The Covenant of Grace - Part IV

THE COVENANT OF WORKS-THE TEST AND FALL

Dr. King Counts

We have observed how God made Adam and placed him in the garden of Eden, having instituted the ordinances of Sabbath, marriage, and labor, and giving him a garden paradise.  We have also seen that Adam stood in a unique covenantal relationship to God  and in that relationship he represented all his posterity to come.  Therefore, Adam was responsible to God, and his actions accountable to all humanity.  God had given him' total dominion  with only one exception in all creation, and that was the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.  That tree was a constant reminder that although Adam was ruler in the garden,  his rule was to always remain subservient to the will of his creator.  Here is a summary chart of the Covenant of Works

THE COVENANT OF WORKS-SUMMARY

THE PROBATION

               When we speak of a probation we mean a test or a trial to prove a person’s character.  God had granted Adam great privileges, blessings, and probably promises  but all upon the condition of perfect obedience to his revealed law.  This obedience must be entire and complete, for no other kind would satisfy a perfect God.  Moreover,  it was to be perpetual in the sense it was to continue on forever.  When we stop and think of the condition of entire and perpetual obedience, we can see that at least in some sense Adam was in a precarious position. One infraction of God's law would mean the loss of all blessings and future inheritance.  It would take only one transgression to constitute a break in the covenant of works, and apparently there was no provision in the covenant of works to remedy any breaking its stipulations. The test involved perfect obedience alone as the condition of blessing.

               The name of the probationary tree, the tree of the knowledge of good and of evil, suggesting the probation.   The issue at stake was to prove the character of Adam, either good or evil. If Adam was successful in avoidin₈ sin and passing through the temptation in holiness, he would certainly have a enlarged understanding of good, from the point of view of one who had been confirmed good through trial, and of evil, from the point of view of one who had seen evil face to face in the serpent and had remained faithful to God.  If Adam was unsuccessful in resisting temptation, he still would have an enlarged knowledge of good and evil from the point at view of one who had fallen into the wickedness of sin.

               The tree of life in the midst of the garden stood as a constant reminder of the promise of perfect obedience to God's revealed will.  In Genesis 3:22 we read how God puts Adam and Eve out of the garden lest he take of the tree of life and live forever.  The reward for perfect obedience would be life. According to Bible perfect righteousness is the basis of confirmation in everlasting life.  We can say with a good measure of safety that if Adam had not sinned his probationary period would have ended with God's declaration of justification,  and his reward would have been acceptance in God¹s family as a  son   In the same way that the Christian is made righteous in the sight of God by the work of Christ, declared justified upon that basis and adopted into God's family as a result of his perfect righteousness.  Surely at some point Gad would have blessed Adam, and his posterity, by confirming him in righteous obedience, and lifting the probation, rather than allowing him to continue in the precarious condition of the covenant of works.

“The great promise of the covenant of works was the promise of eternal life.  They who deny the covenant of works generally base their denial in part on the fact that there is no record of such a promise in the Bible.  And it is perfectly true that the Scripture contains no explicit promise of eternal life to Adam.  But the threatened penalty clearly implies such a promise…..The promise of life in the covenant of works was a promise of the removal of all the limitations of life to which Adam was still subject, and of the raising of his life to the highest degree of perfection.  When Paul says in Rom. 7:10 that the commandment was unto life, he means life in the fullest sense of the word (Berkhof, p. 216).

               Just as there was a promise in the covenant at works_, there was also a threat.  The punishment for failing the probation would be death (Gen. 2:17; 3:17-19).  Death in the sense of separation from communion with God.  No longer would Adam be allowed to know the joy of walking in partnership,  friendship, and peace with his creator. Rather, he would be found in a state of guilt, an obligation to be punished with eternal torment in the lake of fire.  He would always be under the displeasure and condemnation of sin against his maker.  Moreover, because of this guilt, he would become liable to all the miseries of this life.  All of the sickness, heartache, depression_, suffering from want, hunger, humiliation, and disappointments of this life would be his.  Added to this would be the sheer pain and misery of physical death itself, of seeing and experiencing the dissolution of the flesh by age and disease.  As Question 19 of the Westminster Shorter Catechism reads:

Q: What is the misery of that estate whereinto man fell?

A: All mankind by their fall lost communion with God, are under                   his wrath and curse, and so made liable to all miseries in this life, to death itself, and to the pains of hell for ever.

               From all of this we can see that God created us to be totally responsible creatures, in a totally moral universe. He has made Man with the power to choose good and evil, then act out to put him in a situation which would test his loyalties to God.  We still live in that kind of world today. Even though we are no longer under the covenant of works as Adam and Eve were, God proves our loyalties, we read in Scripture that God does try us.  The Psalmist prays, “Test me, 0 Lord, and try me, examine my heart and my mind.  "(Ps. 26:2)  Again we read (Zech. 13:9) "And I will bring the third part through the fire, Refine them as silver is refined, And test them as gold is tested. They will call on My name,       And I will answer them;  I will say, 'They are My people, And they will say, 'The LORD is my God.”

                 We read bow God allowed Job to be put to the test, in order to prove his devotion to God was really sincere,  The Bible clearly teaches us that many hard events of our lives can be for the trial of our faith and love to the Lord. From the original trial in the garden at Eden, we can see how much we should attempt to rise to our responsibilities before the Lord. There is great reward in living before the Lord rightly, even as there is great sorrow in tailing the test   Let us consider our lives both a gift and a challenge from the Lord to prove our obedience to his revealed Word.  It is from God's Word, and not our own desires or beliefs that we must draw out our map of how to live before the Lord.  We must not use the Bible as a mere interesting novelty to be studied or enjoyed.  We must listen to it in order to prove our obedience in the challenges at life.

THE TEMPTATION

The probation came to fruition as the Satan came to tempt the Woman to sin.  It should be remembered that the occasion of the Fall was the temptation of the Devil  which came from outside of humanity_,  the full responsibility for sin must be laid upon the Man and Woman for heeding the temptation.  God gave Adam and Eve the power of contrary choice, that is the ability to choose freely between acts of good and evil.  Eve was not compelled to sin by the way in which God had made her, but freely exercised her will to choose evil.

Satan's assault came in the form of a challenge to the spoken Word of God and a distortion of the probation.  "Did God really say, You can riot eat from any tree in the garden?”  Here is the issue, will Eve heed and believe the Word of God or will she fall to the lies of the Devil.  In several ways Eve had fallen short of what she should have done even before she ate o£ the tree,  God had given them the job of exercising dominion over all that he had made and one aspect of that dominion was to guard the garden and take care of it (Gen 2:15), "The Lord God took the Man and put him in the Garden of Eden to work it and take care of it.")  The words translated in the NIV version "take care of it” in Genesis 2.i5 comes from the single Hebrew word shaw-mar' Rmc  which  is most often translated "guard" in the Old Testament.  We may have a hint here that God had given them the charge to keep out those who could ruin the estate wherein they were created.   Eve should have been on her guard and at the insinuation that God's Word was not the complete truth, she should have exercised dominion and expelled the serpent.

           In her answer to the serpent's question Eve adds to what God required.  He did not say that if they touched the tree that they would die.  It may be that even here we may detect a note of rebelliousness since she nay have said this in a manner that would reveal that she felt that the Injunction was extremely unfair  “Why,  God has said that we may not even as much as touch this tree, or we will die.”

           Satan continues by an outright lie that stands in direct contradiction to God's Word. "You shall not surely die."  "God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will opened and you will be like God, knowing good and evil."  The implication is that God is trying to hold you down from a greater destiny because of his own selfish interest.  This is the age old lie of all false religions, cults and humanistic philosophies, Man is god. 

           Modern liberal feminist theology agrees with Satan.  According to Mary Daly, “Eve was framed.”  Peter Jones summarizes the new liberal view of the Fall of Man into sin in his book Spirit Wars (1997):

            In placing the tree, God is a tempter who tantalizes the first couple: ‘Trust me!….Stay ignorant—or seek knowledge at your own risk.’ God’s control of the garden is less than complete.  His placing the tree might suggest that God is anxious, even insecure and jealous of his power….We need to recognize God’s vulnerability and culpability..god is not capable of simply fixing up the mess….Jahweh should be seen in the role of the villain who steals the man from the earth to till his garden….The serpent and the woman succeed in thwarting the villain’s plan by getting the man to eat the fruit….Eve is unable to know the difference between good and evil.  How then can she be blamed for her actions?  She only does what comes naturally.  She reaches for sustenance, beauty and wisdom, and in doing so, is blamed forever by the male text and the male commentators….Eve, indeed, was framed!  Though Eve’s behavior is condemned by God and berated by centuries of readers, she emerges as a character with initiative and courage….(pp. 127-128).”

            Here is where modern liberal theology is headed, toward a revival of pure  pagan religion.

There is nothing in this interpretative approach that resembles  “Christian Theology” and

everything that resembles old paganism and New Age humanistic philosophy.  Ironically, this

type of interpretation contradicts the expressed view of the writers of Scripture themselves.  We

could say, the Devil would be proud of these writers.  No wonder then, as Don Heder points out,

“Buddist chanting and meditation are no more popular than hymn singing, and the Christian

calendar is passed over in favor of pagan holidays at Harvard Divinity School today (Jones, p.

184).  How different the original charter of Harvard reads, (1647), as it reflects the general

foundation of our American culture.

 "Let every Student be plainly instructed, and earnestly pressed to consider well the main end of his life and studies is, to know God and Jesus Christ which is eternal life (Joh 17:3), and therefore to lay Christ in the bottom, as the only foundation of all sound knowledge and learning.”

           There is a particle of truth in what Satan said, Adam and Eve's eyes were opened, but what God said about death was certainly proven correct..  This in essence is what is at stake every time we sin against God.  We justly fall under his wrath and curse, and the issue is always whether we will believe and heed his Word, or whether we will believe the lie of the Devil that we ourselves are divine or exercise prerogatives which should properly belong to God alone.

           Most of all, the Devil would have us devise our own system of ethics rather than obeying his revealed will contained in the Bible and written in God’s holy laws.  Actress Shirley McClain, a popular proponent of the New Age thinking makes this very clear as she teaches people to chant together, “I am God.”:

God lies within, and therefore we are each part of God.  Since there is no separateness, we are each Godlike, and God is in each of us…We are literally made of God energy, therefore we can creat whatever we want in life because we are each co-creating with the energy of God-the energy that makes the universe itself (Going Within, p. 100)

           Eve sins against God by eating the forbidden fruit. Adam joins her in the transgression, but apparently more self consciously.  "And Adam was  not the one deceived; it was the woman who wacd deceived and became a sinner (I Tim. 2.14)." This Scripture seems to suggest that Adam ate of the tree knowing that he was joining his wife in the Fall.  Could he have done this because he loved his wife enough to join her in the offense?

GOD COMES IN JUDGEMERT

           From reading the account in the English translation of Genesis, it almost seems that God comes causally along, strolling along in the cool part of the morning and evening. This may not necessarily be the case.  We read, "Then the man and his wife heard the sound of the Lord God as he was walking in the garden in the cool of the day."  What kind of sound did they hear as the Lord walked?  Are we to assume that it was merely his gentile footsteps upon the leaves?  The rest of the Scripture paints a different kind of picture of God coming in judgment upon sin. "The earth trembled and quaked  and the foundations of the mountains shook they trembled because he was angry.... Smoke rose from his nostrils, consuming fire came from his mouth, burning coals blazed out of it    He parted the heavens and came down, dark clouds were under his feet. (Psalm 18)',  The rest of the Scriptures describe God's coming in judgment upon sin in very terrible terms.

           The phrase translated “In the cool of the day” is difficult to translate.  The idea is more in keeping with the spirit of the day, and suggests that his coming had more to do with coining in an appropriate way in light the circumstances.   We read that the Lord called to the man.  What are we to think that sounded like   Was  it like our mother's call for us to come in and eat supper?  Psalm 29 may give us a clue, "

    The voice of the LORD is over the waters;

        the God of glory thunders,

        the LORD thunders over the mighty waters. 

    [4] The voice of the LORD is powerful;

        the voice of the LORD is majestic. 

    [5] The voice of the LORD breaks the cedars;

        the LORD breaks in pieces the cedars of Lebanon. 

    [6] He makes Lebanon skip like a calf,

        Sirion like a young wild ox. 

    [7] The voice of the LORD strikes

        with flashes of lightning. 

    [8] The voice of the LORD shakes the desert;

        the LORD shakes the Desert of Kadesh. 

    [9] The voice of the LORD twists the oaks

        and strips the forests bare.

    And in his temple all cry, "Glory!" 

            The Hebrew word translated called is kaw-raw' arq and when applied to the Lord can mean a ear shattering sound.  "Where are you!"  No wonder that Adam and Eve hid themselves.  What a penetrating question "Where are You?” assumes that somehow Adam and Eve have moved into a new way of being. God knew exactly where- the two were, his question goes deeper than that and address the state of sin and misery that had corrupted their whole nature.  Before the Fall Adam and Eve had complete harmony and peace within, but after a great schism had affected their entire being. They were now in great need, because of their lack of righteousness and guilt, and yet the only one that could help that would reject them as they now were.  They were totally depraved, and sin had effectively broken their souls into a hundred pieces.

           They admit their fear and shame of nakedness.  Suddenly there was a fear of being exposed for what they truly were.   Here is a part of their fragmented psyche that is so afraid of being rejected because there was an incredible sense of shame and guilt.  Now the effective tactic was to hide themselves from God and one another as much as possible.  This same fear of being exposed for what they truly had become reveals itself in their blame shifting with one another till the buck stops with the serpent.

THE CURSES OF THE COVENANT

           God deals with the Serpent first since the blame ended with him. The curse which God puts upon the Devil is the ultimate humiliation.  Because the serpent was used for this purpose, he is cursed by having to eat dust by crawling upon the ground.  Here is the lowest of all creatures upon the earth.  God says that he will insure that there is continuing conflict and enmity between the Devil and the woman.  That conflict will also be between her seed and the Devil.  Here we find the basis of the rest of this book of generations and the emphasis in Scripture upon the chosen- seed.  Humanity will be divided into two seeds. The rest of the book of Genesis and indeed the whole Bible is the story of the conflict within the human race between the seed of the serpent and the seed of the woman. According to I John 3:12 Cain was from the evil one and thus acts in character with his progenitor.  After righteous Able’s death, God sends Seith to replace the lost godly seed (Gen 4:25)   The same principle is revealed in the rest of the book with Noah and Abraham, Isaac and Jacob.  Christ also taught the same principle when he said that the Jews who could not heed him were not of the- seed of Abraham, but were children of the Devil (John 8:44-47).

           But there is more here than animosity between Womankind, the seed of the woman, and the Devil.  Genesis 3:15 speaks of the woman's seed as "he" a pronoun applying to a single man.  The text says that there would be mortal combat between the Seed and the serpent and that the serpent^’s head would be crushed. That seed was Christ who died on Galgotha (the place of the skull) to take away the sins of his people.  The promise here is that the Devil would be defeated.

           Next the Lord addresses the woman and declares that she shall be in much pain in childbearing. He also says that "Your desire will be for your husband and he will rule over you.” What is the nature of this desire?  It is very likely understood best in the way in which it is used in Genesis 4:7 where the word is used of dominance.  This understanding seems likely in light of the tact that this verse is also concerned with dominion.   A wife will have a tendency to desire to rule in the home, but without much success. This is the curse which affects the domestic life of society to this day  What a proper curse in light of the tact that Eve had usurped Adam’s authority in the first sin. 

“The desire of the woman shall be in the husband, but he shall rule over here.  Not in the sense of excessive dependence, but in the sense of excessive determination to dominate, the woman shall ‘desire’ her husband.  Her longing shall be to possess him, to control him, to dominate him.   Just as personified sin’s desire was directed toward the possession of Cain, so the woman’s desire shall be directed toward the possession of her husband (Robertson, Christ of the Covenants, p. 102).”

Lastly God deals with the man. The curse involved his labor.  Let us be sure that we understand that labor itself is not a curse.  Adam had labor before the Fall, but what is  different is that he was created to be dominant over the earth, yet in the end he will go back to the earth as dust   What a humiliation death is for glorious man, God's crowing creation!

             As Adam and Eve are expelled from the garden, God kills a lamb and takes the skin to cover their nakedness.  There is a sense in which there is a remarriage.  Adam names his wife and thus reassumes his headship.  By providing them with a covering for their nakedness by the sacrifice of the lamb₁ God is depicting his covenant promise to send a savior to take away their sin:

CONCLUSIONS

What a terrible thing sin is!  We should feel something of the horror of its devastating effects as we read the account of Genesis 3 with understaridin₈ and faith.  We can know what those horrible effects are for we all know the reality of sm and its bitter consequences.  We clearly understand the struggle of the ages between the kingdom of God and the kingdom of the Devil.  We sense the reality of the pain of childbirth and the power struggles of home life.  We know the agony of toil and labor, and the profound sorrow of death and decay.  How horrible and detestable sin should appear to us.  Rather than loving and glorifying sin the way that the children of the Devil do in this world, how we should flee to our savior to be washed clean in his redeeming blood.  How we should plea with him to take away the awful curse upon our lives as well as upon the rest of the creation!    

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