The Covenant of Works

If you have your Bibles, you want to know where we're going, don't you?

Not James.

I've been thinking about what to preach through after going through James, and typically I I like going through Old Testament books than a New Testament book and back to an Old Testament book.

And sometimes after I get done through a series, I take the opportunity to preach through some topical messages that might be helpful.

And I decided as we transitioned from Luke of James to do a study, probably a three-week, week study on how to understand our Bibles.

It's kind of a bigger picture of understanding the history of redemption, how to understand how the Bible works together.

A lot of confusion comes into play because we have our Bible broken into two divisions.

We have an old covenant, an old testament.

We have a new covenant, a new testament.

And we grew up in church, we just take that for granted, but I once gave a Bible to a Romanian friend who had never read the Bible, never had a Bible.

And I was astonished that he had never read the Bible, so I went and bought one and brought one to him.

And the next day he came to me and he says, "Why are there two testaments?" I know you went to the content page and saw that the Bible's broken up into various books, but he saw that there were two major divisions.

He said, "What is the Old Covenant or the Old Testament?

What's this New Testament?" And it struck me that that's a huge question.

It's a very huge question.

It's not an easy answer.

You can't just go, "Well, okay, there's an Old Covenant.

a new covenant. And if you think about theology, most of the problems and controversies and denominational differences comes with misunderstandings or different understandings of how the Old Testament relates to the New Testament, how these two testaments are connected and their relationship with one another. It really comes down to how much continuity is there between the Old Testament and New Testament? Are they essentially the same? Or how much discontinuity is there between the two testaments? You who have a just a beginning understanding of the scriptures understand there's some things in the Old Testament that we don't practice anymore.

Why? Why can we eat all kinds of meats while the Jews in the Old Testament couldn't eat pork and other such meats? Why is that? Why was there circumcision and now there's no need to be circumcised? Why?

Why is that? Why are some rules applicable and demanded for a certain period of time and they no longer are demanded? Why is it in the Old Testament it was an eye for eye for an eye, tooth for tooth. Now Jesus says, "Turn the other cheek." Why is that contrast? Why is the difference? Well, basically it comes down to our understanding of covenant theology. And think about some, some people come and they have a greater discontinuity.

They want to separate the Old Testament.

And there are Christians, church of Christ, for the most part.

Practically they don't even look at the Old Testament.

Old Testament is all abrogated and almost completely in full.

Nothing to really learn from the Old Testament.

One famous evangelical preachers recently said we need to unhitch ourselves from the Old Testament.

But then you've got some, some cults that think the Old Covenant and Old Testament is essentially the same as the New Testament.

Have you ever heard of Zionism?

Zionism is, is applying every law of the Old Testament to the Christian and even going back and trying to implement the sacrifices again and the desire to reconstruct the temple going back to Judaism. So they're like, okay, the Old Testament, nothing has been abrogated. Everything is to be in play. So you have Psalm that says everything the Old Testament is done with, no need to read it, not much to learn from it, to basically let's go back to Judaism. And then there's everything in between.

There's all these different systems in between extreme discontinuity, extreme continuity. You have on the discontinuity side, you've got dispensationalism and historical premillionism. Then you get on more of the continuity side, you have your Presbyterian brothers and sisters. Why do they baptize their children? They baptize their children because they're implementing Old Testament circumcision, that the covenant that God made with Israel was made with believers in their children and they believe that that same paradigm is true of the New Covenant. And though the New Testament doesn't tell us to baptize our children, we're operating on the same paradigm that what was true in the Old Testament is still true in the New Testament. Therefore, we who are in the New Covenant, we baptize our children the same way the Jews would circumcise their children. So they're taking continuity.

taking these principles of the Old Testament and make an application to the New Testament age.

And that leaves all of us kind of wondering where is this balance and what guides us?

Is it a matter of just being balanced and is it a matter of us just saying, well, somewhere in between a total abandonment of the Old Testament and a total reception of it?

Well, that's what I want to cover for the next few weeks so we can have a better understanding of our scriptures, understanding the Word of God so that you can be better equipped to do your own study of scriptures.

And one thing I love about scriptures, scriptures is given to us in a way that I wouldn't have written the scriptures.

My mind thinks very systematically.

If I was going to give a document for us to learn from, I would give a catechism or I'd give a systematic theology book where all the various doctrines would be put in its neat categories.

Let's start with God, and everything we need to know about God would be placed in a particular section.

Then I would go, "Okay, let's learn about man," and I'd talk about man, and I'd have all these real neat, tidy definitions.

and let's talk about salvation.

Let's talk about the church, you know, and I would organize holy scriptures if I was the author of it.

I'd organize it in such a way it'd be very clear, very organized, very doctrinally, very systematically.

But God is smarter than I am, and He has given us His word through a period of 2,000 years through history and development, and He's given us through a story.

And we've got to remember the Bible is a story, it's a narrative.

It's God's interaction and intervention in humanity.

And to understand the history of redemption or the narrative of the Scriptures, you can't understand the narrative of Scriptures if you don't understand the key covenants of Scriptures.

Think of covenants as the kind of the mal markers, the main emphasis of the story has these particular moments that are hugely important to understand the story that you have these covenants that God made. The first covenant He made with Adam and Eve. Then He made a covenant with Noah. Then He made a covenant with Moses and the Israelites. No, He made a covenant with Abraham. Then a covenant with Moses and the Israelites. Then He made a covenant with King David. Then we have the greatest of all the covenants is the new covenant. So you have these malmarkers, covenants.

And the key, an understanding of the history of redemption, of the story, of the narrative of scriptures is understanding these covenants and how they interact and relate to one another and how they build upon one another and ultimately seeing the continuity between one covenant and the other covenants and also seeing the discontinuity, how they're different.

And for us to understand the story of Scriptures and the Bible, there's one covenant we have to grasp that is the foundation of the Bible.

It's the covenant that if you don't understand this covenant, none of the various covenants, and let me say the various covenants, I'm going to say there are ministrations of the ultimate covenant.

And so you got the covenant God made with Abraham and Moses and David.

Those are administrations.

Those are important covenants, but those covenants are rooted in one major covenant.

The Bible calls it the Everlasting Covenant, a covenant that cannot cease to exist.

It's a covenant that is the foundation of the story, the foundation of the Bible.

And I'm going to talk to you about it this morning so that we can be rooted and grounded in this covenant.

I understand what this covenant is.

The name of this covenant is the Covenant of Works.

Now you may have thought I was going to say the Covenant of Grace.

That's the covenant that we live in.

Thankfully we're saved by grace, not by works.

But we can't understand the Covenant of Grace, the covenant, the new covenant that we live in. It's grace, all of grace, not by works that were saved. But we can't understand the covenant of grace, the new covenant, if we don't understand the covenant of works. Because the covenant of grace we will see is built on the fulfillment of the covenant of works. It's built on the covenant of works. If there's no covenant of works, there's no covenant of grace. If there's no covenant of works, there's no gospel. There's no salvation. Without the covenant works, there's no law.

There's no death. There's no life. You can essentially say the whole Bible comes undone.

If the Bible is not laid on top or built off of this ultimate covenant, this great covenant, covenant of works. So my thesis for this message is that the covenant of works is foundational.

It's foundational to our thinking, foundational to scriptures. And if we don't lay our understanding of scriptures on top of this covenant of works and our understanding of proper understanding of the covenant works, we're going to make some grave errors in our thinking and our interpretation of Scriptures. So I have three points. One, there is no law. Now think about how important the law is to Scriptures. There's no law without the covenant works. Two, there's no death without the covenant works. And three, there's no gospel or salvation. There's no gospel.

And we think about the law gospel distinction, the importance of not confusing the gospel with the law or confusing or conflating grace with law.

But we've got to understand that both law and grace and the life and death that flows out of that are built on this covenant of works.

So where we're headed to today, we're going to look at the covenant of works.

week we're going to look at the Abrahamic Covenant, then the Mosaic Covenant, and then the New Covenant.

So we're going to kind of do a broad overview of the major covenants of Scriptures so that we can see how the Old Testament and New Testament work together and fit together.

But we begin with the covenant works in Genesis chapter 2.

Genesis 2 · chapter mention

So that's where I want you to turn, Genesis 2, particularly verses 15 through 17.

We'll see here that God made a covenant of works with our federal head, Adam.

God entered into a particular relationship with him.

In verse 15 it says, "The Lord God took the man and put him in the garden of Eden to work it and keep it.

And the Lord commanded the man, saying, 'You may surely eat of every tree of the garden, but the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat it, you shall surely die.'" Now like a lot of people want to take Genesis and say it's a myth, it's just a story.

this is not a historical reality, the whole Bible falls apart. Everything falls apart if this is not historical truth, literal truth that God made Adam, put him in a garden and entered into a covenant with him. Now for us to see the importance of the covenant of works and this covenant that God made with Adam. We need to understand that there is no, first of all, there's no law without the covenant works. In this first point, we want to answer these four questions. What is the law? Now that sounds very simple, but we're going to try to answer that. Second, we're going to answer what is a covenant. Third, what is the covenant works? And fourth, what an administration of the covenant works. So if you're taking notes in this first point, those are the four headings, the four subheadings. What is the law? What is the covenant? What is the covenant works? And what is an administration of the covenant works? So we start with asking the most basic of all questions of scriptures is what is the law? And scriptures would define the law as the standard of righteousness.

Anything that comes short of it is sin. It's a moral standard of perfection or holiness.

But to understand the moral law or the law, we need to be able to differentiate between the moral law and positive law. So this is a different sermon. This is put your thinking caps on. This is you're in, you're in with the professor here. So here's a category we have to be able to differentiate between. And then they often get conflated is thinking law is just law.

No, there are distinctions within the law and there's the moral law and then there's positive the law. Now both of them are good. Both of them are holy. Both of them are right, but they're not identical. The moral law, when we say the moral law, that is something that's absolute and changeless. The moral law is absolute and changeless because it is the very reflection of the relationship between the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. That God is holy and he's the standard. God did not, when he gave us a law, he didn't do like this, like the school teacher says, "Hey, what kind of rules do I need?" And they're making up rules.

You know how it is, you have three rules and you realize you need four, then, "Okay, I need a ... No, don't do that." So he's just adding to them. That's the way our government does, you know, just add and keep on adding. God is not kind of playing it by ear, trying to figure out what could keep us in check. He didn't look outside of himself to figure out what's a good cold, what's a standard of morality. God looked to himself, he is holy and he says be holy as I'm holy. The standard is his own nature. He's a God of love. He's a God of righteousness. He's righteous. He's loving and everything he does is right and pure. And so he's basically setting himself as the standard of what he expects from man. Be like I am. Be holy. Be perfect.

As your heavenly Father is perfect. So it's an absolute law that it's not situational.

It never changes. There's no time period where it can't be true or inactive. It transcends It was before time because it was with God in the Trinitarian relationship.

And when God made Adam and Eve, he says, "This is the basis of your own conduct.

Be like I am.

Love God and love your neighbor as yourself." That is the standard.

And that'll be the standard when we get to heaven.

It doesn't go away.

It's not anything that can be altered or changed.

So it's transcendental.

It's timeless.

It's the very thing that is written on our conscience.

So the moral law is written on our conscience.

We know how to treat others because we know how we want to be treated.

It's the golden rule.

It's self-evident.

So it's universal and it's applicable to all people.

And it's all people underneath this law at all times.

Now that's the moral law.

Now there's another thing built off the moral law, the moral law is the foundation, but it's called positive law because they're commands that take the moral law and make particular time-sensitive application to it.

It may not be a universal command for everybody, but it's a time-sensitive command based on moral law for a particular circumstances or situation. I'll give you some examples of positive law. Parents, you make all types of positive laws for your children, especially your younger children. You tell your children don't play with the light socket because they're little and they don't know what they're doing and especially don't put anything in that light socket. You could hurt yourself. So you tell a little kid not to stick anything in the light socket. But as that child matures, that particular law is slowly taken away.

And to the point they can plug in things when they're older and more mature. But you told them not to do so, not because you hate them, and not because you're just making silly rules up. It's because you love them and under the particular setting and circumstances that it's built on love, don't hurt yourself. So listen to me. You don't understand, but you have to obey. And if you disobey and put something in the last socket, you've sinned. But see that law is not universal and it's not meant to be transcendental. It's not something we're going to worry about in heaven, but it's an application of the moral law that can be abrogated.

Does that make sense?

And so God made all kinds of moral, positive laws in the Old Testament like don't eat pork.

And He had a reason for that and the reason was something good and it was a moral, based upon the moral law and it had a purpose.

But we understand that that law is not something that has to transcend even to the New Testament.

We can go ahead and have barbecued pork.

the Lord. So, you know, basically if you're a teacher in a classroom, you're putting together positive laws. Don't stand on the desk, you know, don't eat your homework. You know, all these things that are built on something good, but they can and cannot apply in every situation.

Think of civil authorities. There are all kinds of positive laws that governments enact upon their people. And they're good under the situation and circumstances. The difference between positive laws and moral law is that the positive laws of Scriptures are the ones that God has given. God is the one who's enacted positive law in the Old Testament. You know, And one of the positive laws is in our text, do not eat of this particular tree, the tree of knowledge of good and evil.

You and I are not under that prohibition, are we?

We don't have to worry about breaking that one.

The tree's not here.

I don't even, the tree doesn't exist.

So we're not going to be able to break that law because that doesn't apply to us.

However, it did apply to Adam and Eve and it was built upon the moral law.

And if you broke that, if you broke the positive law, I want you to see this.

If you break the positive law, you break the moral law.

If the positive law is inactive and still enforced, as long as the positive law is applicable and inactive, to break it is to break the whole law.

So if you eat, you broke all the commandments.

Because the positive laws are built on moral law, there is truth in value in learning from the positive laws even if they're still not inactive today.

We call it the general equity of the law.

That though we're not under it anymore, we can still learn from it and learn truth by it even though we're not particularly bound to it.

For example, the Bible says in the Old Testament it gave a pause of law to a particular people for a particular time setting do not muzzle the ox.

And that is not something we in the new covenant are obligated to follow through.

We're not bound to that pause of law.

However, we can be like the apostle Paul and say, hey, that pause of law not muzzling the ox has truth in it because it's built on the moral law and we can apply that to pastors and taking care of your pastors. There's a principle that if someone's working, they shouldn't be muzzled. They should be able to eat from their labor. There's a general principle, the general equity, something that you can learn from that. So we can look at some of these Old Testament moral positive laws, these positive laws that have been abrogated or done away with, and still learn from them and learn truth from them. But it doesn't mean that we're going to strictly bind our conscience to these positive laws.

So we see that there's a difference between moral law and positive law, but now we're going to have to figure out what hermeneutical skills or God rails do we have to determine what is the moral law, that which is universal, absolute, transcendental that goes in eternity past will go into the eternity future based upon the very character and nature of God.

And what are these positive laws that are built off of that, that are time sensitive and that are given to particular people in particular circumstances?

Now we think about God's law and we're thinking about the importance of the law and I'm making the point that there's no such thing as law outside the covenant of works. We've got to understand God's law is the very requirement for life. You can't understand life without law. The Bible says in Romans 6 23 the wages of sin, the penalty of sin, is death. Do this and live, right, as long as you're doing as long as are righteous, you live. But if you sin or you break the law, you die. Proverbs 11 19 genuine righteousness leads to life, but the pursuit of evil brings death. Romans 2 6 says he will render to each one according to his works to those who by patience and well-doing seek for glory and honor and immortality. He will give eternal life, but those who are self-seeking and do not obey the truth, but obey unrighteousness, that is disobedience, there will be wrath and fury.

So to understand the law, we've got to understand that that's what brings life.

Without righteousness, there's death.

And death and life are concepts that is important for us to comprehend because death and life is something that the biologists and the scientists can't define. It's a theological term, not a scientific term. Biology can give you attributes of life, you know, movement, reproduction that can respond to stimuli. You know, they can give you a definition of the, some of things that characterizes life, but they can't tell you what life is.

You know, they talk about animation or something that has power, but they can't explain life.

It's because life has to be understood as Christ.

Christ, I am the way, I'm the truth, I'm the life.

Christ, God is life.

You can't understand life without understanding God.

And so life, having life is having communion and relationship and union with God.

He is, he's the only source of life.

There's no two life sources.

You know, you have life only because you derive it from God.

We live, move, and have our being in Him.

So God is life.

And you've got to understand what is death.

Death is not just non-existence.

Death is being separated from God.

being alienated from God. Death is scary because it's not non-existence. Death is scary because it's being pushed out of the presence of God and being left alone to yourself. And so how do you have life? You have to have righteousness. Sin, just the smallest amount of sin leads to separation from God and death. So this is what, understand this, you have to understand the law. Now, secondly, we understand what is a covenant. What is a covenant? Well, a covenant is a legal contract. You know, you've got Old Testament, New Testament, basically testament is just another word for covenant. So you've got two covenants, two major covenants.

So you've got an old one and what makes the old covenant old?

What makes the new covenant new?

You know, what is a covenant?

What's a testament?

A testament is a legal binding document.

A covenant is a legal binding contract.

It includes legal oaths and promises.

Our covenant has two major ingredients, promises, it's going to promise to bless you or promise to curse you, and conditions.

Every time you go buy a new car or go get a loan for a car, you're entering into a covenant.

You're entering into a contract.

If you get married, you're entering into a contract or a covenant.

And it's not just when you're signing your name to something, you're making a promise.

You're making an obligation.

And you've got conditions.

And so the bank is making promises to you, we're going to give you this money and you're going to be good standings with a loan on the conditions that you make your monthly payment.

But if you fail to meet your conditions, the terms of the contract, then the contract will be made dull and void.

And then there's going to be penalties, penalties for breaking it.

And so that's what a covenant is.

a contract, a legal arrangement between God and man.

In other words, a covenant is a legal terms of a relationship with God.

This is my definition of a covenant.

A divine covenant is a legal contract that stipulates the conditions of enjoying a relationship and life with God.

And I know what some of you may be thinking because this is the people, big argument in theology is like I don't, surely God doesn't operate on such legal binding and harsh and unloving type of terms.

I mean, is he going to, I mean, think about as a parent, it's like, okay, kids, here's your contract.

You know, think about signing a contract with your kids.

I'll be a good dad and I'll be, I'll provide for you, but you've got to, oh, you've got to clean your room.

You know, and if you don't, you know, you don't think of entering into contracts with your children.

And you think, why would God enter into contracts with His children?

I'm talking about before the fall when we were the children of God, before we were alienated.

Why would God enter into a contract with His image bearers?

So a lot of people want to fight against the fact that God wouldn't enter into a covenant with Adam and Eve before the fall. Well, we're looking at it wrong. Like the marriage covenant.

There's nothing more beautiful than a covenant arrangement for a relationship.

Tell your fiancé, "Hey, I just want love to be enough." No, I want to swear. I want to enter into a lasting binding arrangement to be faithful to you. And so that's what God is, thinking about what God is doing for us, He is promising. And the Bible says in Hebrews, since He didn't have anything greater to swear on, He swear on Himself. And He's, I mean, God, think about how stable and certain that covenant is on God's side. Aren't you grateful that God has made us a, not just promise, a legal bonding promise. I will do this and I will not relent. I will not go back. I will not be unfaithful. I am a faithful person, but you don't have to trust my faithfulness.

I put my faithfulness in ink. I am making an oath. I swear to you. So that is, that is, it is a covenant, a legal relationship, terms for a loving relationship. I will be faithful to you. I will love you. I will care for you. I will do all these things. I will bless you. I'll give you life. You see, but that covenant also required something of us.

That's why we read the text. I put them in the garden and gave them responsibilities, that Adam had to do certain things himself.

But the point I'm making at this point is that the difference between the moral law, and the moral law has almost all the ingredients of a covenant.

Moral law says do and live or don't, you know, be cursed.

But a covenant is made with a federal head.

You see, when God entered into a covenant with humanity, he didn't make it with me or you.

We weren't there.

He made it with a representative on our behalf.

He made it with the one standing as the federal head or legal representative of the human race.

It's kind of like a father making a contract that includes his whole family.

He represents the whole family.

And so he goes to the bank, the wife doesn't have to be there with them.

The children don't have to be with them.

He's making an arrangement and he represents the family.

Well, Adam was the father of the human race.

And so he represents the whole human race.

And God says, I will enter into a contract, a covenant with you.

And he represents us all.

And that's why the Bible says in 1 Corinthians 15 too, when Adam sinned, we all sinned.

When he died, we all fell.

I mean, he brought us all down with him because he represented us.

Romans 5, 12 says that sin entered into the world through one man and death through sin.

So we all died in Adam.

So God gave the law to Adam and entered into a legal binding covenant with him.

And this covenant was a covenant not of grace.

Some would argue that the covenant that God entered into Adam was a covenant of grace.

If it was a covenant of grace, it wouldn't be death.

It was a covenant based on conditions, promises of life if he would kept those conditions, but death if he broke those conditions.

Now my last little differentiation, I know there's a lot to process, to understand the difference between the covenant of works, which is built on the law itself.

So wherever you see the law, you see the covenant of works and administration of that covenant of works.

Administration is a time sensitive arrangement.

So member positive law is time sensitive.

Administration of a covenant is going to have a beginning point and a completion point.

You go again, borrow money from the bank, it's time sensitive.

You know, you pay your monthly bill and if you're on time, hopefully in three years or four years or five years or however long the arrangement is, when you're done with your last payment, the contract can be ripped up.

It's no longer valid.

It's no longer enforceable.

It's done with.

It's either fulfilled or it could be broken.

Now there's two ways to get out of a contract.

You know, if you get a marriage contract, there's two ways to get out.

And properly it's to be death do your part.

At death you don't have the covenant arrangement into eternity.

The covenant arrangement is over.

You're not bound to that in eternity in heaven.

So there's one way to fulfill it, and you fulfill the covenant arrangement until death do you part, or you can break the covenant through divorce.

And that is the worst way to bring the covenant to null and null is through divorce.

So a covenant arrangement, an administration is a time-sensitive arrangement that takes the moral law, which is not time-sensitive, but then adds positive law.

and the cause of law is the particular arrangement. And for the Adamic covenant was the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. So that tree would have been there forever as long as Adam and Eve wouldn't have sinned. And they could have enjoyed all the other tree, the tree of life. They could eat from that and they had had all the access to the garden in the presence of God. The garden represented being in the temple in the presence of God. You had all the blessings of that arrangement. You get life, you get all these things. But if you break it, you get pushed out. And so that covenant arrangement, in one sense, the administration was broken as soon as Adam and Eve ate from the forbidden fruit. And so administration, understand of any covenant, the administration of covenant works, has an expiration date.

So as we think about our first point that without the covenant of works there's no law, to understand the law, the moral law, we really need to understand how it's made in a given in covenant form.

time the law is given to us. If we see the law given in Genesis 2, we see it given in Exodus 20. The two major places the law is given. The law is delivered to us in covenant form made with federal heads, if you would. So God does not enter into any relationships outside of law and outside of covenant law. So that's my first point. Second point, just as there's no law without the covenant works, there's no death without the covenant works.

The Adamic covenant is not an administration. So some people say the Adamic covenant, their covenant arrangement, the contract God made with Adam and Eve is not an administration of the covenant works. They reject that. And the biggest reason they reject that is because they say read Genesis 1, 2, and 3 and the word covenant is not mentioned. And so because the word covenant is not mentioned, they want to dismiss this arrangement as a covenant works. And so they'll say the covenant works is an extra biblical human construct imposed upon the scriptures to justify a particular theological system. So they would make that charge. But I'm going to try to answer that charge. I want to say no, the covenant works is inherently in Genesis 2. In fact, you can't understand Genesis 2 without seeing this covenant of works arrangement.

Because this objection is based upon the word concept fallacy.

Just because a word is not there doesn't mean the concept's not there.

I'll give you an illustration of that.

You know, tomorrow when we'll meet seven o'clock at night at the park, bring your balls and your baseballs and your bats, be ready to exercise.

We're going to divide up into two teams and we're going to play.

Everybody here knows I'm talking about baseball, though I did not use the word baseball.

All the ingredients of baseball is there, and I don't have to use the very word to describe baseball for you to know that we're talking about a baseball game.

Well, if you have all the ingredients of a covenant in Genesis 2, conditions, curse, blessings, life and death. If you have all the ingredients of a covenant arrangement, you don't, you have to use the word covenant. You know, also we know that Adam and Eve were sons of God because other passages tell us that Adam and Eve were sons of God, but we don't see the phrase the sons of God in Genesis 1, 2, and 3. So you don't have to have the very word in a text to not be able to see that the concept is there. First of all, the Adamic arrangement or the Adamic covenant is conditional.

In Genesis 1, we go back to that, it says in verse 26, "Then God said, 'Let us make man in our own image, after our likeness, and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the birds of the heavens, and over the livestock, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth. So God created man in his own image. In the image of God he created him. Male and female he created them. And God blessed them. And God said to them,"Be fruitful, and multiply, and fill the earth, and so do it, and have dominion." So here we have responsibilities, the purpose of humanity. God made man for a reason. And we all know that He made man to glorify Him. He made them into the image to live holy lives. But they had a particular purpose, to go and take dominion, to do the world and to cover the world. And they needed to be fruitful and multiply in order to carry out that task. Because the ultimate goal and objective of the human race as image bearers of God and to bring glory to God, they were to fill the world with the knowledge and the glory of the Lord. That was the objective.

And it's still the objective, still the grand goal of why God created us is to fill this goal with His righteousness and with His knowledge and with His glory and with His majesty. That's the objective. So God made man for that very reason. He says, "Now you go do this. You've You've got responsibilities.

You're not here just to have fun.

You're not here just to play around.

You've got responsibilities to have communion with God and to be representatives of God as you take dominion and rule over the earth and all over the creatures and so do it and also be fruitful and to multiply.

But that's, and that's based upon the moral law.

understand that the moral law that's transcendental is undergirding this arrangement, holiness and purity. But then God took that moral law and added positive law. We see that in our text, verse 15 of chapter 2, "Lord God took man and put him in the garden of Eden to work it, to keep it, and the Lord God commanded the man saying, 'You may surely eat of the tree of the garden, of every tree of the garden. Here's the blessings. But of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat. So that's the condition. You've got condition, do not disobey me. And here's the threat, you know, is a promise, blessings, and a threat, curses. The day you eat it, the day you disobey this positive law is the day you broke the moral law and the day you die.

The day you do this is the ... you shall surely die. Now you can't read this and go, "Oh, that's a covenant of grace." It's not a covenant of grace. It's a covenant based on the law, works, conditions, promises of blessings if you obey, promises of death and curses if you disobey. And this covenant covenant arrangement was made with a federal head. You and I weren't there, but we were there, not physically, but we were there with a representative. You know, it's just like you're an important man and you can't make it to the bank, so you have a legal representative go on your behalf and they can sign for you, because you can't do this stuff like so. You got someone, and when they're there and they sign your name, it's as if you were there and you sign your name. So though you and I did not live 6,000 years ago, you and I were there.

We were there. We had one who represented us. And his name was Adam. He was our legal head, a federal header. And the Bible tells us in Romans 5, 12, and we know what he did.

We know the end of that story. He fell. He ate. He disobeyed. And of course, Romans 5 tells us,"Therefore just as sin came into the world through one man, death through sin entered." It goes on to say, "If many died through one man's transpasses." It also says that judgment follows one trespass brought condemnation to us all. One trespass led to commendation for all men it says in Romans chapter 5. So here we see that we entered into a covenant arrangement with God.

Romans 5 · chapter mention

This relationship of life was based upon perfect righteousness and Anani have brought death. See, the covenant is a covenant of works because it was broken.

Genesis 3, 6 tells us in the next chapter, "So when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was a delight to the eye, and that the tree was to be desired to make one wise, she took it and ate, and she also gave some to her husband, who was with her, and he ate.

Then their eyes, I mean this is when they died, then the eyes of both were open and they knew that they were naked. For the first time they felt embarrassment and shame.

So they sinned and all of a sudden they felt embarrassment and then that's why when God came they went and hid themselves. They run from God. Rather than being friends with God, sin made them run from God. And the man has been running from God ever since.

And Hosea 6, 7 tells us, like Adam, talking about the nation of Israel, like Adam, they have transgressed the covenant.

That is telling us that this is a covenant arrangement that was transgressed by Adam.

And this brought death and a curse to the whole human race.

What did God do after Adam and Eve sinned?

He brought the devil, the serpent, Eve and Adam, and lined them up like a parent will line up their kids.

It starts lecturing all the kids.

That's what God did to all of them.

Genesis 3.8 says, "And they heard the sound of the Lord"God walking in the garden in the cool of the day.

"And the man and his wife hid themselves"from the presence of the Lord"and among the trees of the garden.

"But the Lord God called to the man and said to him,"Where are you?" And he said, "I heard the sound of you in the garden and I was afraid because I was naked and I hid myself." And he said, "Who told you that you were naked?

Have you eaten of the tree which I commanded you not to eat?" The man said, "That woman you gave me, she gave me the fruit of the tree and I ate." So God turns to the woman.

What do you think she does?

Then the Lord said to the woman, "What is this that you have done?" And the woman says, "Thy snake." So the blame is going shifting.

And we see that God is about to turn and He starts with the snake and says, "I'm going to judge you." And then He turns to the woman, "I'm going to judge you." And He turns to the man, "I'm going to judge you." Now we'll get to how he judged the snake in a little bit, but he told the woman, you know, you had a particular role to play.

Man was to take dominion, be fruitful, multiply, but it's not good for man to be alone and he can't carry this out himself.

He needs to help me.

You're to be there to help him carry out this mission, this purpose statement.

And now this role that you were given to be fruitful and to multiply and to bear children, now you're going to still have to do that.

They're not released from that command, but now that command is going to have a curse on it.

It's going to be through much pain and suffering and hardship.

It's going to be a hard thing to bear children.

And then he turns to the man and says, "Your role was to take dominion and to cultivate the earth, but you still got to do that, but now it's under the curse of the earth.

It's going to be through thistles and thorns and the sweat of your brow." Isaiah 24 verse 5 talks about that.

Isaiah 24:5

The earth is also polluted by its inhabitants, for they have transgressed the laws, violated statues, broke the everlasting covenant.

Therefore, a curse devires the earth and those who live in it are held guilty.

Therefore, the inhabitants of the earth are burned and few men are left.

So this covenant arrangement, the covenant of works made with Adam and Eve, given with the administration of the endemic covenant, has been broken and it's brought a curse and death upon the whole earth and the whole human race.

Women now are under that curse.

No longer do they willingly, eagerly, and happily submit to their husbands.

No longer are they able to have children without much pain and hardships.

Men are under the curse.

They have to labor with the sweat of their brow.

They have to do the work, but it's gonna be that altogether more difficult.

In fact, in reality, impossible.

Do you understand the Garden of Eden was a perfect environment and now man has to cultivate the earth to make it look like the Garden of Eden, but it will not be done?

Man cannot, fallen man cannot do it under the curse.

It's just impossible.

Have you noticed you who have gardens that weeds grow much faster and easier than plants?

It's like you don't have to cultivate the weeds.

You don't have to cultivate sin.

You have to cultivate righteousness, but not sin.

The curse comes easy and natural and it's plaguing the whole world.

In fact, if you look around us, we're under that curse everywhere you look.

We see the judgment of God upon the world.

Ultimately though, the penalty of breaking the covenant works is death.

It's not just sweat and hardship and labor, it's death, the loss of communion with God.

There's three phases of death, but the ultimate phase already happened.

There is spiritual death happening in the garden.

There's physical death when you and I physically die.

Adam and Eve lived for eight, nine hundred years physically, but they were dead spiritually.

It's the spiritual death that brings physical death, and the spiritual death that brings physical death will ultimately bring eternal death. That's being thrown into the lake of fire, eternal judgment. Yeah. So there's three forms of death, but that spiritual death sets the chain of death into action. And so we all died in Adam and we're dead in Adam and some of you go, I don't like that. That seems like it's not fair for me to be judged for someone else's sin.

I don't know if any of you feel that way. Like it's just not fair. You mean I'm going to have to pay for Adam's sin? That's not fair. I didn't commit that sin. Well, you have to look at it this way to make sense of this. It's not as if on the day of judgment, God's going to pull you and say okay you lied five billion times, you've still ten times, you know lusted an infinite amount of times. You know, you know he's not going to start adding up your sins and go oh by the way I forgot I want to add Adam's sin to your account and you know you've got to pay for that one too.

That's not the way it's going to be on the day of judgment. You see there's really two judgments.

There's two judgments. I mean there's multiple judgments. Every day we see the wrath of God being revealed, so we're under the judgment of God. But there's two bookend judgments, two major judgments in history. There's the judgment that's already passed in the Garden of Eden.

That's what God did when he set Satan, Adam, and Eve and line them up. He entered into judgment with them. Now there's the last-day judgment that you and I will have to face on the day of the Lord to this second coming. There's a last-day judgment, but there's that judgment in the garden. And that judgment, we've already were there. It's not like Adam's sin is going to be brought to our account on the future judgment. No, we were judged in Adam, and here's the penalty of that death. So when Adam died, everything that can come from someone who's spiritually dead, all the offspring from someone who's already spiritually dead is death. Adam cannot produce living spiritually alive children. So we died spiritually in Adam. That's why the Bible tells in his Ephesians that we're born dead in our trespasses and sins. We're born already alienated from God. We don't become alienated after we sin. We're born into this world already alienated, already dead, already separated from God. And because we're already separated from God and do not have the life of God in us as a child in the womb coming out, we're coming out speaking lies, the Bible says, we come out with depravity as our nature.

And that is the penalty of the first judgment. And we're living under the sentence. We're already sentenced and we're already living under that penalty and we're walking dead people until we find life in Christ.

But then there will be a future judgment that will be held accountable if we don't know the Lord, will be held accountable for all the sins that we actually have done in our bodies.

So the point is that we can't understand the law without understanding the covenant works.

And secondly, we can't understand death outside of the covenant works.

He said, "Well, God wouldn't enter into a relationship with His children." Yes, He did.

Or otherwise it wouldn't be hell.

It wouldn't be death.

God is a holy God.

And God can't have a relationship with anything that is less than holy.

He's too holy and too pure to look upon sinners and sin and enjoy them and have a felt, right?

relationship with them. So this is why we're all spiritually dead. Again, this basic concept of the covenant works is paramount to understand the gospel and understand our Scriptures.

And it leads me to my final point, and we're almost done. You can't understand the gospel.

You can't understand what Christ did, why Christ had to come if you don't understand covenant works. The covenant works is the foundation of our salvation. You said, "Well, I don't like the covenant works. I don't like the federal headship principle being judged in Adam." Well, how about being made righteous in Christ? How do you like that federal headship?

I like that one. You know that you don't do anything and the righteousness of a representative does it all on your behalf. You see, just as one person died, Romans 5 says, we've all been made alive in Christ. He does it. And you know, and this, you know you're saved by works. You're saved by the covenant of works. You're saved by the fulfillment of the moral law. The moral law is the foundation of the covenant of works, and that is what saves you? You couldn't be saved without the law being satisfied and fulfilled? The thing is this is the gospel, it's not you who doesn't. It's not like Jesus comes and saves you and He just say puts the law aside and say hey that doesn't matter. That original arrangement that God made with humanity, I'm just going to leave that aside and I'm just going to save them another way. You know there's only one way for salvation to take place. If there You know, it could have been another way that Hebrew says he would have used animal sacrifices or he could have done some other way, but there had to be only one way and it had to be a man from us, the seed of the woman.

And that's when I get back to Genesis 3, 15 and 16 where God, before he judged Adam and Eve, before he brought condemnation, he gave us the gospel.

In fact, He gave us the gospel in the very words of condemnation of the serpent.

And He looked at the serpent, you know, He didn't give the judgment.

He started with Eve, and then went to Adam, and then went to the serpent.

But it's not the judgment didn't come until He pronounced it first on the serpent, and He went back that way.

On the serpent, He says, "The seed of the woman is going to crush your head.

You're going to bruise his heel, but that child that comes from the woman.

See the child that has to be someone who comes, who doesn't have the, this is why the incarnation and the immaculate conception is so important.

You have to have someone who is from Adam and Eve, who's a human, who's born in that covenant arrangement, but doesn't have death, doesn't have the penalty of that.

So you needed someone who is without sin that didn't come from Adam, but yet is a part of the human race come from Eve so that he can undo what Satan did, crushed the serpent's head.

And you know, Christ didn't come to do away with the law.

He didn't come to do away with the covenant works.

Matthew 5, 17 says, "Do not think that I've come to abolish the law or all the prophets.

I come to, not to abolish them, but to fulfill them.

You see, Christ obeyed the law.

Not only did he obey all the moral law and the positive laws of the Mosaic covenant, he obeyed everything, but he also suffered the penalty of the law on our behalf.

Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law by becoming a curse for us as it is written, is everyone who hangs on a tree, Galatians 3 13. 2 Corinthians 5 21, "God made him who knew no sin to be sin on our behalf, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God." Think about all the curses. The day you do this, you should surely die. And all that that entails, all that that death implies, and that's what happened on the cross. Christ entered into that death. He entered into that curse so he could satisfy it.

Peter 3 18 for Christ also suffered once for sin the righteous for the unrighteous that he might bring us to God being put to death in the flesh but made alive in the spirit isn't this wonderful how the covenant works is fulfilled in Jesus Christ remember the the endemic covenant says go be fruitful and multiply and to do the earth what do you think Jesus Christ is doing right now first Corinthians 15 says he must reign until he brings all things into subjection. He is currently so doing the world unto himself and he started by conquering Satan and putting Satan underneath his foot. Now he's ruling and reigning and so doing the world and you know what else he's doing? Adam and Eve was to be fruitful and to multiply and fill the world with the people of God.

He is, according to Hebrews chapter 2, he is through his suffering and through his life and resurrection, he is bringing many sons and daughters to glory.

Hebrews 2 · chapter mention

See he's bringing children back to God, not through carnal generation, not through procreation, but through regeneration.

It's through a new heart, a new life.

I mean, he is bringing the children of God back to God where they will one day fill the earth and bring the knowledge and the glory and majesty of God and covers the earth as waters cover the sea.

So he's doing this.

So you're saved by works, but it's not your works.

It's the works of Christ.

The covenant of grace, which is, we'll talk about the new covenant at the end.

We see the covenant of grace is actually the everlasting covenant being satisfied.

So think of the covenant of grace as not possibly in existence outside of the covenant works.

So the covenant works is the very foundation of the gospel.

It's the very foundation of our salvation.

It's the very foundation of life.

And we see that covenant given at the very beginning, and that is the foundation of how to understand the Scriptures.

That's the regional covenant.

Next week we'll go into the covenant that God made with Abraham.

And we'll see that the Abrahamic covenant was also an administration of the covenant works that promised the fulfillment of that covenant in Jesus Christ.

Let's pray.

Dear Lord, we want to understand how the Old Testament relates to the New Testament, how our Bibles fit together.

And we understand that you have these key covenants that unite the Scriptures together, the story, the story of redemption, the narrative of the Bible.

What a glorious story it is, how it all comes together.

There is unity with the beginning, with the end.

There is a division between the law and grace, but we also see how the grace of the gospel comes out of the fulfillment of the law in the person of Jesus Christ.

What a glorious truth.

Help us to appreciate what you've done for us in our Savior.

Jesus' name we pray.

Amen.

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