Devotional 38: The Distance Between God and Man: The Need for a Covenant

The Confession Read

The distance between God and the creature is so great, that although reasonable creatures do owe obedience unto Him as their Creator, yet they could never have any fruition of Him as their blessedness and reward, but by some voluntary condescension on God's part, which He hath been pleased to express by way of covenant.

— Westminster Confession of Faith, Chapter 7, Section 1

Introduction

A man stands at the foot of a mountain whose summit is lost in cloud. He knows the mountain is there; every evidence of his senses and his reason testifies that something immense rises before him. He even knows, in a dim and partial way, that there is a peak. But between the man and that summit lies a distance he cannot measure, a sheer and impassable wall of granite ascending into thinner and thinner air until breath itself fails. He might spend his whole life studying the mountain, mapping its lower slopes, describing its geology with precision. But he will never reach the summit. He was not made for such heights. The air there would kill him. His legs cannot find purchase on that rock. The mountain, in its majesty, remains above him, not unwilling to be known but simply too great. The man, for all his striving, cannot ascend. If he is ever to see the view from the summit, the mountain must stoop down to him. This is the picture our Confession paints in the first section of its chapter on God's covenant with man. After six chapters that have carried us from the Scriptures through the Trinity, the eternal decree, creation, providence, and the fall of man (a dark journey from Eden's gates to the curse of sin), we arrive now at what the Reformed tradition has always recognized as the architectural principle of the entire biblical story. Covenant is not one doctrine among many. It is the framework within which every other doctrine finds its place. Creation was covenantally structured. The fall was a covenant broken. Redemption is a covenant fulfilled. The Christian life is covenant life. And glory will be covenant consummated. Yet before the Divines say a single word about the specific covenants, the covenant of works made with Adam and the covenant of grace made with Christ and His people, they pause to ask a more fundamental question. Why is covenant necessary at all? Why does God not simply relate to His creatures directly, without mediation, without representation, without the elaborate legal and relational structure that the word "covenant" implies? The answer, in a single phrase, is: the distance between God and the creature is so great. Everything that follows in Chapter 7 rests on this foundation. If we misunderstand the distance, we will misunderstand the covenant. And if we misunderstand the covenant, we will misunderstand the gospel.

Scripture Foundation

The Confession's opening claim about the distance between God and the creature is not philosophical speculation dressed in theological language. It rises from the testimony of Scripture at point after point, and grounding ourselves properly requires hearing those Scriptures speak. The prophet Isaiah gives us perhaps the most sustained meditation on the Creator-creature distinction in all of Scripture. Isaiah 40:12-17 — "Who hath measured the waters in the hollow of his hand, and meted out heaven with the span, and comprehended the dust of the earth in a measure, and weighed the mountains in scales, and the hills in a balance? Who hath directed the Spirit of the LORD, or being his counsellor hath taught him? With whom took he counsel, and who instructed him? Behold, the nations are as a drop of a bucket, and are counted as the small dust of the balance. All nations before him are as nothing; and they are counted to him less than nothing, and vanity." The language is overwhelming by design. God measures the oceans in the hollow of His hand (the Hebrew maddad, to stretch out a measuring line), but the instrument here is the palm of God. The heavens are spanned as a man might span a small object with thumb and forefinger. The metaphor is not of great effort but of effortless precision. God is not large compared to the universe; the universe is small compared to God. And then the rhetorical questions: Who has directed the Spirit of the LORD? The Hebrew ruach YHWH can mean both the Spirit of God and the mind of God. No creature has ever sat in council with the Almighty. The questions are absurd, and their absurdity is the point. The climax comes when Isaiah declares that all nations "are as nothing" (the Hebrew k'ayin), meaning that before infinite being, finite being is, comparatively, non-being. The creature's existence is a borrowed flame, kindled and sustained by Another. The distance between God and the creature is not a distance of degrees but a distance of kinds. This same truth appears from a different angle in the book of Job, where Elihu asks a searching question. Job 35:6-8 — "If thou sinnest, what doest thou against him? Or if thy transgressions be multiplied, what doest thou unto him? If thou be righteous, what givest thou him? Or what receiveth he of thine hand? Thy wickedness may hurt a man as thou art; and thy righteousness may profit the son of man." The logic is devastating: God cannot be harmed by human sin, and God cannot be enriched by human righteousness. The creature cannot reach up and touch the Creator, not to wound Him and not to bless Him. The distance is ontological, not merely spatial. The question is not whether man can climb high enough to reach God; the question is whether a finite being can, by any act of its own, lay hold upon an infinite being and claim communion as a right. Elihu's answer, and the answer of the whole Bible, is no. This is the background against which the opening chapters of Genesis must be read. When God places Adam in the garden and gives him a command, something more than a simple prohibition is taking place. Genesis 2:16-17 — "And the LORD God commanded the man, saying, Of every tree of the garden thou mayest freely eat: But of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, thou shalt not eat of it: for in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die." The language of command and sanction, of life promised and death threatened. This is covenant language. What is striking is not that God made a covenant with Adam but that God made any covenant at all. Adam owed God obedience by the very fact of his creation. The Creator did not need to enter into a formal, structured relationship with His creature. And yet God chose to stoop down, to speak in terms Adam could understand, and thereby to invite Adam into a relationship that was not merely that of Maker to thing made but of covenant Lord to covenant servant. Hosea confirms this reading when he looks back on Israel's sin: Hosea 6:7 — "But they like men have transgressed the covenant." The Hebrew reads k'adam, meaning "like Adam." The prophet sees in Israel's breach of Sinai a repetition of Adam's breach of Eden. Adam stood in covenant with God. The relationship was covenantal from the beginning. One further passage speaks directly to the Confession's language of "voluntary condescension." Hebrews 6:17-18 — "Wherein God, willing more abundantly to shew unto the heirs of promise the immutability of his counsel, confirmed it by an oath: That by two immutable things, in which it was impossible for God to lie, we might have a strong consolation, who have fled for refuge to lay hold upon the hope set before us." The author of Hebrews reflects on the promise God made to Abraham and makes an observation. God made a promise, and He confirmed it by an oath. But to whom does God swear? There is no one greater than God by whom He might swear, so He swears by Himself. The Creator stoops to employ a human form, an oath with its invocation of a higher witness, even though there is no higher witness to invoke. This is condescension in its purest form. God accommodates Himself to human weakness, using the forms of covenant and oath that frail creatures can understand, not because He needs them but because we do. The oath adds nothing to the certainty of God's promise, but it adds everything to our capacity to receive that certainty. And this is the very logic of covenant itself: divine condescension, God stooping to speak the language of human relationship so that we who could never ascend to Him might nevertheless know Him and trust Him.

What the Divines Meant

When the Westminster Assembly gathered in the Jerusalem Chamber in the 1640s, the doctrine of the covenants was not a settled matter in English theology. It was deeply contested territory. The Divines were writing in the wake of several convergent controversies, and Section 1 of Chapter 7 is designed to answer errors from more than one quarter. The first error was Socinianism. The Socinians denied that God had ever made a covenant of works with Adam, holding that Adam's relationship with God was simply that of a creature to his Creator. There was no promise of life attached to obedience, no threat of death attached to disobedience, and consequently no federal headship by which Adam's sin was imputed to his posterity. The Divines answered this by affirming what the Socinians affirmed, that reasonable creatures owe obedience to God as Creator, but then insisting that this natural obligation is not the whole story. Creatures "could never have any fruition of Him as their blessedness and reward" on the basis of that natural obligation alone. Something more is needed. And that something more is "some voluntary condescension on God's part, which He hath been pleased to express by way of covenant." The word fruition is chosen with precision. It is not merely that creatures could not have access to God or knowledge of God without condescension. They could not have enjoyment of God as their ultimate blessedness. The Latin root is fruitio, the act of enjoying the possession of a thing. The beatific vision, the sight of God that is the supreme happiness of the rational creature, is not something the creature can attain by climbing. It must be given. And the form in which God is pleased to give it is covenant. The second error was a rationalism that made covenant a necessary expression of God's nature. If God is infinitely good, the argument ran, He must provide the means for His creatures' happiness. Covenant, on this view, is not a free act of divine condescension but a necessary outflow of the divine character. The Confession answers by insisting that God's condescension is "voluntary." The word is not incidental. God was under no necessity, internal or external, to enter into covenant with man. He did so freely, out of the mere good pleasure of His will. The creature can make no claim upon the Creator. If God had chosen to leave Adam in a state of mere natural relation, Creator to creature, without promise, without covenant, without the prospect of fruitio Dei, God would have done no injustice. That He gave more, that He gave covenant with its promises and its hope of eternal blessedness, is pure grace, grace before the fall, woven into the very structure of the original creation. A.A. Hodge draws out this point with clarity. The Creator-creature relationship establishes an infinite difference of being and an absolute dependence, but it does not establish any terms of communion beyond mere existence. The creature cannot, from the bare fact of his creation, claim that God should be his blessedness. For God to become the reward and portion of His creature is a gift so far beyond what creation itself entails that it can only be conceived as a free, sovereign, gracious condescension. Robert Shaw expands on the phrase "by way of covenant." Why covenant? Why not some other form, a simple promise, a unilateral declaration, a bare command? Shaw answers that covenant is the form best suited to the nature of the creature. A covenant involves two parties, mutual obligations, specified blessings, and threatened sanctions. These are the terms in which finite creatures think and act. God could have spoken in a language no creature could understand, the language of bare infinitude. Instead He chose to speak the language of covenant. This is accommodation, not in the sense that God accommodates the truth to human error, but in the sense that God accommodates the mode of revelation to human capacity. The mother stoops to speak to her child in words the child can grasp; she does not falsify, but she does simplify. So God, the infinite Father, stoops to speak to His finite children in the language of covenant. The third error was Antinomianism, which in certain forms denied that the law had ever been a genuine covenant with genuine sanctions. The Confession answers by establishing covenant as the original mode of the Creator-creature relationship, showing that law and covenant are not opposed but intertwined. The covenant is the form; the law is the content. The command God gave Adam was not a bare test of arbitrary will but the expression, in covenantal form, of the creature's natural obligation. The moral law could never be dismissed as an arbitrary imposition; it is built into the nature of things. Finally, the Divines wrote against the Roman Catholic teaching that Adam's original state was one of supernatural grace added to his natural constitution, a donum superadditum. The Confession, by contrast, teaches that the original covenant relationship was the very form in which God created man. In the Roman scheme, grace supplements nature. In the Reformed scheme, even original creation was structured by grace, not redemptive grace but the grace of divine condescension. Grace is not a repair patch applied after the fall; it is the original principle of God's relationship with His creatures, present from Eden onward.

Theological Depth

The Reformed tradition has not been content merely to repeat the Confession's language. It has explored its depths with a thoroughness that repays sustained attention. Herman Witsius, the Dutch theologian whose Economy of the Covenants is a comprehensive treatment of covenant theology, opens his great work with a meditation on this very section. For Witsius, the distance between God and the creature is the reason covenant is such a fundamental category that it must govern our entire understanding of God's dealings with men. "The infinite distance," Witsius writes, "between the supreme Being and the creature, though reasonable and holy, is such that no communion could subsist between them, unless God had condescended to a covenant relation." Note the word "subsist." Communion cannot even exist apart from divine condescension. If there is to be friendship between God and man (and the Bible dares to call Abraham the friend of God), it can only be because God has stooped to make it possible. Witsius distinguishes between God's dominion over the creature, which is natural, necessary, and grounded in creation, and God's covenant relationship, which is voluntary, gracious, and grounded in condescension. Under mere dominion, the creature would owe obedience and could expect nothing beyond the continuance of his existence. But under covenant, God binds Himself to bless. The obedience the creature owes becomes the condition of a promised blessedness that far exceeds anything the obedience itself could merit. Adam owed God obedience by the mere fact of his creation. But God, by condescending to make a covenant, attached a promise to that obedience, the promise of confirmed life, of fruitio Dei. Adam could not have claimed that promise as a right. It was grace, condescending and voluntary grace, from the beginning. Thomas Boston, in Human Nature in Its Fourfold State, takes up the theme from a pastoral angle. Boston imagines Adam in the garden, freshly created and standing before his Maker. Adam knows he owes everything to God: his existence, his faculties, the beauty of the world around him. But what Adam could not know, apart from revelation, was whether this state would last. Would obedience be rewarded with eternal life? The covenant answers that question. By giving Adam a specific command with a specific promise and a specific threat, God lifted the relationship from mere dominion to covenant. Adam now knew, because God had told him, that obedience would be crowned with life and disobedience punished with death. The covenant did not create the obligation of obedience; that existed already. But it made the consequences vastly greater than the mere natural relation would have entailed. This is the wonder of the original covenant: the reward far exceeds the merit. Calvin makes an observation that illuminates the Confession's language about "reasonable creatures." The Confession does not speak of all creatures but of "reasonable creatures," those endowed with intellect and will, capable of understanding a promise. The animals, Calvin observes, have no covenant with God. They serve His purposes without knowing them and receive His blessings without entering into the relationship of promise and trust. But man, made in the image of God, was made for covenant. His reason, his will, his capacity for language and promise, all of these are covenant-faculties. The image of God in man is, in a profound sense, the capacity for covenant. Man was made to be a covenant partner with his Creator, not because God needed a partner, but because this is what the image of God involves: the capacity to know God, to love God, to trust God, and to enjoy Him. And covenant is simply the form in which God enables that capacity to be exercised. As Calvin puts it, God "willingly and freely deigns to enter into a mutual obligation" with His creature. B.B. Warfield sharpens the philosophical precision of the Confession's claim. The distance between God and the creature, Warfield argues, cannot be overcome by any act of the creature: not by obedience, not by piety, not by mystical ascent, not by intellectual contemplation. The distance is infinite, and no finite act can bridge the infinite. If the creature is to have fruitio Dei, God Himself must bridge the distance. The word "condescension" is the Latin condescensio, a stooping down, a coming to meet the other at the level where the other stands. God does not reach down partway, leaving the creature to climb the remaining distance. God comes all the way down. He enters into the creature's world, speaks in the creature's language, and binds Himself to bless. And in the covenant of grace, He even undertakes to keep the covenant on the creature's behalf when the creature has broken it. Robert Rollock, the Scottish theologian among the first to develop covenant theology systematically, captures this truth with an image: the Creator does with His creature what a prince would do if he should descend from his throne, put off his royal robes, sit at the table with a peasant, and speak to him as a friend. The prince is not less the prince for his condescension; his greatness is magnified, for only the truly great can stoop without loss of dignity. So God, in making covenant with man, does not diminish His deity. He displays it in its most glorious form: love that stoops, majesty that serves, infinity that accommodates itself to finitude. The covenant is not an arrangement by which the creature climbs to God. It is an arrangement by which God comes down to the creature. And this is the only way any creature can ever have communion with the Creator.

Puritan Application

First, the distance between God and the creature must silence every impulse to spiritual pride. The natural man imagines that he can ascend to God by his reason, by his morality, by his religious devotion, by his mystical experience. Every religion apart from the gospel is, at bottom, a ladder. Man builds it, man climbs it, and man imagines that at the top he will find God waiting to receive him. The Confession demolishes every such ladder. Your reason is finite; God is infinite. Your obedience is creaturely; God is the Creator. Your devotion is the devotion of dust; God is the One before whom the nations are as a drop in a bucket. If you are ever to know God as your blessedness and reward, you will not reach Him by climbing. He must come down to you. This truth cuts the nerve of every spiritual pride, telling the philosopher, the mystic, and the moralist alike: your ladders do not reach. And it tells the humble sinner who knows he cannot climb: there is One who has descended. The condescension of God is the only hope of every soul. Second, the voluntary character of God's condescension teaches us that grace is always free and sovereign. God was under no compulsion to enter into covenant with Adam, and He is under no compulsion to enter into covenant with you. If you are in covenant with God through Christ, it is not because you were owed a covenant. It is not because your sincerity, your seeking, or your need created an obligation on God's part. It is because God, in the sovereign freedom of His will, chose to do so. Let this humble you. The same God who passed by the fallen angels, for whom no covenant of grace was made, no mediator appointed, has stooped to you. Why you? Not because you are better than the angels who fell. Not because your sin was smaller or your heart softer. Simply because it pleased Him. The voluntariness of grace is the death of merit and the birth of gratitude. You did not earn the covenant; you received it. Live, then, as a recipient, not as a creditor. Third, the covenantal shape of God's condescension teaches us how to read our Bibles. The Scriptures are not a collection of timeless truths, moral maxims, and inspirational stories. They are a covenant document. From Genesis to Revelation, the Bible is the story of a covenant made, broken, and remade, a covenant of works broken by the first Adam and a covenant of grace fulfilled by the second. When you open your Bible, you are opening a legal instrument, a treaty between the King of heaven and His people. Read it that way. When you read the promises, read them as covenant promises that God has bound Himself to keep, as sure as the blood that seals them. When you read the commands, read them not as arbitrary impositions but as the terms of a relationship in which obedience is the path of blessedness. The Bible is a covenant book, and to read it without understanding its covenantal structure is like reading a marriage contract as if it were a poem. You may catch something of the beauty, but you will miss the binding force. Fourth, the fact that God's condescension is expressed "by way of covenant" should shape our understanding of every divine promise. A covenant is not a bare promise but a promise confirmed by solemn sanctions, sealed by oath, and witnessed by ceremony. In the ancient Near East, covenants were ratified in blood: the cutting of a covenant, karat berith, involved the death of an animal, signifying what would happen to the covenant-breaker. When God made a covenant with Abraham in Genesis 15, He passed between the pieces of the sacrificed animals, symbolically taking upon Himself the curse that would fall on the breaker. And in the new covenant, the blood is not the blood of animals but the blood of Christ. "This cup is the new testament in my blood, which is shed for you." The promises of the gospel are covenant promises, purchased with blood, sealed by the death of the testator, and certain beyond all possibility of failure. When you doubt God's promises — and you will — bring yourself back to this truth. Your hope does not rest on a well-intentioned wish from a benevolent Deity. It rests on a binding, blood-sealed, oath-confirmed covenant made by the God who cannot lie. Fifth, let the doctrine of divine condescension fill you with wonder at the incarnation. The greatest act of condescension in history is not the making of a covenant but the becoming of a man. "The Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us." The Greek verb eskēnōsen ("tabernacled") is covenantal language, echoing the tabernacle where God dwelt among His covenant people. In Christ, the God who condescended to make a covenant condescended to become a man, not merely to speak from heaven but to walk on earth, not merely to command but to obey, not merely to promise life but to be the Life. The incarnation is the ultimate covenant act. And yet this condescension did not begin in Bethlehem. It began in Eden, when the infinite Creator stooped to speak covenantal words to the creature made from dust. The whole story, from garden to manger to cross to empty tomb, is the story of a God who comes down. He came down to Eden, to Sinai, to tabernacle and temple. He came down to a virgin's womb and a cattle stall, to a cross and a grave. And He will come down once more, in glory, to bring His covenant people home. All this because the distance was too great for us to cross and because the love of God would not let the distance stand.

Prayer

O Lord our God, who dwellest in light unapproachable, whom no man hath seen nor can see, we confess with wonder and shame that the distance between Thee and us is greater than we have understood. We are dust and ashes; Thou art the everlasting God. The nations before Thee are as nothing, and we, what are we, that Thou shouldst make covenant with us? We acknowledge that we owe Thee all obedience by the very fact of our creation, and that even this obedience could never lay claim to the blessedness that Thou alone canst give. That Thou hast been pleased to condescend, to stoop, to covenant, to promise, to bind Thyself in mercy to such creatures as we are — this is grace beyond all comprehension. We bless Thee for the covenant of works, in which our first father stood and fell, and by whose breach sin and death entered the world. And we bless Thee with still greater wonder for the covenant of grace, in which the second Adam stood where the first Adam fell, and by whose obedience righteousness and life are given freely to all who are in Him. Thou hast made a covenant, ordered in all things and sure, ratified by the blood of Thine own Son, a covenant in which Thou hast promised to be our God and to make us Thy people, to write Thy law upon our hearts, to remember our sins no more, and to give us Thyself as our portion and exceeding great reward. Teach us, we pray, to live as covenant people, to receive Thy promises with faith, to obey Thy commands with love, and to await Thy coming with hope. Keep us from the pride that would climb to Thee by ladders of our own devising. Keep us from the unbelief that doubts Thy covenant pledges. Keep us from the ingratitude that receives grace as if it were owed. And grant that, as we walk through this world with its shadows and sorrows, we may be sustained by the knowledge that we belong, body and soul, in life and in death, to our faithful Savior Jesus Christ, the Mediator of a better covenant, established upon better promises. Even so, come, Lord Jesus. Fulfill what Thou hast promised. Bring all Thy covenant people home. And let the day come when we shall see Thee face to face, not because we have ascended to Thee but because Thou hast descended to us and hast lifted us up to dwell with Thee forever. Through Jesus Christ our Lord, the surety of the covenant, in whom every promise finds its Yes and its Amen. Amen.