God’s Covenant of Grace

Since the covenant of works was made with Adam and all his posterity conceived and born by ordinary generation, all human beings outside Christ remain bound by its terms. Men and women remain obligated to obey God perfectly, and without such obedience they will not have eternal life. Tragically, however, such obedience is impossible for human beings since the fall into sin (Eccl. 7:20). Moreover, apart from saving grace, human beings are counted guilty of Adam’s sin and worthy of eternal suffering and death (see Rom. 5:12–21). Adam’s sin put humanity in a terrible predicament.

Our Creator could have justly abandoned all people to eternal condemnation. Praise be to His name that He did not. After Adam’s failure, the Lord did not cast off the human race entirely but freely chose to enact another covenant with some of Adam’s descendants. We call this the covenant of grace.

Westminster Confession of Faith 7.3 describes the covenant of grace in more detail: “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.” Note that unlike the covenant of works, the covenant of grace does not operate according to a works principle. The condition that must be met to obtain the blessings of this covenant—eternal life—is faith and faith alone. Even here, however, faith is not something that we work up in ourselves, but it is the gift of the Holy Spirit to the elect. Furthermore, our good works are not absent entirely in this covenant. Instead, they function as the fruit and proof of genuine faith, not as things that merit eternal life as under the covenant of works (Eph. 2:8–10; James 2:14–26).

The first announcement of the covenant of grace can be found in today’s passage, sometimes called the protoevangelium, which means “first gospel.” God promised Adam and Eve that one of their descendants would crush the serpent, the devil himself, and in so doing destroy sin and death, for Satan is the agent by which these terrors entered God’s good creation. This descendant would be wounded in the process, but He would deal the fatal blow to the serpent’s head (Gen. 3:15). This descendant, of course, is the Lord Jesus Christ.