If you’ll please turn with your Bibles. We will be moving around a little bit this morning, but we’ll begin at Genesis chapter 2, verse 15.
The Lord took the man and put him in 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 the day that you eat of it, you shall surely die.’
From there, we turn probably only a page to chapter 3, beginning at verse 14. The Lord God said to the serpent, ‘Because you have done this, cursed are you above all livestock and above all beasts of the field. On your belly you shall go, and dust you shall eat all the days of your life. I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your offspring and her offspring. He shall bruise your head and you shall bruise his heel.’
From there we turn to the prophet Jeremiah chapter 31 beginning at the 31st verse. The prophet writes, ‘Behold, the days are coming, declares the Lord, when I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and the house of Judah, not like the covenant that I made with their fathers on the day when I took them by the hand to bring them out of the land of Egypt. My covenant that they broke, though I was their husband, declares the Lord. For this is the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel after those days, declares the Lord. I will put my law within them, and I will write it on their hearts, and I will be their God, and they shall be my people, and no longer shall each one teach his neighbor, and each his brother, saying, ‘Know the Lord.’ For they shall all know me, from the least of them to the greatest, declares the Lord. For I will forgive their iniquity and I will remember their sin no more.
This is the word of the Lord. Thanks be to God. Let us pray.
Heavenly Father, your word is a book of grace. A book which tells us of your grace and mercy. And it helps us to understand the mercy that you have given us in our lives. Help us to hear your word and learn to respond to all that you have done with faith and love. In Jesus name we pray. Amen.
So I have previously said that everything in scripture and in life revolves around the biblical covenants. The Lord has chosen to relate and engage with both his creation and his specially chosen and called people through this means of covenant. They provide us with a systematic framework to understand our redemption that’s purchased by Jesus Christ and to teach us how we should respond to God’s grace, mercy, and love.
Rightly understanding these covenants and how they are expressed across scripture helps us to understand our worldly concerns, to apply biblical truth to them, and respond to them in a manner that is faithful to Jesus Christ and which glorifies our father in heaven. This framework, which we call covenant theology, helps us to rightly live within our present world and live in a manner that consistently shows forth the love and mercy of Jesus Christ through our works, our words, and activities.
Covenant theology is a biblical theology, meaning that it’s not just derived from isolated or distinct portions of scripture, but is a whole Bible theology. And although each of these covenants have an eternal institution and character, they are or were revealed at specific times in history. And they were given to specific groups of people, whether to all of humanity or to God’s elect alone.
Each biblical covenant was given through a particular mediator who is acting on their behalf. And this divinely chosen mediator was invested with authority to act fully for those whom they represented, to agree on their behalf, to make commitments on their behalf, and to receive something on their behalf.
Now, we might argue from within our sinfulness that if we did not choose our mediator, then we should not be bound to their decisions or actions. But each mediator was chosen perfectly by the Lord for us. Now that doesn’t mean that each mediator was perfect, but that simply they were the perfect mediator for us according to God’s sovereign plan.
So just as we did not choose Adam, we also don’t get to choose Christ. Rather, we are chosen by God and given to Christ as his treasured possession, with whom he has graciously chosen to share his divine inheritance. So if we believe that the Lord God is everything that he says he is here in scripture, then we must admit that no one could have chosen a better mediator for us.
The Westminster Confession of Faith describes this framework of covenant theology by explaining the distance between God and the creature is so great that although reasonable creatures, thinking people owe obedience unto 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.
Then it outlines the two broad covenants that God has instituted, saying the first covenant made with man was a covenant of works wherein life was promised to Adam and in him to his posterity upon the condition of perfect and personal obedience. And that man by his fall, having made himself incapable of life by that covenant, the Lord was pleased to make a second, commonly called the covenant of grace, wherein he freely offers to sinners life and salvation by Jesus Christ, requiring of them faith in him that they may be saved, and promising to give unto all those that are ordained unto eternal life his Holy Spirit to make them willing and able to believe.
And this covenant, the covenant of grace, was differently administered in the time of the law and the time of the gospel. Under the law, it was administered by promises and prophecies and sacrifices. All these things delivered to the people of the Jews, all for signifying Christ to come. And that’s called the Old Testament.
Under the gospel, when Christ the substance was exhibited, the ordinances in which this covenant is dispensed are the preaching of the word and the administration of the sacraments of baptism in the Lord’s supper. And that’s called the New Testament.
So there are not two covenants of grace, but one of the same under different administrations. Taking a closer look at these covenants, these two, we will examine how they continue to explain and inform life’s present challenges and questions.
First, considering the covenant of works with Adam, that covenant was revealed near the conclusion of God’s creative work after the Lord formed the man of dust from the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living creature. But this was before he created Eve.
And the Lord God at this time commanded the man, saying, ‘You may surely eat of every tree in the garden, but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for the day that you eat of it, you shall surely die.’
So we need to remember that Adam was the only human person in existence at this moment. He was the only person able to act as our mediator and receive this covenant on behalf of all humanity. But it is also important to note that while Adam did not specifically agree to this covenant, he did accept it. He could not negotiate terms, nor could he refuse the Lord because God is the universal suzerain and Adam was his created vassal.
And so the Lord graciously imposed this covenant on Adam for his and our good benefit out of love for this creation that he called good. Now, there are several details and elements concerning this covenant that we will return to later.
Our present focus today, though, is on God’s command to Adam. God gave Adam permission to eat from every tree of the garden except for one. God only prohibited Adam from eating fruit from one tree out of innumerable countless options. And then God defined a penalty for his potential disobedience, that being death.
And by defining a penalty for disobedience, the opposite is implied as the reward for obedience: life. And so now Adam entered into a probationary period, a period without a defined duration, which makes sense and is good because it wasn’t long before Adam transgressed that one single divinely given statute. He sinned and disobeyed God, justly earning the penalty of death for himself and all humanity.
But neither Adam nor Eve died on the day when they disobeyed God, at least not physically. Instead, the mercy of God was applied to them as the covenant of grace took immediate effect. And God showed his mercy here by sacrificing an animal to provide a covering for their bodies, giving its life for theirs as an atoning death that paid for the preservation of their lives.
And then they were cast out into exile and separated from the life-giving presence of God. That since God the Lord is true and perfectly just, after he proclaimed the sanction of death for disobedience, that penalty was required to be immediately enforced as he said it.
But that doesn’t mean that it must be in our expected way because remember at this moment death was still unknown. And God is the one who gets to define things. And we now understand death as having four kinds of dying that cover the totality of what God warned Adam.
There’s a biological death that was promised, the death that everyone will die barring Christ’s return beforehand. There’s a judicial death, where the state of original righteousness was lost to Adam and transformed us into sinners. There’s a moral death, which caused our nature to become corrupted and which now causes us to sin.
And finally, there is the eternal death that is found in the punishment of hell and is experienced by the reprobate. So when Adam transgressed God’s covenant, we also transgressed God’s covenant. Adam’s sin cost both him and us our original righteousness. It corrupted our good nature and made us sinners.
And Adam died a judicial death and a moral death that day while his biologic death was delayed. And humanity along with him was given a gracious stay of execution. Adam broke God’s covenant, but it was not annulled or avoided, and the covenant of works still remains in effect.
But if Adam, our covenant mediator, did not satisfy that requirement on our behalf, and if we are now not capable of satisfying that requirement, then we are utterly without hope of gaining the life that was promised. We have no hope for ourselves because we have no hope in ourselves unless someone else can satisfy that requirement on our behalf as a righteous substitute.
So the elect, we must rely upon the divinely promised benefits of the covenant of grace. Benefits that we receive through faith alone and is received from Jesus Christ, the second and last Adam, the mediator of a better covenant.
So next we turn and we consider the covenant of grace. And although God’s covenant of grace and their evidence for it and its impact are found across the entire Bible between Genesis 3 and Revelation 22, the very first expression of it in scripture is Genesis 3:15, where the Lord told Satan, ‘I will put enmity between you and the woman and between your offspring and her offspring, and he shall bruise your head, and you shall bruise his heel.’
This first promise of grace is a prophecy describing how a particular descendant of Eve, her offspring, shall bruise Satan’s head while Satan will bruise his heel. And regardless of Adam and Eve’s immediate, their personal expectations and hopes about who this offspring might be, there’s three elements to this prophecy that are key to understanding our redemption.
This offspring would not be her offspring, not Adam’s. He would not be Adam’s inheritor, nor his natural son. He would not possess Adam’s sinful and corrupted nature. Adam would have no authority over him, and he would have no responsibility towards Adam. He would be like Adam with no natural and earthly father.
But he would also be unlike Adam because he would have a mother. And this offspring would be the same child spoken of by the prophet Isaiah. Behold, the virgin shall conceive and bear a son and shall call his name Emmanuel, a son without a natural father, the woman’s offspring.
Second, he would bruise Satan’s head. It’s the location of this bruising which signifies his triumph over Satan, signifying Satan’s ultimate defeat and absolute inferiority. But his heel would be bruised by Satan in turn. The location of that bruising signifies him suffering a terrible injury, a grievous and even incapacitating one, but not a defeating one.
So these three elements describe someone to come who would be like Adam but much greater. They describe someone who would do what Adam failed to do and achieve what Adam failed to achieve.
Now, this prophetic promise and their exile from Eden was still an act of God’s grace because they did not deserve mercy. They didn’t warrant it because they had just confessed their guilt in defying and disobeying God’s command. But God still made this promise. He still gave them clothing to wear for their protection. And he still preserved their lives.
And all they had to do was respond with faith in God, to believe and trust his word and live as he had already commanded them. So according to God’s covenant promise, they were saved by grace through their response of faith in the Lord.
Next, we consider Noah, another mediator for humanity like Adam. Now Noah, he lived during a time of global wickedness and corruption. The people were so bad that the Lord regretted that he had made man on the earth and grieved to his heart. Yet Noah found favor in the eyes of the Lord.
So the Lord graciously told Noah, ‘I have determined to make an end of all flesh, but the earth is filled with violence through them. Make yourself an ark of gopherwood. For behold, I will bring a flood of waters upon the earth to destroy all flesh in which is the breath of life under heaven. But I will establish my covenant with you, and you shall come to the ark: you, your sons, your wife, and your sons’ wives with you.’
So here, by grace, God chose to save the man Noah, a righteous man, blameless in his generation, a man who walked with God, extending divine mercy to Noah’s whole family. But they were not saved because of Noah’s work, but rather according to God’s covenant promise. They were all saved by God’s grace through Noah’s response of faith because he trusted and believed the Lord by building the ark just as he was commanded.
Then we move to Abraham who was called by the Lord to leave the home of his father and the land of his people, where by grace alone the Lord promised to give him a homeland and make him into a great nation to bless him and make his name great and that all the families of the earth shall be blessed through him.
Therefore, since he believed God, Abraham went, and his response of faith was counted to him as righteousness. The Lord made and confirmed a covenant with Abraham and his offspring to give them a land, to be their God, and for them to be his chosen people.
So trusting God’s covenant promise, Abraham faithfully obeyed God and even accepted the sign of circumcision as marking God’s chosen people. Later, when the Lord remembered another promise he had made to Abraham to rescue his descendants from bondage, God sent Moses to Egypt.
And the Israelites responded in faith. They heeded his command to put lamb’s blood on the doorpost that first Passover Eve, and according to God’s covenant promise, they were delivered from slavery. Then they faithfully followed Moses through the wilderness to Mount Sinai, where the Lord revealed his holy law to them.
And this law is what we now know as the old covenant, the older formal administration of this covenant of grace. And contained within this law is the moral law, the universal law that humanity is obligated to obey.
The same moral requirement and standard of perfection is demanded by the covenant of works. There’s the judicial law, the law which governed civil justice and the Israelite social order, and the ceremonial law, the law which governed the right practice of religion. It explained how corrupted sinful creatures should live lives of holiness as befits God’s chosen people who are made in his image, and also how our sin may be graciously atoned for.
So like the covenant of works, this administration of grace also promised life for perfect obedience. But through the impossibility of keeping the moral law, the need of defined sanctions for every possible kind of transgression, and by providing a means for substitutionary atonement, this law presupposes our need for God’s grace and mercy.
The law already expects and teaches us that we need a substitute. We need a better last Adam, the one who was first prophesied in Genesis 3. Because the law was not given so that we could achieve perfection and live by our works, but to prove our utter lack of capability in doing so. The law was given to show us how, according to God’s promise, that we might be saved by his grace through our response of faith and trust in the Lord through faith in Jesus Christ.
Around 800 years later, the prophet Jeremiah prophesied and proclaimed a systemic change in God’s covenant was coming. He declared, ‘Behold, the days are coming when I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and the house of Judah, not like the covenant I made with their fathers. I will put my law within them, and I will write it on their hearts, and I will be their God, and they shall be my people. For I will forgive their iniquity and I will remember their sin no more.’
He proclaimed a change in the administration, prophesying about a coming new covenant which we know as the gospel. And then we come to Jesus of Nazareth, born of the Virgin Mary, fulfilling Isaiah’s prophecy and making him truly the woman’s offspring.
Jesus understood and explained God’s law in full. He lived a sinless and perfect life as the last Adam, so that as in Adam all die, so also in Christ shall all be made alive. He offered himself up as our, as your and my substitute by giving his life in our place and for our sake, dying and rising again for us so that we no longer need to fear the final death or the divine wrath that follows God’s condemnation.
And lastly, he regenerated us, filling us with his Holy Spirit, writing his law upon our hearts and producing a desire to obey and keep it. That is why we believe that according to God’s covenant promises, by his grace alone through our response of faith, belief, and trust in Jesus Christ who is the greater Adam and mediator of a better covenant.
That is why we are saved for his sovereign purposes and glory. Because Jesus’s perfect obedience to God’s law is accounted as our obedience, justifying us before the Holy Lord. And Jesus’s triumph over Satan and sin is accounted as our triumph, redeeming us and restoring us to a state of righteousness.
And Jesus’s resurrected life will be accounted to us when we’re raised with him in glory, imperishable. And that is what the Lord has done for us. These are God’s eternal covenant promises graciously given for his chosen people.
But knowing and believing this, how do we know and discern what is the proper response of faith? Truly, the ultimate questions for our life application are: if we already know Jesus and we have faith in him, then how do we obediently live out of that faith? How should we respond to all the many questions and challenges that the world places before us and which we are forced to engage with since we do remain within the world even as we are set apart from the world?
The means for discerning answers to those questions is why this whole foundation of covenant theology has been laid. This biblical theology tries and endeavors to be consistent because the Lord is perfectly consistent and unchanging in his nature and will.
Which makes us confident that the covenant of grace was never intended as plan B. It was always plan A. It’s God’s only plan. And rather than nullify, replace, or override the covenant of works, this covenant of grace incorporates it into itself and completes it instead.
And these two separate administrations of the old and new covenants remain in harmony together as one single covenant of grace because their whole focus is on Jesus Christ. The old covenant looked ahead to Christ and his work through all those ritualistic types and shadows while the new covenant looks back to Christ and his work by proclaiming and explaining everything that he has done for us.
So to understand what this means for us and for our faithful response, we have to consider what Jesus plainly taught. When asked, ‘What is the greatest commandment?’ Jesus replied by quoting the law of Moses and summarized the whole moral law, answering, ‘You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and all your mind, and you shall love your neighbor as yourself.’
His answer reminds us that although he’s satisfied our obligation to the law for our justification, our required obedience remains in force for the purpose of holiness.
And while teaching upon the Mount of Olives, Jesus prophesied about a time to come, a time of tribulation when the Jerusalem temple would be defiled and destroyed and the Jewish nations scattered and ended. And this prophecy was partly fulfilled in 70 AD with the destruction of the temple and more fully in 135 AD after the Bar Kokhba revolt when the remaining Jews were all forcibly removed and Jewish Jerusalem was transformed into the Roman city Aelia Capitolina, ending the need for Israelite civil law.
And when Jesus taught specifically about the Mosaic law, he said, ‘Do not think that I have come to abolish the law or the prophets; I have not come to abolish them but to fulfill them,’ affirming the relevance and validity of the old covenant.
But he also implied that a time was coming when their function, their ritualistic function, would rightly cease. A time when the requirements of the old covenant would be fulfilled, accomplished, and completed. And so Jesus ruled the ceremonial law complete as he died, crying out to tell us, ‘It is finished.’
So we understand that our right and faithful response to all things should be mediated through God’s continuing moral law. As summarized by Jesus, we faithfully respond by acting out of our love for God and by our love for our neighbors.
But what is love? How are we intended to love? Jesus tells us, ‘A new commandment I give you, that you love one another just as I have loved you. You also are to love one another. And greater love no one has than this that someone lay down his life for his friends.’
This means we should love like Jesus, how the Lord has loved us, and remember that the greatest expression of love is found through acts of self-sacrifice. Of course, since God has been just and fair through his discipline of us, we also need to be fair in our dealings with others.
But since we prefer to receive mercy rather than the fullness of justice that we deserve, then we must also be gracious and merciful towards everyone. God was merciful to us first so we need to be merciful to others, and God gave us grace first so we need to give grace to others without expecting any grace in return.
That is how the Lord God Jesus Christ has shown his great love for us. So that’s how we must show our love for others. We must give God what he is owed, our faithful response of obedience. And we should give others what they do not deserve, mercy and grace. We should be willing to sacrifice for their good benefit and for the glory of God.
So now understanding how we can discern a faithful and biblical Christ-honoring response to our various questions and circumstances, there are three questions we must learn to ask scripture and allow their answer to direct our response.
How may I love the Lord best in relation to this? How may I love my neighbors, those within the church, best in relation to this? And how may I love my neighbors who are outside of the church best, those who still belong to the world, in relation to this?
Whenever we are seeking answers to those questions, we should always try and consider both the Old and New Testaments, what they have to say on the matter. But sometimes they don’t both speak directly to an issue, especially with many of our modern problems.
And when that happens, we need to find something similar, related, or analogous in scripture to use and inform and guide our interpretations. And lastly, we must remember when doing this that because God’s word is the only truly consistent thing, our interpretations and assumptions must not contradict anything that it plainly declares.
And so we will be using this framework over the next several weeks to examine and better understand what scripture has to say about several of our modern problems and challenges. And then we will use our understanding to help us craft better and more faithful and more loving responses for God’s glory. Because that is how we live the Christian life. Amen.