Devotional 42: The Administration of the Covenant: Under the Law and Under the Gospel

The Confession Read

This covenant was differently administered in the time of the law, and in the time of the gospel: under the law, it was administered by promises, prophecies, sacrifices, circumcision, the paschal lamb, and other types and ordinances delivered to the people of the Jews, all foresignifying Christ to come; which were, for that time, sufficient and efficacious, through the operation of the Spirit, to instruct and build up the elect in faith in the promised Messiah, by whom they had full remission of sins, and eternal salvation; and is called the old testament.

— Westminster Confession of Faith, Chapter 7, Section 5

Introduction

There is a quiet tragedy unfolding in many Christian hearts, and it takes this shape: they open their Bibles to Genesis and find themselves strangers in a foreign land. The blood of bulls and goats, the smoke rising from bronze altars, the elaborate choreography of priests in linen garments, the rigid calendar of feasts and fasts and new moons: it all feels distant, opaque, faintly unsettling. These readers love the Psalms and treasure the prophecies of Isaiah, but the massive legal and ceremonial apparatus of the old covenant leaves them bewildered, and the bewilderment breeds a silent suspicion: that the God of the Old Testament was somehow different from the God of the New, that salvation worked by a different mechanism then, that Abraham and Moses and David belonged to a religion of works while we belong to a religion of grace. The suspicion is rarely stated in those terms, but it lurks beneath the surface of a thousand sermons and a hundred thousand private readings. And it is, in the most literal sense, a catastrophic misunderstanding of the gospel. The Westminster Divines, in the fifth section of their chapter on God's covenant with man, set themselves to demolish this misunderstanding with the patient precision of men who knew that the unity of the covenant of grace was not an academic question but the very thread on which the whole biblical story hangs. They had established, in the preceding sections, the architecture of God's covenantal dealings: voluntary condescension bridging infinite distance, the covenant of works broken in Adam, the covenant of grace freely offered to sinners, and the testament sealed by the death of Christ. Now they faced the question that every careful reader of Scripture must eventually ask: if the covenant of grace is one, why does it look so different before and after the coming of Christ? Why the bloody altars, the dietary laws, the elaborate typology that seems to point everywhere and arrive nowhere, until suddenly, in the Gospels, it all gives way to the simplicity of preaching and sacrament? The covenant was one. The administration was two. And the difference between them was not a difference in the substance of salvation but in the clarity with which Christ was revealed. To misunderstand the old administration is to misunderstand the new, for the new is nothing other than the old with the veil removed. There has never been but one way of salvation, one Mediator, one covenant of grace, from the gates of Eden to the consummation of all things.

Scripture Foundation

The apostolic witness to the relationship between the old and new administrations of the covenant of grace is nowhere more concentrated than in the epistle to the Hebrews, and the author of that epistle provides us with the controlling metaphor for everything the Divines would later confess. Hebrews 10:1 — "For the law having a shadow of good things to come, and not the very image of the things, can never with those sacrifices which they offered year by year continually make the comers thereunto perfect." Every word in this verse is chosen to establish a relationship of correspondence and contrast. The law, by which the author means the entire Mosaic economy, the Decalogue and the full system of priesthood, sacrifice, and ceremony, possesses a shadow. The Greek word is skia, the silhouette cast by an object when light falls upon it. A shadow tells you something genuine about the object that casts it: its outline, its shape, its proportions. You can learn from a shadow. You can even recognise a friend by his shadow before he rounds the corner. But the shadow is not the substance. You cannot shake hands with a shadow. You cannot drink from the shadow of a cup or rest in the shadow of a house. The shadow points to the substance, depends upon the substance for its very existence, and derives all its meaningfulness from the substance, but it is not the substance itself. And what is the substance? The author tells us in the same breath: the law has a shadow, but not the very eikon: the image, the full representation, the thing itself in its substantial reality. The eikon of the good things has arrived in Christ. The old covenant had the outline; the new covenant has the reality. The old covenant had the silhouette of redemption; the new covenant has redemption itself, embodied, accomplished, and applied. The repeated sacrifices of the old economy could never perfect the worshipper, not because they were false pointers but because they were pointers only. An arrow is not the destination. A menu is not the meal. And a shadow, however accurate, is not the person whose shadow it is. The apostle Paul makes the same point with a slightly different vocabulary in his letter to the Colossians, and his language sharpens the contrast to a razor's edge. Colossians 2:16-17 — "Let no man therefore judge you in meat, or in drink, or in respect of an holyday, or of the new moon, or of the sabbath days: Which are a shadow of things to come; but the body is of Christ." The word "body" here translates the Greek soma, and Paul uses it in deliberate antithesis to skia. The dietary laws, the festival calendar, the sabbath observances: these were not arbitrary regulations imposed by a capricious deity. They were shadows, and shadows serve a purpose. They taught Israel to distinguish clean from unclean, sacred from common, holy time from ordinary time. They carved the rhythm of redemption into the very calendar and kitchen of the covenant people. But the substance that cast all those shadows, the solid reality whose outline they traced, is Christ. When the body arrives, you do not continue to study the shadow as though the body were still absent. You turn from the shadow to the substance, not because the shadow was worthless, but because the shadow has done its work. It has led you to the One whose shadow it was. This is why Paul can say that the ceremonial distinctives of the old covenant are no longer binding. It is not that God changed His mind about holiness. It is that the holiness toward which every dietary law and festival observance pointed has arrived in person, and to cling to the shadows after the substance has come is to insult the substance. But if the old administration was all shadow, how did anyone under it come to saving faith? The question is not merely historical. It touches the very character of God. If the old covenant saints were saved by keeping the law, by the scrupulous observation of ceremonies and the offering of sacrifices, then Paul's insistence that salvation has always been by grace through faith collapses, and we are left with two different religions inhabiting the same Bible. The answer, and it is among the great liberating truths in all of Scripture, is that faith has always looked to the same Christ, whether it saw Him in shadow or in substance. John 8:56 — "Your father Abraham rejoiced to see my day: and he saw it, and was glad." The Lord Jesus spoke these words to men who prided themselves on being Abraham's children, and what He claimed stopped their breath. Abraham saw Christ's day. The Greek verb is eiden: he saw, he perceived, he beheld. Not with physical eyes, for Abraham lived two millennia before the incarnation. But with the eyes of faith, kindled by the Spirit, Abraham looked through the promises given to him, the promise of a seed in whom all nations would be blessed, the promise of a land, the promise of an inheritance, and he saw, dimly but truly, the One in whom all those promises would find their Yes and Amen. He saw and rejoiced. The joy of Abraham was not the joy of a man who hoped his works would measure up but the joy of a man who had seen his Redeemer from afar and knew that the promise was sure. This is why the author of Hebrews can devote his entire eleventh chapter to what we might call the shadow-faith of the old covenant saints, and the portrait he paints is one of deep unity with our own. Hebrews 11:13 — "These all died in faith, not having received the promises, but having seen them afar off, and were persuaded of them, and embraced them, and confessed that they were strangers and pilgrims on the earth." They died in faith. The Greek is kata pistin: according to faith, in the sphere and power of faith. Not works. Not merit. Not ceremonial precision. Faith. The same faith by which we believe, though their faith grasped a Christ promised while ours grasps a Christ who has come. They saw the promises from afar; we see them in their fulfillment. But the instrument of reception was identical: faith, and faith alone. The apostle Paul gives us perhaps the fullest single exposition of this progressive unfolding in his letter to the Galatians, where he employs an analogy drawn from the ordinary arrangements of human families to illuminate the extraordinary arrangements of God. Galatians 4:1-7 — "Now I say, That the heir, as long as he is a child, differeth nothing from a servant, though he be lord of all; But is under tutors and governors until the time appointed of the father. Even so we, when we were children, were in bondage under the elements of the world: But when the fulness of the time was come, God sent forth his Son, made of a woman, made under the law, To redeem them that were under the law, that we might receive the adoption of sons. And because ye are sons, God hath sent forth the Spirit of his Son into your hearts, crying, Abba, Father. Wherefore thou art no more a servant, but a son; and if a son, then an heir of God through Christ." The analogy is precise and exact. A child who is heir to a great estate lives, during his minority, under conditions outwardly indistinguishable from servitude. He has tutors, the Greek is paidagogous, household slaves charged with the moral formation of the heir, and governors, oikonomous, stewards who manage the estate. He is told when to rise, what to study, what to eat. And yet, in status, he is lord of all. The restrictions are not a denial of his sonship; they are the pedagogy that prepares him for its full exercise. The day appointed by the father, the prothesmia, will arrive, and on that day the child passes from tutelage to liberty. So it was with the people of God under the old covenant. They were genuine heirs, possessing the promises, indwelt by the Spirit, justified by faith. But they were children, and their childhood was marked by the stoicheia tou kosmou: the ceremonies, dietary restrictions, and calendrical observances that hedged them about. These were not salvific; they were tutorial. And when the fullness of time arrived, the childhood ended. The heir entered his inheritance. The Spirit of adoption was poured out in the measure appropriate to full-grown sons. The cry of the old covenant saint was, "I believe; help thou mine unbelief." The cry of the new covenant saint is, "Abba, Father." The faith is the same; the experience of it is transfigured by the accomplished work of the Son and the poured-out Spirit.

What the Divines Meant

When the Westminster Assembly set down these words in the 1640s, they were not speculating. They were drawing a line in the sand between the Reformed faith and a cluster of errors that had been gathering force for more than a century, and the precision of their language reflects the urgency of the controversies they were answering. The first target was Rome. The Council of Trent, in its seventh session, had pronounced an anathema upon anyone who denied that the sacraments of the new law were substantially different from the sacraments of the old law. For Rome, the old covenant sacraments, circumcision, the Passover, the various purifications, were merely figures and shadows, possessing no inherent efficacy, serving only to prefigure the grace that would later be given. The new covenant sacraments, by contrast, were held to confer grace ex opere operato, by the mere performance of the rite, provided the recipient placed no obstacle in the way. The effect of this teaching was to drive a wedge between the two testaments: the old covenant saints had ceremonies that signified grace; the new covenant saints have ceremonies that actually convey it. The unity of the covenant of grace was fractured at its most practical point: the means by which God communicates His benefits to His people. The Divines answered this by insisting, with one voice, that the old covenant ordinances were "sufficient and efficacious, through the operation of the Spirit, to instruct and build up the elect in faith in the promised Messiah." The efficacy of any means of grace, whether circumcision or baptism, Passover or the Lord's Supper, never resides in the outward element or the ritual action. It resides in the sovereign operation of the Holy Spirit, who uses the means as He wills to accomplish His purposes in the elect. The old covenant sacrifices did not save anyone, and neither do the new covenant sacraments. Christ saves. The Spirit applies Christ. The means are instruments in the Spirit's hands, and they are efficacious, genuinely, truly, spiritually efficacious, not because of anything in themselves but because the Spirit who instituted them is faithful to work through them. This is true of the old administration and the new alike. The difference is not one of efficacy but of clarity, fullness, and scope. The second error was Socinianism, which denied both the deity of Christ and the organic unity of the biblical revelation. The Socinians read the Old Testament as a religion of law and fear, a provisional arrangement that taught a crude and carnal piety suited to an infantile stage of human development. Christianity, in their view, was not the fulfillment of the old covenant but its replacement: a new religion founded on the superior moral teachings of the man Jesus. The types and shadows of the Mosaic economy were, on this reading, merely the gropings of a primitive religious consciousness, not divinely instituted foresignifyings of Christ. The Divines answered by insisting that every type, every sacrifice, every ordinance of the old covenant was given by God and "foresignified Christ to come." They were not human inventions; they were divine appointments. They were not crude approximations; they were precise, Spirit-designed pointers to the person and work of the coming Redeemer. The entire old covenant economy was a sustained exercise in Christological pedagogy, and to miss this is to miss the meaning of the Old Testament itself. The third error was Anabaptism, which in its more extreme forms denied that the old covenant saints belonged to the same covenant of grace as new covenant believers. The Anabaptists argued that the old and new covenants were substantially different: the old was carnal, national, and earthly; the new was spiritual, personal, and heavenly. Circumcision was a mark of physical descent from Abraham; baptism is a mark of personal faith. The two covenants have different memberships, different promises, and different signs. The Divines' insistence that the covenant of grace is "one and the same, under various dispensations," a phrase that appears in the last line of Section 6 but governs Sections 5 and 6 together, was crafted as a direct refutation of this radical disjunction. Abraham was justified by faith. David was justified by faith. The elect among Israel were elect unto eternal life. The Holy Spirit regenerated old covenant believers no less than new covenant believers. The differences between the administrations were differences of degree, not of kind: differences in the manner of dispensing the one grace of the one covenant through the one Mediator.

Theological Depth

The Reformed tradition has expended some of its finest theological energy on the precise relationship between the old and new administrations of the covenant of grace, and the harvest of that labour is a vision of redemptive history in which unity and diversity are held together without the one swallowing the other. Calvin, in the Institutes, devotes a long and carefully argued chapter to the similarity and difference of the two testaments, and the weight he assigns to the unity of the covenant is remarkable. The old covenant fathers, Calvin insists, "had the same promise of eternal life as we have." They knew Christ as Mediator, they were regenerated by the Spirit, they were justified by faith, they were heirs of the heavenly inheritance. Every argument that would make the old covenant a religion of earthly promises and carnal blessings, Calvin meets with the same insistent question: If Abraham hoped only for Canaan, why does the author of Hebrews say he looked for a city whose builder and maker is God? If the old covenant saints knew nothing of eternal life, why does David say, "In thy presence is fulness of joy; at thy right hand there are pleasures for evermore"? The unity of the covenant of grace across both testaments is, for Calvin, not a deduction from systematic theology but the plain teaching of Scripture read as a coherent whole. But Calvin is equally insistent on the differences, and he identifies three that illuminate the Confession's language. First, the old covenant presented heavenly realities under earthly figures; the new covenant presents them directly. Israel had a land flowing with milk and honey as a type of the better country; we have the better country itself, exhibited in the resurrected Christ. Second, the old covenant was, in comparison with the new, a dispensation of shadows: not falsehood, but shadow, which is true as far as it goes but incomplete. Third, the old covenant was a dispensation of bondage and fear, suited to the childhood of the church; the new covenant is a dispensation of liberty and confidence, suited to the full-grown sonship of the Spirit-indwelt believer. The law was a paidagogos, and a paidagogos is not an enemy but a tutor whose strictness serves a liberating purpose. The fear that attended Sinai was not the terror of the damned but the wholesome dread of children who had not yet learned to call God "Abba." Turretin takes up the question of sacramental continuity with characteristic thoroughness. The old covenant had two ordinary sacraments, circumcision and the Passover; the new covenant has two, baptism and the Lord's Supper. His answer is that they are the same in their internal substance: both circumcision and baptism signify regeneration, the putting off of the body of the sins of the flesh, and incorporation into the covenant community, but different in their external form and in the clarity with which they exhibit Christ. Circumcision looked forward to the cutting off of Christ; baptism looks back upon His death and resurrection. The Passover looked forward to the Lamb who would be slain; the Lord's Supper looks back and feeds upon the Lamb who has been slain and now lives. The difference is not in the grace signified but in the relation of the sign to the historical accomplishment of redemption. The old covenant sacraments said, "He will come." The new covenant sacraments say, "He has come, and He is coming again." Herman Bavinck deepens the doctrine by situating it within the broader drama of redemptive history. For Bavinck, the diversity of administrations is not an accident of history but a necessity of pedagogy. God did not reveal everything at once, not because He was unwilling but because the church was not ready. Revelation is progressive, not in the sense that later truths contradict earlier ones, but in the sense that later truths unfold what was present in seed form from the beginning. The protevangelium in Genesis 3:15 contained the whole gospel in kernel, but the kernel had to grow into a tree. Abraham knew more than Adam; Moses knew more than Abraham; the prophets knew more than Moses; and the apostles knew more than them all. The history of redemption is the history of light increasing: not from darkness to light, as though the old covenant were false, but from dawn to noon, as shadows shorten and colours brighten until the Sun of Righteousness stands at the zenith and the whole landscape is ablaze with glory. Robert Shaw, whose exposition of the Confession is a trusted guide to the mind of the Divines, draws attention to a phrase that can easily be overlooked: "for that time, sufficient and efficacious." The old covenant administration, Shaw notes, was perfectly adequate for the purpose God intended. It was not a botched first attempt. It was sufficient: it contained everything the elect needed to know for their salvation in that era. And it was efficacious: it actually accomplished, through the Spirit, the instruction and upbuilding of the elect in faith. The old covenant saint who brought his lamb to the tabernacle and laid his hand upon its head, confessing his sin and looking in faith to the promised Redeemer, went home justified. Not justified by the blood of the lamb, the blood of bulls and goats can never take away sin, but justified by the blood of the Lamb to whom that lamb pointed, the Lamb slain from the foundation of the world. The efficacy of the old covenant means was retroactive: it drew its power from a death yet to come, a testament not yet activated but already valid in the counsel of God.

Puritan Application

First, learn to read the Old Testament as a Christian book. It is a tragedy of modern evangelical piety that the first thirty-nine books of the Bible are so often treated as background material: interesting for context, useful for proof-texts, but not living and active in the way the New Testament is. The Confession calls us to read more deeply. Every sacrifice whispers the name of Christ. Every prophecy strains toward His coming. Every type and shadow traces the outline of His person and work. When you read Leviticus, do not ask merely what the ritual teaches about ancient Israelite religion. Ask what it teaches about the One who is our great High Priest, who entered not the Holy of Holies made with hands but heaven itself, who offered not the blood of goats and calves but His own blood, and who sat down at the right hand of the Majesty on high because His work was finished. When you read the Psalms, listen for the voice of Christ, His prayers, His praises, His sufferings, His triumphs, for He is the true Singer of Israel and the true King enthroned on Zion. The Old Testament is not a foreign country. It is your family history, the record of your elder brothers and sisters in the faith who walked with God in the shadows and are now with Him in the substance. Second, let the unity of the covenant enlarge your confidence in the Scriptures. One of the oldest objections to the Christian faith is that the God of the Old Testament seems harsh, wrathful, and bloodthirsty, while the God of the New Testament is gentle, forgiving, and kind. The heretic Marcion made this objection in the second century, and it has never gone away; it simply dresses itself in new clothes every generation. The Confession's teaching demolishes it. The God who gave the law at Sinai is the God who gave His Son at Calvary. The God who commanded the slaughter of the Canaanites is the God who wept over Jerusalem. The God who demanded blood upon the altar is the God who provided the blood of His own Son. The apparent tensions between the testaments are not contradictions; they are the tensions proper to a single story told across centuries, in which the same holy love that judges sin also provides the atonement for sin. When you encounter a passage in the Old Testament that troubles you, and there are many, do not set it aside as belonging to a different and inferior revelation. Wrestle with it. Ask what it teaches about the holiness of the God you worship and the costliness of the grace you have received. The answer, pursued with patience and prayer, will always lead you to the same place: the foot of the cross, where the wrath and mercy of God met and kissed. Third, cherish the liberty of the new covenant without despising the pedagogy of the old. It is easy, reading Galatians, to feel impatience with the old administration. Why all the rules? Why the endless distinctions between clean and unclean? Paul's answer is that the rules were a paidagogos: a strict but benevolent instructor whose severity served liberation. The child who has come of age does not despise the tutor who taught him to read, even if the tutor was stern. So it should be with the old covenant. The dietary laws taught Israel that God is holy. The sacrificial system taught that sin deserves death and God provides a substitute. The separation from the nations taught that God's people are called to be distinct. Their outward forms have passed away because the substance has come, but the spiritual realities they taught are permanent. The new covenant believer who scorns the old covenant is like an adult who scorns his primary school; he owes his very literacy to the instruction he now derides. Fourth, rest your assurance on the unity of the covenant, not on the intensity of your experience. One of the quiet anxieties that troubles many believers is the sense that Old Testament saints seem to have known God with an intimacy and immediacy that we lack. Abraham walked with God and was called His friend. Moses spoke with God face to face, as a man speaks with his friend. David poured out his heart in psalms of such raw honesty that we almost blush to read them. And we, by contrast, plod through our days with a faith that often feels thin and a sense of God's presence that flickers like a candle in a draft. But the unity of the covenant teaches us that we are not second-class citizens in the kingdom. The same Spirit who enabled David to write, "Whither shall I go from thy Spirit? or whither shall I flee from thy presence?" dwells in every believer. The same Christ in whom Abraham trusted is the Christ in whom we trust. The promise is not that every believer will experience the same degree of conscious communion with God but that every believer possesses the same Christ, the same Spirit, the same adoption, the same inheritance. Your faith may be weaker than Abraham's; your prayers may be poorer than David's; your obedience may be feebler than Moses'. But your standing before God is identically secure, because it rests not on the quality of your faith but on the object of your faith, and the object is the same Christ who was promised to them and is proclaimed to us. The sun that dawned for them in promise has risen for us in fulfillment, but the sun is the same sun, and its light is the same light, and all who look to it in faith, whether from afar or from near, are saved. Fifth, let the history of the old covenant teach you patience in the Christian life. The old covenant saints lived their entire lives without seeing the fulfillment of the promises they believed. Abraham died owning nothing in Canaan but a burial cave. Moses died on Mount Nebo, gazing at a land he would never enter. David died with the temple unbuilt and the kingdom still a shadow of what was promised. And yet they died in faith, persuaded of the promises, embracing them from afar, confessing that they were strangers and pilgrims on the earth. We live on the other side of the incarnation, but we too are waiting. We have received the firstfruits of the Spirit, but we groan inwardly as we wait for the redemption of our bodies. We have tasted the powers of the age to come, but we still live in the age that is passing away. We know Christ, but we do not yet see Him as He is. The patience of the old covenant saints, their willingness to trust God across decades of deferred hope, across centuries of unfulfilled promise, is a rebuke to our impatience and a model for our perseverance. They waited for the first coming; we wait for the second. Their patience was rewarded beyond all they could have imagined; ours will be too. The same Christ who came once in humiliation will come again in glory, and on that day the shadows will flee away forever and the substance will be all in all.

Prayer

O most wise and gracious God, who in Thy perfect counsel didst ordain that the revelation of Thy Son should unfold across the ages, from promise to fulfillment, from shadow to substance, from dawn to noonday, we bless Thee for the unity of the covenant of grace. Thou hast not provided one way of salvation for the fathers and another for their children. From the garden wherein Thou didst promise the seed of the woman to the garden wherein the second Adam sweat great drops of blood, from the altar whereon Abraham bound Isaac to the hill whereon the Father gave His only Son, from the tabernacle in the wilderness to the true tabernacle not made with hands: there has been but one Mediator, one sacrifice, one Spirit, one faith, one salvation. We praise Thee for the perfect consistency of Thy character and the unsearchable wisdom of Thy plan. We confess, O Lord, that we have too often read the Old Testament as a closed book, failing to see that every page is filled with the fragrance of Christ. Forgive the poverty of our attention and the sluggishness of our hearts. Open our eyes, as Thou didst open the eyes of the two on the road to Emmaus, that beginning at Moses and all the prophets, we may see in all the Scriptures the things concerning Jesus. Grant us to love the law as a tutor leading us to Christ, to treasure the Psalms as the prayers of the Head in whom all His members share, and to study the prophets as heralds of the grace manifested in the appearing of our great God and Saviour. Teach us, we pray, to live in the liberty of the new covenant without despising the childhood of the church. Let the simplicity of new covenant worship, Word, sacrament, and prayer, be precious to us because Christ the substance is present in these means by His Spirit. And let the memory of the shadows teach us the weight of what we now possess. Every time we hear the gospel preached, we hear what Abraham longed to hear. Every time we come to the Table, we feed upon what the Passover could only foreshadow. Every time we cry "Abba, Father," we speak with a confidence that David could hardly have imagined. Fill us with grateful wonder that we live in the fullness of time, and let that gratitude overflow in lives of joyful obedience and eager expectation. Sustain us, O blessed Spirit, in the long wait between the first and second comings of our Lord. The patriarchs waited for the seed; we wait for the harvest. The prophets waited for the suffering Servant; we wait for the reigning King. The apostles waited for the promise of the Father; we wait for the promise of the Son, who said, "Surely I come quickly." Grant us the faith of Abraham, who staggered not at the promise through unbelief. Grant us the patience of Moses, who endured as seeing Him who is invisible. Grant us the hope of the psalmists, who sang of a city whose builder and maker is God. And when the shadows have fled and the day has fully come, when faith gives way to sight and hope to possession, bring us into the presence of the One who is the substance of every promise, the body that casts every shadow, the Alpha and Omega, the Beginning and the End. Even so, come, Lord Jesus. Amen.