R.C. Sproul

And again and again and again in the gospel of John, Jesus is saying that He was sent from the Father.

that he was the supreme missionary of God.

A missionary is someone who is sent and authorized by the one who sends them or the group that sends them.

And so Christ constantly refers back to his origin, not as a baby born in Bethlehem, but as the one who came down from heaven who was sent by the Father and authorized by the Father to speak the Father's word.

If you look at that, then you understand something of what went on before God even created the world, before God ever created Adam and Eve, before there was any kind of probation in the Garden of Eden.

And we talk in the first instance not about a covenant that God makes with us, but a covenant that takes place within the triune Godhead itself.

And this we call in theological parlance the covenant of redemption.

Now one of the things that's so important about this is that it speaks to us about the agreement

that has existed from all eternity among the persons of the Godhead about God's plan of redemption.

I remember when I was in graduate school in the 60s and there was a controversy brewing among German theologians on the continent that if I recall it was called something like the Umstimmung Controversy, which there were those theologians who were arguing that the ministry of Jesus

was impelled by Jesus' desire to overcome

the vengeful, wrathful inclinations of the Old Testament God.

Going back to the heresy of Marcion in the early church who expunged all references in the New Testament that would make the Old Testament God the father of Jesus because he thought that there was a basic incompatibility between Christ and the God of the Old Testament.

You still see people like that all over the place who say, well, I like the

Jesus in the New Testament said, Old Testament God, I can't stomach, He's such a vengeful God, and so on.

And so this idea that arose in German theology was the idea that Christ came, really, He was trying to change God's mind.

to relent from His purpose and plan to judge people and expose them to His wrath, and that basically the salvific work of Christ had to do with the sons persuading the Father to ease up, as it were, and so that Christ reveals to us mercy where the Father was all judgment.

Well I can't think of anything that is more distorting of the biblical portrait of both God the Father and God the Son than that kind of understanding.

And so the principle that we're talking about here of the covenant of redemption is that the plan of salvation is conceived in the Godhead.

And in a sense we can say it's the Father's plan.