10. Will God suffer such disobedience and apostasy to go unpunished?

By no means,¹ but He is terribly displeased with our inborn as well as our actual sins, and will punish them in just judgment in time and eternity, as He has declared: "Cursed is every one that continues not in all things which are written in the Book of the Law to do them."^{2 1} Hebrews 9:27. ² Deuteronomy 27:26; Galatians 3:10; ^* Romans 1:18. ^* Matthew 25:41.

Adam did not act as a purely private person. This is another idea that is hard for us to understand today. We don't always clearly distinguish between "private" and "public" acts or roles. Adam had a public, official role to perform as the representative of all humanity. He was created good (Col 3:10), in the image of his Creator. He was, as Augustine said, "able to sin, able not to sin."

Whatever he did, he would do for all of us, and thus, what he did, we did. Thus, Adam was not alone in the Garden. There is another, literal, sense in which he was not alone. Beside his wife, there was another creature in the Garden: The Evil One. According to the Genesis narrative, as catechism summarizes it, he instigated sin. He tried or tempted Adam. It was the image bearer's vocation to resist the tempter and to conquer him, to slay him out of devotion to the Lord. The curse for breaking the covenant of works/nature/life/law was death. The Evil One was manifestly a liar and the father of sin. He was intent on seducing Eve, and through her, Adam, into breaking the covenant. He proposed an alternative to the covenant of works/life/nature/law: a covenant of equality with God. Whereas the Lord had promised glorification on condition of obedience to God, the Evil Promised deification on condition of obedience to himself. Adam had a clear, unequivocal choice. He chose equality with God and with that choice, he also chose death.

The sin that he committed was the original sin. When he sinned, he became a sinner. Since, however, we are all Adam's children, we don't become sinners when we sin (that was the error of Pelagius). Rather, we sin because, in Adam, we are all sinners (Rom 5). We all have inborn sin. As a consequence of that inborn sin, we all commit actual sin. Scripture reflects on this relationship in Ps 51:5, "Behold, I was brought forth in iniquity, and in sin did my mother conceive me." David confesses his sin but he also confesses his sinfulness. When he says that he was conceived in sin he isn't reflecting on the act of procreation, but rather, on the results of the fall. Adam's children are all sinful from the beginning of our existence. This is the teaching of Rom 5:12 Through Adam's sin, "death spread to all men, because all sinned."

Outside of Christ, we face temporal punishment. Paul is explicit about the devastating effects and the overwhelming evidence of sin. Some would explain away sin by appealing to evolutionary biology, but that's just a convenient dodge. It 's a way of making sin normal. It is a way of excuse ourselves, to relieve our selves of responsibility for our choices when, in fact, sin and death is the exact opposite of normal. It is abnormal. That's why we experience the sting of death. The pain and grief associated with death is no mere evolutionary response. Indeed, evolution doesn't explain the grief we experience when we lose a loved one. The Scriptural explanation does, however, account for human experience. We grieve because death was the consequence of sin. This is why Heb 9:27 relates our death and the coming judgment to the death of Christ.

The death that followed sin is curse. It was repeated in the history of redemption. Deut 27:26 says, "Cursed be anyone who does not confirm the words of this law by doing them.’ And all the people shall say, ‘Amen.'" The very curse of Gen 2:17 is repeated and re-affirmed in the context of the Israelite national covenant. Not that Israel's justification before God or even her salvation from sin and death was conditioned upon works, but her status as a national people was a reflection of the original works principle. It served to remind them corporately of the righteousness of God's law and the need for a law keeper.

This is just how the Apostle Paul understands this passage in Gal 3:10. He quotes this same passage and adds, "Now it is evident that no one is justified before God by the law, for 'The righteous shall live by faith.'" (Gal 3:11).

Whether in the first covenant or during the Mosaic covenant or now, the wages of sin is death. The law is the standard of righteousness. The law is extrinsic and objective and unyielding. The law does not care about our feelings. It is what it is. The penalty is equally relentless.

The gospel is equally objective and extrinsic. That's why Paul says that "the righteous shall live by faith." Faith is, as we confess in the Belgic Confession, the "sole instrument" by which we come in possession of the righteousness which has satisfied the law of God.

We don't like to face the ugly facts of sin and death, but they are just that: facts. Anyone with eyes can see the effects of sin all about us. Those effects testify of the reality of sin and that reality drives to look for a Savior who has faced our sin and addressed its consequences.

10. Will God suffer such disobedience and apostasy to go unpunished?

By no means,¹ but He is terribly displeased with our inborn as well as our actual sins, and will punish them in just judgment in time and eternity, as He has declared: "Cursed is every one that continueth not in all things which are written in the Book of the Law to do them."²

¹ Hebrews 9:27. ² Deuteronomy 27:26; Galatians 3:10; * Romans 1:18. * Matthew 25:41.

    Most people in our age seemed truly shocked by the notion that there is an abiding, universal, unbending moral standard. I think that we have all got so used to simply making up things as we go along that it never occurs to most of us that, in fact, there is a revealed, moral, righteous, eternal law to which each and everyone of us must give account.

The first thing the Evil One did was to raise doubts about this very question? "Has God really said?" Is the law really abiding, eternal, immutable etc? Or, is it the case that the law is situationally determined? Could it be that we can reason with God and show him how unjust he's being? The Adversary offered to Adam an alternate explanation of reality. He offered to him a story that included the fulfillment of innate human potential and a story that implied that God isn't really just-- and in fact suggested that God is positively unjust for seeking to suppress that innate potential divinity by means of the law.

To reinforce his law and to signal how he regards disobedience, the LORD instituted the strongest possible  punishment for disobedience: "The day you eat thereof, you shall surely die." Looking back, of course, it all seems so clear. There may have been certain kinds of (plant and animal) death before the fall, on that question I'm uncertain, but I'm sure that no humans, no image bearers had died before the fall.  Thus, the idea of human mortality must have been strange to Adam. I wonder if he contemplated it? Perhaps it seemed so unreal to him that when the Adversary suggested an alternate interpretation of the universe it had a  certain plausibility to it? Of course, Adam's job, his holy vocation before the face of God, was to despatch the Liar (and father of lies) immediately. He did not. As it turned out, that would be only one of a complex of sins (James 1:13-15).

 It is no small thing that God instituted the death penalty for sin. The Apostle Paul understood the consequences and reflects on it when he says "the wages of sin is death."  The moment Adam chose to enter into what Olevianus called a "false covenant" with Satan, he died. He died spiritually. Now God was no longer his friend. When God the Son came looking for Adam, it was not in friendship but in judgment and Adam knew it. Ridiculously, he attempted to hide himself from the omniscient ruler of the universe. This first futile postlapsarian act is immediate and prima facie evidence of the effect of the  fall on the human intellect! Rule #1: When you offend an omniscient and omnipotent being, don't compound it by hiding and lying.

The moment he sinned, he began to decay. Instead of passing the test and entering into glory and life, he failed the test and entered into condemnation and corruption.

Tragically, when he did so, he didn't do it alone. 

 More on this next time.

Der Heiliggeistkirche zu Heidelberg

9. Does not God then do injustice to man by requiring of him in His Law that which he cannot perform?

No, for God so made man that he could perform it,¹ but man, through the instigation of the devil, by willful disobedience deprived himself and all his posterity of those divine gifts.²

¹ Eph 4:24 ² Rom 5:12

It is difficult to get modern people to imagine, on the one hand, that we were were once good but are now, by nature, bad. It is exceeding difficult to get late moderns to imagine that we are all, by nature, under a just and relentless law. The late modern person assumes that there is no universal law that could possibly bind all persons, in all times, without exception. It is of the essence of late modernity to imagine that we are our own law-givers.

It is important for us to realize how deeply ingrained these ideas are. This recognition helps us to understand, in part, why folk are so resistant to the notion of a probationary, prelapsarian covenant. Opposition to this covenant is often couched in terms of an answer to critics of the covenant of works/nature/life/law. The Barthians reject the covenant of works on several grounds, chief among them, the a priori that there could not have been any such arrangement between God and man. As far as I can tell, Barth hardly believed in creation, as we have understood it, let alone an historic person, a prelapsarian law, and an historic fall.

Others, influenced by Barth, have rejected the covenant of works because they want to begin with grace and not law. They do this as a response to the criticism that to begin with the covenant of works/law/nature/life is "legalistic." In contemporary theological discourse, the adjective "legalistic" is a magic word. Just as when we were children and in some children's game someone said the magic word and we all fell down, so it is today that, when someone utters the word "legalism," we must, as it were, fall down, abandon our position and take up a fall-back position. We all know that legalism is a bad thing. We don't want to be associated with a bad thing. We want folk to believe the faith and if this "legalistic" construct keeps folk from the faith, then we must abandon it.

Not I. Yes, it is true that the prelapsarian covenant of life/works/nature/law is legalistic. So what? We were under law! God made a law. We had to keep it. Our status was contingent upon keeping it. Our life was contingent upon keeping it. Our entrance into eschatological glory was contingent upon law keeping. The future of the human race was conditioned upon our law keeping. If we kept the law, God would approve of us. If we failed to keep the law, God would disapprove of us and that's a bad thing. When it comes to the covenant of works, I'm a legalist! You betcha.

Why do we resist this but we accept other legalisms routinely. If we run a red light and get pulled over, we cannot complain. We broke the law. Is it legalistic for the officer to write a ticket? We might try to argue so, but we know that we are liars. We know we did it and we know that we are guilty. Theft is still wrong. Is a shopkeeper legalistic for prosecuting a thief? No. Have you ever taken a new position and been put on "probation?" If you haven't, you probably will be. Students are on probation all the time. The first year of my doctoral work I was on "probationary" status. I had to perform certain tasks to successfully fulfill the probation. Civil life is generally a covenant of works, one giant probation. There are no "do-overs" when it comes to civil righteousness. To the degree we don't reckon with these realities, to that degree we delude ourselves. Law is everywhere and it reflects the creational order.

Why do we fear the adjective "legalistic"? Because when folk accuse the covenant of works/life/nature/law of being "legalistic" they are equivocating. Legalism, after the fall, as a way of justification by and for sinners, is a bad thing, but before the fall and for the sinless (e.g. Jesus!), is it's a good thing. We fear it because we do not distinguish clearly before the prelapsarian world and the postlapsarian world. This is a fundamental mistake.

The sinless have nothing to fear from the law. The law is their friend. The law does not accuse them. The law does not condemn them. It is the sinner and the sinful who should fear the law. Adam, before the fall, was neither a sinner nor sinful. Jesus, born of a virgin, was neither a sinner nor sinful. They were righteous and able to keep the law. Jesus, the Second Adam, did keep the law. He was under a covenant of works. Indeed, we could even say that he was under a twofold covenant of works since he had not only to keep the covenant of works/law/nature/life that Adam refused to keep but he also had to keep the legal covenant he voluntarily made with his Father (pactum salutis) from eternity. Talk about legalism!

Please bear in mind our definition of sin: "Any want of conformity unto or transgression of the law of God." That's significant. The Roman communion defines the fall as a fall from grace. We do not. We confess that the fall was a violation of the law. So, yes, it is fair to require sinners to keep the law. The fall is not the fault of the law. The law is good, holy, and just. We were made to keep the law. The needs to be kept. It demands to be obeyed and it demands reparations from those who have not kept it.

In this light, we can see why it is so wonderful to speak of a covenant of grace. The covenant announces that someone else has kept the law, has satisfied its demands, has paid the penalty for our lawbreaking for us (pro nobis). This is the good news: Christ the law keeper and penalty payer has come. This is what it means for Paul to call him the "last Adam." He is the head of all who believe (Rom 5). By his one act of obedience, we, who believe, who are united to Christ by grace alone, through faith alone, are made right again with God for all time.

If we begin with a covenant of grace, however, pious it may sound, we actually do a great disservice to Adam and to Christ. We diminish Christ's work for us. If we say Christ was under a covenant of grace, we deny his obedience for us. Grace, by definition, means that Christ did not really fulfill the terms of justice. How is that not blasphemy? To say suggest that Adam was under grace is to deny his initial righteousness and holiness. As a righteous and holy man, Adam had no need of grace.

Just as the last Adam was under law for us, so the first Adam, and we in him, were under law. Only against this background can we understand and appreciate what it means to speak of grace. If the first covenant was "gracious" and we are under that "gracious" covenant then grace is no longer grace and law is no longer law and the good news is no longer the good news.

I understand the impulse to make the faith attractive, but giving up the covenant of works/law/nature/life is too high a price to pay. As Cornelis Plantinga says about the doctrine of the Trinity, it is attached to the gears and pulleys of the Christian faith. To cut it loose would bring the whole thing, the message of the gospel, to a stop.

Many thanks for your prayers. We've had a ton of emails expressing concern, asking questions, and promising to pray.

We've all taken great comfort in the truths that we confess in Heidelberg Catechism questions 27-28:

27. What do you understand by the providence of God?

The almighty, everywhere present power of God, whereby, as it were by His hand, He upholds heaven and earth with all creatures, and so governs them that herbs and grass, rain and drought, fruitful and barren years, meat and drink, health and sickness, riches and poverty, indeed, all things come not by chance, but by His Fatherly hand.

28. What does it profit us to know that God created, and by His providence upholds all things?

That we may be patient in adversity, thankful in prosperity, and for what is future have good confidence in our faithful God and Father, that no creature shall separate us from His love, since all creatures are so in His hand, that without His will they cannot so much as move.

Ironically, I warned the students in the doctrine of God class Wednesday and Thursday of last week that they must preach and teach the doctrine of providence to their people before their parishioners become ill or suffer in other ways. When folk are suffering is not the time to try to teach them the doctrine of providence. We need to develop the conviction that health and sickness, riches and poverty, indeed all things come not by chance, but by his fatherly hand. We need this truth to gain perspective on suffering.

Sunday rolled around. We have a lovely day with the most hospitable George and Paula Barton. As we entered Escondido from the west we noticed a disturbingly large plume of smoke rising from the northeast corner of Escondido or from SE Valley Center. The rest, as they say, is history.

There is no question that whatever happens is under the control of the providence of God.

It's appropriate to say "thanks" to those who have been praying for us in So Cal and at WSC in particular because we do not simply confess that God is sovereign and that all things are under his control but we also confess that God works through means. One of the most important means through which he accomplishes his purposes is prayer. For Christ's sake alone he is pleased to hear our prayers and he answers them according to his perfect wisdom and righteousness. For some of us, it is a little easer right now to see the wisdom and righteousness of God's providence: we got what we wanted. Others, whose plight has been described in this space, have a much harder providence with which to reckon.

In both cases God answered our prayers. He answered them differently, but he answered them.

In any case, his ways are inscrutable. They are beyond our knowing and he will glorify himself in everything he does, even if it isn't immediately apparent to us how a given providence and God's glory are connected. We may never know.

If you are dealing with a hard providence right now or in the future, fix your eyes on Christ. If you're tempted to shake your fist at your heavenly Father because he has not ordered things to your liking, consider his Son whom he gave up for sinners, whom he gave up for you. He sent his Son into the fury and maelstrom of human sin and wrath with God to propitiate the wrath of God for all his people. God himself is no stranger himself to hard providences and our Savior entered history knowing what that hard providence would be. You and I face them as they arise, but our Savior lived his whole life knowing what was to come.

His Father heard his righteous prayer and he hears our prayers in our righteous Mediator Jesus.

Over the last week we've had a mild foretaste of what divine wrath might look like. We should be chastened and we are certainly reminded our our finitude, sins, and mortality. We are also reminded of the mercy of our Father who does not give to us what we deserve but who is patient with his children and gives them grace -- which they manifestly do not deserve.

We are unusually ready for the Sabbath.

Holy Spirit Church in Heidelberg in October 2000

9. Does not God then do injustice to man by requiring of him in His Law that which he cannot perform?

No, for God so made man that he could perform it,¹ but man, through the instigation of the devil, by willful disobedience deprived himself and all his posterity of those divine gifts.²

¹ Eph 4:24 ² Rom 5:12

As we have seen repeatedly through the first eight questions of the HC, Scripture teaches that we were created good. This truth needs to be repeated because it has been denied so widely and often that one suspects that most Christians whether evangelical or Roman or Orthodox do not really believe that we were created good. Rome teaches and many evangelicals believe that we were, in some way, defective from the beginning and that the fall happened because we were defective. Of course Scripture says that opposite: "And it was very good."

Why is it necessary to go over this once again? Because it is essential to the answer to this question. Is God unrighteous for demanding of fallen humans, who cannot now perform it, the same obedience that he demanded of them before the fall, when they could actually do it?

The answer is no. God is just in his demand of sinners that they obey because they were created with the ability to obey. The fact that they cannot now obey is not God's fault. He has not changed. His law has not changed. His righteousness has not changed. Indeed, in the nature of things, it cannot change. God being who and what he is. There's nothing wrong with God's standard.

Part of the problem is that we don't understand the word "righteous" any longer. It means "just." It means "without moral flaw." It means "beyond question." It means "the standard by which everything is measured morally and legally."

Of course, as fallen and corrupt sinners, we think that WE should be the standard of righteousness! We demand of God that he change his standard to conform to us. Yes, we "erred" we think to ourselves, but "to err is human, to forgive divine." Ah, now we have God right where we want him. We've established a new morality, a parallel morality to his and we assert it vigorously and demand that he come to heel.

The main difficulty is that God isn't having any of it. He won't come to heel. He won't change himself or his standard. Our sin is not, as it were, his problem. It is our problem. He does not have to conform to our changing standards and expectation, we must conform to his. The law of God is perfect, holy, and righteous. There is nothing wrong with it and everything right with it. It's expectation is relentless. It's demand is relentless: "Perform." "Do." "Obey." "Love God and neighbor flawlessly and perpetually or die." "The day you eat thereof you shall surely die." "Cursed is everyone who does not continue to do everything written in the book of the law." "Holy, Holy, Holy is the Lord of Hosts."

One corollary to these facts is this: the Heidelberg Catechism assumes and clearly implies that before the fall we under the law. The catechism clearly says that we were made so that we could obey it. We did not obey it but we could and, presumably for an indeterminate period of time, we did obey it. Only after the fall, when we had sinned, can we be said to be under grace.

More on this next time.