Given at the Association of Confessional Baptist Churches UK at Stanley Park Church, Liverpool, on 3rd February 2026
Thank you for the invitation to address you this morning on the exciting and hugely encouraging topic of covenant, from chapter 7 of our confession of faith. Covenant is fundamental both to the Scriptures and to our lives as Christian believers. Yet it is a neglected subject. Christians shy away from it because they think it is difficult. Or they are simply unaware of it, as a topic to be studied and understood. Evangelicalism in recent decades has in large part rejected the idea of covenant as a way of understanding God’s dealings with us, preferring to put in its place other, less biblical ideas. It is my hope this morning that we will see afresh the beauty and the glory of God’s covenant arrangements and that, through this, we will experience anew the basis that this gives us for Christian unity and liberty, for our commitment to and enjoyment of church and for our joy and assurance of salvation in Christ.
1. Covenant introduced (7.1)
Imagine that a wealthy donor offers to provide full fund for a particular aspect of the work of a charity, with no strings attached. He is under no obligation to commit to this funding; the money was his, to do with it whatever he saw fit. He did not have to give it to the charity in this way. Yet he chose to do so. In the same way, God did not have to enter into any covenant with humans, even before the Fall. The covenants that God has made with mankind, before and after the Fall, are the fruit of his condescension to us – his grace, in other words.
Look at paragraph 1 of chapter 7 and how it speaks in its opening sentence of the ‘distance between God and the creature’ being ‘so great’. Think about this – how much greater God, our creator, is than us and the immense, infinite distance between us. God is everlasting, without beginning or end, not bound by time in any way; he does not change in any way; there is no limit to his power or his knowledge; he is everywhere; he is completely and entirely righteous and holy, without sin or defect of any kind; he cannot be broken down or analysed in terms of different parts or aspects of his being, for he is one and everything that he is is himself, God, purely and simply; and he is triune, wonderfully yet mysteriously three subsistences – Father, Son and Holy Spirit, each fully, consubstantially and co-equally God. He is far, far beyond us.
So even before the Fall, when Adam and Eve were without sin of any kind, they were infinitely inferior to and very different from their creator. They owed him obedience – he gave them one specific, expressed command, not to eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. And they had the whole of the moral law of God written upon their hearts – they knew intrinsically that it was wrong to murder, steal, lie and so forth, and that they must not worship any other god. But the Confession makes this vital point in paragraph 1 – their complete obedience to all these commands could not earn them the ‘reward of Life’, as it puts it. Why is this? Because their obedience was no more than what they ought, as God’s creatures, to give to him, their creator and God.
Note one of the verses that are cited here – Luke 17:10, ‘So likewise you, when you have done all those things which you are commanded, say, “We are unprofitable servants. We have done what was our duty to do.”’ If you employ someone to do something for you and they do it perfectly well; you pay them what you agreed for the work; then they come to you and ask for a bonus. What do you say? I never agreed any bonus with you – you’ve done the work we agreed and I’ve paid you – I owe you no more. You would be right. So here – the Lord Jesus says to his disciples that our obedience to all God’s commands does not earn us anything extra. We have simply done what we ought to do.
Therefore, concludes the Confession in paragraph 1, the covenants that God makes with humans, whether before or after the Fall, are purely of grace, a matter of condescension, as it puts it, not right. So whenever we see a covenant made or referred to in Scripture, we are to mark it as a sign of God’s great grace to humanity. Even what is called the covenant of works is made out of grace – God’s goodness and kindness to his human creatures, which is not earned but comes from his grace and condescension to us.
2. The covenant of grace made (7.2)
And, wonderfully, this is true even after the Fall – even with man as sinners, fallen, God is pleased to be gracious and to condescend to enter into covenant with us! What grace! And this is what is needed now – as we are sinners, we stand in need of a covenant of grace, which is the subject of the rest of chapter 7. It is introduced in paragraph 2.
The paragraph first explains why this is necessary – man had brought a curse upon him, because of the Fall. Adam’s sin plunged humanity into this dire situation, of being under the curse of the law. This takes us back to the previous chapter, chapter 6, which describes the Fall and its effects in more detail. The key phrase for us here is toward the end of paragraph 3 of that chapter, which tells us that, because of Adam and Eve’s disobedience, we have all become ‘by nature children of wrath, the servants of Sin, the subjects of death and all other miseries, spiritual, temporal and eternal’. This is the curse of the law, the inevitable fruit of that one act of disobedience in the Garden.
The law by which the command was imposed and the curse threatened is also referred to in chapter 19 of the Confession, on the law of God, paragraph 1. That paragraph confirms that that law ‘promised life upon the fulfilling, and threatned death upon the breach of it’. Adam having breached that law thus brought death and the curse on the human race. This law is normally referred to by theologians as the ‘covenant of works’. Chapter 20 thus begins, ‘The Covenant of Works being broken by Sin, and made unprofitable unto Life’. This then is how we are to understand our predicament as fallen sinners – as descendants of fallen Adam, we are under the curse of God’s law, the curse of the covenant of works, which brings upon us all kinds of misery, the wrath of God and death.
But, praise God, this is merely the backdrop in 7.2 of the unveiling of the wonderful covenant of grace! Note the phrase, ‘it pleased the Lord’, here. This covenant was not made grudgingly – ‘I suppose I’d better repair the damage they’ve done’. It was not forced out of an unwilling God by an importunate humanity. It was willingly given by our triune God and on his initiative alone – ‘it pleased’ him to make this covenant!
And see what it offers: life and salvation by Christ, on the basis of faith in him, ‘freely’ – what a tremendous word that is! What a tragedy that the Particular Baptists of the eighteenth century did not give more attention to the wording of the Confession here! Many of them were sadly caught up on the wrong side of the hypercalvinist controversy that plagued calvinistic baptist churches in those years. They wrongly believed that the gospel was not to be extended to all people indiscriminately, but only to those who gave signs that they were among the elect. This, as you can imagine, imposed a huge dampener on evangelistic effort among the Particular Baptists of that century, with tragic results for their churches which experienced, for the most part, significant decline. Recovery came only with the publication of the famous work by Andrew Fuller, The Gospel Worthy of All Acceptation, arguing that all people were to be called to immediate repentance, without discrimination, and to saving faith in Jesus Christ. Yet how clear the Confession is at this point: in the covenant of grace, the Lord makes this free offer of life and salvation ‘unto Sinners’ – not merely to the elect, but to all humanity, fallen under the curse as a result of Adam’s sin.
This ‘life and salvation’ promised in the covenant of grace is permanent and everlasting. This is expressed later in the Confession, in chapter 15.2, which deals with those who fall into sin, even great sins. It reassures us that ‘God hath in the Covenant of Grace, mercifully provided that Beleivers [sic] so sinning, and falling, be renewed through Repentance unto Salvation’ and, in paragraph 5 of that chapter, that God has made provision in that covenant ‘for the preservation of Believers unto Salvation’. The covenant thus provides perfect security for the believer, in this life and for that which is to come, despite our ongoing sinfulness. All of this is received freely from God’s gracious hand, in this covenant of grace.
The fact, however, that it is only the elect who will actually receive and enter into the covenant of grace by faith is expressed in the last part of paragraph 2 of our chapter, which expresses God’s promise of the Holy Spirit to ‘all those that are ordained unto eternal Life’. It is only the Holy Spirit who can bring the sinner to the point of saving faith, ‘to make them willing, and able to believe’. The Confession here builds upon what it has already taught – that the Fall has rendered us ‘utterly indisposed, disabled, and made opposite to all good, and wholly inclined to all evil’ (6.4). Later, in chapter 9, the Confession brings together its teaching on the human will, affirming in the case of fallen humanity that we have ‘wholly lost all ability of Will, to any spiritual good accompanying salvation’ so that the natural man ‘is not able, by his own strength, to convert himself; or to prepare himself thereunto’ (9.3). Thus, as our paragraph states, it is only by the Holy Spirit that the elect are brought to saving faith – and it is only to them that the Lord, in the covenant of grace, promises to give his Spirit to that end.
This is a vital truth for us to grasp today. Do we recognise, in our evangelism, how powerless and ineffective we are without the work of the Spirit? Do we see how utterly unable and unwilling the unbeliever is to come to Christ? Evangelistic manuals and advice often urge us to ensure that our meetings contain nothing that will be unnecessarily offputting to the unbeliever who may wander in among us. In our dress, the music we sing and the instruments we use to accompany it, in our language and even the length and style of the preaching, we are to ensure, we are told, that we are as relatable and understandable as possible by the unbeliever. Now it is true that we are not to be obscurantist, dwelling in the past, unnecessarily stuffy or awkward, but do we really believe that these are the only or main obstacles to people becoming Christians? Listening to some people, you might be led to think that, once these obstacles are cleared out of the way, people would be flocking in off the streets to our services and coming to faith in Christ in their droves.
What nonsense! What is the main reason why people do not come to our services and do not come to saving faith in Jesus Christ? The main – indeed, the only – reason is that they – and we – are sinners. We are lost in sin, hardened against God, law-breakers, loveless, without concern for the Lord or for our own souls, unless and until God in his covenant of grace gives to us the promise of his Holy Spirit to convict us of sin and bring us to the Saviour. And this he does, for every one of his elect, all of whom will indubitably be saved for eternity, according to that same covenant. See what comfort and what encouragement there is in this paragraph – to believe on the Saviour, to be assured of the certainty of life and salvation for ever if you do, and to continue to call all people everywhere to repentance and faith in the Saviour, in the sure knowledge that every one who hears that call and is ‘ordained unto eternal Life’ will in due time respond under the influence of the Holy Spirit and be saved.
So that is the covenant of grace. How then has it been revealed, what is it founded upon and how does it operate? These are the questions that paragraph 3 answers.
3. The covenant of grace revealed (7.3a)
The paragraph begins with a clear, uncompromising, absolute statement: ‘This Covenant is revealed in the Gospel.’ You may be saying to yourself, where in the Bible do we find this covenant of grace? What is it, exactly? What are we talking about? Well, here it is: it is revealed in the gospel. When we preach or share the gospel, we are in essence proclaiming the covenant of grace – that, as we have seen in paragraph 2, life and salvation are offered freely to sinners, on the basis of faith in Christ. It is all there, in essence, and the rest of the Confession goes on to expand and explain in more detail what this involves. We go on in the chapters that follow to learn of Christ our mediator and his person and work that saves, of the work of the Holy Spirit in calling the elect to repentance and saving faith, and then of the great salvation truths of justification, adoption, sanctification, saving faith and repentance to life, the life of holiness, perserverance and so on. This is the gospel and its outworking in the life of Christ’s sheep, his elect. And it is where we see the covenant of grace fully revealed.
But clearly the gospel – these great truths – is more fully revealed in the New Testament than it is in the Old. It is there in the Old, as we know, but only partially, cloaked in types and shadows. As the Old Testament progresses, more and more is revealed, but it is not until we come to the New Testament and the coming of the Saviour into the world to live and give his life for sinners that the full revelation of the covenant of grace is made. And this is what paragraph 3 tells us. First of all, the covenant is revealed, in a very initial way, to Adam in the promise of salvation found in Genesis 3:15, ‘I will put enmity between you [that is, the serpent] and the women [Eve], and between your offspring and her offspring; he [that is, Christ] shall bruise your head [that is, destroy you], and you shall bruise his heel [that is, cause him to suffer].’ This is not a full revelation of the gospel in all its glory, but it is a clear promise of a saviour to come, who will overcome the devil and all his works.
What happens after that initial promise in Eden? Well, by a simple but pregnant phrase, ‘by farther steps’, the Confession indicates the gradual unfolding, through the Old Testament revelation as it is progressively given, of more and more light – a clearer and fuller revelation of the covenant of grace as time goes on. The Confession does not specify what these ‘farther steps’ are, but it seems clear that they are thinking, particularly, of the covenants of which we read in the Old Testament – with Noah in Genesis 6, then with Abraham and the patriarchs, then with Moses at Sinai and then with David as king in 2 Samuel 7. By these ‘farther steps’, more and more information is provided about the covenant of grace, more light is shed on the way in which God will deal with the sins of his people and provide for them the redemption that they need, until this revelation is ‘compleated in the new Testament’. With the coming of Christ, his death and resurrection and the reflections of the apostles on that contained in their letters, we have the complete and final revelation of the covenant of grace in all its fulness, in which we rejoice and on which we live today.
Now theologians have argued for centuries about these various covenants and their relationship to one another. Our presbyterian brothers, in particular, have constructed a certain way of understanding the covenants of the Old Testament and that of the New Testament which has in part been the foundation for their practice of infant baptism. For the most part, they argue that all these covenants, from Genesis 3:15 onwards, form the one covenant of grace, albeit under different administrations, as they put it. Our baptist forefathers disagreed with this, arguing that there are very significant differences between the covenants of the Old Testament and that of the New Testament, as can be seen especially in the letter to the Hebrews, for example. Baptists therefore tend to reject the paedobaptist idea that all the covenants in the Bible, Old and New Testament, form just one covenant of grace, in different administrations. We prefer to follow the biblical pattern and understand that there were several different covenants revealed in the Old Testament and that the covenant of grace in contrast did not come into being, fully and formally, until Christ came and died – that his death sealed the new covenant in the sense that that was the point at which the covenant, genuinely new, actually came into being. Before that, it was promised, foreshadowed, typified, preached and hoped on, but was not actually, fully and formally in being. It is in the death and resurrection of Christ that the new covenant was finally executed, sealed, ratified and established. And that is why, as the writer to the Hebrews says, the saints who lived before Christ were not completed or made perfect apart from us (Heb. 11:40).
4. The covenant of grace founded (7.3b)
This, though, raises a vital question. Our presbyterian brothers at this point would say to us, that is all very well, but where is the unity of the covenants? You say that the covenant of grace was revealed in ‘farther steps’ through the Old Testament, but you maintain that they were all different covenants, not simply different administrations of the one covenant. So what unites them, such that the believers of the Old Testament could be saved? Presbyterians say that they are clear on this – the covenant of grace was fully in being and operative throughout the Old Testament, under the various covenants, that is, administrations of the one covenant of grace, that we read of in that part of God’s Word. There is a wonderful consistency and unity to this, they say, which provides a sure foundation for the salvation of all believers, Old or New Testament. How do we respond to this, admittedly attractive, argument?
The answer to it lies in the next section of paragraph 3, which teaches us that the covenant of grace, the new covenant in Christ, is founded in the eternal covenant, made before the beginning of time, among the persons of the Trinity, the ‘covenant of redemption’. The Confession here calls it ‘that Eternal Covenant transaction’. So it was made in eternity. That is to say, it belongs to the eternal realm, not to this age of time. It was not entered into at some time after the creation of all things, but ‘before the foundation of the world’, as Paul expresses it in Ephesians 1:4. This takes us outside the realm of time altogether, to something that is eternal and therefore unending and unchangeable. This is indeed a sure foundation for our salvation.
It is sometimes complained that the covenant of redemption leaves out the Holy Spirit, in that it is usually expressed as being made between the Father and the Son, as the Confession here states. The best theological accounts of this covenant, however, recognise the place that the Holy Spirit has in this covenant, as the one who will apply the work of redemption planned by the Father and executed by the Son, all as part of this eternal covenant transaction. The reason for the particular emphasis on the Father and the Son here is that we are especially thinking of the Father’s role in sending and the Son in being sent into the world to die for sins.
This eternal covenant of redemption concerns, the Confession says, ‘the Redemption of the Elect’. This reflects what paragraph 2 tells us, that the Holy Spirit is promised to ‘all those that are ordained unto eternal Life’. As already recognised in chapter 3 of the Confession, on God’s decree, we believe that the number and identity of all who will be saved is known and planned by God before time began. There is no uncertainty in God as to who will be in glory at Christ’s return. They are all known to him – not merely because he has peered into the future and noted who will repent and trust in Christ in response to the preaching of the gospel, but because he has himself decreed in advance who will so respond and thus be saved. This decree to save the elect is wrapped up in the eternal covenant of redemption. It is under that covenant that Christ, as it were, agreed to become incarnate and come into this world as a man to live, suffer, die and rise again for the redemption of each one of the elect in every age.
So in his high priestly prayer recorded in John 17, Jesus calls all believers, as he prays to his heavenly Father for them, those ‘whom you have given me’ (v. 24). They were ‘given to’ him so that he would ‘give eternal life’ to them (v. 2). And he does this by dying on the cross and giving his life for them. This truth is the subject of the first paragraph of the very next chapter in the Confession, 8.1, which teaches at the end of the paragraph that it was to Christ that God ‘did from all Eternity give a people to be his seed, and to be by him in time redeemed, called, justified, sanctified, and glorified’. So it is that we believe firmly in what has become known as ‘particular redemption’ – the doctrine that answers the vital question, ‘For whom did Christ die?’, with the unequivocal statement that he died for the elect, not for every individual. That truth is reflected here in the Confession.
This eternal covenant of redemption, then, between the persons of the Trinity, is the sure foundation for the covenant of grace on the basis of which life and salvation are offered freely to sinners, through faith in Christ, as we have already seen from paragraph 2. Paragraph 3 ends, then, with a clear statement of how this covenant of grace operates. Let us look finally at this before drawing some practical lessons for our encouragement and instruction.
5. The covenant of grace in operation (7.3c)
I hope, then, that you see the vital connection between the eternal covenant of redemption, among the persons of the Trinity, which planned our salvation, and the covenant of grace that is offered to us in the gospel and by which we actually receive all the benefits of redemption and are saved. The covenant of grace, then, is simply the outworking in time, for our benefit, of that eternal trinitarian covenant transaction. The eternal covenant of redemption is the absolute guarantee that the covenant of grace will always be operative and effective for the salvation of sinners, for so long as this world lasts and for ever. This is a tremendous boost to our assurance of salvation.
The Confession underlines this as it brings chapter 7 to a close. Towards the end of the third paragraph, it makes the wonderful assertion that ‘it is alone by the Grace of this Covenant’ – that is, the covenant of grace rooted and grounded in the covenant of redemption – ‘that all of the posterity of fallen Adam, that ever were saved, did obtain life and a blessed immortality’. In other words, the only way for sinners to be saved is through this covenant of grace. Let us hold firmly to this great, unchanging truth! As the apostle Peter so stirringly put it in his defence before the rulers, elders and scribes in Jerusalem who had arraigned him for continuing to preach the resurrection of Christ, ‘There is salvation in no one else, for there is no other name under heaven given among men by which we must be saved.’ (Acts 4:12). Notice how he puts this – no other name ‘given among men’: it is in this covenant of grace that the name of Jesus is given – proclaimed to men and women across all the peoples of the earth, that they may be saved. As Christina Georgina Rosetti put it in her hymn:
None other Lamb, none other Name none other hope in heaven or earth or sea, none other hiding-place from guilt and shame, none beside Thee.
The Confession underlines here, rightly, that this has been the only ground of salvation for any sinner, before or after the coming of Christ. Old and New Testament; it is only the covenant of grace that saves. Old Testament believers looked forward to this covenant and put all their hope and trust in it, based on the promises and prophecies made to them in their day. We look back to Christ’s coming and the final sealing and ratification of the covenant of grace in his precious blood. Either way, it is by faith in Christ alone that any are found in the covenant of grace and by that covenant are redeemed.
It could be no other way for fallen sinners like us. It is hopeless to think that we, sinners, could work or earn our way to redemption and glory. As the Confession puts it, right at the end of the chapter, ‘Man being now utterly uncapable of acceptance with God upon those terms, on which Adam stood in his state of innocency’. What does this mean? It is referring back to the covenant of works, which governed Adam and Eve before the Fall. That covenant promised them life on the condition of perfect obedience to the commands of God. They failed and fell and we are fallen in them. We come into this world as condemned sinners. There is no opportunity or possibility for us to live a life of perfect obedience such that we could satisfy any covenant of works. That way is closed and this is what the Confession so clearly teaches here. And so we give up all hope of earning our salvation or of contributing anything at all to it by our own efforts. And we rest our hopes entirely – and securely – in the covenant of grace offered to us freely as sinners. As the seventeenth-century Scottish minister David Dickson said as he lay dying, in response to a friend’s request as to his spiritual state: ‘I have taken all my good deeds and all my bad deeds, and have cast them through each other in a heap before the Lord, and fled from both, and betaken myself to the Lord Jesus Christ, and in him I have sweet peace.’1 Or as another Scottish minister, Horatius Bonar, put it in his hymn:
Not what these hands have done can save this guilty soul … Thy work alone, O Christ, can ease this weight of sin; Thy blood alone, O Lamb of God, can give me peace within.
This is the work of the covenant of grace, the outworking in time of the eternal covenant of redemption made among the persons of the Trinity, whereby all the elect in every age are saved through faith in the blood of their Saviour Jesus Christ.
Application
Let us close by considering three ways in which this helps us in our daily Christian life, both individually and as members of our churches. The benefits that we enjoy under the covenant of grace should drive us to study and teach the doctrine of the covenant more closely and more assiduously.
a) Christian Unity and Liberty
If you have read anything very much on the subject of covenant, you will have found that it is a subject on which Bible-believing Christians disagree. As we have seen, theologians have devised a variety of different covenantal schemes to try to make sense of what they each believe the biblical record to be teaching. These schemes can appear very complicated and this can make the whole subject very confusing, as well as potentially divisive. While it is important to be clear on our views as to how the covenants operate in the Bible, the position of the Confession in chapter 7 has the great benefit of not trying to be too detailed in what it asserts. It is very simple in what it teaches – the need for a covenant, because we are creatures; the failure of the covenant of works because of our sin; and the making of the covenant of grace on the basis of the covenant of redemption, whereby sinners may be saved, with the covenant of grace being revealed in the Scriptures step by step until its completion in the new covenant in Christ. As one Baptist writer has put it, ‘Presbyterians and Independents could subscribe the Baptist wording’.2 If we can agree with our presbyterian brothers on this basis, even though they have such a different view of the covenantal structure of the biblical record, then we can certainly agree with one another as baptists and together confess the glorious truths that we have examined in chapter 7 of our Confession. It is a wonderful basis for Christian unity, which at the same time allows us proper liberty in our understanding of the biblical accounts of the divine covenants. We may derive different ways of understanding covenant from the Scriptures and yet remain united on the basis of this confessional statement.
b) The Church
Secondly, the doctrine of the covenant helps us enormously with our doctrine and understanding of the place of the church, especially the local church, in the Christian life. This is something which we, as confessional baptists, consider to be of great importance. The way in which church life is structured is not, for us, something of indifference. The Lord Jesus instructed his apostles in the Great Commission to make disciples and baptise them, ‘teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you’ (Matt. 28:20). Speaking earlier of the law, in the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus had said, ‘whoever relaxes one of the least of these commandments and teaches others to do the same will be called least in the kingdom of heaven’ (Matt. 5:19). If we love him, he says, we will keep his commands (Jn. 14:15). And, contrary to what many say, Jesus has, we believe, given us clear instructions in his Word as to how our churches are to be ordered. Those instructions are summarised in the teaching of the Confession – especially in chapters 26 to 30. We cannot and, I trust, do not ignore these things, or downgrade them to matters of little importance or even indifference. We place a very high value on a well ordered church, in line with the teaching of Christ, and on our participation in the church life which flows from it.
And this church life is founded and evidenced in the covenant. The covenant of grace is a corporate covenant. That is, it is made with all God’s people together, not merely with a very large number of individuals who are elect. It is not a series of covenants with individual believers, but one, single covenant with all of them together, with God’s people as a whole. This reality is expressed in the oft-repeated covenantal affirmation of the Old Testament, ‘You will be my people and I will be your God’ (see Ex. 6:7; Lev. 26:12; Jer. 30:22; Ezek. 34:24). This formula is repeated expressly in relation to the new covenant in Jeremiah 31:33: ‘For this is the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel after those days, declares the Lord: I will put my law within them, and I will write it on their hearts. And I will be their God, and they shall be my people.’ These words are repeated verbatim in the New Testament (Heb. 8:10). The new covenant, the covenant of grace, is thus unequivocally a corporate covenant, made with all the elect, establishing them together as the people of God.
Peter takes this up in a wonderful way in his first letter, where he speaks in the second chapter of believers as ‘like living stones … being built up as a spiritual house, to be a holy priesthood, to offer spiritual sacrifices acceptable to God through Jesus Christ’ (1 Pet. 2:5). So, he concludes, the church, the covenant people of God, are ‘a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people for his own possession, that you may proclaim the excellencies of him who called you out of darkness into his marvellous light’ (2:9). These are all Old Testament expressions, repurposed – or more precisely, rightly purposed – for the new covenant people of God. They are, again, unashamedly corporate expressions, rooted firmly in the divine covenant.
It is then in church life – and particularly in local church life – that we live out the realities of the blessings of the covenant of grace of which we have been made beneficiaries in Christ. This is not to say that the covenant is somehow inapplicable to us in our individual lives for Christ or that it has no blessings in that regard – of course not. But its primary application and outworking is to the corporate people of God. That is why the New Testament letters are so full of exhortations concerning our relations one with another. We are constantly urged by the apostles to love one another, care for one another, forgive and bear with one another, encourage and exhort one another, and so on. Why is this? Because we are in covenant together with almighty God and the behaviour that is urged upon us by instructions such as these is covenant behaviour. Let us then give this substance and priority – that we are first of all local church men and women, that we live out our Christian lives pre-eminently in the context of the covenant community of the local church – and consciously also in the context of the wider church as we do today in our associations. It is in this context and for this reason that we place such a high value on the ordinances that we engage in as local churches and even on church discipline. All these things, together with our regular worship and fellowship together, form the warp and weft of our lives together as the covenant people of God.
c) Assurance
Finally, the doctrine of the covenant provides the Christian with great assurance. Understand that you are, as a believer, in covenant with almighty God. That covenant – the covenant of grace, in the blood of the eternal, incarnate Son of God – is itself founded upon the eternal covenant of redemption among the persons of the Trinity. It is made for the benefit of all God’s elect, evidenced by their faith in Jesus Christ for a salvation that brings them eternal life and unites them with the Saviour in an unbreakable union, in the covenant bond that brings all God’s people into communion with him for ever.
Unlike the old covenant – the covenants that we meet in the Old Testament – the covenant of grace, finalised and ratified in the new covenant in the blood of Christ, cannot be broken. The Confession makes clear (15.2) that believers can fall into ‘great sins, and provocations’ because of indwelling corruption that remains in us, yet still the true believer will in time be restored to faith in Christ. He cannot be lost – he will persevere in faith until the end, as chapter 17 assures us: ‘Those whom God hath accepted in the beloved, effectually called and Sanctified by his Spirit, and given the precious faith of his Elect unto, can neither totally nor finally fall from the state of grace; but shall certainly persevere therein to the end and be eternally saved, seeing the gifts and callings of God are without Repentance’ (17.1). Again, the foundation of this assurance is the covenant of grace – we are in the covenant and none can ever remove us from it. Jesus has promised, ‘whoever comes to me I will never cast out’ (Jn. 6:37); ‘no one is able to snatch them out of the Father’s hand’ (Jn. 10:30). Let us rest in this and rejoice in our security in Christ and the redemption that he has accomplised for us for time and eternity. We will give the last word to Augustus Montague Toplady, in the final verse of his great hymn, ‘A debtor to mercy alone, of covenant mercy I sing’:
My name from the palms of His hands eternity will not erase; impressed on His heart it remains, in marks of indelible grace; yes, I to the end shall endure, as sure as the earnest is given; more happy, but not more secure, the glorified spirits in heaven.
- Robert Wodrow, ‘Short Account of the Life of the Author’, in David Dickson, A Commentary on the Psalms (1653-55; repr. Edinburgh: Banner of Truth, 1959), p. xxiii. ↩︎
- Samuel D. Renihan, From Shadow to Substance: The Federal Theology of the English Particular Baptists (1642-1704) (Oxford: Centre for Baptist History and Heritage, 2018), p. 189.
↩︎
Great content! Keep up the good work!