Devotional 95: The Moral Law: A Perfect Rule of Righteousness

The Confession Read

God gave to Adam a law, as a covenant of works, by which He bound him and all his posterity to personal, entire, exact, and perpetual obedience; promised life upon the fulfilling, and threatened death upon the breach of it; and endued him with power and ability to keep it.

— Westminster Confession of Faith, Chapter 19, Section 1

Introduction

No man can understand the gospel who has not first understood the law: not the law as a set of moral precepts merely, but the law as a covenant, as the original constitution under which God placed the human race in the person of its first father. The Westminster Divines understood this with a clarity that much of the modern church has lost, and they signal their understanding by the strategic placement of the nineteenth chapter. Having spent eighteen chapters laying out the doctrines of Scripture, God, the decrees, creation, providence, the fall, the covenant of grace, Christ the Mediator, free will, effectual calling, justification, adoption, sanctification, saving faith, repentance, good works, perseverance, and assurance, having traced the whole arc of redemption from eternity past to the believer's present confidence, they now turn, as though retracing their steps to the very beginning, to the law of God. And they begin not with Moses but with Adam, not with Sinai but with Eden. The instinct behind this ordering is profoundly pastoral. The Confession has just spoken of assurance, of the believer's privilege of knowing that he is in a state of grace, of the Spirit's witness, of the infallible certainty that rests upon the divine promise. But assurance, if it is to be durable, must be rooted in something deeper than the present warmth of the heart. It must rest upon an understanding of what salvation actually accomplishes, and what it accomplishes cannot be grasped until we have grasped what the fall ruined. The covenant of works is the necessary backdrop against which the covenant of grace appears in its true proportions. A man who has never felt the crushing weight of the law's demand, personal, entire, exact, and perpetual obedience, will never taste the full sweetness of the gospel's provision. He will be a superficial Christian, trusting in a Christ he has never truly needed, rejoicing in a salvation whose dimensions he has never measured. The Divines, therefore, devote this opening section to a single sentence, and that sentence is a masterpiece of compression. In fewer than sixty words, it establishes the federal headship of Adam, the covenantal character of God's original relation to man, the comprehensive nature of the obedience required, the double sanction of life and death, and the original righteousness with which Adam was endowed. Every subsequent section of the chapter (the moral law's perpetuity, the Decalogue's abiding authority, the ceremonial law's abrogation, the judicial law's expiration) rests upon the foundation laid here. And every sermon on grace that does not first rehearse the law's demand is a sermon built upon sand.

Scripture Foundation

The entire doctrine of the covenant of works is derived from the opening chapters of Genesis, and particularly from the command that God laid upon Adam in the garden. The language of Genesis 2:16–17 bears all the marks of a covenantal arrangement, even though the English word "covenant" does not appear until later in the sacred narrative: "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" (Genesis 2:16-17). Here are the essential elements of any covenant: two parties, a stipulation, a promise implied in the permission to eat freely of every other tree, and a threatened penalty for transgression. The Hebrew phrase rendered "thou shalt surely die" (moth tamuth) employs the infinitive absolute construction, the strongest form of verbal intensification available in biblical Hebrew. It is not a mere prediction of mortality but a judicial declaration: dying thou shalt die. The death threatened is comprehensive: physical, spiritual, and eternal, the sundering of the creature from the Creator in whom alone he had life. The apostle Paul, in that passage of the epistle to the Romans where he sets the disobedience of the first Adam against the obedience of the second, provides the definitive apostolic exposition of the federal principle. "Wherefore, as by one man sin entered into the world, and death by sin; and so death passed upon all men, for that all have sinned" (Romans 5:12). The logic of the verse is representational, not merely imitative. Paul does not say that all men die because each man, following Adam's example, commits his own sins, though that is also true. He says that death passed upon all men because all sinned in and through the one man. The Greek prepositional phrase eph' hō has occasioned centuries of exegetical dispute, but the entire thrust of the passage, confirmed by the parallel that Paul draws in the verses that follow, demands a federal reading. "Therefore as by the offence of one judgment came upon all men to condemnation; even so by the righteousness of one the free gift came upon all men unto justification of life. For as by one man's disobedience many were made sinners, so by the obedience of one shall many be made righteous" (Romans 5:18-19). The parallel is as precise as language can make it. If Christ's righteousness is imputed to those He represents, and this is the very heart of the Reformed doctrine of justification, then Adam's guilt must be imputed to those he represented. The two federal heads stand at the two poles of redemptive history, each acting for a people, each determining the legal standing of those united to him. The apostle returns to this covenantal logic in his first letter to the Corinthians, where he draws the contrast between the two Adams with even greater explicitness: "For since by man came death, by man came also the resurrection of the dead. For as in Adam all die, even so in Christ shall all be made alive" (1 Corinthians 15:21-22). And then, a few verses later, the Pauline typology reaches its climax: "And so it is written, The first man Adam was made a living soul; the last Adam was made a quickening spirit. Howbeit that was not first which is spiritual, but that which is natural; and afterward that which is spiritual. The first man is of the earth, earthy: the second man is the Lord from heaven" (1 Corinthians 15:45-47). The contrast is not between two private individuals but between two representative men, each the head of a humanity. All who are in Adam share his nature, his guilt, and his destiny. All who are in Christ share His nature, His righteousness, and His destiny. The covenant of works is the legal framework within which the first headship operates; the covenant of grace is the legal framework within which the second headship operates. To these Pauline passages must be added the apostle's argument in Galatians, where he sets the principle of law and the principle of faith in sharp antithesis. "For as many as are of the works of the law are under the curse: for it is written, Cursed is every one that continueth not in all things which are written in the book of the law to do them. But that no man is justified by the law in the sight of God, it is evident: for, The just shall live by faith. And the law is not of faith: but, The man that doeth them shall live in them. Christ hath redeemed us from the curse of the law, being made a curse for us: for it is written, Cursed is every one that hangeth on a tree" (Galatians 3:10-13). The citation of Leviticus 18:5, "the man that doeth them shall live in them," establishes the operating principle of the covenant of works: life is offered upon the condition of perfect, personal, perpetual obedience. No fallen son of Adam can meet that condition, and therefore every man who stands before God on the ground of his own doing stands under the curse. The only escape from that curse is the substitutionary death of Christ, who was "made a curse for us," bearing in His own person the very sanction that the covenant of works pronounces upon every transgressor. Finally, the prophet Hosea provides the Old Testament's most direct confirmation that Adam's original relationship with God was genuinely covenantal. "But they like men have transgressed the covenant: there have they dealt treacherously against me" (Hosea 6:7). The Authorized Version's "like men" renders the Hebrew ke'adam, which more accurately means "like Adam." Israel's covenant-breaking at Sinai, Hosea declares, is a repetition of Adam's covenant-breaking in Eden. The sin of the garden was not a mere infraction of an arbitrary rule; it was the violation of a covenant, a foedus, a binding agreement between God and man with stipulated conditions and threatened penalties. And every subsequent human transgression is, in its essential character, a reenactment of that primal breach.

What the Divines Meant

When the Westminster Divines declared that God gave Adam a law "as a covenant of works," they were doing far more than making a historical observation about the garden. They were laying the legal foundation of the entire system of grace, and they were answering a constellation of errors that had troubled the church from its earliest centuries. The phrase "covenant of works" (foedus operum in the Latin vocabulary that the Reformed orthodox inherited from the Reformation) distinguishes this original arrangement from the "covenant of grace" (foedus gratiae) by which sinners are saved. In the covenant of works, the condition of obtaining life is perfect obedience, to be rendered by the covenant partner himself. In the covenant of grace, the condition of obtaining life is faith in Another, who has rendered the obedience that the first covenant demanded. The two covenants are not complementary paths to the same destination; they are mutually exclusive principles of relating to God. One says, "Do this, and thou shalt live." The other says, "Believe, and thou shalt be saved." One demands righteousness from man; the other bestows righteousness upon man through a substitute. The Divines set this distinction at the head of their treatment of the law because every subsequent statement about the law's continuing use, its threefold office, and its relation to the believer presupposes it. The four adjectives with which the Divines describe the obedience required, personal, entire, exact, and perpetual, are chosen with surgical precision, and each excludes a specific error or evasion. The obedience must be personal. Adam could not satisfy the covenant by proxy. No mediator stood between him and his Maker in the garden. He himself, in his own person, must render the obedience that the covenant demanded. This excludes, by anticipation, every scheme of salvation that would allow one man's surplus merit to be transferred to another, as though the performance of a saint could compensate for the deficiency of a sinner. The obedience must be entire. It must cover the whole range of God's revealed will, the explicit prohibition regarding the tree and the moral law written upon the heart alike. Partial obedience is no obedience under the covenant of works, for the law is an indivisible whole: offend in one point, and the whole covenant is broken. The obedience must be exact. It must conform in every particular to the divine standard, without defect in motive, manner, or measure. An outward compliance that conceals an inward reluctance is not the obedience the covenant requires, for the covenant claims the whole man. And the obedience must be perpetual. It must be sustained without interruption for the entire duration of the probation. A single failure at any point, a single act of disobedience, a single moment of defection, breaches the covenant and triggers its curse. There is no provision for repentance within the covenant of works, no mechanism for restoration once the terms have been violated. The four words together describe a demand so comprehensive and so inflexible that no fallen son of Adam could meet it for a single hour of his life. The sanction clause is expressed in perfect antithesis: life for obedience, death for disobedience. The life promised was not merely the continuation of Adam's biological existence in the garden; that he already possessed by virtue of creation. It was a confirmed and irrevocable state of blessedness, a passage from the possibility of falling to the impossibility of falling, from a probationary condition to a permanent inheritance. The Reformed orthodox described Adam's pre-fall state as posse peccare, posse non peccare, able to sin, able not to sin. Had he passed the probation, he would have entered the state of non posse peccare, not able to sin, confirmed in righteousness and secured in fellowship with God forever. The death threatened was correspondingly comprehensive: spiritual death, the severing of communion with the Creator; physical death, the dissolution of the body and its return to dust; and eternal death, the second death from which there is no resurrection unto life. On the day Adam ate, the process of dying began in all three dimensions, and all his posterity entered the world under the same comprehensive sentence. The final clause, "and endued him with power and ability to keep it," is a crucial affirmation of the justice of the covenant. Adam was not commanded to perform what he was unable to perform. He was created upright, in original righteousness, with true knowledge, righteousness, and holiness. His faculties were sound; his will was free in the truest sense: free from any inward bias toward evil, free to love God with all his heart, free to obey the commandment he had been given. His fall was not the result of any defect in his constitution but of the mysterious liberty of a finite will which, though created good, was capable of turning from the good. The covenant was just in its terms, and Adam's breach of it was inexcusable. God owed him nothing beyond what He had already given in creation, and what He demanded was nothing beyond what Adam was endowed to render. The Divines were conscious, as they drafted these words, of the errors they were excluding. Against the Socinians, who denied that Adam's sin was imputed to his posterity and who rejected the very idea of a covenant of works, the Confession insists that the law was given "as a covenant" and that it bound Adam and "all his posterity." Against the Pelagians, who taught that Adam's fall affected only himself and that infants enter the world in the same state of moral neutrality as Adam before the fall, the Confession teaches that the covenant bound Adam representatively and that his act had consequences for all whom he represented. Against those who would later dissolve the distinction between the law as a covenant and the law as a rule, the Divines lay the ground for the threefold use of the law that the subsequent sections will develop. The law terrifies, restrains, and guides, but only for those who stand in a new relation to it through the Mediator.

Theological Depth

Herman Witsius, whose Economy of the Covenants remains the fullest treatment of federal theology in the Reformed tradition, opens his discussion of the covenant of works with an observation that sets the entire doctrine in its proper light. The covenant was not, Witsius argues, an arbitrary arrangement imposed upon man from without. It was a condescension, a voluntary act of the Creator by which He bound Himself to reward the obedience of the creature. God might have required Adam's obedience simply as a matter of creaturely duty, without annexing any further promise to its performance. That He chose instead to enter into a covenantal relationship, with stipulated blessings and threatened penalties, was an act of sovereign goodness. The covenant form itself, a law with a promise, is an anticipation, however faint, of the gracious character that would later define the covenant of grace. The God who condescends to deal with man by covenant in Eden is the same God who condescends to deal with sinners by covenant in Christ. Witsius also addresses with characteristic thoroughness the question that has troubled many tender consciences: how can it be just for Adam's sin to be imputed to his posterity, who had no hand in the act itself? The answer, he explains, lies in the nature of federal representation. Adam did not act as a private individual when he took the forbidden fruit. He acted as the head of the human race, the representative in whom all his natural descendants were federally included. The same principle, inverted, operates in the covenant of grace: Christ did not act as a private individual when He fulfilled the law and bore its curse. He acted as the head of the elect, the representative in whom all His spiritual descendants were federally included. If the second imputation is just, and every believer stakes his eternal hope upon it, then the first imputation, however mysterious, must be just as well. The two imputations stand or fall together. The denial of original sin, Witsius observes with quiet irony, is always accompanied sooner or later by a denial of imputed righteousness. Robert Shaw, in his Exposition of the Westminster Confession of Faith, brings out the pastoral implications of the covenant of works with a clarity that has helped generations of ordinary Christians grasp a doctrine too often left to the scholars. He notes that the covenant of works, considered in itself, is a covenant without a mediator. Adam stood before God in his own person, with no one to interpose between him and his Creator. When he fell, he fell alone, and there was no provision within the covenant for his restoration. The law could condemn the transgressor; it could not restore him. The gospel alone provides what the law could not: a Mediator who is both God and man, able to satisfy the law's demand in the place of those who have broken it. Shaw's comment on the four adjectives is particularly helpful: personal obedience excludes the Romish doctrine of supererogation, entire obedience excludes all merely outward conformity, exact obedience excludes every thought of partial merit, and perpetual obedience excludes every scheme of salvation by a deathbed repentance that lacks a changed life. The four words are a fortress against four errors, and the believer who meditates upon them will find his self-righteousness dismantled word by word. Warfield, whose essay "Imputation" remains a landmark of American Presbyterian scholarship, draws out the exegetical foundations of the doctrine with a rigour that complements the more pastorally oriented work of Witsius and Shaw. Warfield demonstrates that the parallel between Adam and Christ in Romans 5 is not a rhetorical flourish but the very structure of Paul's argument. The apostle is not saying that Adam and Christ are similar in some general way; he is saying that the same principle of federal representation operates in both cases, with opposite results. Adam's act of disobedience constituted the many as sinners; Christ's act of obedience constitutes the many as righteous. The parallel is precise, juridical, and comprehensive, and it cannot be weakened without weakening the parallel upon which the doctrine of justification rests. Warfield's conclusion is as sobering as it is inescapable: you cannot have Paul's doctrine of salvation without Paul's doctrine of the fall, and you cannot have Paul's doctrine of the fall without the federal headship of Adam. William Ames, whose Marrow of Theology was the standard textbook of Reformed divinity in the seventeenth century, brings a different, and uniquely helpful, emphasis to the covenant of works. Ames treats the covenant not primarily as a legal arrangement but as a relational bond, an expression of the friendship that existed between God and man before the fall. The law was not a burden laid upon a reluctant creature; it was the form in which the Creator's love and the creature's grateful obedience met. The commandment concerning the tree was not an arbitrary test but a sacramental sign: the outward and visible token of an inward and spiritual reality, namely, Adam's acknowledgment that he was a creature under authority and not a god unto himself. When Adam ate, he was not merely breaking a rule; he was renouncing the relationship that the rule signified, declaring his independence from the God who had made him, and reaching for an autonomy that belongs to the Creator alone. Ames's treatment reminds us that the covenant of works was, in its original institution, a covenant of life, a gracious arrangement by which the creature was invited to pass from a mutable to an immutable state of blessedness. It became a covenant of death only through man's transgression. Turretin, in his Institutes of Elenctic Theology, provides the most rigorous defence of the covenant of works against its theological detractors. He distinguishes carefully between the substance of the covenant (the obligation to obedience, which is rooted in the Creator-creature relationship and is therefore natural and perpetual) and the form of the covenant (the promise of life upon condition of perfect obedience, which is a positive addition and was peculiar to Adam's state before the fall). The substance remains; the form has been superseded. The moral law continues to bind all men because it reflects the unchanging character of God and the unchanging obligations of the creature. But the covenant form, the promise of life upon the condition of perfect personal obedience, no longer applies to fallen man, because fallen man cannot meet the condition. Turretin's distinction prevents two errors: the antinomian error that the law has no continuing claim upon the believer, and the legalistic error that the believer's standing before God depends upon his own obedience. The law binds as a rule but not as a covenant; it directs but does not condemn; it guides the justified sinner in the path of gratitude without threatening him with the curse from which Christ has redeemed him.

Puritan Application

First, let the perfect righteousness that the covenant of works demanded become, in your meditation, the measure by which you learn to despair of yourself. This is not a counsel of gloom but the first step toward genuine comfort. The natural man supposes, until he is taught otherwise by the Spirit, that his defects are minor and his virtues substantial. He imagines that God, being merciful, will overlook the one and accept the other. The covenant of works demolishes this presumption with the force of a thunderclap. It does not ask whether you are better than your neighbour, better than you used to be, or better than the average of humanity. It asks whether your obedience has been personal, entire, exact, and perpetual. It asks whether you have loved God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength for every moment of your existence. The honest heart, when it hears that standard, can only bow its head and confess: I have not kept it for a single hour. And that confession, painful as it is, is the door through which every sinner must pass to reach the cross. Until you have learned to despair of your own righteousness, you will never flee to Christ's righteousness. Until the law has slain you, the gospel cannot make you alive. Second, understand your union with the first Adam not as a distant theological category but as the explanation of your deepest inner distress. The restlessness of your heart, the gravitational pull toward sin that you did not choose and cannot escape, the sorrow that attends every earthly joy: these are not accidents of your particular constitution. They are the judicial consequences of the fall, in which you, as a child of Adam, were federally implicated. You were born into a legal state of guilt before you committed a single act of your own, and you were born with a corrupt nature that ensures you will commit a thousand. This is not to excuse your sin; you have ratified Adam's rebellion with your own, and your guilt is genuine. But it is to understand that the problem is far deeper than bad habits or poor choices. What you need is not self-improvement but a new federal head. And that is exactly what the gospel provides. The second Adam has obeyed where the first Adam disobeyed. The second Adam has satisfied the law's demand where the first Adam defaulted upon it. The second Adam has passed through death into resurrection life, carrying all who are united to Him into that same life. Your union with Adam explains your ruin; your union with Christ explains your restoration. The one is the diagnosis; the other is the cure. Third, distinguish carefully between the law as a covenant of works and the law as a rule of life, for the failure to make this distinction lies at the root of two of the most persistent errors that trouble the church: legalism and antinomianism. The believer is not under the law as a covenant. Christ has fulfilled its terms, exhausted its curse, and satisfied its demand. The law can no more threaten you with condemnation than it can threaten Christ with condemnation, for you are in Christ, and His relation to the law has become yours. But the believer is under the law as a rule, not as a ladder by which to climb to acceptance, but as the path upon which the accepted son walks in grateful liberty. The same Ten Commandments that would condemn you if you stood under the covenant of works now guide you as a beloved child who already possesses the whole inheritance. The distinction is not a license to sin; it is the only ground upon which obedience can be rendered without servile fear. A slave obeys because he dreads the lash. A son obeys because he loves the Father and delights in His will. The covenant of grace transforms the law from a threatening tyrant into a friendly guide, and the believer who understands this will find the commandments not grievous but sweet. Fourth, when you read the Decalogue or hear it expounded, as the Confession will do in the sections that follow, let the first movement of your soul be not a resolve to improve but an acknowledgment of failure. The law was given on Sinai amid thunder and lightning and the sound of a trumpet, a display of divine majesty so terrifying that the people begged that the word should not be spoken to them any more. That terror was pedagogical. It was designed to teach Israel, and you, the impossibility of approaching a holy God on the ground of your own obedience. When you read, "Thou shalt have no other gods before me," do not ask how your performance compares with your neighbour's. Ask whether you have ever, for a single moment, loved God with the purity and intensity that the command requires. The honest answer will drive you again to the cross, where the One who loved the Father perfectly has borne the curse of your imperfect love. The law is a schoolmaster to bring you to Christ. Let it do its office daily, not once at conversion but every morning, that every morning you may begin again at the foot of the cross. Fifth, let the covenant of works deepen your adoration of the covenant of grace, and let that adoration express itself in a life of glad and willing obedience. We do not prize what we have not understood, and we do not understand grace until we have understood the alternative. The first covenant demanded everything and provided nothing for the transgressor. The second covenant demands nothing (for Christ has fulfilled the demand) and provides everything for the sinner. The first covenant promised life to the obedient; the second covenant gives life to the disobedient who trust in the Obedient One. The first covenant had no mediator, for none was needed when the parties were at peace. The second covenant has a Mediator who is both God and man, who laid His hand upon both and reconciled them at the cost of His own blood. When you set the two covenants side by side, the demand and the gift, the curse and the blessing, the terror and the comfort, the justice and the mercy, you begin to glimpse why the angels desire to look into these things, and why the redeemed will spend eternity praising the Lamb who was slain. The covenant of works is the unyielding frame within which the portrait of grace is painted, and the darker the frame, the brighter the portrait shines.

Prayer

O eternal and most righteous God, who didst create man upright and enter into covenant with him in the garden, we bow before Thee in acknowledgement of Thy perfect justice and Thy unsearchable wisdom. Thou didst give to Adam our father a law, as a covenant of works, binding him and all his posterity in him to an obedience that was personal, entire, exact, and perpetual. Thou didst promise life upon its fulfillment and threaten death upon its breach, and Thou didst endue him with power and ability to keep it. The covenant was holy, just, and good, and its terms were the expression of Thy holy nature and Thy rightful claim upon the creature Thou hadst made. We confess, O Lord, that Adam transgressed the covenant by a free and inexcusable act of his will, bringing death upon himself and upon all his posterity in him. We confess further that we have ratified his rebellion with innumerable rebellions of our own, in thought, in word, and in deed, treasuring up wrath against the day of wrath. The law that demanded perfection we have broken at every point, and under its covenant we stand justly condemned. We bless Thee, O God of all grace, that where the first covenant provided no remedy for the transgressor, Thou didst provide a second, a covenant of grace, sealed with the blood of Thine own dear Son, in whom the obedience we could not render was rendered for us and the death we deserved was died in our stead. We praise Thee for the second Adam, the Lord from heaven, whose righteousness exceeds our sin as the sea exceeds a single tear, and whose intercession pleads for us when our own lips are silent and our own hearts condemn us. Grant us, we humbly beseech Thee, a right understanding of the law in all its relations. Let the covenant of works do its convicting work upon our consciences, stripping us of every vestige of self-righteousness and driving us ever afresh to the cross where mercy and truth met together. And let the law, as a rule of life written upon our hearts by Thy Spirit, guide our steps in the path of holy obedience, not that we may be accepted, for we are accepted already in the Beloved, but that we may walk worthy of the vocation wherewith we are called. Preserve us, we pray Thee, from the two great errors that press upon us from either side. Keep us from legalism, lest we trust in our own obedience and fall from grace. Keep us from antinomianism, lest we turn Thy grace into lasciviousness and crucify the Son of God afresh. Grant that our obedience may ever be the glad and free response of sons who know their Father's heart, not the anxious striving of servants who fear their Master's rod. And at the last, O Lord, bring us to that city whose builder and maker Thou art, where the tree of life stands on either side of the river, and where the covenant shall no longer be written on tablets of stone but fully and forever realized in the unbroken fellowship of the redeemed with their Redeemer. Through Jesus Christ our Lord, who for us men and for our salvation came down from heaven, was made under the law, and redeemed them that were under the law, that we might receive the adoption of sons. Amen.