From God’s words spoken to Adam, we know He created a covenant with Adam and his posterity. God provided Adam with a garden, an ideal place He could work, keep, and live in, but with a condition. Adam was prohibited from eating from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, or he would die.
The first indication in Scripture of the so-called ‘covenant of works’ is recorded in Genesis 2:15-17, “The Lord God took the man and put him in the garden of Eden to work it and keep it. And the Lord God commanded the man, saying, “You may surely eat of every tree of the garden, but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it you shall surely die.”
This covenant is referred to by the seventeenth-century theologian Francis Turretin as the covenant of nature. He did so because the covenant was founded on human nature. However, Turretin recognized that the covenant was ‘legal’ in that it required the obedience of Adam’s nature to God’s law. Turretin also understood that it was a covenant of ‘works’ because Adam was required to obey God’s commands.
Some have called this covenant the Adamic covenant. However, we prefer the covenant of works because it depends on Adam and Eve’s obedience (or works). No matter what this covenant is called, Scripture confirms that God made a covenant with Adam; he would receive eternal life on the condition that he remain perfectly obedient, and his failure to comply with this condition would result in the penalty of eternal death. Since Adam was the head and representative of the human race, his failure under this covenant would result in eternal death for his posterity.
Scripture is very clear about the parties to the covenant of works. The passage quoted above involves God dealing directly with Adam. Hodge writes, “that God made to Adam a promise suspended upon a condition, and attached to disobedience a certain penalty.”[1] God made a covenant with Adam, not as an individual, but as head and representative of the human race.
This covenant contained the promise of eternal life. Though Scripture does not explicitly state that God promised eternal life, the fact that the penalty for failing to comply with the covenant’s condition was eternal death implies that eternal life was the promise under the covenant of works. The teaching that obedience to God results in eternal life is found throughout Scripture (Lev. 18:5; Eze. 20:11, 13, 20; Luke 10:28; Rom. 10:5; Gal. 3:12). Eternal life is represented everywhere in Scripture as the consequence of obedience to God.
The condition of the covenant works is obedience. Scripture states that obedience to the law of God is the condition for eternal life (Deut. 27:26). In the case of Adam, the fact that he was forbidden to eat of a particular tree was God’s test to see if Adam would be obedient to God. Adam was required to perfectly obey all God’s commands to earn eternal life.
The penalty contained in the covenant of works is death, that is, spiritual and eternal death. And it is precisely this penalty from which Christ delivers us. All human beings fell with Adam, and all are conceived in the guilt of Adam’s first transgression against God. Therefore, the covenant of works has not been available to any of Adam’s posterity. Nevertheless, the covenant of works has NOT been abolished. Jesus was conceived as a sinless human being; therefore, the covenant of works was available to Him. He lived a perfectly obedient life and thus, as the second Adam, received merited righteousness, which is the ground for the justification of all believers.
Scripture teaches that Adam and Eve were disobedient, and as a result, they and their entire posterity fell into a depraved state.
There are only two ways to attain eternal life. One is by perfectly obeying God in everything we think and do throughout our lives. This is the covenant of works. Only Jesus was able to earn merited righteousness in this manner. The other way is beyond the ability of human beings by their own devices. God must regenerate the depraved human heart for anybody to be able to seek God and, through faith, receive eternal life.
This is where the plan of salvation agreed to in the covenant of redemption comes into play. The Son of God becomes an incarnate man, Jesus, the second Adam. He satisfies the covenant of works through His perfectly obedient life and pays for the sins of those who believe in Him through faith by His propitiatory and substitutionary death on the cross. God then justifies and adopts the believer who continues living a sanctified life until physical death and spiritual life in heaven in the intermediate state until Christ returns to bodily resurrect and consummates the salvation of the elect.
Even though Adam failed in the covenant of works, Jesus succeeded and was able to redeem the lost by God’s grace. The covenant of grace, which begins after the Fall, defines the plan of salvation for God’s chosen ones and fulfills the covenant of redemption.
[1] Charles Hodge, Systematic Theology, vol. 1, (Hendrickson 2016), 117.
