sister, right? And it's funny, what does his son do when they get to Abimelech?
SPEAKER_10My sister.
SPEAKER_08It's my sister, right? So sins kind of arc passed down. Um but yeah, so just this the point that we are saved by because Jesus Christ has fulfilled the covenant of works for us.
SPEAKER_09Okay, and then I'm sorry again. You're good. We were made to reflect perfectly the image of God. So I always, in my mind, I go back to lots of stuff, but why was Ruby made to reflect the image of God perfectly in a root size?
unknownAnd I cannot do that in my unregenerate self.
SPEAKER_09But Paul tells us in every and every book to him. We keep our eyes fixed on him, we are changed from glory to glory, to what he made us to be in the first place. A perfect reflection of his character in these little screw tape letters, these little bipeds walking around screw tape causes. And this right this biological animal was made to reflect bubbles from mind.
SPEAKER_05And we were made with a destiny, too. So, you know, again, what was the reward held out in the garden? The tree of life. We were barred from the reward, right? Fast forward, we talked about the beginning of the Bible, fast forward to the end of the Bible. You have the new heavens and new earth, you have the heavenly Jerusalem descending from the sky, you have the throne of God, you have the river coming out through it, just like Ezekiel prophesied would happen. And what's planted on either side of the river? The tree of life. And its leaves are for what?
SPEAKER_10Healing.
SPEAKER_05The healing of the nations. Uh and Revelation 2.17, who gets to eat from that tree? To those who conquer. To those who conquer. Now, how do we counter by the blood of the land?
SPEAKER_10And the word of their testimony.
SPEAKER_05And the word of their testimony. The blood of the land stand, the lamb stands for the finished work of Christ. How is it that we can conquer? That's another way of talking about fulfill the covenant of works. How can we do that? Not in ourselves, but in Christ, who we are united to by way of the covenant of grace, which we'll have plenty of time to get into that as we go through this. But Jesus kept the covenant of works on our behalf. By way of the covenant of grace, we are united to Him as our federal head. And so we get through Him all of the benefits of that covenant of works being kept. So all of humanity, right? You know, some people, and maybe you do this, maybe I do this sometimes. You know, you're talking to somebody about Jesus, and like, don't you want to have a relationship with God? Do you want to have a relationship with God? Come to Christ. You can have a relationship with God. Which, you know, I'm not bagging on that. That's we all know what we mean by that. But the kind of the fact of the matter that the covenant of works tells us is that every human being has a relationship with God already. By way of a covenant head, a covenant mediator. You either have a relationship with God by way of the covenant of works, where the first Adam is your covenant head and you are a covenant breaker, or you have a relationship with God by way of the covenant of grace, where the last Adam is your covenant head, and by way of his finished work, you are a covenant keeper. Those are the two choices. Everyone is already in covenant with God. It's just a matter of which covenant.
SPEAKER_04How much does in the covenant of works and federal head stuff does um Adam's mutability and the probation period? How important is that to the equation of covenant of works?
SPEAKER_08I mean his ability to not sin or to sin?
SPEAKER_04Well, yeah, his mutability and the probationary period of the order of the three piece, perfect, perpetual, and impersonal, right? Like it was a time period if he if he would have not have, if he would have obeyed the positive precept, at a certain period of time, at the end of the probation, God would have fixed his holiness. And Christ, in a sense, in his probation, in his time period, his time here on earth. He completes, we're talking about what he completed for us, right? Um, what he ratified in the covenant, all that gets applied to us in that time period, all that took place in there. And the covenant of grace is a fixed you know, yeah through election and all the things that come with it.
SPEAKER_05Right. So most of the Orthodox in our tradition will talk about the mutability of Adam as being you know belonging to the probationary period. And part of the blessing and reward that was held out to him was that he would become immutable in a moral sense. Right? And that's the same thing that's held out to us. When we die and we go to heaven, or when we go into the new heavens and new earth, uh, we won't be able to sin anymore. Otherwise, what's to say that there would we wouldn't just keep repeating the fall again and again? Heaven, fall, heaven, fall, heaven, fall. Right? So that was held out to Adam. Um not sure how to answer your question, to be honest. Uh Jesus was mutable in the sense that you know he had to, he became man, he had to grow in wisdom, stature, and favor before God and before men. He had to be perfected. Right? Hebrews talks about that. Uh, not in the sense that he had to move from a state of sinfulness to sinlessness, but he had to run the course of a human life, he had to fulfill his ministry, all of that. There's a way in which he was beautiful. Part of this gets into the conversation about the impeccability of Christ. Uh could Jesus have sinned? Uh I want to say no. Uh I think most in our tradition want to say no. The nature of that no is an interesting question. Uh, could he not sin because he was constitutionally incapable of sinning? Because there was something about the metaphysics of Jesus that made it impossible for him to sin? Maybe by way of his hypostatic union. I like to think of it, and you know, I'm not an impeccability expert, so take this with a grain of salt. I think it was more of a covenantal inability to sin, because Jesus was so dialed in and committed to his mission that it was just impossible to knock him off of it. And uh, yeah, you could say more about that, you can think more about that. But the fact of the matter is that regardless of how you answer questions like that, Jesus is clearly presented to us, Romans 5 and 1 Corinthians 15, as the last Adam who's come to do and to succeed, where the first Adam failed. Alright, so you know, thinking about this in terms of uh relevance, right? Some of you might be hearing about the covenant of works for the first time. Maybe you're not used to this sort of understanding of covenant works, covenant of grace. This stuff is really central to reform theology, the theology of the confession, of the theology of this church. Really, I think it's central to that because it's central to the Bible and the way the whole overview of the Bible works, like the through lines from beginning to end. But thinking about it, you know, what difference does this make? You can answer that question from you know whatever angle strikes you as most immediately relevant. What doesn't difference does it make theologically? What difference does it make doctrinally? What difference does it make personally, practically? How would you answer that question?
SPEAKER_02I think uh when I look for the covenant of redemption really helps uh confidence in prayer I've been gifted to the son, personally gifted to the son and the father helps me know that there's actually listening. Yeah, you know there's a real connection being that we want to father the father.
SPEAKER_06You understand, you understand the depth of the love, you understand the goodness of God, you want it it's not superficial. Jesus died for me, right? It's like yeah, and you're missing out on the depth and the breadth, and you really oh it's just you're missing out. You know, it's like going, it's like going to a steakhouse and you order a salad. Salad is good, but you're missing out on that, oh my goodness. And Genesis removes that.
SPEAKER_09Meaning rare filet.
SPEAKER_05Meaning rare filet, yeah. So don't you just miss it out. Go with that. Like the depth and the breadth. Um, and this is like a good connection point between doctrine and devotion. Because we as Protestants, we're all about that justification doctrine, right? We are justified by grace alone, through faith alone, in Christ alone, to the glory of God alone, which is revealed for us, and scripture alone is our highest authority. Your five solas right there. It's the justification. Well, you know, the doctrine of scripture was the formal principle of the Reformation, justification was the material principle. Right? Let's get the Bible back into a position of authority. And what does the Bible teach us? That we're saved by grace through faith and not by our own works. So the covenant of works, if you lose the covenant of works, if you lose this understanding we're talking about, you actually lose your doctrine of justification. And I'm gonna let RC scroll and convince you why. In this work of fulfilling the covenant for us in our stead, theology speaks of the active obedience of Christ. That is, Christ's redeeming work includes not only his death, but his life. His life of perfect obedience becomes the sole ground of our justification. It is his perfect righteousness gained via his perfect obedience that is imputed to all who put their trust in him. Therefore, Christ's work of active obedience is absolutely essential to the justification of anyone. Without Christ's active obedience to the covenant of works, there is no reason for imputation. There is no ground for justification. If we take away the covenant of works, we take away the active obedience of Jesus. If we take away the active obedience of Jesus, we take away the imputation of his righteousness to us. If we take away the imputation of Christ's righteousness to us, we take away justification by faith alone. If we take away justification by faith alone, we take away the gospel, and we are left in our sins.
SPEAKER_06Beautiful.
SPEAKER_05So yeah, we're not, you know, when we talk about this stuff, we're not just wrangling about like little doctrinal quibbles and oddities. We're not just upholding the minutia or the finer details of our doctrinal system. We are really getting at to at deep central truths that God has revealed in his word about how he relates to us, how we relate to him, and how when we broke that relationship, God sent himself to come and fix it. Not from afar, not just kind of reaching in and tweaking like he's working under the hood of a car, but the second person, the Trinity, actually becomes man so that he can fix our problem from the inside.
SPEAKER_09I see them running around Mount Juliet all the time, like you go, whoever you know. But imagine them having a fun for injury, and I've had those patients too, that he cannot, he or she cannot move from the neck down. Now imagine by grace alone, through faith alone, the Lord and April's going to run again. Can you imagine that person ever saying, Oh, I wish I would go back and be a total paralysis again? Can you imagine that ever happening? I think that's the way our wants would be so in tune with what God wants for us. It would be like somebody saying, Oh, I wish I'd be a paraplegic or whatever again. Just can't happen. Yeah. Just would not happen because the horror of not being able to move at all compared to being a young person in the health of their body, just trekking on down the road or a sidewalk or whatever. I mean, we that we have to think of very vivid metaphors to get into our imagination to understand what we're talking about.
SPEAKER_05And the covenant of works teaches us that we were made to run. That we were, you know, uh works righteousness is the default mode of every sinful religious heart, right? Uh our hearts are idle factories. Um we we tend to think of religion as the set of rules we keep in order to get right with God. Uh there's a deep truth hiding under a bushel of falsehood in that statement. Because we actually were created to know God and make him known. We were created to glorify and enjoy him. We were created to keep his rules because his rule is what establishes us and gives us perfect freedom. As paradoxical as that might sound. We were created for that. And so we, when we in our sin, you know, we still have this latent sense that there is a God, that he does reward people who trust in and follow him, and so I better get my act right. Uh that's not 100% wrong. What where it's wrong is we say, well, I'm gonna come up with how best to do that. So we're gonna suppress the truth about God and unrighteousness because of our sin, and we're gonna come up with an alternate truth. And we're either we're gonna find God in the creation, or maybe we'll find him somewhere up there in the stars, and we'll kind of adopt our best guess in a moral system, maybe our tradition handed down to us, whatever. That's where we go wrong. So again, what we need is Jesus as the incarnate God and perfect human being, the Adam to end all atoms, right? He comes to show us what humanity is in himself as the preeminent image of God in Colossians 1.15, but he also comes to restore humanity in that he lives as the perfect human. Again, keeps that covenant of works. And he shows us that because of our sin, you know, we're never we're not climbing the ladder. We're not gonna keep the rules, we're not gonna earn God's favor, we're not gonna earn God's grace, we're not gonna make it up the mountain to find God wherever he is. God actually has to come down the mountain, throw us on his back, and then carry us up. Again, that's that's what the covenant of works gives us. It gives us a biblical category, a set of biblical teaching that actually explains why that's the case.
SPEAKER_08Evan, close us out, man. Dear most holy and loving Father, we stand in awe of who you are, Lord. We stand in awe of your holiness and of your love and of your mercy and grace towards us, Lord. We confess, Lord, that we have not lived up to your holiness, or that we have sinned, Lord. And we thank you, Lord, so much that you have sent your Son, Jesus Christ, Lord, who conduit and took on human flesh and lived a perfect life and fulfilled a covenant of works, Lord, all so that we may be justified through him by or through him in our faith, Lord. We do thank you, Lord, that you have given us a pathway, Lord, to dwell with you forever. Lord, we uh ask that do it help this grace, Lord, help your grace help the work of Christ, and help our faith, Lord, to to motivate us, Lord, to live for you in all that we say, do, and think.
SPEAKER_07We pray these things, Father. Thank you very much.
SPEAKER_00All right, very so um uh big power one and cross and yeah, it's not gonna be hard.
SPEAKER_06He's gonna play the joke.