Keeping Covenants

I used to labour under the misapprehension that God has made a covenant of grace with me and that I am living to keep that covenant. I believed I had a personal relationship with the Living God in which He offered to me the means of salvation, and that my part of the covenant between us was to receive and then serve Jesus Christ. It was so nearly right that it was close to fatal. The truth is that there have only ever been two types of covenant - the law and grace. Each covenant was made with a single person in whom rested all the interests of any progeny who might eventually issue from them.

Adam, as the federal head of all humanity (even though they were as yet unborn), served God under the covenant of works. If He obeyed God explicitly in all points at all times down to the most exquisite of details, then God would remain his sovereign companion and provider. Adam willfully failed to keep his end of the agreement and, as a result, we live in a world of darkness and sin. All of Adam’s children are born in darkness - already lost and already dead in trespasses and sins because, outside of obedient fellowship with God, only sin is possible. As God Himself put it in describing people even before the flood, "Every imagination of the thoughts of men’s hearts was only evil continually."

But didn’t God make a new covenant with Abraham and then with Israel through Moses? Not really. He reaffirmed His original covenant with Adam to some of Adam’s descendants. It was the same covenant. It was the covenant of works. It required obedience to the immutable law of God in dizzying detail and with the most severe of penalties for failure. Not one person in all of Israel ever kept that covenant and, if one reads Romans, one sees that none ever could because they were already fallen, broken, dead, impotent, rebellious and perverse. That is why God gave the ritual sacrifice and why that sacrifice was going on so abundantly and continually. Adam, as their representative of the covenant, had already decided their status, their condition and their abilities. But the sacrifice was the harbinger and the promise of coming grace.

Jesus Christ is the only other man with whom God ever made a covenant. It was a new covenant – the covenant of grace – the new covenant in His blood. The only man that would ever keep the original covenant was the God/man Jesus Christ. God swore by Himself, since there was nothing greater by which He could swear, that He would redeem His people. God covenanted with Himself in the person of Christ, since there was no other who could live by the terms of the agreement. The new covenant extended to - it covered - all of those who were latently in Christ, who would later be revealed, who would spring from His spiritual loins, who were contained (through God’s election) in the mystery of His redemption.

Just as surely as all who sprang from the fallen Adam were (apart from His elective grace) forever dead in trespasses and sins - so all who are born again in Christ are alive in Him forevermore. As one who is saved, I benefit from God’s covenant with Christ - it is extended to cover me – I am included - only because I was in Him already at the time, waiting to be revealed. He undertook to be the representative of all who would believe because of Him. But God’s covenant of grace is not with me - it is with Christ - extending to all His seed, just as all the terms and effects of God’s covenant with Adam extended to all of his seed.

So – it is not that I considered a proposal of God’s in which the rights and duties of both sides were laid out, and then agreed to it by signing on for eternity at the time of my acceptance of Him. This is the modern gospel - the gospel of man’s rights before God, and of his “response-abilities” to God - the gospel of man’s ability to perform his end of the bargain. It is the gospel that many lambs have been led to by two centuries of preaching and teaching which ignore sound doctrine in favour of a belief in human power. It is the pint of poison in the ocean of truth. Let me, once for all, understand that God’s covenant of grace is made with Christ – not me - and that I am included only in Him, and only because the Father has given me to Him out of love. This is the true meaning of grace - that while we were still sinners Christ died for the ungodly , and lost not one of those whom the Father had given unto Him.

I do not live under the covenant of grace as if it were possible of myself to perform the duties that entitle me to the benefits. Rather, I live by grace as beneficiary of Him Who kept the covenant of the Law in order to receive and to impart the covenant of grace to His people.