OF GOD’S COVENANT

1.  The distance between God and the creature is so great, that although reasonable creatures do owe obedience to Him as their Creator, yet they could never have attained the reward of life by some voluntary condescension on God’s part, and this He has been pleased to express by way of a covenant.[1]

2.  Moreover, man having brought himself under the curse of the law by his fall, it pleased the Lord to make a covenant of grace.  In this covenant He freely offers to sinners life and salvation by Jesus Christ, requiring from them faith in Him, that they may be saved; and promising to give to all who are appointed to eternal life, His Holy Spirit to make them willing and able to believe.[2]

3.  This covenant is revealed in the Gospel; first of all to Adam in the promise of salvation by the seed of the woman, and afterwards by further steps until the full revelation of it became completed in the New Testament; and the covenant of salvation is founded upon an eternal covenant transaction that was between the Father and the Son about the redemption of the elect; and it is solely by the grace of this covenant that all the descendents of fallen Adam who have ever been saved have obtained life and blessed immortality,  because man is now utterly incapable of gaining acceptance with God on the terms by which Adam stood in his state of innocence.[3]