What Is Reformed Theology? with R. C. Sproul, Covenant, 6

The Covenant as the Framework of Reformed Theology

As we continue now with our study of the heart of Reformed theology, I want to turn our attention today to the concept of covenant. One of the frequent nicknames that we will hear used to define Reformed theology is the term covenant theology.

To be candid with you, I almost never use that designation, not that I'm opposed to it for any particular reason, it's just that I think it can be a little bit misleading because I think all Christians recognize that the concept of covenant is obviously front and center in both Testaments.

In fact, when we talk about the Old Testament and the New Testament, we are talking about the Old Covenant and the New Covenant, and we're all aware of the reality of covenant language that is sprinkled throughout the Scriptures.

We hear about lots of covenants in the Old Testament, the covenant that God makes with Noah with the sign of the rainbow in the sky, and the covenant with Abraham with the sign of circumcision, and the covenant at Sinai with Moses, and we hear of Jeremiah speaking about a new covenant, and we know that in the upper room when our Lord is celebrating the Passover with His disciples the night before His execution, He institutes the new covenant and speaks of the new covenant that it be in His blood, and so on.

And so we have this repeated motif of covenant in Scripture. But the reason why Reformed theology is often called covenantal is that because it sees the structure or format of covenant in the Bible as being a crucial element in which the whole plan of redemption works out and becomes kind of a key to understanding and interpreting the whole of Scripture.

And because of that, Reformed theology stresses this central motif of covenant as the framework in which redemption is carried out. And again, in theological categories and in terms of historic confessions, the Reformed churches have a tendency to distinguish among three chief covenants.

It's a general designation, but I want to take the time to look at these. The first is called the covenant of redemption, and the second is called the covenant of works, and the third is called the covenant of grace.

And what I want to do today is give a brief exposition of the distinctive characteristics of these three covenants. Now normally we think of a covenant as an agreement between two or more parties. We have covenants in our own culture.

In fact, the form of government that we have has been called historically a social contract or a social covenant that involves the consent of the governed, that there is an agreement between the government and the people, and that there are certain stipulations that define that relationship that we look to in the Constitution and the Bill of Rights.

We institutionalize and consecrate marriages today on the basis of covenants. Promises are made, and again, terms are agreed to and so on, and likewise they have the reality of the business covenant or the industrial contracts which are in the news all the time.

When labor and management are hammering out a new contract, what they're dealing with is a covenant, an agreement that imposes obligations on both parties and so on. Well, when we look at the biblical covenants, the first covenant that we delineate is not a covenant that directly and immediately involves people.

The Covenant of Redemption and the Trinity

The covenant of redemption is a theological concept that refers to the harmony and unity of purpose that has been in existence from all eternity in terms of the mutual relationship and agreement of all three persons of the Trinity.

It's that God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit are all agreed from all eternity in terms of bringing forth the work of redemption. We distinguish among the persons of the Godhead in terms of the specific tasks that are performed by them in the outworking of redemption.

We read in John 3 .16 that God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son that whosoever believes on Him would not perish but have everlasting life. Now the language of that text in John 3 .16 is significant.

We don't say, and the New Testament doesn't say, that Christ so loved the world that He persuaded the Father to forgive them of their sins. That is, the Father sends the Son into the world. The Son doesn't send the Father into the world.

It is the Father who designs the plan of redemption and who initiates the work of redemption by sending His only begotten Son into the world to perform His redemptive work as our Savior and as our mediator.

And in the Nicene Creed in the fourth century, the creed confesses that after Christ performs His redemptive work and He ascends into heaven, then together the Father and the Son send the Holy Ghost into the world to apply the work of Christ to God's people.

So the Father first sends the Son, and the Father and the Son together send the Holy.

Spirit.

Now this can be misleading because we know that the atonement, for example, is ascribed to the Son, not to the Father or to the Holy Spirit. And we know that the process of sanctification is assigned to the work of the Holy Spirit, not to the Father or to the Son.

However, it's not as if the Father and the Son are completely uninvolved in our sanctification. The whole of creation is a Trinitarian work, and the whole of redemption is a Trinitarian.

Work.

The whole personal dimension of the Godhead is involved in all of it. But the point for spelling out the covenant of redemption is to avoid the error that has occurred more than once in church history of thinking that the Father and the Son are at odds with each other and that the Son has to persuade this angry Father to turn away His wrath from the Son.

As if it weren't God's gracious idea, God the Father's idea in the first place, or the idea that Christ is performing His work grudgingly. He comes to Gethsemane, and He prays to the Father, let this cup pass from Me, but then goes on to say what?

Nevertheless, not My will but Thine be done. And it's not as if the Son says, okay, if I have to do it, I'll do it. But what He's saying is if this is what pleases the Father, then it is My meat and drink to do the will of the Father.

The whole point of the covenant of redemption is to show the complete unity and agreement in the Godhead itself from all eternity with respect to the plan of salvation. Now, when we get into the distinction between the covenant of works and the covenant of grace, that does engender a little bit more controversy.

The Covenant of Works and Adam’s Probation

But what is in view here is chiefly this. The covenant of works in Reformed theology refers to the initial covenant that God makes with man qua man, with Adam and Eve in paradise, where Adam is representing not just himself and his wife, but his progeny, all people.

He is Adam. He represents mankind. And God creates Adam and Eve and puts them in a situation of probation. He makes promises of blessing to them in the event that they are obedient and promises of judgment upon them in the event that they are disobedient, and He puts them to the test, as it were, saying that if you eat of the tree of knowledge of good and evil, you will surely die, and the day that you eat of it, you shall surely die.

That is, penalties are pronounced to the creatures in the event that they transgress the commandment of their Creator. Now that means that the destiny of Adam and Eve and their progeny is determined by their response to the law of God, by their behavior, by their work, and hence it is called the covenant of works.

God says if you do good works, you live. If you do bad works, you die. It's that simple. Now some people don't like the distinction between the covenant of works and the covenant of grace because they say, well, you know, God didn't even have to make a covenant at all with Adam and Eve.

The very fact that He stooped to enter into a personal relationship with them and gave them the opportunity for eternal life of blessedness in His kingdom was itself gracious. And I don't think there's really any dispute about that.

I mean, obviously God was not morally compelled to give away of salvation at all to His creatures, and we grant that even the covenant of works is rooted and grounded in God's eternally gracious character.

But what is meant by the distinction is that initially the terms of the relationship with God is set up with respect to obedience or disobedience to His law. And what happened was that Adam and Eve disobeyed.

They violated the covenant of works, bringing upon themselves and all whom they represented the judgment of God because the covenant of creation had been violated. Now, let me just take a second to give a little parenthesis here.

We understand that we live in a culture where there are all different kinds of competing religions and people who are secular and who have no time for religion at all, and they couldn't be less interested in the whole idea of covenant.

And people say to me, well, are these people in God's covenant? And I said, well, the question is first, are these people people? And if we answer that question, yes, of course, these people are people.

And then the next question is, well, when God made His covenant in creation, was it with a view to everybody in the world or just with two isolated individuals that lived in a pretty garden in Eden? Now, the biblical idea is that the covenant that God made with Adam and Eve was a covenant with all of the human race.

Now, people can deny that covenant, people can repudiate that covenant, people can despise that covenant, but what they can't do is get rid of it. They can't annul it. And one of the reasons why the Scriptures brings all of us before the judgment seat of God and pronounces us guilty before God is that all of us have broken His law.

All of us have done bad works. All of us have failed to keep the original covenant of creation. All of us have failed to perform what every creature's duty is to perform, to glorify God, to honor Him as God, to be grateful to Him, and to obey His law.

So the bottom line is that the whole world is populated by covenant breakers. Christ is sent into a world that is already guilty before the Father for breaking the Father's law, for violating the very terms of human existence, the very basis for human life as we were created before God.

And so that's what is meant when we talk about the covenant of works. Now, it is because the first Adam failed in the covenant of works, and God would have had every moral right on that occasion to do exactly what the terms of the covenant.

Promised.

He could have destroyed them and the whole race, and that would have been it. But instead He condescended to cover their nakedness and to promise them redemption through one who would act as their Savior.

The Covenant of Grace and Salvation by Faith

And so that God then at that point institutes the covenant of grace, which is given to Abraham, which is given to Moses, which is given throughout the Old Testament, the promise that God would redeem His people who were guilty according to the covenant of works, that He would save His people through another way.

Now, that's a critical thing because there are professing Christians today who believe that there is a fundamental difference between how God saved people in the Old Testament and how people are saved now or after the New Testament.

That despite Paul's laboring the point in the third, fourth, and fifth chapters of Romans, using Abraham as his illustration, that salvation was accomplished in the Old Testament by grace just as it is in the New Testament, and that Abraham was justified not by the works of the law but by faith in the promised Messiah.

The difference is the difference between promise and fulfillment. The people in the Old Testament look to the future promised Redeemer, put their trust in Him, and they were justified by faith in Him.

We look backward to the work that has been accomplished by the Savior. We put our trust in Him, and salvation is basically the same now as it was then. What's different is we have a much deeper understanding of the particulars and the details of it, and what is even more different is that it is a fait accompli, that the work of Christ has been already performed on the plane of history.

But once a person breaks the covenant of works, the only way he can possibly be restored to fellowship with God is by God's mercy, not by His justice, by His grace, not by our works. And this is crucial because we live in a day where people still entertain the idea that they can be saved in the presence of God by their own works, that they can still merit their way into the kingdom.

We don't really believe that we are debtors who can't pay our debts. We forget that the terms of the covenant of works were pretty stiff. They demand perfection, and if you sin once, there's nothing you can do to make up for that because once that blemish comes next to your name, what do you have to do to become perfect again?

You can't become perfect again because perfection doesn't allow for the slightest blemish, but of course when we come before God we come with a lot more than a slight.

Blemish.

We come with a radical kind of pollution before Him, and so this distinction between the covenant of works and the covenant of grace is really designed to shed clear light on the nature.

Of the gospel.

Now I'm going to say something that's probably going to confuse everybody. We've been talking about the doctrine of justification by faith alone, and it's only by grace that we're saved and so on. Now I'm going to say something that maybe you're going to choke on.

Justification by Christ’s Works Alone

In the final analysis, the only way any person is ever justified before God is by works. We are saved by works, and we are saved by works alone. Don't touch that now. Let me explain this please. When I say the only way we are saved by works is this, that the covenant of grace must be distinguished from the covenant of works, but never separated from it.

The covenant of grace is God's covenant that He institutes to ensure that the original covenant is finally kept, and when I say we are justified by works and by works alone, what do I mean by that? I mean that the grounds of my justification and the grounds of your justification are the perfect works of Jesus Christ.

We're saved by works, but they're not our own. That's why we say we're saved by faith and we're saved by grace, because the works that save us aren't our works. They're somebody else's work who submitted Himself at every point to the covenant of.

Works.

The New Testament describes Jesus as the new Adam. He is the new humanity who accomplishes what Adam failed to accomplish. By one man's disobedience, the world is plunged into ruin, and by the other man's obedience to the law of God in all of its demands and in perfect conformity, Christ redeems His people by winning the blessings promised, that God had promised to His original creatures in their behalf.

Now I'm saved by grace insofar as the work that saves me is not my own. I'm saved by works in the sense that the basis of my salvation is on the works of the perfect worker, the one who from all eternity was willing to assume the burden of God's creatures and was willing to come to this world to submit Himself to the terms of the original covenant of works and to fulfill it by His perfect obedience, and that God gives to His people all of the benefits of that work so that He gives to us all that Christ has earned and all that He is becomes ours when we place our trust in Him.

That's what we mean by the covenant of grace. It's not like the covenant of works is the Old Testament and the covenant of grace is the New Testament. No, the covenant of grace is working ever since the third chapter of Genesis, and it's all through the Old Testament and into the New because it is based upon God's free grace to needy sinners.