3. Because the man, by his fall, made himself incapable of life by that covenant, the Lord was pleased to make a second covenant, commonly called the covenant of grace, in which he freely offers to sinners life and salvation through Jesus Christ, requiring them to have faith in him so that they may be saved, and promises to give to all those that are ordained to eternal life his Holy Spirit, to make them willing and able to believe.
(WCF 7.3)
For the past few weeks we have been exploring the nature of the covenant that God made with man. First with Adam, the father of all humanity and the root of the whole tree. God made a covenant of works with him in which he - with Eve - were to follow the stipulations and commands perfectly to maintain a living relationship with our creator. Adam and Eve failed, and the curse of death was pronounced on them. They didn’t physically die straight away, but spiritually they were cut off from life eternal and the covenantal blessings of God.
Genesis then moves through different stories and genealogies of people not thriving (like originally planned) but dying, and we’re meant to feel the effect of sin’s curse as we read of people unravelling to the point of no return. And if it were left up to us, that’s exactly where things would continue, as humans are incapable of pulling ourselves out of spiritual death and making things right with God again Because (as the confession puts it here) the man, by his fall, made himself incapable of life by that covenant.
This is why God had to step in. What He made with our first parents could never be fulfilled by anyone born from the seed of Adam, but because of His undeserved mercy and love the Lord was pleased to make a second covenant, commonly called the covenant of grace. Now that’s what grace is, undeserved mercy and love - that’s why the confession titles it so. Humans were lost and heaping up sin upon sin (Gen 6:5-6), yet in God’s divine unmerited favour, He came seeking that which was lost and made another covenant with us, though this time with sinful people.
Now to go a little deeper here, if covenantal blessing comes through perfect obedience (Gen 2-3, Rom 3:2, Gal 3:21), was God setting us up for failure? The answer to this lay in Jesus Christ. You see as far back as Genesis 3, God promised to send someone who would rescue us (Gen 3:15) and this idea was developed throughout scripture in that there would be a seed (Gen 28:14), a sacrifice (Gen 22:8), a priest (Psalm 110:4) and a king (2 Sam 7) that would bless His people. None of the initial people that God graciously made covenant with kept to the terms, yet as we read through the pages of the New Testament, it becomes apparent that those covenants were in fact pointing beyond themselves - to someone in which [God] freely offers to sinners life and salvation through Jesus Christ.
How is God able to save us in Jesus? Because He and He alone is the perfect covenant keeper (Gal 3:16, 2 Cor 5:21), and thus all the blessings of covenant faithfulness were granted to Him (Mk 14:24), and from having faith in Him we are able to cut out of the tree of Adam and grafted into the vine of Christ going from eternal ruin to eternal life (Jn 15, Rom 11:11-31).
Faith is the instrument that God uses for salvation to become a reality in our lives, but even in that, faith is a gift granted from God to those He chose from the foundation of the world, it is a work of the Holy Spirit in our inner most being or as the confession sums it up, God promises to give to all those that are ordained to eternal life his Holy Spirit, to make them willing and able to believe (Eph 2:1-10).