R.C. Sproul

In the nature of things, by the very fact that God has made us and not we ourselves

We owe Him.

We are debtors to Him for our very existence.

We owe Him everything.

He owes us nothing.

However, as it says,

Our participation in blessedness comes from the voluntary condescension on God's part which He's been pleased to express, and the way He does it is through covenant.

Doesn't that say that the first covenant is not a covenant of works, but a covenant of grace?

No, this distinction between covenant of works and covenant of grace is not intended to say that.

The point of the distinction between the covenant of works and the covenant of grace is what conditions God imposes upon those of us who are in covenant with Him for our experience of its benefits.

Now we all agree, I would think, that for God to enter into a covenant with us at all is gracious.

And because of that point, there are some people that object to this distinction between covenant of works and covenant of grace because they think it would obscure the reality that any covenant that we have with God is only by His grace.

It is gracious that He would make any kind of a covenant with us in the first place.

But again, the Westminster divines acknowledge that in part one, and then in part two immediately go on to make this distinction between covenant of works and covenant of grace.

When Paul announces the gospel in his letters or the preachings in the book of Acts, they talk about how Jesus was born according to the Scriptures in the fullness of time, that God had prepared that throughout all of history.

Everything in Old Testament history before the birth of Christ was moving towards that moment.

In our first session, I mentioned to you that the basic role of the covenant is that it is the structure of God's revelation in history.

And I've used this term more than once, the history of redemption or redemptive history, because history is the context in which God works out His plan of redemption.

And that idea became very controversial in the middle of the 20th century, again with higher critical scholars, chiefly in Germany, people like Rudolf Bultmann, who made a distinction between what he called Hausgeschichte,

or salvation history, and history.