1. The distance between God and the creature is so great, that although reasoning creatures owe obedience to him as their creator, yet they could never have any fruition of him as their blessedness and reward, except by some voluntary condescension on God’s part, which he has been pleased to express by way of covenant.
(WCF 7.1)
Over the past few weeks in chapter 6 of the confession, we have been looking at how the sin of our first parents (original sin) and our own personal sin (actual sin) has severed us from the blessed presence of God. In and of ourselves there is nothing that we can do to make ourselves right with our creator, because we are spiritually dead, and from this spiritual death, all our efforts to justify ourselves before Him are tainted with sin (Rom 3:23-24, 5:12 c.f. Isa 64:6). To put it simply, all humanity is in a hopeless situation and are damned from the moment of conception (Job 14:4, Ps 51:5).
Now none of this is to say that we the creatures don’t have some sense in and of ourselves that we have a creator or that we owe him our allegiance. Romans chapter 1 is clear, we’ve been created and our God has made that apparent as “what may be known about God is plain to them, because God has made it plain to them. For since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities—his eternal power and divine nature—have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that people are without excuse” (Rom 1:19-20, NIV).
And so the question begs. If we know there is a God, and we know that we “could never have any fruition of him as [our] blessedness and reward” what hope is there? Well hope for all humanity came by way of grace in that God “by some voluntary condescension” was pleased to make covenant with His creatures so that salvation really might become a reality.
A contract is an agreement between two equal parties like a marriage or business partners, but the situation that we have with God is far from equal, no the distance from creator to creature is great (WCF 7.1). That’s why the bible draws on the imagery of suzerain/vassel covenants of the ancient near east. When a nation was defeated and dead in the water, sometimes the conquering king would make a covenant with them. They would be blessed if they kept to the law and terms as dictated, but if they broke the stipulations, they would come under the wrath of the king. All of humanity is a defeated people, our sin rendered us dead in the water, yet by the grace of God, He made covenant with some. And that’s what a lot of the Old Testament brings forth time and time again. God’s grace and humanity’s covenant breaking. We see it with Israel, we hear it from the prophets and we read about it in the Psalms - God comes to His broken creatures, He makes covenant with them, yet something in us keeps pushing his grace and mercy aside to follow our own desires; we keep breaking covenant.
This is why the ultimate covenant keeper, God’s Son, Jesus Christ had to come. He is the only man that could keep the requirements of the covenants made with Adam, Abraham, Israel and David perfectly, and not only did He keep the stipulations perfectly, He also took the curse of covenant breaking on Himself on the cross. The cross is where God’s grace and wrath are met, they are met on the person of Jesus Christ whom was presented as an atoning sacrifice for our sin (Rom 3:25).
Salvation doesn’t come by way of our covenant keeping, it comes by way of putting all our hope and trust and faith in Jesus’ perfect covenant keeping and sacrifice. And it is those that trust Him that will never be put to shame (Rom 10:11).