Devotional 40: The Covenant of Grace: God's Promise of Salvation Through Christ

The Confession Read

Man, by his fall, having made himself incapable of life by that covenant, the Lord was pleased to make a second, commonly called the covenant of grace; wherein he freely offereth unto sinners life and salvation by Jesus Christ; requiring of them faith in him, that they may be saved; and promising to give unto all those that are ordained unto eternal life his Holy Spirit, to make them willing, and able to believe.

— Westminster Confession of Faith, Chapter 7, Section 3

Introduction

A man sits in a condemned cell. The trial is over, the sentence pronounced, the date fixed. He has exhausted every appeal, and every appeal has failed because the evidence against him was overwhelming and the law under which he was judged admits no exceptions. He is not merely sorry for what he has done; he is broken by it, undone, hollowed out by the knowledge that he has wrecked everything he was made to be and can do nothing to rebuild it. The door of his cell is locked, and he holds no key. He faces death, and he faces it justly. Then, without warning, without any motion of his own, the door swings open. Light floods the darkness. A voice speaks, not to demand, not to accuse, not to negotiate terms, but to announce that a full pardon has been issued, purchased at unfathomable cost by another, and offered to him freely. He has only to receive it: to rise and walk out of the cell into the sunlight of a liberty he did not earn and cannot repay. This is the picture the Westminster Divines paint in the third section of their chapter on God's covenant with man, and it is the most concentrated jewel of gospel truth in the entire Confession. In Section 1 we learned that covenant is necessary because the distance between God and the creature is infinite and unbridgeable from below. In Section 2 we learned that God made a covenant of works with Adam, promising confirmed and eternal life upon the condition of perfect and personal obedience, a covenant Adam broke, dragging his posterity into sin and death with him. Now we arrive at the answer: not improvised in haste after the catastrophe of Eden, but decreed before the foundation of the world, an answer that turns the darkness of the fall into the backdrop against which the glory of divine grace shines with undimmed brilliance. God was pleased to make a second covenant. It is called the covenant of grace, and the name is everything. Not a renewed covenant of works, with lowered standards and achievable demands. Not a covenant of mutual effort, in which God does His part and man does his. A covenant of grace: conceived in the sovereign pleasure of God, executed by the obedience and blood of Jesus Christ, offered freely to sinners who bring nothing but their need, applied by the Holy Spirit to hearts that would otherwise remain stone. Every Christian who has ever drawn a breath of spiritual life lives within this covenant. Every true hope of heaven rests upon its promises. And every clause the Divines set down repays the closest, most reverent attention.

Scripture Foundation

When Adam fell, God did not fall silent. The serpent heard judgment; the woman heard a promise. And the promise, however brief, contained within it the entire substance of the covenant of grace. Genesis 3:14-15 — "And the LORD God said unto the serpent, Because thou hast done this, thou art cursed above all cattle, and above every beast of the field; upon thy belly shalt thou go, and dust shalt thou eat all the days of thy life: And I will put enmity between thee and the woman, and between thy seed and her seed; it shall bruise thy head, and thou shalt bruise his heel." This is the protevangelium, the first gospel. The Hebrew phrase zera' ha'ishshah, the seed of the woman, points to a singular deliverer who would come by extraordinary generation, not from the man's seed but from the woman's alone. The bruising is mutual: the serpent bruises His heel, a wound from which the Deliverer rises; the Deliverer crushes the serpent's head, a wound from which there is no recovery. Here, spoken in the very garden where rebellion brought death, is the promise of a Redeemer who would undo what the serpent had done. The covenant of grace is proclaimed before the flaming sword is set at Eden's gate, before Adam and Eve take their first sorrowful steps into the thorns and thistles of a fallen world. Judgment falls, but mercy is promised first. The Lord was pleased to make a second covenant. Centuries unfold, and through the prophet Jeremiah the promise takes on a clarity that leaves no room for misunderstanding. This new covenant would not be like the one made at Sinai, for that covenant had been broken; the Hebrew is vivid: heferu, they shattered it, as a treaty is shattered by treachery. Jeremiah 31:31-34 — "Behold, the days come, saith the LORD, that I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel, and with the house of Judah: Not according to the covenant that I made with their fathers in the day that I took them by the hand to bring them out of the land of Egypt; which my covenant they brake, although I was an husband unto them, saith the LORD: But this shall be the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel; After those days, saith the LORD, I will put my law in their inward parts, and write it in their hearts; and will be their God, and they shall be my people. And they shall teach no more every man his neighbour, and every man his brother, saying, Know the LORD: for they shall all know me, from the least of them unto the greatest of them, saith the LORD: for I will forgive their iniquity, and I will remember their sin no more." Every clause breathes the air of the covenant of grace. The law will no longer be external, written on stone tablets that can be smashed. It will be internal, inscribed on hearts. The knowledge of God will be direct and intimate rather than mediated through a teaching priesthood. And the foundation of the whole arrangement is the final, breathtaking promise: "I will forgive their iniquity, and I will remember their sin no more." Not "I will overlook," not "I will excuse," not "I will balance their good against their bad." I will forgive. I will forget. And because God remembers what He wills, His not-remembering is an act of sovereign, deliberate, eternal mercy. This is the covenant that the blood of Christ ratifies; this is the covenant of which the Lord's Supper is the perpetual memorial: "This cup is the new testament in my blood." But how can hearts of stone receive an inscribed law? How can a people who have broken every covenant they ever made become a people who keep this one? The answer comes through the prophet Ezekiel in words that prepared the way for the Confession's final, decisive clause. Ezekiel 36:26-27 — "A new heart also will I give you, and a new spirit will I put within you: and I will take away the stony heart out of your flesh, and I will give you an heart of flesh. And I will put my spirit within you, and cause you to walk in my statutes, and ye shall keep my judgments, and do them." The language is unilateral. God does not say, "I will invite you to receive a new heart." He says, "I will give." He says, "I will cause." The stony heart (Hebrew lev ha'even, a heart as unresponsive as rock) is removed. A heart of flesh (lev basar, soft, responsive, alive) is put in its place. The instrument is the Spirit of God placed within, and the result is certain: "ye shall keep my judgments, and do them." What Ezekiel saw in prophetic vision, the Confession captures in systematic precision: God promises to give His Holy Spirit to make His people willing and able to believe. The New Testament opens this promise into its full, radiant clarity. John 3:16-17 — "For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life. For God sent not his Son into the world to condemn the world; but that the world through him might be saved." Here is the freeness of the offer, set forth in words that have brought comfort to more souls than perhaps any other in human language. The Greek adverb houtōs, meaning "in this manner," governs everything that follows: God's love is demonstrated in the giving of His Son. The purpose is life, everlasting life. The condition is faith — "whosoever believeth in him." The Confession's phrase "requiring of them faith in him, that they may be saved" is simply the Johannine logic rendered with confessional precision. The covenant of grace does not say, "Obey perfectly and live." It says, "Believe on the One who obeyed perfectly, and live." But how does a sinner who is spiritually dead, whose will is in bondage and whose very nature is hostile to God, come to exercise this faith? The apostle Paul answers with a portrait of the human condition so dark that only the light of sovereign grace can penetrate it. Ephesians 2:1-9 — "And you hath he quickened, who were dead in trespasses and sins; Wherein in time past ye walked according to the course of this world, according to the prince of the power of the air, the spirit that now worketh in the children of disobedience: Among whom also we all had our conversation in times past in the lusts of our flesh, fulfilling the desires of the flesh and of the mind; and were by nature the children of wrath, even as others. But God, who is rich in mercy, for his great love wherewith he loved us, Even when we were dead in sins, hath quickened us together with Christ, (by grace ye are saved;) And hath raised us up together, and made us sit together in heavenly places in Christ Jesus: That in the ages to come he might shew the exceeding riches of his grace in his kindness toward us through Christ Jesus. For by grace are ye saved through faith; and that not of yourselves: it is the gift of God: Not of works, lest any man should boast." Every word is chosen to exclude human contribution. We were dead; the Greek nekros means a corpse, incapable of response, needing not rehabilitation but resurrection. We walked under the dominion of the prince of the power of the air. We were children of wrath by nature. And then the great adversative that contains the entire gospel: "But God." Rich in mercy, loving with great love, God quickened us when we were dead. He raised us. He seated us. The verbs are all divine actions upon passive recipients. And Paul anticipates the inevitable objection: if salvation is all of God, what room is left for faith? His answer is that faith itself is the gift. "By grace are ye saved through faith; and that not of yourselves: it is the gift of God." The Greek demonstrative touto, meaning "that," refers to the entire complex of salvation-by-grace-through-faith. The whole package, faith included, is a gift. It does not originate in the sinner's free will; it is bestowed by the God who makes the dead alive. Our Lord Himself removes every possibility of autonomous faith with a statement of searching finality. John 6:44 — "No man can come to me, except the Father which hath sent me draw him: and I will raise him up at the last day." The Greek verb helkysē does not mean to woo, to invite, or to entice. It means to draw with force, to drag. The same verb describes the disciples dragging a net full of fish to shore in John 21 and Paul and Silas being dragged into the marketplace in Acts 16. The Father's drawing is not a gentle suggestion the sinner may accept or decline. It is the irresistible power of sovereign grace, pulling dead sinners out of the grave of their unbelief and into the arms of the risen Christ. And it is effectual: everyone who is drawn will be raised up at the last day. The Confession's language — "promising to give unto all those that are ordained unto eternal life his Holy Spirit to make them willing and able to believe" — is John 6:44 rendered in confessional terms. These passages, taken together, establish every element of the doctrine. Genesis 3 supplies the initial promise made after the fall. Jeremiah 31 supplies the new covenant's promise of inward transformation and full forgiveness. Ezekiel 36 supplies the sovereign gift of the Spirit as the efficient cause of all true obedience. John 3 supplies the free offer of life through faith in the Son. Ephesians 2 supplies the state of spiritual death from which only sovereign grace can raise us. And John 6 supplies the necessity and certainty of the Father's drawing. The Confession's single sentence distills them all into a theology of remarkable compression, a compression possible only because the Divines understood that the freeness of grace is the only hope of sinful men.

What the Divines Meant

When the Westminster Assembly turned from the covenant of works to the covenant of grace, they entered territory that was every bit as contested as the ground they had just left. The seventeenth century was awash in disputes about the nature of grace, the freedom of the will, the condition of salvation, and the extent of the atonement. Every phrase in this section was chosen to answer specific errors, and the precision of the language becomes fully apparent only when those errors are understood. The first and most obvious target was Arminianism. The Remonstrants taught that grace is resistible, faith is an act of the unregenerate will, and election is based on foreseen faith. The Confession answers comprehensively. Man "made himself incapable of life by that covenant": the fall was total, leaving no island of spiritual ability. The dead cannot contribute to their own resurrection. The offer is "freely" made — this adverb excludes any notion that sinners merit the offer by sincerity or preparation. And the decisive clause closes the section: God promises to give the Spirit "to all those that are ordained unto eternal life." The Arminian taught that God gives sufficient grace to all and the sinner determines whether it becomes effectual. The Confession teaches that God gives effectual grace to the elect, a grace that unfailingly produces belief rather than merely enabling it. The Spirit is given not in hope but with certainty. The second error, less visible to modern eyes but no less dangerous, was Antinomianism. In certain extreme forms, Antinomianism denied that the covenant of grace required anything of the sinner at all. Since Christ had done everything, faith was merely a matter of recognizing what was already true. The Confession answers by stating plainly that God promises salvation "requiring of them faith in him, that they may be saved." Faith is a requirement — the instrument by which the sinner receives what Christ has purchased. The Confession does not turn faith into a work; it makes faith the empty hand that receives the work of Another. But it does insist that apart from this resting, receiving, trusting reliance upon Christ alone, there is no salvation. The requirement is real, even though the ability to meet it is itself a gift of grace. The third error was associated with Richard Baxter and those sometimes labeled Neonomians. They taught that the gospel is a "new law" in which faith, repentance, and sincere obedience replace perfect obedience as the condition of justification. Faith, on this view, becomes the new work God accepts instead of the works of the law. The Confession carefully avoids this error by grounding salvation in Christ alone: God "freely offereth unto sinners life and salvation by Jesus Christ." Salvation is offered through Christ, on the ground of His obedience and satisfaction; faith is the instrument of reception, not the ground of acceptance. The difference is vast. In the Neonomian scheme, faith is the righteousness God accepts. In the confessional scheme, faith receives the righteousness of Christ, which alone God accepts. The fourth error was Rome's teaching that justification is a process of inner transformation by infused grace rather than a once-for-all forensic declaration. The Confession grounds the covenant of grace in the free offer of "life and salvation by Jesus Christ," not in sacramental administration. The Spirit is promised to make sinners "willing and able to believe," not to enable cooperation with infused grace. The entire soteriology of the Confession is forensic, immediate, and complete — and this section is its covenantal foundation. The phrase "ordained unto eternal life" is the hinge of the whole section. The Divines speak of election — the eternal, sovereign, unconditional choice of certain persons to eternal life. They do not say the Spirit is given to all who hear the gospel in the hope that some will believe. The Spirit is given to every single one ordained to eternal life. This is particular redemption taught as a promise. The covenant of grace is not a general offer that becomes effectual only if the sinner supplies the decisive element. It is a specific, irrevocable covenant in which every elect person will, in the appointed time, be made willing and able to believe. The doctrine of election is not a dark cloud over the gospel but the very ground of its certain success.

Theological Depth

The Reformed tradition has probed the covenant of grace with an intensity born of the conviction that here the glory of God shines most brightly and the comfort of the believer rests most securely. Four voices will guide us deeper. John Owen, in his commentary on Hebrews and his treatise on the Holy Spirit, insists that the covenant of grace rests upon an eternal covenant between the Father and the Son. Before the covenant was offered to sinners in time, it was transacted between the persons of the Godhead in eternity. The Father appointed the Son to be Mediator; the Son undertook to assume human nature, render perfect obedience, and bear the curse of the broken covenant; the Father promised to give Him a people and bring them to glory. This eternal transaction — the pactum salutis, the covenant of redemption — is the unshakable foundation of the covenant of grace. Owen expresses it with precision: the covenant of grace is the temporal administration of what was eternally agreed upon between the Father and the Son. Every promise made to sinners — forgiveness, justification, adoption, sanctification — is a promise first made to Christ as the representative of His people, purchased by His blood. This is why the gospel can be offered without price: because Christ has already paid the full price, and the Father now freely bestows the benefits upon all who are in the Son. Thomas Goodwin, one of the Westminster Divines themselves, draws out the implications of the Confession's final clause with pastoral warmth. Goodwin observes that the promise of the Spirit to make sinners "willing and able to believe" answers the deepest fear of every awakened conscience. The sinner convicted by the law knows he ought to believe, must believe — and yet finds in himself nothing but unwillingness and inability. His heart is stone. His will is in chains. He cannot produce faith any more than a corpse can produce breath. And it is precisely here that the covenant of grace meets him. The covenant does not say, "Make yourself willing; produce faith from your fallen nature." It says, "God will give His Spirit to make you willing and able." This turns despair into hope, teaching the sinner to look away from himself to the God who has promised to do for him what he cannot do for himself. Goodwin's counsel is simple: do not wait for willingness; go to Christ with your unwillingness. Do not wait for ability; go to Christ with your inability. The Spirit who makes willing and able often begins by showing the sinner how thoroughly unwilling and unable he is. Herman Bavinck, in his Reformed Dogmatics, argues that the covenant of grace is the unifying principle holding the ordo salutis together. Calling, regeneration, faith, justification, sanctification, perseverance, glorification: each is not an isolated transaction but a benefit of the covenant, a promise made to Christ and applied by the Spirit. The covenant is the form; the benefits are the content. This means the believer never receives a partial Christ — one who justifies but does not sanctify, who forgives but does not transform. To be in covenant with God through Christ is to receive every covenant blessing. The God who freely offers life and salvation will not rest until every promise is fully realized in the believer's experience. The covenant of grace is comprehensive — it covers everything from the first stirring of faith to the final vision of glory. John Colquhoun, the Scottish minister whose treatises on the law and the gospel remain treasures of experiential Calvinism, makes a vital pastoral observation that builds on what we noted in Section 2. A persistent error among some believers is to imagine that because Christ has fulfilled the covenant of works, that covenant has been abolished. It has not — it cannot be abolished, for it is nothing other than the expression of God's unchanging holy nature. What has changed is not the demand but the person who meets it. For those in Christ, the demand has been fully satisfied by their federal Head. The law's perfection stands, immutable and unyielding, but those in the covenant of grace face it not as an accuser but as a beloved transcript of their Father's character, a law written now on hearts of flesh. The covenant of grace does not annul the law; it fulfills it in Christ and writes it on the hearts of Christ's people. This is the beauty of the new covenant: the law that condemned us becomes the law we love, not because we have kept it but because Christ has, and because the Spirit is making us increasingly able to walk in it with grateful, childlike steps.

Puritan Application

First, rest in your inability. This may seem a strange place to begin an application of the covenant of grace, but it is the place where grace always begins. The covenant of works was broken because Adam misused the ability he possessed. The covenant of grace was made because you, as a fallen child of Adam, have no ability at all. You cannot keep the law. You cannot produce faith from your own resources. You cannot make yourself love God. And the gospel does not ask you to. It tells you that what you could not do, God has done in Christ, and what you still cannot do, God will do in you by His Spirit. Let this truth settle into the deepest places of your soul. The exhausting effort to make yourself acceptable to God — let it go. You are not acceptable because of anything in you. You are acceptable because of everything in Christ. Your inability is not an obstacle to grace; it is the qualification for receiving it. The healthy do not need a physician; the righteous do not need a Savior. Your sins, your failures, your hard heart, your weak faith — bring them to the throne of grace not as reasons to stay away but as the very reasons to draw near. The covenant of grace was made for people exactly like you. Second, receive the free offer. The Confession says that God "freely offereth unto sinners life and salvation by Jesus Christ." The offer is not made to the worthy — there are none. It is not made to the prepared — no preparation is required. It is made to sinners. The gospel does not say, "Improve yourself, and then come to Christ." It says, "Come to Christ, and He will improve you." The freeness of the offer means there is nothing you must bring except the empty hands of faith — and even those hands are placed in yours by the Spirit. If you have been waiting for a feeling, waiting to be good enough, stop waiting. The offer stands. It is made to you now, exactly as you are. The only thing required is that you receive it — that you take Christ as He is offered freely, fully, without reservation and without delay. Third, look to Christ alone. The Confession says that God offers "life and salvation by Jesus Christ." The preposition is small; its theological weight is infinite. Salvation is not by Christ's teaching, as if He were a moral example whose precepts we follow to heaven. It is not by Christ's death considered as a demonstration of love that moves us to reform. It is by Christ — by His person and His work, by His active obedience to the law in our place and His passive obedience in bearing the penalty of our sin. Your hope before God this very moment must be Christ and Christ only. Not Christ plus your repentance. Not Christ plus your sanctification. Not Christ plus your church attendance, your devotional habits, your emotional experiences. When Satan accuses you — and he will — do not answer him with a list of your spiritual achievements. Answer him with the blood of Christ. When your own conscience testifies against you — and it will — do not silence it by pointing to your growth in grace. Point it to the cross, where the Son of God bore your sins in His body on the tree. The covenant of grace is a covenant in which Another has done everything. Your part is to receive, to rest, to trust, to look, to lean, to hope. Fourth, depend on the Spirit for everything. The Confession promises God will give the Holy Spirit to make His people "willing and able to believe." The faith by which you first came to Christ was the Spirit's work in you — you did not generate it, He did. And the faith by which you continue to come day by day is the Spirit's ongoing work. You are no more able to sustain your faith than you were able to produce it in the first place. This should drive you to prayer. When you find your heart cold, your affections dull, your trust wavering — do not try to work yourself up into a better frame by sheer effort. Go to the God who has promised His Spirit. Plead with Him: "Lord, Thou hast promised to make me willing and able. I am neither willing nor able at this moment. Do what Thou hast promised." The Spirit delights to do what He has been sent to do: to glorify Christ by taking what is Christ's and showing it to His people. Dependence on the Spirit is not weakness; it is the mark of spiritual maturity. Fifth, rejoice that your salvation rests not on your grip on Christ but on His grip on you. The covenant of grace is, from first to last, an arrangement in which God takes the initiative, God provides the Mediator, God makes the promises, God gives the Spirit, God produces the faith, and God brings the work to completion. The only thing you contributed to the covenant of grace was the sin that made it necessary. Everything else is gift. Let this truth free you from the anxious introspection that plagues so many believers. Your assurance does not rest on the strength of your faith but on the object of your faith. A weak faith in a strong Christ saves as surely as a strong faith, just as a trembling hand that receives a priceless jewel possesses it as truly as a steady hand. Your perseverance does not rest on your ability to hold on but on Christ's ability to hold you. He who began a good work in you will carry it on to completion until the day of Christ Jesus. You are safe not because you are faithful but because God is faithful. Let your joy rest there, and let nothing shake it.

Prayer

O Most Gracious and Merciful God, who didst not leave our fallen race to perish under the covenant we had broken, but wast pleased to make a second covenant of grace, we bow before Thee with hearts too small to hold the wonder of what Thou hast done. We confess that we made ourselves incapable of life by that first covenant, that we have no righteousness of our own to plead. Our father Adam sinned, and we sinned in him. Our own transgressions rise against us, more than the hairs of our head. Were we left under the law's demand for perfect obedience, we could only hear the verdict of condemnation and the closing of the gate of life against us forever. But, O Lord, we bless Thee for Jesus Christ. We bless Thee that what the law could not do, Thou didst accomplish by sending Thine own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh, who condemned sin in the flesh. We bless Thee that He kept what Adam broke, rendered the obedience we owed, bore the curse we deserved, and rose as the firstfruits of a new creation. He sits at Thy right hand as the Mediator of a better covenant, established upon better promises. We rest wholly in Him. We thank Thee, O Father, for the free offer of the gospel — that Thou dost freely offer unto sinners life and salvation by Jesus Christ, without money and without price. Grant us grace to receive this offer afresh each day, not as those who have earned a hearing but as beggars who have everything to receive. Keep us from the subtle pride that would turn faith into a work, that would make our believing the ground of acceptance rather than the instrument by which we receive the righteousness of Another. We plead with Thee, O blessed Spirit, for the fulfillment of the covenant promise: to make us willing and able to believe. Our hearts are often hard, our wills stubborn, our affections cold. Come, Holy Spirit, and do what we cannot do. Take away the heart of stone. Give us the heart of flesh. Cause us to walk in Thy statutes. When doubts assail us, bear witness with our spirits that we are children of God, heirs of God, and joint-heirs with Christ. Grant us to live each day in the liberty of the covenant of grace — not as slaves but as sons and daughters who serve a loving Father. Let our obedience be the glad response of gratitude, not the anxious attempt to secure what Christ has already secured. And when we stumble, lift us up again on the basis of Thy promise. And we pray for those still outside this covenant — still strangers to Thy grace, still trusting in themselves. O Lord, who didst make light shine out of darkness, shine in their hearts. Draw them with that irresistible drawing none can withstand. Give them the Spirit who alone can make the unwilling willing and the unable able. Bring us at last, with all Thy redeemed, to that city whose builder and maker is God, where the covenant shall be no longer a matter of faith but of sight. There shall we praise Thee, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, one God in three Persons, for the covenant of grace, for the blood that sealed it, for the Spirit who applied it, and for the glory that it purchased. Through Jesus Christ our Lord, the surety and mediator of the everlasting covenant. Amen.