Two Adams, Two Covenants of Works

Excerpt from Kingdom Prologue (2006) by Meredith G. Kline

I. THE CREATOR’S COVENANT OF WORKS WITH THE FIRST ADAM

Scriptural Evidence (KP, pp. 14-21)

Covenant theologians have generally taken the position that the covenant concept can accommodate the entire history of the kingdom of God. Thus, the original creational stage of the kingdom and the entire subsequent redemptive phase have been comprehended under the headings of Covenant of Works and Covenant of Grace. Since here in Section A of our study we will be dealing with the data of Genesis 1-3 under a covenantal heading, this is the place to discuss the biblical warrant that exists for regarding the pre-Fall kingdom as a covenantal affair.

It is to be observed in the first place that even though the term berith does not appear in the immediate biblical record of the creational kingdom, the substance of covenant is the stuff that forms the contents of Genesis 1-3. It is, therefore, altogether appropriate to give the covenantal phenomena that are found here the label that identifies them elsewhere. That, by the way, is what covenant theology does elsewhere when, for example, it extends the category of Covenant of Grace to the redemptive situation before the days of Noah (although the term berith does not appear until Gen 6:18) or when it subsumes the Abrahamic history in Genesis 12-14 under the category of the Abrahamic Covenant (although the term berith does not appear in that history until the Gen 15 transaction).

Actually, it is possible that the Bible itself, in later references back to Genesis 1-3, applies the term berith to the situation there, just as 2 Samuel 23:5 and Psalm 89:3 refer to God’s covenantal revelation to David as a berith, though that term is not employed in the account of it in 2 Samuel 7. Isaiah 24:5 and Hosea 6:7 have been suggested as instances of this. Although the meaning of both passages is disputed, the everlasting covenant of Isaiah 24:5 definitely appears to refer to the creational arrangements and Hosea 6:7 probably refers to Adam as the breaker of a covenant. Also, comparison of Jeremiah 33:20,25 and Jeremiah 31:35-37 suggests that the former applies the term berith to God’s ordering of the world of nature as described in Genesis 1, though the use of the term berith here possibly reflects the use of berith in Genesis 9 for the postdiluvian reestablishing of the order of nature according to the measure of common grace. Even though the Jeremianic reference would not be to the Genesis 1-3 arrangement precisely, it would nevertheless show that covenants may be found in historical narratives from which the term berith is absent.

Certainly the substance of berith was present in the kingdom order described in Genesis 1-3. It was characterized by precisely those elements that constitute a covenant, for it was produced through divine words and acts of commitment and it was subject to the sanctions of ultimate divine blessing and curse.

The words and acts that expressed God’s creational commitments had the character of oaths and bonds. Of God it can truly be said that his word is his bond. The author of Hebrews says that when God added his oath to his promise to Abraham there were then two immutable things on which Abraham’s faith could rest - “two” because God’s previous simple word of promise was itself the equivalent of an immutable oath (Heb 6:13-18). Similarly, God’s making of promises to David in 2 Samuel 7 is referred to in Psalm 89:3 as the swearing of an oath. Since, when God is the speaker, the truth character of a simple word of commitment is guaranteed as by oath, to identify the speaker as God is to identify the word as an oath. Hence, the divine self-identification, “I am Yahweh,” may be understood as an introductory oath-formula. Thus, in Ezekiel 20:5, God’s swearing (literally, lifting up his hand) to Israel is explained as an act of making himself known to them, saying “I am the Lord your God.” God’s spoken self-identification is here regarded as an equivalent of the physical oath-gesture of raising the hand to heaven, a verbal counterpart to a theophanic appearance in the oath-stance. In the Exodus 6 passage, which is apparently the one chiefly in view in Ezekiel 20:5, God’s words of commitment are bracketed within the introductory and concluding oath-formula: “I am Yahweh” (vv. 2 and 8). This means that the ancient treaty-form as adopted by the Lord God when making covenant with his people was tantamount to a divine oath document, for the customary self-identification of the suzerain in the preamble was now a divine self-identification and so a virtual oath-formula (see Exod 20:2a; cf. Gen 17:1ff.; 26:24; 28:13; 35:11). Accordingly, the Sinaitic Covenant could be interpreted as a divine pledging of troth (see Ezek. 16).

In the beginning God’s covenanting bond-words took the form of creative fiats. By these fiats God dictated into existence a covenantal kingdom order and implicit in the structuring-defining words spoken by the beneficent Creator was his oath commitment to maintain by faithful providential oversight the good world he had made and given its meaning. As noted above, Jeremiah interprets the establishment of the order of heavenly luminaries with their control of the day-night cycle as a divine covenantal commitment (Jer 31:35-37 and 33:20,21), with the implicitly covenantal character of the original creation process becoming explicit in the postdiluvian reestablishment of that order. The divine creation fiats were then covenant fiats too.

Before the first creative fiat is heard in Genesis 1:3, the divine speaker is portrayed in Genesis 1:2 as God the Spirit overshadowing the deep-and-darkness. As we shall be observing further below, this form of divine presence is to be identified with the Glory-cloud epiphany. At the ratification of the old covenant at Sinai, this cloud-pillar form of theophany represented God standing as witness to his covenant with Israel. Once again at the ratification of the new covenant at Pentecost, it was God the Spirit, appearing in phenomena that are to be seen as a New Testament version of the Glory-fire, who provided the confirmatory divine testimony. And the book of Revelation pictures the consummation of creation’s history as involving a reappearance of the Glory-Spirit of Genesis 1:2, now enveloping the incarnate Son, his hand lifted in oath to heaven as he swears by himself, the Creator, that the mystery of God was to be completed (Rev 10:1,5-7; cf. Rev 1:15; 2:18).

As I have written elsewhere: “In the interpretive light of such redemptive reproductions of the Genesis 1:2 scene, we see that the Spirit at the beginning overarched creation as a divine witness to the Covenant of Creation, as a sign that creation existed under the aegis of his covenant lordship. Here is the background for the later use of the rainbow as a sign of God’s covenant with the earth (Gen 9:12ff.). And this appointment of the rainbow as covenant sign in turn corroborates the interpretation of the corresponding supernatural light-and-clouds phenomenon of the Glory (the rainbow character of which is explicit in some instances) as a sign of the Covenant of Creation.” (Images of the Spirit, pp. 19f.) The effect of the Genesis 1:2 portrayal of the Creator in oath-stance is to reinforce powerfully the commitment character of his ensuing words of creative fiat recorded in Genesis 1:3ff.

Another act of the Glory-Spirit with special covenantal significance appears at the sixth day climax of the creation narrative, namely, the forming of man in the image of God. Elsewhere in the Bible this creative act is interpreted as a marriage, as a covenantal pledging of troth by the Creator. (Here only a brief summary is presented of my review of the biblical data in Images of the Spirit, chapter 2).

One of the biblical figures for the bestowing of the divine image on man is that of covering him with a robe emblematic of God’s Glory. The outstanding instance of this symbolism in the Old Testament is found in the placing of the sacred vestments on the high priest of Israel. Now in the allegory of Ezekiel 16 such an act of investiture with the image of God is used as a symbol for an act of covenant ratification. Presenting the Sinaitic covenant-making in nuptial imagery, Ezekiel depicts the divine pledging of the marriage troth as God’s act of adorning the bride-Israel with the sacred vestments of his Glory-likeness. The prophet thus interpreted the Sinai covenant-making as a redemptive re-creation event culminating (as did the original creation) in the production of a covenant people fashioned in God’s image, and he interpreted that climactic episode of investiture with the divine image as an act of divine commitment, sealing the marriage covenant. The specific historical reality behind Ezekiel’s portrayal of the covering of the bride with her divine husband’s robe of glory was the bringing of Israel at Sinai under the overshadowing canopy of the Glory-cloud. And that was, of course, the counterpart in the exodus re-creation to the Glory-Spirit’s overarching of the deep-and-darkness in the original creation, preparatory to his creating of mankind in his Glory-likeness on the sixth day. Thus, for the Creator to adorn mankind with his image in the beginning, was, from the biblical perspective, to create mankind in a covenant of marriage, as bride of the Maker-Lord, with all the commitment of promise and obligation inherent in such an alliance.

In a special sense then the particular divine fiat to create man as one invested with the Glory-image of God was a covenantal fiat. Right here it is, of course, patent that the covenantal relationship of God and man had its origin in the very act of creating man. It is not the case, as some theological reconstructions would have it, that the covenant was superimposed on a temporally or logically prior noncovenantal human state. The covenantal character of the original kingdom order as a whole and of man’s status in particular was given along with existence itself. For the Creator of Genesis 1 gave name and existence simultaneously in his creative fiat - and his creative fiat-names were covenantal fiat-names of divine commitment, especially so the fiat-name that called man into being in the divine image.

By investing man with the divine image, God appointed him to privileged status over the rest of creation (Gen 1:26-30). This sovereign determination of the relationship between man and the world can be viewed as an instance of God acting as third party or mediator in the arranging of a covenant between two parties. (Such mediation of covenants by a third party is attested in ancient international diplomacy.) In the account in Jeremiah 27:2-8, God’s giving of dominion over the nations to Nebuchadnezzar is portrayed in symbolic act and word as the imposing of the yoke of a vassal treaty upon those nations, obliging them to serve the Babylonian suzerain. Nebuchadnezzar’s position is described in terms evocative of the narrative of man’s original dignity in Eden. (Reflection of the primal situation of man is still clearer in the picture of Nebuchadnezzar’s suzerainty in Dan 2:38.) Accordingly, the Creator’s giving of the earth and its creatures into man’s hands in Eden may be viewed as the placing of the covenantal yoke of man’s lordship upon the earth.

Such authoritative mediating of a covenantal order by the Creator clearly involved commitment on his part to supervise and enforce that covenant. In fact, divine arranging of a kingdom order wherein nature serves man’s well-being is at times in the Bible expounded as a covenant that God makes between himself and man, God committing himself therein to secure man in a state of peace (see Ezek 34:25; Hos 2:18[20]). Viewed in these terms, the Lord’s assignment of dominion to man over the world under conditions of Edenic beatitude (Gen 1:28) can be seen as signalizing a covenantal relationship between God and man. Indeed, it is likely that the later identification of episodes of subordination of nature to the service of man in terms of a covenant of God with man reflect an understanding of the original order with its similar relationship of man and nature as such a covenant.

Conspicuous among the stipulated terms of the original divine-human relationship were the paired divine sanctions of life and death, the curse of death threatened against any breach of fealty and the blessing of life promised for loyal obedience. Now divine sanctioning is an essential element in covenants. Moreover, in a divine covenant the divine sanctions coalesce with the commitments made by God as one party to the covenant, for here, uniquely, the covenant suzerain is himself the divine witness and enforcer of the sanctions of the covenant. Thus, in pointing to the notable role of the dual sanctions in Eden, we are also adducing further evidence of the presence there of the feature of commitment, which is the hallmark of covenants.

In part, the blessing sanction of the Edenic arrangement was expressed in the sign of the Sabbath, and this may be singled out as of particular interest for the covenantal identity of the original kingdom order. (We assume here conclusions that will be reached in our discussion of God’s Sabbath below.)

For one thing, the setting of man’s kingdom labors in a sabbatical framework imitative of the pattern of God’s work of creation was an expression of man’s identity as image of God and as such the sabbatical ordinance also served to identify man as a creature in covenant with God. By the Sabbath ordinance God made covenantal commitment that man with his God-like endowment would move on in the way of obedience to a consummation of rest, indeed, to the glory of God’s own Sabbath.

Also, the Sabbath ordinance appointed for man’s observance celebrated the reality of the archetypal Sabbath of the Creator’s seventh day, and in doing so highlighted aspects of the creation order that were distinctly covenantal. God’s entrance upon his Sabbath rest was an enthronement of the Creator, an assumption by him of his rightful position as Lord of the world, of all lands and peoples. The Sabbath ordinance thus called upon all earthly kingship to acknowledge itself to be a vassal kingship under the heavenly Suzerain. Now such a relationship is the kind of covenantal relationship that was defined by the ancient suzerain-vassal treaties. Agreeably, when God later made covenant with Israel, adopting for this purpose the form of these ancient political covenants, he appointed the Sabbath ordinance as a seal of this covenant (Exod 20:8-11; 31:16,17), signifying thereby that the people and the land belonged to him (cf., e.g., Lev 25:2-4). The Sabbath declared that Yahweh was covenant Lord of the kingdom of Israel. And if the Sabbath ordinance serves as a symbolic sign of God’s covenantal lordship in the holy kingdom of Israel, it is surely because the original divine Sabbath represented the Creator’s covenantal lordship over the world. Indeed, this connection is conspicuous in the appointing of the Sabbath to Israel. For this later Sabbath observance is explained as a remembering of God’s creation acts, a celebrating of the glory of his covenantal kingship first established by his work of creation and now being reestablished through the redemptive sanctifying of a covenantal people renewed in God’s image under God’s lordship (Exod 20:8-11). In short then, the Sabbath ordinance in Eden was a sign of the covenant of God with man already in effect there. The very fact that the Genesis creation prologue is cast in sabbatical form tells us that the creation of the world was a covenant-making process.

Further, there is the familiar fact that the biblical accounts of redemptive covenants, the old and the new covenants, depict these covenant histories as divine works of re-creation. The point here is much the same as we were making about the appointing of the Sabbath ordinance as a sign of the covenant to Israel, but with our view extended now to include all the creation motifs that are used in the Scriptures to set forth the nature of God’s covenantal action through Moses and Jesus Christ, the mediators of the old and new covenants. In interpreting these later covenants as creational, the biblical authors reflect their understanding of the creation as covenantal.

It is especially significant for our present thesis that in the Mosaic economy there was a reproduction of the creational order as a whole (within the limitations of the fallen situation and with the adjustments resulting from the redemptive process), including specifically the nature of the original Edenic order as a holy paradise-kingdom and as a probationary-works arrangement. The covenant identity of the reproduction points compellingly to the covenantal nature of the original.

Another such parallel is found in the Bible’s use of the two-Adams scheme in its comprehensive analysis of God’s government through history. If the role of Christ as the second Adam is recognized as covenantal, this scheme provides further clear warrant for classifying the arrangement made with the first Adam as covenantal.

Our conclusion is, therefore, that Genesis 1-3 teems with evidences of the covenantal character of the kingdom in Eden. We have in fact seen that the covenantal identity of this creation order was given to it with its very existence, particularly in the creation of man, its head, in the image of God. The creational covenant will here be called “The Creator’s Covenant of Works with Adam.” By continuing the use of the term “works” we preserve an important advantage that the traditional name, “Covenant of Works,” has when combined with use of “Covenant of Grace” for redemptive covenant - the advantage of underscoring the fundamental law-gospel contrast. And our additional terms, “Creator’s” and “with Adam,” will serve to bring out the parallelism between this covenant of works and what we shall be calling “The Father’s Covenant of Works with the Son” (i.e., the eternal intratrinitarian covenant), namely, the parallelism of the two Adams scheme, each of these covenants involving, as it does, an Adam figure, a federal representative under probation in a covenant of works.

As the analysis of this covenantal administration of God’s kingdom lordship with its dual sanctions unfolds in the following chapters, we will see that it involves not only the bestowal of the kingdom on a holy people of God but an offer to make the kingdom given in creation a permanent possession on a glorified level of existence. Described in terms of varieties of international covenants familiar at the time of the writing of the book of Genesis, the original covenant with Adam was thus a suzerain-vassal covenant plus the proposal of a special grant to the vassal for loyal service.

Within the Scriptures are treaty texts (like the Decalogue) produced for particular covenant ratification transactions and displaying the literary-legal form attested in the contemporary ancient international treaties. The several standard sections of this treaty-form provide serviceable categories for analysis of the creational covenant. The first two chapters of the following analysis include data that would be found in the preamble and historical prologue, the opening sections of the treaty form. Chapter Three corresponds to the section of treaty stipulations or law; Chapter Four, to the sanctions section. Finally, Chapter Five will trace the history of the creational covenant, with the tragic failure of the first man to obtain the proposed grant of the eternal kingdom. Our use of the standard sections of the ancient treaty-form in this way should not be misunderstood as suggesting that the earliest chapters of Genesis have the literary form of a treaty. However, the fact that these treaty sections serve as satisfactorily as they do as an analytical framework for describing the sum and substance of these chapters does support illuminatingly the identification of the creation order as a covenantal arrangement.

[Chapters 1-3 may be found on pp. 22-90 of Kingdom Prologue. We now proceed to chapter 4.]

Eschatological Sanctions (KP, pp. 91-103)

Balancing the review of the past presented in the historical prologue of ancient suzerain-vassal treaties was a section of sanctions pointing to the future of the covenant. They expressed the determination of the suzerain that his dominion should be irresistibly enforced and indefinitely continued in his ongoing dynasty. His promise of blessing and, even more, the curse of appalling desolation which he threatened against disloyalty were calculated to impress upon his vassals the wisdom of performing faithfully the obligations laid on them in the treaty stipulations.

Similarly, the future of God’s covenant with Adam was revealed in the form of covenant sanctions. That the Creator’s sovereign rule would endure was certain, but just how it would be ultimately manifested must be determined through a probationary testing of mankind. Eschatological destiny, the choice of eternal weal or woe, was set before man in the dual sanctions of the covenant …

Man’s confrontation with the alternatives of the curse and blessing sanctions signalizes the condition of probation that obtained in the first phase of the covenant in Eden. Along with our examination of the precise nature of those sanctions as such, the promise of life and threat of death, we shall, therefore, include an account of the governmental principles operative in this probation and the specific means employed in administering it.

a. The Promised Blessing

Man’s creation as image of God meant, as we have seen, that the creating of the world was a covenant-making process. There was no original non-covenantal order of mere nature on which the covenant was superimposed. Covenantal commitments were given by the Creator in the very act of endowing the man-creature with the mantle of the divine likeness. And those commitments were eschatological. The situation never existed in which man’s future was contemplated or presented in terms of a static continuation of the original level of blessedness. For the God in whose likeness man was made is the consummating God of the Sabbath. This sabbatical aspect of the divine image was present in the image as imparted to man and it came to expression in the promise of consummation contained in the creational ordinance of the Sabbath. Blessing sanction promising a consummation of man’s original glory as image of God was thus built into man’s very nature as image of God. This eschatological prospect was in-created. It was an aspiration implanted in man’s heart with his existence as God’s image. That being so, to restrict man to the mere continuation of his original state of beatitude would be no blessing at all, but a curse. For it would frustrate man’s longing to realize his in-created potential as image of God by disappointing his hope of entering into the Creator’s Sabbath rest and thereby experiencing the perfecting of his likeness to the divine paradigm of the Glory-Spirit. The blessing sanction was, therefore, no artificial addition to the covenant but was already involved in man’s God-like eschatological-sabbatical nature and was essentially nothing other than the perfecting of that nature …

Perfecting of the imago Dei coincides with the attainment of the sabbatical goal of completing the construction of the temple of God as mandated in the kingdom commission. (See above, chapter three.) Identification of the blessing sanction with this sabbatical temple directs us once again to the creational origins of the revelation of that sanction. For the sabbatical temple is constructed according to the original divine pattern revealed on the mountain of God in Eden. The Glory-Spirit-temple was the archetype temple, the promise-paradigm and, more than that, the matrix of the Sabbath-temple of man in the Spirit. From this perspective too, then, it can be seen that the eschatological blessing sanction of the creational covenant, the Omega-hope of the covenant, was disclosed from the earliest beginning in the theophanic Alpha-Original of the human temple-image.

Another reproduction of the theophanic Glory-Spirit, a symbolic one, was planted by the Creator in the midst of the trees of the garden-sanctuary (Gen 2:9), and therewith another revelation was given of the offer of ultimate beatitude by which the covenant was sanctioned. In the wonder of the trees that God made, light is transformed into a tangible glory, a delight to the eyes, with fruit for food to nourish the life of man. And these lords of the plant world, these majestic by-forms of light, the Creator put to further use as earthly symbols of the heavenly Glory-light.

Two aspects of the theophanic Glory that reappear as elements in the replication of that Glory in man are judicial dominion and the light of immortality (cf. Rom 2:7; 1 Tim 1:17; 6:16; 2 Tim 1:10). The two special trees in Eden’s sanctuary were designed to function as symbolic means in man’s participation in those aspects of God’s glory. In these trees the heavenly divine Glory was represented in an earthly form that expressed God’s intention of making that glory available to man for his appropriation. How the tree of knowledge was to figure in the development of man’s judicial likeness to God will be discussed below. Here we focus upon the tree of life as the sacramental seal of man’s participation in the glory of immortality …

It was not life of the kind or at the level bestowed on man in creation that was signified by the tree of life but life consummated through eschatological transformation. This is intimated by the identity of the tree as a symbolic replica of the immortal Glory. It is also indicated by the relationship of the tree of life to the probation, particularly to the outcome of the probation. This tree is introduced in the narrative in conjunction with the tree of probationary testing, whose location in the midst of the garden it shared (Gen 2:9); it is mentioned again in connection with the consequences of the probation in Genesis 3:22, where it is regarded as a seal of everlasting life; and subsequently in revelation in the course of redemptive history it reappears in the context of the consummated glory of the restored paradise of God (Rev 2:7; cf. Ezek 47:7,12; Rev 22:2).

No mere endless existence was signified by this arboreal sign of the promised blessing of the covenant. Unending existence is a feature of the curse as well as of the blessing sanction. One thinks of how the fate of the wicked raised up to endless life in the lake of fire is called the second death (Rev 20:13-15; 21:8). Eternal life properly so called, the life signified by the tree of life, is life as confirmed and ultimately perfected in man’s glory-likeness to God, life in the fellowship of God’s Presence. Access to the tree of life and its fruit is only in the holy place where the Glory-Spirit dwells; to be driven from there is to be placed under judgment of death. Here again it is relevant to recall the identity of the tree of life as an earthly symbolic replica of the immortal Glory. Consummation of man’s life and God-likeness, like their creation, is of God, the Alpha and Omega Glory-Spirit.

Clearly sounded through the blessing sanction was the call to covenant-keeping whereby man might maintain his enjoyment of the presence of God and so of his access to the symbol and the reality of eternal life. Piety and total prosperity were united in the creational order. More than that, the fullness of life, the true summum bonum, consisted in the religious life, the union and communion of man with God, the Source of life. This truth appears in redemptive history in Jesus’ identification of himself as the resurrection and life of his people. Those united to him never die (John 11:26). That which is called death, and for others is death, is “the first resurrection” for believers, whom dying unites more closely to Jesus so that they live and reign with and in him (Rev 20:5,6). And the prologue of John’s Gospel tells us that this redemptive identity and function of the Son of God stands in continuity with what was already true of him as the Logos in the beginning. “In him was life; and the life was the light of men” (John 1:4). The tree of life was, in a figure, the Logos, the life of man …

Obedience with respect to the tree of knowledge would qualify man to avail himself of the invitation of the Logos-Life to partake of the sacramental tree of life. By that sacramental communion he would be confirmed in the beatitude of the covenant; the promise of glorified life would be sealed unto him. He would experience Sabbath rest in the sense that he would be placed beyond the onus of probation; established by the Spirit in indefectible righteousness and holiness, no longer subject to a fall into sin and exposure to the covenant curse; and confirmed as the heir of the full-orbed, luminous glory of the imago Dei …

According to the promise made to man in his endowment with likeness to the One revealed in theophanic Light, physical glorification was also contemplated in the blessing sanction. Here, and in our entire attempt to portray the heavenly hope of the covenant, disclosures of the eternal state provided in the biblical revelation of the consummation of redemptive history help us draw out the eschatological prospects that were intrinsic to the imago Dei and were signified by the Sabbath and tree of life. Caution is called for in exploiting this analogy because features peculiar to God’s redemptive response to man’s Fall are taken up into the nature of the heaven to which Christ brings his church. Nevertheless, the biblical identification of Jesus as the second Adam guarantees that his redemptive achievement fits into the basic eschatological framework that informed the covenant with the first Adam. Indeed, Christ’s work is explicitly expounded by the Scriptures as a re-creation and perfecting of the imago Dei and as a bringing of his people into their Sabbath rest in the land of access to the tree of life. Hence, we may properly resort to the analogy of the eschatological glorification of Christ’s redeemed people. They are assured that their present earthly bodies, designed for genealogical history, will be transformed into spiritual bodies suited for a state of existence in which earthly marriage has no place. This physical transformation belongs to the re-creation of the new mankind in the image of the incarnate Glory, the Light of man. By this analogy we can more readily perceive that the prospect of ultimate glorification was implicit in the nature of the first Adam as image of the theophanic Glory …

Heaven is not a human achievement; it is not the end-product of human culture. God created it in the beginning (Gen 1:1) and it requires a supernatural act of God to bring man into participation in the reality of heaven. The consummation of human earth history consists in the removal of man’s limitation to the earthly. Or, positively, it consists in the transformation of man’s perceptive capability and total experiential capacity with respect to the cosmos whereby he can apprehend the heavenly dimension(s) and particularly that epiphanic Glory, which, filling all, gives to the whole, from the perspective of human history, the character of a new heavens and earth. Glorification, by which man enters this Sabbath realm of glory, is as much a supernatural act of God as the original act of man’s creation. Man’s own historical cultural enterprise could take him only so far toward gaining a maximal creaturely mastery of the world. Only by an eschatological injection of divine creative power does man move past the days of his cultural working and come to the Sabbath enthronement in which his dominion over the world, under God, is perfected.

At the consummation man leaves behind the external culture he has developed through his earthly history. He then has no further need for the instruments he has devised to protect himself from whatever in nature has been inhospitable or to extend his influence over the world or to enhance the splendor of his person. Glorification has made all of this superfluous. Clothed in the luminosity of his transfigured nature, man has no need for his former man-made garments whether for beauty or protection, nor for the cultural extensions of clothing in the earthly architecture of the city. This divine investiture of men with the glory-light which is the perfecting of the imago Dei makes obsolete the fashions of human culture. Such too is the enduement of the glorified nature with the Spirit of power and knowledge that man has no need for his former cultural aids for the processing of information, communication and transportation. Man’s external culture was intended to serve only a provisional purpose during man’s preconsummation history. It was merely a temporary substitute for glorification, the real and permanent thing …

Typological terminology may be applied to this relationship; historical human culture is prototype and the divine heavenly-glorified culture is antitype. We should remember too that the Glory-Spirit stands at the beginning of history as the archetype of all created glory. Scripture endorses such typological analysis by portraying the heavenly goal of redemptive history after the model of the cultural preformations of earthly history. Glorified mankind is depicted as the city of God, the fullness of the new heaven and earth, the ultimate realization of the cultural mandate. Prototypal culture performs its necessary function, then passes away at the advent of the heavenly antitype culture, which is not just a top-story superimposed on the earth-founded prototype but an eschatologically new reality through and through. And this metaculture, which renders all prototypes obsolete, comes down from heaven, from God, its Architect-Creator.

New Jerusalem is the name of the metaculture in biblical prophecy. The city of God at the goal of the redemptive process bears the distinctive impress of the specifically redemptive history that has led to it. Specifically, the antitype at the consummation of the new covenant is depicted in the mode of the typological model of it that was developed under the old covenant. But stripping away the peculiarly redemptive features, we are still left with the generic image of a city in the biblical vision of the consummation. The metaculture is a metapolis. Particularly, then, when it comes to the consummate cosmos, the ultimate eschatological blessing proferred in the sanctions of the creational covenant, Metapolis may serve as its name. New Jerusalem is a specifically redemptive version of Metapolis.

In an unfallen world, cultural history would have been a tale of one city only. Starting from Eden man was to work at constructing this one universal kingdom-city. Blessed by the Great King of the city, man would have prospered in that task and eventually the extended city might have been aptly called Megapolis. But such a worldwide community of the human family would have marked the limits of the cultural potential of earthly man. God himself must perfect the promise of the covenant by transforming prototypal Megapolis into antitypal Metapolis.

Metapolis is not just an enlarged Megapolis, but a Megapolis that has undergone eschatological metamorphosis at the hands of the Omega-Spirit. Nothing of earthly culture external to man enters Metapolis. Even man himself cannot enter it as mortal flesh and blood (1 Cor 15:50). Only as the glorified handiwork of God can man pass through the gates of the eternal city. Actually, to speak of glorified men entering Metapolis is to speak with a pronounced typological accent. For Metapolis is not a city that glorified man inhabits. It is rather the case that glorified man is Metapolis; in the redemptive dialect, the bride of the Lamb is the New Jerusalem (Rev 21:9,10). In the Metapolis enterprise materiel and personnel coincide.

“Yahweh-is-there” is another name for Metapolis (Ezek 48:35; cf. Rev 21:3; 22:3). The eternal city of glorified mankind in the Spirit is a temple of God’s Presence. To produce this temple-cultus was the ultimate objective of man’s cultural enterprise, as we concluded from an analysis of the programmatic stipulations of the original covenant. But from our analysis of the blessing sanction of that covenant we must conclude that whatever contribution of personal materiel (“living stones”) is in a secondary sense supplied by human culture, it is the Lord God, the Alpha and Omega, who creates and consummates his Spirit-temple.

Scriptures’ identification of the eternal city with the glorified church (Rev 21:9,10) is accompanied by its proclamation of a new heaven and earth (Rev 21:1) and thus intends, of course, no negation of the cosmic dimension of consummated creation. In Metapolis, glorified mankind is incorporated into the archetypal Spirit-temple with which, from the epiphanic flash of the absolute beginning, the cosmos has been integrated. Hence, Metapolis is at once the people-temple and the cosmos-temple, together consummated in the Glory-temple.

b. The Threatened Curse

Blessing belonged properly to the creational covenant. In its created condition that covenantal order was one of beatitude and the eschatological perfecting of that beatitude was its proper goal. Nevertheless, a threat of curse was included within the total disclosure of the terms of this covenant. “But of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat thereof you will surely die” (Gen 2:17).

Something of the form of this death specter might be descried by way of analogy in the phenomena of death in the subhuman creation. We have suggested above that this was one of the nature parables the Creator had made available by which his spoken revelation might be illustrated. What was threatened in the curse could be ascertained in more of its human particularity, however, by way of antithesis to what was revealed in the promised blessing sanction. Death was failure to realize the eschatological potential of the imago Dei and the loss of all the glory of the divine likeness, ethical and regal, already bestowed in the creation of man. It was frustration of the hope of completion of man’s historical mission beaconed by the covenant sign of the Sabbath. It was the denial of the consummation of life that was proferred in the tree of life. It was the loss of all these things, and it was their opposite.

The curse was the reversal of man’s original and proper relationship to the world. He who should have exercised dominion over all the earth would be humiliated and tormented by the world. Instead of becoming a realm of cosmic freedom and luminous fulfillment, man’s world would be turned into a prison of diabolical darkness, the very lake of fire prepared for the devil and his angels, as it is known to us from subsequent biblical revelation, which names it “the second death.” It is to be observed that this “second death” does not involve what we know as physical death but on the contrary is something experienced by the wicked after they have been raised from the grave in the resurrection of damnation. Accordingly, the disembodied state we commonly identify as death was not contemplated in what was threatened in the curse sanction of Genesis 2:17. In fact, apart from the intervention of the program of redemption after the Fall, death as physical disembodiment would have served no necessary historical function. Death of that (mitigated) sort is the form that death assumes only as part of the common curse with which God afflicts fallen mankind while the judgment of the lake of fire is delayed during the time that the foreordained salvation-history is introduced and runs its course. Once this kind of death exists as a first kind of death experience for fallen mankind, the death-curse of the lake of wrath, which in the beginning would have been simply “death,” comes to be distinguished as a “second” death.

Just as our analysis of the covenant blessing led to an exploration of the eschatological concept of heaven, so our analysis of the covenant curse turns out to be a matter of delineating the nature of hell. These are the primal subjects of biblical prophecy.

The severity of the curse answered to the gravity of the offense of covenant-breaking. In the ancient international treaties the terrible retaliation threatened in the curse sanction against the offending vassal had its rationale in the fact that the vassal’s disloyalty to the suzerain was also an act of defiance against the gods by whom the covenant oath had been sworn. Closely associated with the curses in the treaty was a section in which the gods of the oath, individually named in long array, were invoked to witness the covenant ratification and so assume their role as supervisors and, in case of violations, as avengers of the covenant. With such surveillance no transgression of the stipulations could go undetected and, since any such offense constituted an impious challenge to the gods, it was not only foolhardy but deserving of the total destruction detailed in the curse sanctions. Under the Creator’s covenant with Adam the character of covenant-breaking as a sin against deity was directly entailed in the divine nature of the Lord of the covenant himself. Disloyalty to the covenant Lord was in itself disruption of the religious relationship and it is in terms of this alienation of man from his God that the curse sanction of death is, in the last analysis, to be perceived.

God’s Glory-Presence was the executor of both the dual sanctions. Thus, in Israel’s exodus history, the same Glory that functioned to bless Israel was the divine Agent to inflict God’s curse on the Egyptians. The Glory-cloud was a protective shade to one, a bewildering darkness to the other. The Glory-fire was a guiding light to one, but to the other a blinding, consuming blaze. So it was from the beginning. The Spirit-Presence was the holy Sanctifier who made the garden a sanctuary. As Sanctifier he enforced the sanctions that maintained the holiness of God’s house. Man’s blessedness, his life, consisted in the Spirit’s sanctifying him, fashioning him in the likeness of the Spirit, so that he might abide in joy before God’s Face lifted up over him in holy beauty and in the benediction of peace. The curse would consist in the putting of another visage on the Presence-Face. Death would be the wrathful glare of the Glory that makes intolerable to those on whom it is directed the presence of the holy Glory-Spirit, the Breath of life.

It was then not simply that the punishment threatened in the covenant would be commensurate with the crime; the curse would take its shape from the nature of the offense. In sinning man would contradict the norm of the imitation of God, despise his likeness to the Spirit, repudiate the Face of Glory. The curse of death would deliver the sinner over to his hatred of the Glory-beauty of God, the hatred that makes him turn away from God’s Face and separate himself from it. But to be thus separated from the vivifying-glorifying Spirit is to be cut off from participation in the divine Glory-likeness. And in the eyes of God, for creatures whom he has made in his image, men and angels alike, to lose the glory of the imago Dei is to perish.

Probation (KP, pp. 103-17)

In its original form as produced through creation the covenant order was already one of beatitude, but, as previously observed, this covenant contained the proposal of a special grant to man, the servant-son, for loyal service to his Lord. It offered an eschatological advance in kingdom glory conditioned on man’s obedience.

If the Lord of the covenant were to fulfill his offer of confirming his servant in a state of blessedness, if man’s entrance into the promised Sabbath were not to be delayed forever, the testing of man’s obedience could not be endlessly prolonged. The arrangement could not be one of permanent conditionality. The testing must have temporal limits; that is, it must be a probation. And that being the nature of the necessity of the probation, its proper purpose was clearly not to put man in jeopardy of losing his beatitude but to bring him on the way to its consummation.

Another factor was present in the divine ordering of the covenant that required that the days of man’s probation be shortened. This factor was the governmental principle of federal representation. Mankind was to undergo probation as a corporate whole represented by the first Adam, rather than on an individual basis. But the proliferation of responsible covenant servants before the issue of the probation had been settled would conflict with the operation of this principle of federal representation. The Lord, therefore, arranged that the probationary issue should be settled prior to such a development by bringing the test of Adam’s obedience to a point of crisis where a prompt, decisive response was unavoidable. In view of the momentous consequences of the probation for all humanity, it was in any case a desideratum that the crucial testing should probe man’s covenantal commitment at its most radical depths.

Two measures were introduced by the Lord to achieve this intensification of the probationary process. One was to add to the general obligations of the covenant a special proscription (Gen 2:16,17). If we call this the probationary stipulation, our intention is not to suggest that man’s covenantal obligations and testing were reduced to this one requirement, but simply to indicate that this stipulation had a special function to perform in bringing the probation into concentrated focus for a radical decision. The second measure was to subject man to a direct satanic solicitation to disobedience. The two measures were not unrelated. Indeed, it is through an appreciation of their relationship to one another that we can best apprehend the meaning of the probation tree and the significance of Satan’s role in the probation episode, and thus the nature of the probationary assignment.

Both in its form and substance the special probationary proscription was exceptional within the law of the covenant. Whereas the other stipulations were framed positively and set man forward on his cultural-cultic journey, the negative form of the special stipulation confronted man with a limitation on his way which he must not transgress. In its substance, this proscription introduced an exception into the pattern of consecration by which God had interpreted the world and man’s place in it. Man’s investment with dominion over the earth, according to which all earth’s hosts were consigned to his use, was contradicted by this prohibition. Specifically, the probationary stipulation separated one tree from the realm of plants and trees that God himself had subjected to man and had defined as “for food” (Gen 1:29,30; 2:16) and assigned it the opposite meaning: “You shall not eat of it” (Gen 2:17). The prohibition removed the eating of the fruit of this tree from the category of good or lawful and sovereignly reclassified that act as unlawful.

In the probation tree man found himself face to face with the claims of absolute lordship. Restricting man in the exercise of his royal authority and privileges, the probationary commandment compelled him to acknowledge that his own kingship was that of a vassal-king, that the world was his only in stewardship. It demanded that in the naming-interpretive task, the wise man role that was ancillary to man’s kingship, he must follow without question the direction of the Logos-Creator. Even when God addressed to him an apparently arbitrary word that constituted an exceptional instance within divine revelation, man must not assume an autonomous, critical stance over against his Lord, selecting for himself a canon within the canon of God’s word. He was rather held responsible to recognize the canonical word at every point, to grasp it, and submit his thought and life to all that God said. The effect of this special probationary prohibition was to confront man head-on simply and solely with God’s absolute authority and thus to face him inescapably with the demand for a clear-cut confession of his sovereign Lord. And in this way the test of man’s covenantal loyalty was brought to its decisive issue.

To find the significance of the probation tree we naturally begin with its name, “the tree of the knowledge (or knowing) of good and evil” (Gen 2:17). Good and evil are viewed in this designation of the tree as opposites between which a choice is to be made (the usual usage where this pair is found in the Bible), not as an antonymic pair indicative of a totality (as is sometimes the case in ancient literature). Repeatedly in biblical usage the good-evil pair appears in the context of references to the ability to discern between things and especially to exercise a legal-judicial kind of discrimination (cf. Mic 3:1,2). The references are largely to the rendering of verdicts. “Good” and “evil” may at times even be legal terms used in pronouncing judgments (cf., e.g., Isa 5:20,23; Mal 2:17). In clear allusion to the probation tree, God identifies man’s knowing of good and evil as an aspect of his likeness to God and angels (Gen 3:22). The same connection is recognized in Satan’s perverse suggestion (Gen 3:5). Now, as we have previously observed, when the discerning of good and evil is elsewhere noted as a mark of likeness to God and his Angel or of the possession of God-like wisdom, the reference is precisely to a king engaged in rendering judicial decisions (2 Sam 14:17; 1 Kgs 3:9,28). The probation tree was the judgment tree.

God-like judicial prerogative was signified by the name of the probation tree and in the course of the probation this tree would be instrumental in man’s exercise of the royal-priestly function of rendering judgment, the function inherent in his status as image of God. It would be by the appearance of the satanic agent at this judgment tree in the garden of God that man would find himself compelled to discern in judicial act between good and evil. Here man as priestly guardian of the sanctuary would be called upon to enforce the demands of God’s exclusive holiness against the unholy intruder. It might seem strange that this tree should simultaneously signify something to do as well as something not to do, that along with the prohibition against partaking of its fruit it should also present the positive obligation to perform the work of judgment expressed in its name as the tree of the knowing of good and evil. Perhaps the explanation of this combination is in part that precisely when man was being exalted to the high authority implied in the requirement to pronounce judgment on heavenly beings it was opportune to remind him, as the prohibition compellingly did, of his subordination to the ultimate and absolute authority of God.

In the event, the negative and positive aspects of the probation tree would come together as the evil one centered attention in the encounter which transpired at the site of the tree on the prohibition concerning it. Refraining from the forbidden fruit and performing of the holy judicial function against the tempter were thus intertwined. It appears, then, that the name of the tree pointed not so much to something man would acquire as to something he must do. It referred not to knowledge of a certain kind that he might gain, but to knowledge in action, knowledge engaged in pronouncing judgment. At the same time this tree would be instrumental in an acquisition man would make. For by doing what was signified by the name of the judgment tree, man would advance in the glory of his judicial likeness to the Lord of the heavenly council. (According to Gen 3:22, in a formal sense this regal dimension of man’s likeness to God came to intensified expression even when he rendered a false verdict). Thus, this tree would, like the tree of life, be instrumental in man’s maturing participation in the imago Dei.

In the judicial encounter with Satan at the tree of judgment man was obliged to come to a crucial decision as to his own ultimate personal loyalty by committing himself to the side of good or evil in the conflict between God and Satan. And his choice between good and evil in the form of opposing covenant suzerains constituted a choice of good or evil in the sense of blessing or curse, life or death, for man himself. The tree of the knowing of good and evil was indeed the probation tree. By this tree it would be determined whether man, by faithfully fighting the Lord’s battle in the war against Satan, should receive from his Sovereign approbation and the proposed grant of the kingdom. The whole covenant order ought not to be reduced to this one feature of the probation tree and the requirements centering in it as though this were the sum and total substance of the covenant. But the outcome of the probation crisis at the tree of judgment was decisive for the future of the entire covenant order. It was the hinge on which everything turned.

A principle of works - do this and live - governed the attainment of the consummation-kingdom proferred in the blessing sanction of the creational covenant. Heaven must be earned. According to the terms stipulated by the Creator it would be on the ground of man’s faithful completion of the work of probation that he would be entitled to enter the Sabbath rest. If Adam obediently performed the assignment signified by the probation tree, he would receive, as a matter of pure and simple justice, the reward symbolized by the tree of life. That is, successful probation would be meritorious. With good reason then covenant theology has identified this probation arrangement as a covenant of works, thereby setting it in sharp contrast to the Covenant of Grace …

Our finding is that under God’s covenant with mankind in Adam attainment of the eschatological kingdom and Sabbath rest was governed by a principle of works. Adam, representative of mankind, was commissioned to fulfill the probationary assignment; he must perform the one meritorious act of righteousness. This act was to have the character of a victory in battle. An encounter with Satan was a critical aspect of the probationary crisis for each of the two Adams. To enter into judicial combat against this enemy of God and to vanquish him in the name of God was the covenantal assignment that must be performed by the servant of the Lord as his “one act of righteousness.” And it was the winning of this victory of righteousness by the one that would be imputed to the many as their act of righteousness and as their claim on the consummated kingdom proferred in the covenant.

We conclude then that covenant theology has been biblically sound in its traditional formulation of God’s original kingdom administration in Eden as the Covenant of Works. However, it is also the case that the redemptive order, though a covenant of grace in contrast to works when viewed from the perspective of God’s covenantal offer of the kingdom to men, at the same time included as a foundation under that covenant of grace a covenant of works in the form of the eternal intratrinitarian counsel envisaging the Son as second Adam.

II. THE FATHER’S COVENANT OF WORKS WITH THE SECOND ADAM (KP, pp. 138-49)

“For as by one man’s disobedience many were made sinners, so by the obedience of one shall many be made righteous” (Rom 5:19). There was a first man Adam and a first covenant of works. And for the redemption of the lost world there is a second and last Adam, the Adam from heaven (cf. l Cor 15:45-49), and another covenant of works. This second covenant was kept, this second man was obedient and his obedience under this covenant of works is the foundation of the gospel order. The redemptive program as well as the original kingdom order in Eden is thus built on the principle of works.

This second covenant of works is the eternal covenant, which we shall call “The Father’s Covenant of Works with the Son.” The series of temporal administrations of redemptive grace to God’s people are subsections of what we shall call “The Lord’s Covenant of Grace with the Church” (or, for brevity’s sake we may use the traditional “Covenant of Grace”). Preeminently the Covenant of Grace finds expression in the new covenant, but it also includes all those earlier covenantal arrangements wherein the benefits secured by the obedience of Christ in fulfillment of God’s eternal covenant with him were in part already bestowed during premessianic times, in each case according to the particular eschatological phase of covenant history.

Though interlocking, these two redemptive covenants, the eternal and the temporal, are nevertheless to be clearly distinguished from each other for they differ in several most basic respects. In the eternal covenant, (1) the Son is assigned the role of covenant servant; (2) the second party is the Son in his status as second Adam and thus, included along with him, the elect whom he represents, and them exclusively; and (3) the operative principle is works. Contrariwise, in the series of historical administrations of the gospel, (1) the messianic Son is Lord and mediator of the covenant; (2) the second party is the church, the community of the confessors of the faith and their children, including others beside the elect; and (3) the operative principle is grace.

Scriptural Evidence

[Above] we defended the propriety of the biblical theologian’s applying the term covenant to arrangements not labelled berith (or diatheke) in the Bible. In the case of the intratrinitarian covenant, the justification for the covenantal designation is once again that the substance of a berith is found in the biblical intimations afforded us of the eternal counsel between God the Father and the Son. Commitment was there, and divine sanctioning - there if ever!

Jesus’ life is portrayed as a mission. His very identity as Messiah involved commissioning and his messianic consciousness was revealed in statements reflecting his awareness of having been sent by the Father on a special mission with a commandment to obey (John 10:18), a righteousness to fulfill (Matt 3:15), a baptism to be suffered (Luke 12:50), and a work to finish (John 17:4). This special mission of the Son is interpreted in the New Testament within the context of various covenants. When the fullness of time was come, he was sent by God as one under law (Gal 4:4), as the Servant of the Lord prophesied by Isaiah (cf. Isa 42; 49; 50; 52-53), and thus as the true Israel, the true covenant servant that Israel failed to be. Indeed, covenant sums up the mission of the Isaianic Servant (Isa 42:6; 49:8). Or again, as we have seen, Jesus was sent forth as another Adam, to be the obedient covenant servant that the first Adam failed to be. Also, he was the image of God (2 Cor 4:4) and, as observed above, covenantal relationship was inherent in the first Adam’s possession of that image.

The messianic mission performed on earth began in heaven: “For I came down from heaven, not to do my own will, but the will of him that sent me” (John 6:38). Jesus was sent forth from heaven to earth on a covenantal mission with covenantal oath-commitments from his Father. Messianic psalms reveal to us the eternal communion between the Father and Son, in which the Father covenants to the Son a kingship on Zion over the uttermost parts of the earth (Ps 2:6-9) and grants him by oath an eternal royal priesthood (Ps 110:4; cf. Heb 5:6; 7:17,21). Jesus, identifying himself as the divine royal Son of those psalms declared to his disciples: “As my Father appointed unto me a kingdom, so I appoint unto you that you may eat and drink at my table in my kingdom, and sit on thrones judging the twelve tribes of Israel” (Luke 22:29, 30). It is interesting that the verb translated “appointed” (diatithemi) is the verb to which diatheke*,* “covenant”, relates. Indeed, this affirmation of Jesus stands in the context of his ordaining the sacramental seal of the new covenant, in association with his statement, “This is my blood of the new covenant” (Matt 26:28; Mark 14:24; Luke 22:20; 1 Cor 11:25). Hence, in this biblical passage we have the next thing to an actual application of the term “covenant” to the arrangement between the Father and the Son. A justifiable rendering would be: “My Father covenanted unto me a kingdom.” On that same occasion, the Son of God in prayer recalled the Father’s commitment to him in love before the foundation of the world, a commitment to grant him as obedient messianic Servant the glory he had with the Father before the world was (John 17:5,24). He presented his claim of merit as the faithful Servant who had met the terms of the eternal covenant of works by obediently fulfilling his mission: “I have glorified thee on the earth; I have finished the work which thou gavest me to do” (John 17:4). And then he made his request that the grant of glory proposed in that covenant now be conferred: “And now, O Father, glorify thou me with thine own self with the glory which I had with thee before the world was” (John 17:5). Jesus, the second Adam, standing before his judgment tree could declare that he had overcome the temptation to eat the forbidden fruit and that he had accomplished the charge to judge Satan, and, therefore, he could claim his right of access to the tree of life.

Heavenly commitments of the Father to the Son are reflected in words of covenant promise spoken by God to man. In the Abrahamic Covenant God promised to Abraham and his seed royalty and a mediatorship of blessing to all nations. And in the Davidic Covenant that royal seed of Abraham was identified as a coming son of David, concerning whom God swore that his throne should endure as the days of heaven, higher than the kings of the earth (cf. 2 Sam 7 and Ps 89). In the New Testament, Paul, expounding God’s ancient covenant, quotes its promise and interprets: “And to thy seed, which is Christ” (Gal 3:16), and he identifies this descendant of Abraham, the Christ, as “the seed to whom the promise was made” (Gal 3:19). Jesus Christ was the one to whom God’s covenantal commitment, given in promise and oath, was directed. Thus, both in the inner divine communication of heaven’s eternity and in the revelation provided in the course of earthly history the Son of God received, along with his commissioning to redemptive suffering, his Father’s covenantal commitment of a reward of kingdom glory.

Enough of the evidence has been cited to show that the biblical theologian will certainly want to identify these eternal commitments between the Father and Son as a covenant. Incidentally, since this arrangement between the Father and the Son, viewed as the second man, is the second half of the two Adams structure (cf. Rom 5 and 1 Cor 15), to demonstrate its covenantal character is also to corroborate yet further the case that has been made for identifying God’s relation to the first Adam as a covenant - and, indeed, as a covenant of works.

Because God was pleased to constitute both the first and second Adams as federal representatives of a corporate humanity, the obedient performance of the obligations of the covenant of works administered to each of them would have the result that all whom they represented would receive with them the proposed grant of God’s kingdom-glory. In the case of the first Adam all the predestined mankind that should descend from him was represented by him in his covenant of works and all would, therefore, have been beneficiaries, if he had kept the covenant. In the case of the second Adam, however, not all of mankind is elect in him and represented by him in his covenant of works and, therefore, not all men but only those who, by the sovereign election of divine grace, are in Christ are the actual beneficiaries of the eternal glory bestowed through the Covenant of Grace.

In the historical administration of the Covenant of Grace until the Consummation, membership in the covenant community is not coextensive with the elect. This is the case not so much because of the anomaly that some elect persons who belong in the visible covenant community might not unite themselves with it, but rather because numerous persons who are not elect, and not therefore “the seed of promise,” nevertheless are part of the visible covenant community in this world. Some indeed are in it in terms of a legitimate application of the divinely appointed terms of admission; others, through various abuses. Not to be lost in these complexities of the historical administration of the covenant institution is the simple fact that this grace covenant is built upon the Father’s covenant of works with Christ, the second Adam. It is by the obedience of the one that the many are made righteous in God’s grace (Rom 5:19). Paraphrasing the words of Jesus already quoted: “As my Father covenanted to me a kingdom, so I covenant to you to participate with me in the glory of the royal court and dominion of God’s kingdom” (Luke 22:29f.; cf. Matt 19:28) …

Gospel of Redemptive Judgment

Back of the redemptive renewal of the covenantal community on earth stood the eternal intratrinitarian covenant as the necessary foundation for the restoration of God’s covenant with men. Disclosures of this predetermined redemptive purpose were made in the course of the judicial proceedings following upon the breaking of the Creator’s Covenant of Works with Adam. Intimations of this divine plan of salvation were given in the curse on Satan (Gen 3:15) and in the sentence pronounced against mankind (Gen 3:16-19). A divine act of symbolic sealing of God’s redemptive intentions also occurred before the sentence of exile was executed (Gen 3:21). The Genesis 3 narrative of the judgment that terminated the original covenantal order in Eden is, therefore, at the same time the record of the inauguration of the new redemptive order of the Covenant of Grace.

Here we return to God’s curse on the serpent (Gen 3:15), emphasizing now those features in the passage that make it, surprisingly, as the church has recognized, the first disclosure of the gospel.

a. Messiah

As the Scriptures themselves plainly indicate, the individual seed of the woman, the champion of the woman’s army who would vanquish Satan, is to be identified as the Messiah of Old Testament redemptive promise and prophecy. The portrayal of the mission of Christ in Revelation 12 may be singled out as rich in clear allusions to Genesis 3:15. In this vision a great dragon appears, identified as the ancient serpent, the devil (v.9). There is also a woman who gives birth to a son, and the passage speaks too about the rest of the “seed” of the woman (v.11). The history of the child born to the woman is described in messianic terms: he attains to the world-rule of the anointed Son foretold in Psalm 2 and fulfills the Daniel 7 vision of the Son of Man, for his encounter with the dragon culminates in his ascension to the throne of God (v.5), a victory celebrated as a coming of the salvation and kingdom and authority of the Christ of God (v.10). As for the dragon-serpent, though he sets himself to devour the child (v.4), he is doomed to defeat. When the messianic son is caught up to heaven in triumph, Satan is cast down out of heaven into the prison of the abyss and at last into the lake of second death (v.9; Rev 20).

Though Satan’s doom was already announced by God himself on the occasion of the parousia in Eden, that very announcement made known that the task of judging the evil one which was given to man at the beginning was still to be carried out by a son of man. It is true that the son of man in view in Genesis 3:15 would be one who is at times set forth in the Scriptures as the embodiment of the Glory-Presence, so that with reference to his defeat of Satan the Lord might have said to the serpent: “I will bruise your head.” Nevertheless, he would be the woman’s seed, a man. And the fact that Genesis 3:15 attributes to him as a dominant concern of his mission the judicial confrontation with Satan that was so central in the covenantal probation of the first Adam is indicative that this descendant of the woman would have the historical status of a second Adam, a new federal head in a new administration of God’s kingdom.

Scripture’s identification of Jesus as a second Adam is therefore another facet of its identification of him as the representative seed of the woman of Genesis 3:15. Particular mention may be made of the relevant data in the Gospel accounts of Jesus’ temptation-encounter with Satan, where the parallelism of our Lord’s experience to that of the first Adam is most pronounced. Once again there is the special presence of the devil with the same objectives and strategies as of old in Eden. He tempts again to break covenant with God and render allegiance to himself and it is again his seductive suggestion that the dominion and glory belonging to image-of-God status (peculiarly so in the case of the messianic Son of God) might be attained at the hidden expense of defying the authority of God as expressed in specific covenantal stipulations. By rebuking Satan and driving him away from the holy hill the second Adam performed the judicial assignment that had figured critically in the probation-temptation of the first Adam. The probation of Jesus, too, involved the accomplishment of a particular act of obedience; specifically, the gaining of a decisive victory over Satan. Further, in connection with the temptation of Jesus there is again found the presence of the Spirit and the angels. The acts of the Glory-Spirit and the angel attendants are now appropriate to the faithfulness displayed by Jesus in his probation and therefore contrast sharply with the roles they played in Eden, but this very antithesis accents the fundamental parallelism in the two events. Against the first Adam, the angels stood as adversaries, preventing his return from the wilderness to the garden. Now they minister to the needs of the second Adam in the wilderness (Mark 1:12). Following the unsuccessful probation in Eden, the Glory-Spirit had appeared in terrifying storm-theophany to pronounce condemnation. Now, before leading Jesus to the temptation crisis, the Spirit appears in the theophanic form of the dove above the waters, evocative of the Creator-Spirit of Genesis 1:2 and bespeaking the divine favor. Again there is the heavenly parousia-voice (cf. Gen 3:8), but this time it utters a word of approbation, anticipating Jesus’ triumph of obedience in the imminent temptation, where he would remain unswervingly on the way to fulfill his baptismal commitment to undergo the ordeal of redemptive suffering foretold of him in Genesis 3:15.

Coming as the second federal head, the Son of Man, whose origins were in heaven, would undergo probation in another covenant of works, the covenant which he made with the Father before he left heaven and for the fulfillment of which he came to earth as the seed of the woman. The covenantal commitments made in eternity in the intratrinitarian counsels must be fulfilled on earth in historical time. In the world of the generations of Adam and the woman the second Adam, as the representative of God’s elect, must gain the reward of the covenanted kingdom for himself and for them, as had been decreed in Genesis 3:15. By his obedience in the earthly probation phase of his eternal covenant of works the champion of the woman’s seed would open the way for the Covenant of Grace, whose proper purpose is to bring salvation to the rest of the woman’s seed and to bestow on them the kingdom of the Glory-Spirit won by their messianic kinsman-redeemer. Indeed, in suffering the bruising of his heel the messianic seed would ratify this new covenant.

b. Grace

Essentially the same eschatological goal that is secured through the second Adam was already envisaged as the reward for a successful probation of the first Adam. In both cases the blessing sanction of the covenant consists in a consummation of the kingdom of God. But however similar with respect to the ultimate blessings offered, the new redemptive covenant administration differs from the creational covenant in that it is an administration of divine grace. It is a covenant of grace in distinction from works inasmuch as it bestows the grant of the kingdom of God on those who had forfeited their right to God’s favor and so lost their hope of glory. Consummation blessing must now come by way of reconciliation and restoration through God’s forgiving, redemptive mercy. And since the grace of God operative in the Covenant of Grace is sovereign grace in Christ, the eschatological kingdom goal is not merely offered; its attainment is assured.

The promise of this redemptive grace was present in the curse on Satan in Genesis 3:15 as the implicit corollary of that curse. God’s declaration that he would initiate enmity between the woman’s seed and the serpent, severing the league man had entered into with the devil, was a promise of reconciliation and of the restoration of the covenant between the Lord and man. Thus, the curse of the bruising of the serpent’s head would itself be an act of blessing, for through the crushing of Satan’s power the community of the woman’s seed would be rescued from the fierce hostility directed by the devil and his forces against them. Victory for the champion-seed of the woman meant the deliverance of the woman’s army from the onslaught of the demonic hordes, deliverance from the power of death possessed by the devil (Heb 2:14). The judgment of the devil foretold in Genesis 3:15 would be a redemptive judgment, a work of judgment that was itself the means of procuring salvation.

Redemptive grace entails another kind of deliverance too, a redemption from sin and its penalty. The curse sanction of the broken covenant must be honored and the justice of the Lord of the covenant must be satisfied with respect to the company of the woman’s seed as well as the seed of the serpent. It is for this reason that the prophecy of the victory of the messianic seed of the woman must contain the additional words: “You will bruise his heel.” Suffering, the suffering of the curse to which all the rest of the woman’s seed were liable, must be vicariously borne by the second Adam. Messianic prophecy is summarized in Scripture as the message of the sufferings of Christ and the glory that should follow (1 Pet 1:11; cf. Luke 24:25-27,44-47; Acts 26:22,23). In fact, without the sufferings to make atonement and deliver from sin there could not be the glory of the redemptive judgment against Satan. In Isaiah’s prophecies of the messianic Servant, the sufferings that seem to threaten the success of the Servant’s mission are eventually seen to be the very means by which he accomplishes his soteric purpose and achieves his matchless exaltation (cf. Rev 12:11). In the first messianic prophecy this interrelationship of Messiah’s sufferings and glory is already observable. They are brought together in the figurative imagery, according to which it would naturally be in the act of trampling the head of the serpent that the woman’s seed would suffer the wounding of his heel.

If it were not for God’s concern to redeem a sinful people, the judicial triumph over Satan and his demonic hosts might have been accomplished as a simple exercise of divine power. The Son of God in the angelic existence-form known to us in biblical revelation as the Angel of the Lord, or Michael, might have led the legions of his angels against the dragon and his angels and prevailed in judgment against them (cf. Rev 12:7). But because it must be through the suffering of an atoning death that he destroyed the devil as a redemptive victory in behalf of his people, it was necessary that the Son of God partake of the existence-form of flesh and blood for the suffering of that death (Heb 2:14,15). He must become the seed of the woman as foretold in the mother prophecy. In his incarnate form, assumed so that he could make reconciliation for the sins of his people (Heb 2:17), he must not resort to the more than twelve angelic legions at his disposal, for how then should the Scriptures be fulfilled that the Christ must suffer and only so enter into his glory (Matt 26:53,54)? The sequence as well as the combination of visions in Revelation 12 is significant. Only after the son born to the woman had undergone the sufferings of the conflict with the dragon that issued in his ascension to glory (Rev 12:1-5) might Michael wage war and prevail against Satan (Rev 12:7ff). It is through the blood of the Lamb that the brethren are said to overcome their accuser (Rev 12:11) …

c. Election

A happy ending was guaranteed in the redemptive program, even though it was founded on a covenant of works. Successful probation was assured in advance by the fact that the second Adam was the incarnate Son of God. While, therefore, the messianic seed of the woman was, like the first Adam, a federal representative of a people, he could also be presented to them as their surety, as the guarantor of the blessings of the covenant for them. Their victory over Satan and their inheritance of the kingdom of glory were certain because their champion must surely win the battle.

Moreover, this guarantee was given in spite of the conditionality that obtained by virtue of the necessity that the rest of the woman’s seed fulfill their responsible part in repentance, faith and perseverance. No uncertainty as to the outcome crept in at this point because the grace that is operative in redemptive covenant is the sovereign grace of the God who keeps covenant. If the identity of the second Adam as the Son of God guaranteed that he would perform his part in that covenant of works made in heaven, then the fact that it was God the Father who promised him the reward of a people and kingdom in the Spirit guaranteed that that reward would be granted, that the promised people, the rest of the woman’s seed, would come to Christ and share his glory. It was the Glory-Spirit, the Alpha-Omega executant in the creation of the cosmic temple at the beginning, who was given in the promise of the Father to the Son to raise up and consummate the living temple of Christ’s people in a further exercise of that same sovereign creational omnipotence.

Genesis 3:15 announced that mankind would be divided by virtue of the separation of a people of God from the people of the devil and further that this separation, this “enmity”, would be the result of God’s own action: “I will put enmity.” This declaration of a strictly divine initiation of the distinction between the two seeds, in particular of the separation of the one seed unto God in Christ, was a disclosure of God’s sovereign election of a remnant people. It was this act of election that defined at once the design of the Son’s work of atonement and his corresponding just reward from the Father. Implicitly included too was an assurance of the sovereign operation of the Spirit, infallibly effecting what the Father promised the Son in their eternal covenant. Because of the Father’s faithfulness to his covenant promise, all those for whom the Son suffered the bruising of his heel would be given the requisite perseverance in faith by the Creator-Spirit and so come to heaven; because of the justice of God, none of those for whom the Son suffered the penalty of the broken covenant could suffer it a second time by descending themselves into hell. This is the gospel of sovereign redemptive grace which the Lord published in Eden. Proclaiming his own sovereign decree of election he prophesied in Genesis 3:15 the future that had been foreordained and guaranteed by the mutual commitments of the Father, Son, and Spirit in covenantal council before the world began.