The covenant of works and the covenant of grace

A God who stoops to make promises

Reformed theology is often called covenant theology, because it reads the whole Bible as the story of the covenant God makes with his people. The Westminster Confession opens its chapter on the subject with a striking thought. The distance between the Creator and his creatures is so great that, although we owe him obedience as our Creator, we could never enjoy him as our blessedness and reward unless he came down to us. So the Confession speaks of "some voluntary condescension on God's part", which he has been pleased to express "by way of covenant" Westminster Confession 7.1.

So covenant is God's kindness from the first page. God owed Adam nothing, yet he bound himself by promise. The Reformed confessions speak of two great covenants: a covenant of works made with Adam before the fall, and a covenant of grace made in Christ after it.

The covenant of works

And the LORD God commanded him, "You may eat freely from every tree of the garden, but you must not eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil; for in the day that you eat of it, you will surely die."

Genesis 2:16-17

The Confession calls the first covenant "a covenant of works, wherein life was promised to Adam; and in him to his posterity, upon condition of perfect and personal obedience" Westminster Confession 7.2. The Shorter Catechism calls the same arrangement "a covenant of life" Westminster Shorter Catechism, Q. 12. Behind the warning stood a promise. As Matthew Henry puts it, there was "everlasting life made sure to him upon his obedience" Matthew Henry.

Does Scripture itself call this a covenant? Hosea says of Israel, "they, like Adam, have transgressed the covenant" (Hosea 6:7). The Hebrew adam (אָדָם) can also mean simply man, and Adam was also a town by the Jordan (Joshua 3:16), so some read the verse as about mankind or about a place. Many Reformed interpreters, though, read it of the first man. Matthew Henry does: "As Adam broke the covenant of God in paradise, so Israel had broken his national covenant" Matthew Henry.

Paul treats Adam as the head of the human race. "Sin entered the world through one man, and death through sin" (Romans 5:12), and Adam "is a pattern of the One to come" (Romans 5:14). The Shorter Catechism draws the conclusion: "The covenant being made with Adam, not only for himself, but for his posterity; all mankind, descending from him by ordinary generation, sinned in him, and fell with him, in his first transgression" Westminster Shorter Catechism, Q. 16. Adam stood for us. When he fell, we fell in him.

The name itself is not found in Scripture. Many historians trace the phrase "covenant of works" to Reformed writers of the later sixteenth century, and the Westminster Assembly made it part of a confession. The Heidelberg Catechism and the Belgic Confession confess Adam's creation and fall without using the term. Some Reformed theologians, such as John Murray in the twentieth century, preferred another name, the Adamic administration, because Scripture uses the word covenant chiefly for God's promises of redeeming grace. Yet Murray too taught that Adam stood on trial as the representative of us all. The debate is largely over how to name and describe this first arrangement; that Adam acted for the whole race is common ground.

The covenant of grace

Adam had hardly fallen before God spoke a new promise.

And I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your seed and her seed. He will crush your head, and you will strike his heel.

Genesis 3:15

The church has long called this the first gospel. Matthew Henry marvels that "no sooner was the wound given, than the remedy was provided and revealed" Matthew Henry. The Confession teaches that when man by his fall had made himself incapable of life by the first covenant, the Lord was pleased to make a second, "commonly called the covenant of grace". In it he "freely offereth unto sinners life and salvation by Jesus Christ", requires of them faith in him, and promises his Holy Spirit to all who are ordained to life, "to make them willing, and able to believe" Westminster Confession 7.3. The faith God asks for, he also gives.

God tells Abraham that he will be "your God and the God of your descendants after you" (Genesis 17:7). Jeremiah foresees a new covenant written on the heart (Jeremiah 31:31-34), and at the Last Supper Jesus says, "This cup is the new covenant in My blood" (Luke 22:20). How this one covenant of grace was administered through the ages is the subject of the next lesson, One covenant of grace in many ages.

The second Adam and the covenant of redemption

The two covenants set two men side by side, Adam and Christ.

For just as through the disobedience of the one man the many were made sinners, so also through the obedience of the one man the many will be made righteous.

Romans 5:19

Christ stood where Adam fell. He obeyed the law perfectly, and he bore its curse in our place: "Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law by becoming a curse for us" (Galatians 3:13). The covenant that is free to us cost him everything. The Larger Catechism says that "the covenant of grace was made with Christ as the second Adam, and in him with all the elect as his seed" Westminster Larger Catechism, Q. 31. Matthew Henry draws out the comfort: God's free gift "did not place them anew in a state of trial, but fixed them in a state of justification, as Adam would have been placed, had he stood" Matthew Henry.

Many Reformed theologians trace the covenant of grace further back, before creation, to an eternal agreement between the Father and the Son, which they call the covenant of redemption. The Father gives the Son a people, and the Son undertakes to redeem them. They hear it in Jesus' prayer: "I have glorified You on earth by accomplishing the work You gave Me to do" (John 17:4), and of his disciples, "They were Yours; You gave them to Me" (John 17:6). Paul says that God "chose us in Him before the foundation of the world" (Ephesians 1:4). Herman Witsius gave the doctrine a classic treatment alongside the covenants of works and grace Herman Witsius, The Economy of the Covenants. The Westminster Confession does not use the name, but it confesses that God, in his eternal purpose, chose and ordained his only Son to be the Mediator between God and man Westminster Confession 8.1. Some Reformed writers are cautious about calling an agreement within the Trinity a covenant; all confess that our salvation rests on the eternal love of the Father and the Son. In Matthew Henry's words, "The covenant of grace is from everlasting in the counsels of it, and to everlasting in the consequences of it" Matthew Henry.

Other traditions, and our comfort

The Particular Baptists of seventeenth-century England built their Second London Confession on Westminster, and they too confess a covenant of works and a covenant of grace. They stress that the covenant of grace was revealed step by step in the Old Testament until it was fully disclosed in the New, and so they give its sign, baptism, to those who profess faith Second London Baptist Confession. Dispensationalism, spread widely by the Scofield Reference Bible, organises history around a series of dispensations rather than the two covenants, and it keeps Israel and the church distinct as two peoples Scofield Reference Bible. The doctrine course's lesson on law and covenant sets these views side by side.

All this is not a cold scheme but a deep comfort. We do not stand before God on our own obedience, but on the obedience of the second Adam. In Adam we fell; in Christ we stand, not put on trial again but held fast by grace. Paul says it was all "so that, just as sin reigned in death, so also grace might reign through righteousness to bring eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord" (Romans 5:21).

Practice