How does God relate to man? Since the creation of the world, God’s relationship to man has been defined by specific requirements and promises. God tells people how he wants them to act and makes promises about how he will act toward them in various circumstances. The Bible contains several summaries of the provisions that define the different relationships between God and man that occur in Scripture, and it often calls these summaries “covenants.” ‘With respect to covenants between God and man in Scripture, we may give the following definition: A covenant is an unchangeable, divinely imposed legal agreement between God and man that stipulates the conditions of their relationship.
Although this definition includes the word agreement in order to show that there are two parties, God and man, who must enter into the provisions of the relationship, the phrase “divinely imposed” is also included to show that man can never negotiate with God or change the terms of the covenant: he can only accept the covenant obligations or reject them. Probably for this reason the Greek translators of the Old Testament (known as the Septuagint), and, following them, the New Testament authors, did not use the ordinary Greek word for contracts or agreements in which both parties were equal (syntheke), but rather chose a less common word, diatheke, which emphasized that the provisions of the covenant were laid down by one of the parties only.
This definition also notes that covenants are “unchangeable.” They may be superseded or replaced by a different covenant, but they may not be changed once they are established. Although there have been many additional details specified in the covenants God has made with man throughout the history of Scripture, the essential element at the heart of all of them is the promise, “I will be their God, and they shall be my people” (Jeremiah 31:33; 2 Corinthians 6:16).
Some have questioned whether it is appropriate to speak of a covenant of works that God had with Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. The actual word covenant is not used in the Genesis narratives. However, the essential parts of the covenant are all there, a clear definition of the parties involved, a legally binding set of provisions that stipulates the conditions of their relationship, the promise of blessings for obedience, and the condition for obtaining those blessings. Moreover, Hosea 6:7, in referring to the sins of Israel, says, “But like Adam they transgressed the covenant”. This passage views Adam as existing in a covenant relationship that he then transgressed in the Garden of Eden. In addition, in Romans 5:12 – 21 Paul sees both Adam and Christ as heads of a people whom they represent, something that would be entirely consistent with the idea of Adam being in a covenant before the fall.
In the Garden of Eden, it seems quite clear that there was a legally binding set of provisions that defined the conditions of the relationship between God and man. The two parties are evident as God speaks to Adam and gives commands to him. The requirements of the relationship are clearly defined in the commands that God gave to Adam and Eve (Genesis 1:28 – 30) and in the direct command to Adam, “You may freely 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 die” (Genesis 2:16 -17).
In this statement to Adam about the tree of the knowledge of good and evil there is a promise of punishment for disobedience, death, most fully understood to mean death in an extensive sense, physical, spiritual, and eternal death and separation from God. In the promise of punishment for disobedience there is implicit a promise of blessing for obedience. This blessing would consist of not receiving death, and the implication is that the blessing would be the opposite of “death.” It would involve physical life that would not end and spiritual life in terms of a relationship with God that would go on forever. The presence of the “tree of life . . . in the midst of the garden” (Genesis 2:9) also signified the promise of eternal life with God if Adam and Eve had met the conditions of a covenant relationship by obeying God completely until he decided that their time of testing was finished. After the fall, God removed Adam and Eve from the garden, partly so that they would not be able to take from the tree of life “and eat, and live forever” (Genesis 3:22).
Other covenants in Scripture generally have an outward “sign” associated with them (such as circumcision, or baptism and the Lord’s Supper). No “sign” for the covenant of works is clearly designated as such in Genesis, but if we were to name one, it would probably be the tree of life in the midst of the garden. By partaking of that tree Adam and Eve would be partaking of the promise of eternal life that God would give. The fruit itself did not have magical properties but would be a sign by which God outwardly guaranteed that the inward reality would occur.
As in all covenants that God makes with man, there is here no negotiating over the provisions. God sovereignly imposes this covenant on Adam and Eve, and they have no opportunity to change the details, their only choice is to keep it or to break it.
Is the covenant of works still in force? In several important senses, it is. First of all, Paul implies that perfect obedience to God’s laws, if it were possible, would lead to life. We should also notice that the punishment for this covenant is still in effect, for “the wages of sin is death” (Romans 6:23). This implies that the covenant of works is still in force for every human being apart from Christ, even though no sinful human being can fulfill its provisions and gain blessing by it. Finally, we should note that Christ perfectly obeyed the covenant of works for us since he committed no sin (1 Peter 2:22) but completely obeyed God on our behalf (Romans 5:18 -19).
On the other hand, in certain senses, the covenant of works does not remain in force: (1) We no longer are faced with the specific command not to eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. (2) Since we all have a sinful nature (both Christians and non-Christians), we are not able to fulfill the provisions of the covenant of works on our own and receive its benefits, as this covenant applies to people directly, it only brings punishments. (3) For Christians, Christ has fulfilled the provisions of this covenant successfully once for all, and we gain the benefits of it not by actual obedience on our part but by trusting in the merits of Christ’s work. In fact, for Christians today to think of themselves as obligated to try to earn God’s favor by obedience would be to cut themselves off from the hope of salvation. “All who rely on works of the law are under a curse. . . Now it is evident that no man is justified before God by the law (Galatians 3:10 – 11). Christians have been freed from the covenant of works by virtue of Christ’s work and their inclusion in the new covenant, the covenant of grace.
Theologians speak of another kind of covenant, a covenant that is not between God and man, but is among the members of the Trinity. This covenant they call the “covenant of redemption.” It is an agreement among the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, in which the Son agreed to become a man, be our representative, obey the demands of the covenant of works on our behalf, and pay the penalty for sin, which we deserved. Does Scripture teach its existence? Yes, for it speaks about a specific plan and purpose of God that was agreed upon by the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit in order to gain our redemption.
On the part of the Father, this “covenant of redemption” included an agreement to give to the Son a people whom he would redeem for his own possession (John 17:2, 6), to send the Son to be their representative (John 3:16; Romans 5:18 -19), to prepare a body for the Son to dwell in as a man (Colossians 2:9; Hebrews 10:5), to accept him as representative of his people whom he had redeemed (Hebrews 9:24), and to give him all authority in heaven and on earth (Matthew 28:18), including the authority to pour out the Holy Spirit in power to apply redemption to his people (Acts 1:4; 2:33).
On the part of the Son, there was an agreement that he would come into the world as a man and live as a man under the Mosaic law (Galatians 4:4; Hebrews 2:14-18), and that he would be perfectly obedient to all the commands of the Father (Hebrews 10:7-9), becoming obedient unto death, even death on a cross (Philippians 2:8). The Son also agreed that he would gather for himself a people in order that none whom the Father had given him would be lost (John 17:12).
The role of the Holy Spirit in the covenant of redemption is sometimes overlooked in discussions of this subject, but certainly it was a unique and essential one. He agreed to do the will of the Father and fill and empower Christ to carry out his ministry on earth (Matthew 3:16; Luke 4:1, 14, 18; John 3:34), and to apply the benefits of Christ’s redemptive work to his people after Christ returned to heaven (John 14:16-17, 26; Acts 1:8; 2:17-18, 33).
When man failed to obtain, the blessing offered in the covenant of works, it was necessary for God to establish another means, one by which man could be saved. The rest of Scripture after the story of the fall in Genesis 3 is the story of God working out in history the amazing plan of redemption whereby sinful people could come into fellowship with himself. Once again, God clearly defines the provisions of a covenant that would specify the relationship between himself and those whom he would redeem. In these specifications, we find some variation in detail throughout the Old and New Testaments, but the essential elements of a covenant are all there, and the nature of those essential elements remains the same throughout the Old Testament and the New Testament.
The parties to this covenant of grace are God and the people whom he will redeem. But in this case Christ fulfills a special role as “mediator” (Heb. 8:6; 9:15; 12:24) in which he fulfills the conditions of the covenant for us and thereby reconciles us to God. (There was no mediator between God and man in the covenant of works.)
The condition (or requirement) of participation in the covenant is faith in the work of Christ the redeemer (Romans 1:17; 5:1). This requirement of faith in the redemptive work of the Messiah was also the condition of obtaining the blessings of the covenant in the Old Testament, as Paul clearly demonstrates through the examples of Abraham and David (Romans 4:1 -15). They, like other Old Testament believers, were saved by looking forward to the work of the Messiah who was to come and putting faith in him.
But while the condition of beginning the covenant of grace is always faith in Christ’s work alone, the condition of continuing in that covenant is said to be obedience to God’s commands. Though this obedience did not in the Old Testament and does not in the New Testament earn us any merit with God, nonetheless, if our faith in Christ is genuine, it will produce obedience, and obedience to Christ is in the New Testament seen as necessary evidence that we are truly believers and members of the new covenant.
The promise of blessings in the covenant was a promise of eternal life with God. This promise was repeated frequently throughout the Old and the New Testaments. God promised that he would be their God and that they would be his people. “And I will establish my covenant between me and you and your descendants after you throughout their generations for an everlasting covenant, to be God to you and to your descendants after you” (Genesis 17:7). “I will be their God, and they shall be my people” (Jeremiah 31:33). “And they shall be my people, and I will be their God . . . I will make with them an everlasting covenant” (Jeremiah 32:38-40). That theme is picked up in the New Testament as well: “I will be their God, and they shall be my people” (2 Corinthians 6:16). In speaking of the new covenant, the author of Hebrews quotes Jeremiah 31: “I will be their God, and they shall be my people” (Hebrews 8:10). This blessing finds fulfillment in the church, which is the people of God, but it finds its greatest fulfillment in the new heaven and new earth, as John sees in his vision of the age to come: “Behold, the dwelling of God is with men. He will dwell with them, and they shall be his people, and God himself will be with them” (Rev. 21:3).
The sign of this covenant (the outward, physical symbol of inclusion in the covenant) varies between the Old Testament and the New Testament. In the Old Testament, the outward sign of beginning the covenant relationship was circumcision. The sign of continuing the covenant relationship was continuing to observe all the festivals and ceremonial laws that God gave the people at various times. In the new covenant, the sign of beginning a covenant relationship is baptism, while the sign of continuing in that relationship is participation in the Lord’s Supper.
What then is the “old covenant” in contrast with the “new covenant” in Christ? It is not the whole of the Old Testament, because the covenants with Abraham and David are never called “old” in the New Testament. Rather, only the covenant under Moses, the covenant made at Mount Sinai (Exodus 19-24) is called the “old covenant” (2 Corinthians 3:14), to be replaced by the “new covenant” in Christ (Luke 22:20; 1 Corinthians 11:25; 2 Corinthians 3:6; Hebrews 8:8, 13; 9:15; 12:24). The Mosaic covenant was an administration of detailed written laws given for a time to restrain the sins of the people and to be a custodian to point people to Christ. Paul says, “Why then the law? It was added because of transgressions, till the offspring should come to whom the promise had been made” (Galatians 3:19), and, “The law was our custodian until Christ came” (Galatians 3:24).
We should not assume that there was no grace available to people from Moses until Christ, because the promise of salvation by faith that God had made to Abraham remained in force:
Now the promises were made to Abraham and to his offspring . . . the law, which came four hundred and thirty years afterward, does not annul a covenant previously ratified by God, so as to make the promise void. For if the inheritance is by the law, it is no longer by promise; but God gave it to Abraham by a promise. (Galatians 3:16 -18)
In this new covenant, there are far greater blessings, for Jesus the Messiah has come; he has lived, died, and risen among us, atoning once for all for our sins (Hebrews 9:24-28); he has revealed God most fully to us (John 1:14; Hebrews 1:1 – 3); he has poured out the Holy Spirit on all his people in new covenant power (Acts 1:8; 1 Corinthians 12:13; 2 Corinthians 3:4-18); he has written his laws on our hearts (Hebrews 8:10). This new covenant is the “eternal covenant” (Hebrews 13:20) in Christ, through which we shall forever have fellowship with God, and he shall be our God, and we shall be his people.