Question 16
What special act of providence did God exercise towards man when he was created?
Q. What special act of providence did God exercise towards man when he was created?
A. When God created man, He entered into a covenant of works with him with the condition of perfect obedience, forbidding him to eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil under the threat of death.
Commentary
Beyond preserving and governing man in general, God exercised toward Adam a special act of providence: He entered into a covenant of works with him. A covenant is a solemn arrangement in which God binds Himself to His creature by promise and stipulation. In this first covenant, God dealt with Adam not merely as a creature but as a covenant head, setting before him the prospect of confirmed life upon the condition of his obedience. This was an act of great condescension, for God owed Adam nothing; yet He was pleased to enter into covenant, that man might have a sure and gracious way to everlasting blessedness held out before him.
The covenant had a clear condition of perfect obedience. The whole law of God, written upon Adam’s heart, required of him an obedience that was perfect, personal, and perpetual. As a particular test of that obedience, God forbade him to eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, attaching to it a fearful sanction: the threat of death. “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” (Genesis 2:17). The command was simple, but the issue was momentous: life for obedience, death for transgression. The principle of this covenant is summed up in the words the apostle later cites, “The one who does them shall live by them” (Galatians 3:12).
The covenant of works is of the greatest importance for understanding the whole of Scripture, for Adam stood in it not for himself alone but as the representative of all his posterity. His obedience would have secured life for all whom he represented; his disobedience brought ruin upon all. And precisely here the gospel begins to shine. Where the first Adam failed, the last Adam, Jesus Christ, came to render the perfect obedience the covenant required and to bear the death its breach deserved. Thus, the covenant of works, though broken by us, prepares us to receive the covenant of grace, in which a better Representative obeys in our place and earns the life we never could.
Scripture Proofs
“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’” (Genesis 2:16–17).
“Therefore, just as sin came into the world through one man, and death through sin, and so death spread to all men because all sinned” (Romans 5:12).
“But the law is not of faith, rather ‘The one who does them shall live by them’” (Galatians 3:12).
2nd London Baptist Confession of Faith of 1689
6.1: Although God created man upright and perfect, and gave him a righteous law, which had been unto life had he kept it, and threatened death upon the breach thereof, yet he did not long abide in this honor; Satan using the subtlety of the serpent to subdue Eve, then by her seducing Adam, who, without any compulsion, did willfully transgress the law of their creation, and the command given to them, in eating the forbidden fruit, which God was pleased, according to His wise and holy counsel to permit, having purposed to order it to His own glory.