Then Fisher gives the weight of the passage: the promised seed of the woman is Christ, and “this promise of Christ, the woman’s seed…was the gospel,” serving as “the only comfort” of Adam and the godly fathers until Abraham. Fisher’s point is simple: God’s first revealed comfort to fallen humanity was Christ promised in the gospel.

The words come in a scene of judgment, and the serpent is addressed as the enemy who will be crushed, yet Adam and Eve hear, in the place where condemnation is deserved, that God will provide a seed from the woman who will suffer and conquer for them. God promises a Redeemer who will enter the nature that fell, suffer under the bruising of the serpent, and crush the serpent’s head through that suffering.

Boston’s note keeps the burden of salvation where Scripture places it, because he says man’s restoration to God’s favor and salvation were to be effected by another, since our first parents were given a new covenant in which a Savior was promised as their hope.1

This is where our legal frame fights the gospel, because the legal frame can tolerate Christ as necessary while still resisting Christ as everything. We say we believe in grace alone while functioning as though God gives Christ to the ashamed enough, awakened enough, transformed enough, or exhausted enough.

Adam had no such qualification to bring, because he stood before God exposed, guilty, afraid, hiding, and empty-handed.

God’s first word of hope to fallen humanity was promise.

The gospel saves sinners by giving Christ, who fulfills the law, bears the curse, conquers the enemy, and covers the shame of those who cannot cover themselves.

However, Adam and Eve’s attempted covering still speaks, because the fig leaves show humanity’s effort to manage shame without receiving covering from God. Some fig leaves are distraction, denial, blame-shifting, anger, busyness, and entertainment, while other fig leaves are moral reform, public seriousness, visible sorrow, accountability language, and reputation management.

The issue is who provides the covering, because every covering stitched from resolve, sorrow, seriousness, doctrinal accuracy, emotional intensity, or improvement will be too thin for the presence of God. Fisher connects the skins God provided with sacrifice and says Adam and Eve’s “sin and shame were covered with Christ’s righteousness,” though that typology should be stated with care because Genesis itself does not unfold the point with the same fullness.2

This makes Genesis 3:15 a word for the Christian who has sinned again and now feels that Christ must be approached after a period of quarantine.

The first gospel promise confronts the instinct that says God’s first word after your worst failure must be a demand for improvement, because God’s first word of hope after Adam’s fall was promise. The Son of God comes near, takes flesh, assumes our nature, enters the field where we were conquered, submits himself to suffering, and redeems sinners through triumph in the place of bruising.

Boston says the promise revealed that the Savior would become man as the seed of the woman, that he needed to suffer with his heel, namely his humanity, bruised to death, and that by his death he would make a full conquest over the devil and destroy his works.3

The bruised heel and the crushed head belong together, because the cross is the place where the serpent’s strike becomes his ruin. That matters for Christians who suffer, because many believers expect the victory of Christ to remove every bruise in this life, while Genesis 3:15 teaches us to see victory through suffering.

Some of you are limping under guilt that has stayed longer than expected, affliction that has refused to become a clean testimony, temptation that still humiliates you, grief that still enters the room, or weakness that makes you feel like a poor witness to the Christian life. The promise does not shame bruised Christians for failing to look triumphant, because the Redeemer conquers with a bruised heel. This promise is received by faith, though faith must be understood according to the nature of the promise instead of treated as a new work in the place of Adam’s lost obedience.

Boston says the promise revealed saving interest in Christ and his salvation by faith alone, namely by believing the promise with particular application to oneself and receiving Christ, since these things are revealed “by way of a simple promise”.4

Faith is the receiving of the Christ who is given in the promise.

When the anxious Christian asks whether his faith is strong enough, he is asking an understandable question in a dangerous direction, because the strength of faith saves no one as though faith were the Redeemer.

The better question concerns Christ’s sufficiency, the truth of the promise, the victory of the seed of the woman, the freeness of Christ in the gospel, and the right of the empty hand to receive what God gives. This places repentance where it belongs, because repentance is grace’s fruit rather than grace’s price.

The same Christ who justifies also sanctifies, the same Christ who covers shame also cures our love of hiding, and the same Christ who is received by faith gives the Spirit who turns sinners from sin.

When your conscience tells you to sew something more impressive before you come to God, Genesis 3 tells you that your leaves will fail in his presence. When your guilt tells you God waits for improvement before he speaks mercy, Genesis 3 tells you that God’s first word of hope to fallen humanity was promise. When your shame tells you to hide until you become less exposed, Genesis 3 tells you that Christ was promised for exposed sinners who could not clothe themselves.

God’s first word to fallen humanity was promise, and that promise means Christ would come, Christ would suffer, Christ would conquer, and Christ would be enough for sinners who have run out of leaves.

Those who criticize the distinction, while well-meaning, I’m sure, fear that if the words of God are distinguished too carefully, all commands will be treated as condemning and thus every instruction of obedience will be dismissed as legalism.

However, much like Don Quixote’s tilting at windmills, the problem is that the wrong enemy has been identified. Critics charge the law/gospel distinction with weakening obedience, silencing imperatives, and making the Christian life practically lawless. Missing the real problem, which is a failure to distinguish between the first and third uses of the law.

The irony is that critics end up tilting at windmills, not realizing that the law/gospel distinction is the very thing needed to solve the problem.

We Must Distinguish

The first use of the law serves to point us to our inability to keep it. In the words of the apostle, it functions to shut the mouth of the self-righteous and to leave us without hope (Rom. 3:19).

In its third use, that same law directs the believer’s life. It reveals the will of God, identifies what pleases Him, restrains remaining corruption, and gives shape or guides the grateful obedience of those in Christ.

These are distinct uses of the same law, but when they are collapsed, one use will always be swallowed by the other.

When the first use swallows the third, every command is heard only as accusation, and while it may still drive the believer to Christ, it loses its function to direct the believer in Christ.

Once that happens, the only apparently “gospel-centered” response to the law is to move away from its commands as quickly as possible. The Christian is treated only as a defendant who must be acquitted, never as a child who is being instructed by his Father.

Ironically, the believer is being bound up under a covenant of works that he has been freed from, and complete missing that he has been freed from the law as a master. While this posture may not openly declare that obedience is unnecessary, it can appear as a suspicion toward any claim that the law has a positive, continuing, and non-justifying role in the Christian life.

On the opposite side, when the first use of the law is swallowed by the third, true legalism is produced. If the law is no longer permitted to expose sin and reveal our need for Christ, the sinner is directed toward obedience before being stripped of confidence in that obedience. The law ceases to function as a mirror that drives us outside ourselves and instead becomes a ladder by which we attempt to ascend toward God. This error does not take the law too seriously; it fails to take its condemning office seriously enough. Only when the law is allowed to destroy confidence in our righteousness can its third use direct Christian obedience without turning that obedience into merit.

The Confessional Answer

As a Baptist, the conversation should really be directed toward our confession.

“Although true believers be not under the law, as a covenant of works, to be thereby justified or condemned; yet it is of great use to them.” (2LBCF 19.6)

(Our Presbyterian brothers can find their counterpart in WCF 19.6)

Notice how that sentence preserves both the law/gospel distinction and the first and third uses of the law.

Believers are not under the law as a covenant of works. The law cannot justify them, but thanks be to God, Christ alone has fulfilled its demands, borne its curse, and provided the perfect obedience for His people. Yet the confession immediately adds that the law remains “of great use” to believers.

The confession goes on to explain that the law informs them of God’s will and their duty; it directs and binds them to walk accordingly; it exposes the sinful pollution remaining in their hearts, and it restrains corruption, warns against sin, and encourages obedience.

It is important to realize that the confession does not protect the gospel by removing the law from the Christian life (nor should we). Further, it protects the gospel by refusing to make the law the means of justification, while simultaneously protecting obedience by preserving the law as the believer’s rule of life.

Examination and Extra Nos

The question of self-examination gives a perfect example of the issue that happens when we confuse the two uses. If the target is someone who says that examination has no evidentiary role whatsoever in assurance, then I agree that the criticism has force. The fruits of grace may provide real evidence that the Spirit is at work within us. But evidence is not foundation.

According to 19.6, the law exposes the remaining pollution within believers so that, by examining themselves, they may come to further conviction, humiliation, and hatred of sin, together with a clearer sight of the need they have of Christ, and the perfection of his obedience.

Properly ordered introspection does not compete with extra nos; it serves it.

The believer looks within long enough to tell the truth about what remains there, yes, but he does not remain within himself searching for something substantial enough to quiet his conscience. What he discovers within gives him a clearer sight of his need for the righteousness accomplished outside of him.

Assurance may look within for evidence, but it must look outside itself for rest.

The Guard Against Antinomianism

Far from producing antinomianism, the law/gospel distinction actually gives us the categories necessary to resist it.

The distinction allows us to affirm the third use of the law without asking the law to perform the work of the gospel:

When the law is asked to provide our acceptance before God, we move toward legalism. When the gospel is used to silence the law’s direction of the Christian life, we move toward antinomianism. But when law and gospel are properly distinguished, Christ remains the believer’s only righteousness while the law remains the believer’s rule of life.

The law tells us what God commands, but the gospel does what the law cannot. It gives us Christ.

This distinction enables us to pursue obedience without converting obedience into merit. We can receive the law as instruction without imagining that our performance establishes our standing before God. We can examine ourselves without making our examination the foundation of assurance.

The Remedy

If the law can only accuse, then the believer must constantly be rescued from the law rather than also being directed by it. The third use disappears, and the resulting theology naturally leans toward antinomianism.

Conversely, if the law can only direct and is no longer permitted to expose sin, condemn self-righteousness, and drive us to Christ, the first use disappears. The believer is then sent to his obedience for the confidence that can be found only in Christ, and the resulting theology tends toward legalism.

In the first error, the law’s direction is silenced to protect the gospel; in the second, the gospel’s promise is obscured by the law. However, proper law/gospel distinction guards against both by allowing the law to expose our need for Christ and direct those who are already in Christ in grateful response, and reserving rest for the gospel alone.

Friends, the remedy is not to weaken the law/gospel distinction, and it is surely not to abandon it. The remedy is to distinguish more carefully between the law’s uses and then allow both law and gospel to perform their proper functions.

Far from undermining holiness, the law/gospel distinction is what allows us to preserve Christian obedience without turning that obedience into another means of justification.

“Ready, fire, aim” seems, at times, to be the battle cry of American evangelicalism when it comes to the growing number of people questioning, reconsidering, or abandoning the faith. Yet before the church begins firing in every direction, it is worth asking what exactly we are aiming at and whether we have understood the problem we are trying to address.

Some have described what is happening as a faith exodus, while others have used terms such as church hurt, religious trauma, or simply apostasy. The term that continues to gain the most traction, however, is deconstruction, even though the word has become broad enough that two people may use it while describing very different experiences.

For one person, deconstruction may mean the rejection of historic Christianity altogether, while for another it may mean questioning the particular expression of Christianity in which they were raised, including beliefs, practices, and expectations they had previously assumed were inseparable from the faith itself.

Because these experiences are not identical, the church cannot respond to all of them in the same way. The lack of clarity surrounding deconstruction has often pushed American Christianity toward two reactions, with some waging a culture war in defense of inherited Christian traditions and others searching for ways to reshape Christianity into something more attractive or palatable to those who have walked away.

One group feels compelled to defend nearly everything that has been handed down, while another is willing to reconsider nearly everything that has been received, and both responses can miss the more basic question of what actually belongs to the foundation of the Christian faith.

Although deconstruction may be a modern term, the problem it describes is not particularly modern, because the church has always faced the temptation to elevate secondary doctrines, practices, and cultural expectations into positions of authority they were never intended to occupy.

Secondary Things Can Be Deadly

When writing to the church in Rome, the apostle Paul warns believers not to “destroy with meat” the person for whom Christ died and later commands them not to “destroy the work of God” for the sake of food (Rom. 14:15, 20).

Paul is addressing disagreements among believers in which some possessed liberties that others did not yet feel free to exercise, and those differences had begun producing contempt, judgment, and spiritual injury within the body of Christ. We should not miss that Paul’s warning concerns secondary matters while the damage caused by the way those matters were handled was serious, which forces us to recognize that secondary things can do primary damage whenever they are given primary importance.

A person may have been taught, explicitly or implicitly, that faithful Christianity requires faith in Christ along with adherence to a particular political identity, educational philosophy, worship preference, dress standard, parenting method, or other expectation that has become associated with Christian faithfulness. Some of these practices may be wise, and some may arise from an attempt to apply biblical principles, yet wisdom and application do not give every practice the authority of the gospel.

Eventually someone begins examining one of those assumptions and discovers that it does not possess the biblical weight they were told it possessed, and because that assumption had been woven so tightly into the rest of their Christian identity, questioning one part of the structure causes the rest of the structure to begin shaking. What began as a question about something secondary can then become a question about everything.

For some people, deconstruction will ultimately involve a rejection of Christ and the historic Christian faith, while for others it may begin with the realization that they were handed Christ together with an entire system of expectations without ever being taught how to distinguish the foundation from the things that had been built upon it.

One of the church’s responsibilities, then, is to help people make those distinctions before they conclude that discovering weakness in one part of their inherited Christianity requires the abandonment of the whole.

Love Must Govern Liberty

Once Paul identifies the danger created by secondary disputes, he insists that Christian liberty, conscience, and disagreement must be governed by love.

Paul writes that if a brother is grieved by what another Christian eats, that Christian is no longer walking in love (Rom. 14:15), which means that even the rightful exercise of Christian liberty can become sinful when it is exercised without concern for the spiritual well-being of another believer.

Paul also refuses to give the restrictive conscience unlimited authority over everyone else, since both the strong and the weak are called to live together as members of the same body, with their relationships governed by love rather than by the demand that everyone share the same preferences or scruples.

Love orders the way Christians live with one another in the midst of disagreement, which is why Paul can say elsewhere that love fulfills the law toward one’s neighbor and that Christian freedom is to be expressed through serving one another in love (Rom. 13:8–10; Gal. 5:13–14).

This becomes especially important when dealing with those who are questioning the faith they inherited, because the church’s instinct can be to determine immediately which side a person occupies before taking the time to understand what that person is actually questioning and why.

When Paul tells the Colossians to put on compassion, kindness, humility, meekness, patience, and love while bearing with one another, he describes a Christian community capable of receiving difficult questions without immediately treating them as signs of rebellion or unbelief (Col. 3:12–14).

Likewise, when Christians are commanded to bear one another’s burdens and thereby fulfill the law of Christ, the church is being called to become a place where believers can bring doubts, confusion, wounds, and difficult questions without being told that the presence of a question proves the absence of faith (Gal. 6:2).

A church shaped by this kind of love can take questions seriously because it takes truth seriously, and it can walk patiently with people through those questions because its confidence rests in Christ rather than in the preservation of every inherited assumption.

The Church Should Be a Place for Reconstruction

One of the failures in the church’s response to deconstruction may be the assumption that questioning the structure surrounding Christianity amounts to rejecting Christ himself. When people come to believe that certain questions cannot be asked within the church, they will often search for somewhere outside the church where those questions can be explored, and the voices they find there may have little interest in helping them preserve what is true.

The church should therefore become a place where inherited beliefs can be examined against Scripture, where cultural expressions of Christianity can be distinguished from the substance of the faith, where personal preferences can be separated from biblical commands, and where people who discover errors in what they were taught can be helped to rebuild around what Scripture actually says.

This requires more than permission to ask questions, because reconstruction also involves helping people recover a foundation capable of bearing the weight that had previously been placed on traditions, personalities, institutions, or cultural expectations.

Although deconstruction is a present issue within American Christianity, the impulse behind it has existed for centuries and will continue to exist as long as sinful people imperfectly hand the faith to other sinful people. Every generation receives both truth and the accumulated assumptions of the generation before it, which means every generation must learn again how to distinguish the two.

The danger to the church is that it becomes so preoccupied with defending itself that it never asks why people came to believe demolition was necessary in the first place, while the danger for the person who is deconstructing is that the process never moves beyond criticism and becomes an identity built around what has been rejected rather than a search for what is true.

The church must therefore maintain the humility to repent where it has confused its traditions with Christ, the patience to walk with those who are sorting through what they have received, and the courage to call people back to the faith once delivered to the saints when the process of questioning begins to move away from the truth of the gospel.

What we need is a church continually reformed according to the Word of God and continually directing wounded, confused, questioning, and weary people back to Jesus Christ, who remains the foundation beneath every faithful act of reconstruction.

Bad construction requires more than demolition because a cleared foundation is still waiting to be built upon, and faithful reconstruction begins when the church helps people place the weight of their faith where Scripture has always placed it, upon Jesus Christ, for, as Paul writes, “other foundation can no man lay than that is laid, which is Jesus Christ” (1 Cor. 3:11).

One question specifically raised is: if God has eternally chosen a particular people in Christ unto salvation, can the gospel still be offered freely to every sinner who hears it?

This was actually one of the very questions that was being asked as the Marrow of Modern Divinity was coming to popularity. Well-meaning pastors were trying to be honest with the scriptures, and honest with their theology, but were creating a big problem.

Not to bury the lede (this spelling is correct, but for those with ADHD, here is the reason and the origin of the phrase), the answer is yes, and the reason is found in the relationship between God’s eternal purpose and the revealed promise of Christ.

Let’s make sure that we understand our categories before we get into the explanation.

Election concerns God’s purpose to save.

The gospel concerns the way Christ is proclaimed and received in time.

And Scripture never requires the sinner to know the decree of election before coming to Christ, nor does the preacher need access to that decree before calling sinners to believe. The gospel comes to sinners as a revealed word from God, and that word gives sufficient warrant for faith.

This is important because election can easily be handled in a way that creates uncertainty where Scripture gives a promise. A sinner hears that God chose his people before the foundation of the world and begins asking whether he is included among them, or whether those who hear are elect.

This is why, in The Marrow of Modern Divinity, Edward Fisher begins the discussion of grace with God’s eternal purpose. Election belongs within an eternal purpose. God chooses sinners in Christ unto salvation, and that choice rests in his grace and not in something foreseen in them. This means election explains why sinners come to Christ, but it does not establish who is permitted to come.

Jesus actually brings these truths together in John 6:37:

“All that the Father gives me will come to me, and whoever comes to me I will never cast out.”

The first clause speaks of the Father giving a people to the Son and promises that those given to Christ will come to him.

The second clause speaks directly to the sinner who comes, and promises that Christ will receive him.

This distinction is important, and must be understood in order for us to understand the free offer.

The warrant of faith is found in the gospel promise itself. A sinner may come to Christ because Christ is presented to him in the gospel as sufficient for sinners and because Christ promises to receive those who come. The preacher may proclaim Christ to every hearer and call every hearer to repentance and faith because God has commanded that the gospel be preached in this way, and because the preacher does not have the ability to identify the elect before preaching.

The same principle applies to the hearer. The sinner is not told to investigate the counsel of God before believing. He is confronted with the command to repent and the promise that Christ receives sinners.

Again, to keep the categories clear, election belongs to the eternal counsel of God, and the gospel belongs to what God has made known and commanded us to proclaim.

We do not reason from what God has hidden in order to qualify what he has revealed.

When Christ says that whoever comes to him will not be cast out, the troubled sinner has no warrant to insert anything that he may think or feel into that promise, and neither does the preacher.

The doctrine of election also gives us an explanation for the efficacy of the gospel.

If salvation ultimately depended upon the sinner producing faith from within himself, then the universal proclamation of Christ would provide an opportunity that fallen humanity would uniformly reject, namely because of the sinner’s inability under the covenant of works. Man owes obedience and cannot render it. His problem includes both guilt and corruption. This is the reason that salvation must go farther than a bare invitation.

To carry the flow of how election works forward, Fisher explains that God purposes salvation in Christ, Christ undertakes the obligations of his people as their surety, and the Spirit brings sinners to faith.

In short, election ensures that the preaching of Christ will actually result in sinners actually coming to him.

That gives us another way to state the relationship between the two. The free offer tells us that Christ is truly presented to sinners, while election explains why that offer becomes effectual in those whom God brings to faith.

This also helps guard assurance from becoming consumed by speculation. A believer may ask whether his sins prove that he was never elect, or whether the weakness of his faith places him outside the saving purpose of God. If he begins there, his attention quickly turns inward. But election understood points him toward Christ, where the believer’s confidence rests upon a Savior who has undertaken the debt of his people.

This is also the reason that election is always spoken of as being ‘in Christ’.

God’s choice cannot be separated from the mediator through whom salvation is accomplished. The Father’s purpose includes the Son’s work, and the Spirit applies that work in time.

Seen this way, election gives no basis for imagining that God secretly works against the gospel he publicly proclaims. The Father who elects is the Father who gives the Son; the Son who accomplishes redemption is the Son who promises to receive sinners, and the Spirit who applies redemption is the Spirit who brings sinners through the gospel to Christ.

Every sinner who hears the gospel may be told that Christ is sufficient, that repentance and faith are commanded, and that everyone who comes to Christ will be received. And the preacher does not need to soften election to preach the free offer of the gospel, nor does he need to qualify the gospel to preserve election.

God’s election does not limit the free offer; it simply explains it.

Before the sinner ever moved toward God, God purposed grace in Christ.

There is a particular form of spiritual anxiety that arises when a person begins to suspect that their salvation depends on what they did in the beginning.

Questions like: Was my faith strong enough, or sincere enough? Did I repent of enough sin, or was I under a sufficient amount of conviction?

Once such questions begin to govern the conscience, conversion itself can become an object of constant reconstruction, so that the believer repeatedly searches his memory in the hope of locating some moment in time or a place that will finally assure him that everything began as it should have.

The difficulty is not that such questions are entirely meaningless, since Scripture certainly speaks of true and false faith and the necessity of genuine repentance. The true difficulty happens when troubled conscience begins to treat its movement toward Christ as the foundation upon which the reality of salvation finally rests.

If salvation begins with the sinner’s movement toward God, then the conscience must finally determine whether that movement was adequate; if, however, salvation begins in the gracious purpose of God in Christ, then the believer may learn to rest not in the strength of his first act, but in the mercy of the God who purposed Christ before the world began.

Grace Begins in God

When Fisher turns to the covenant of grace, he does not first describe the sinner’s preparation, awakening, repentance, or faith, but takes us instead into the eternal purpose of God.

He describes the gospel as the joyful tidings that God, to whom all things are eternally present, “purposed before all time” the sending of his Son, then promised him in time, and finally performed that promise in the fullness of time.1

The initiative belongs to God because the gracious purpose precedes the sinner altogether. Before any sinner sought mercy, mercy had been purposed in Christ.

This is one of the deepest comforts contained in the doctrine of God’s eternal purpose. God is not reactive in the sense that he waits upon the sinner and then adjusts his disposition accordingly. Rather, the acts of God in history proceed from the gracious counsel of God, so that what is accomplished in Christ is the historical execution of a mercy that did not originate in us.

Fisher presents the Father as requiring from Christ what fallen sinners themselves would owe, and he describes the Son as the One who willingly undertakes their cause. To put this into language that is easily understood, he states that Christ, “from everlasting struck hands with God” as the sinner’s Surety, assuming the obligation to satisfy what the sinner could not satisfy and to bear what the sinner could not bear.2

The category of suretyship is essential because it prevents us from reducing Christ to the one who merely makes salvation possible while leaving the decisive accomplishment to the sinner. A surety does not simply provide the debtor with a more manageable payment; the surety answers for the obligation itself. Fisher therefore insists that Christ became liable for what his people owed, because in becoming their Surety he undertook their cause as his own.

Thomas Boston presses the same point when he observes that God not only accepts satisfaction from a Surety rather than demanding it from us, but provides the Surety himself and freely gives all things for his sake.3

Faith Does Not Create Grace

Faith is necessary because faith receives Christ.

The sinner is not justified on account of an eternal purpose considered apart from union with Christ, nor does the Marrow teach a justification possessed irrespective of faith. Fisher repeatedly directs the sinner to receive and rest upon the Christ freely presented in the gospel.

What must be denied is that faith constitutes the originating cause of grace, as though God’s gracious purpose awaited the sinner’s believing before it could take effect. The hand receives the gift, but the hand does not originate the gift, determine its value, or move the giver to provide it.

Boston warns that taking the view of faith coming first can cause distressed consciences to become entangled in endless inquiries concerning the being, kind, measure, and degree of such qualifications, with the result that the sinner remains occupied with examining whether he is fit to come rather than actually coming.4

Troubled believers frequently assume that their lack of assurance must arise from the weakness of their faith, and therefore conclude that the solution is to examine their believing until they can discover something impressive enough to quiet the conscience.

The trembling sinner and the assured saint do not possess two different Saviors proportioned to the strength of their believing. The sufficiency of Christ is not measured by the intensity of the believer’s apprehension of him, because Christ’s righteousness possesses its value from his person and work, not from the quality of the act by which we receive him.

The anxious conscience must learn to distinguish between the imperfection of faith and the perfection of Christ. My faith may fluctuate, but Christ’s righteousness does not fluctuate. My sense of acceptance may grow dim, but Christ’s obedience does not become less complete. My repentance may remain painfully imperfect, but Christ’s satisfaction does not thereby become deficient.

The believer’s hope rests upon an accomplished righteousness outside himself, received through faith but never constituted by the quality of that faith.

Fisher, in line with this, writes that justification is “freely by his grace, through the redemption that is in Jesus Christ.”5

The adverb freely must be allowed to do its evangelical work. We are not accepted because our faith is admirable, because our repentance is sufficient, or because our conversion story displays an ideal amount of sincerity.

We are accepted because Christ has redeemed, Christ has obeyed, Christ has satisfied, and Christ is received by faith as the One in whom righteousness and life are found.

God Was Not Improvising

There is another layer of comfort contained in the doctrine of eternal purpose; God was not improvising when he saved his people.

The fall did not place God in a situation for which He was left scrambling for what to do. The sending of Christ belongs to the eternal purpose of God, which means that redemption in history reveals rather than creates the gracious will of God toward sinners in Christ.

The anxious sinner does not need to climb into eternity in order to know whether God is gracious. He needs to look to Christ. The eternal purpose comforts us not because it gives us access to God’s secret will apart from the gospel, but because it tells us that the Christ revealed in the gospel is not an improvised remedy or a tentative offer. He is the One whom God purposed, promised, sent, and accepted as the Surety and Mediator of his people.

Before the sinner ever moved toward God, God purposed grace in Christ, and therefore the believer’s hope does not rest upon the strength of his first move but upon the eternal mercy of God revealed and accomplished in the Surety.

The first decisive movement in salvation was never yours, because grace was already in Christ before you were, and the Christ whom you receive by faith is the Christ whom God purposed, promised, sent, and gave for sinners.

The eternal purpose of God makes the gospel more certain, because it teaches us that Christ is not God’s response but the expression of his gracious will.

For more on Christ as the sinner’s Surety and the eternal purpose of grace, you can listen to Marrowcast episode 6 and subscribe at Marrowcast.com

In this episode of Marrowcast, John and Jeffrey begin Chapter 2 of The Marrow of Modern Divinity and explore what Fisher calls “the eternal purpose of grace.”

Before the foundation of the world, God purposed to save fallen sinners through Jesus Christ. What He purposed before time, He promised in time and performed in the fullness of time through the incarnation, obedience, death, and resurrection of His Son.

This does not mean that God simply ignored His law or relaxed the demands of His justice. The debt still had to be paid, the curse still had to be borne, and the corruption of fallen humanity still had to be repaired.

The good news is that God laid the whole burden upon Christ.

Jesus entered the covenant as the sinner’s Surety, taking responsibility for a debt that was not His own. He satisfied divine justice, fulfilled the law, bore its curse, and secured the salvation of His people.

Grace does not sneak sinners around the law. Grace gives sinners the whole Christ.

In This Episode

John and Jeffrey discuss:

• Why the covenant of grace was not God’s backup plan

• What The Marrow means by the “law of faith”

• The gospel as “good, merry, glad, and joyful tidings”

• How God purposed grace before time, promised grace in time, and performed grace in Christ

• Why divine mercy never comes at the expense of divine justice

• What it means for Christ to become the sinner’s Surety

• Why God looked to Christ for the payment of His people’s debt

• The difference between Christ satisfying our guilt and the Spirit repairing our fallen nature

• Why election should comfort sinners rather than prevent them from coming to Christ

• How the law condemns, while the gospel freely gives us Christ

Key Takeaway

Grace is older than your guilt.

The debt was ours.
The bond was Christ’s.
The payment was full.

God looked for the debt from Christ, and Christ paid it all.

Scripture Discussed

Ephesians 1:3–5
2 Timothy 1:9
Titus 1:2
Psalm 85:10
John 6:37
Galatians 4:4–5
Hebrews 7:22
Romans 5:12–19

Reading

The Marrow of Modern Divinity
Chapter 2: “Of the Law of Faith, or Covenant of Grace”
Section I: “Of the Eternal Purpose of Grace”

Subscribe at Marrowcast.com to receive new episodes and articles exploring law and gospel, assurance, Christian obedience, and the free offer of Jesus Christ to sinners.

Marrow Theology, Practically Applied.

The conscience becomes troubled, the believer resolves to pray more consistently, avoid occasions of temptation, and demonstrate through improved conduct that the repentance is genuine. Although confession, vigilance, and practical reform all belong to the Christian life, they can quietly be turned into something they were never meant to be: an attempt to repair our standing before God through future obedience.

Beneath many sincere resolutions lies the hope that God will accept tomorrow’s improvement as compensation for yesterday’s failure. We may never express the thought so bluntly, yet the underlying reasoning is familiar: I have failed, but I will begin again; I will do better now, and perhaps my new obedience will restore the favor I have forfeited.

The problem is not that the believer desires greater obedience, since grace always teaches those whom it saves to renounce ungodliness and live in holiness. The problem arises when obedience is assigned a justifying function.

Fisher portrays fallen humanity as naturally inclined toward the covenant of works. This instinct appears not only in openly moralistic religion but also in the troubled Christian who, after sinning, tries to negotiate a new beginning with God.

In the Marrow, Neophytus recounts how the fear of death and judgment led him to promise that, if God prolonged his life, he would reform his behavior. His outward conduct improved, but because his confidence rested upon the quality of that improvement, he remained spiritually miserable. Whenever he compared himself with people who seemed more devout, he concluded that his own efforts were insufficient and that his condition remained hopeless.1 His mistake was not that he desired reformation, but that he looked to reformation for the peace that can be found only in Christ.

Why Adam Could Not Restart the Covenant

The covenant of works required perfect, personal, and perpetual obedience, promising life upon obedience and threatening death upon disobedience.

After Adam fell, Nomesta asks whether he might have renewed the same covenant and recovered life by keeping it from that point forward. His answer is unequivocal: the covenant of works, considered as a way of recovery for fallen humanity, was incapable of renovation.

It had originally been established between God and an upright creature, whereas Adam had now become guilty, corrupt, and hostile to God. Although fallen people continually attempt to renew the covenant by promising obedience and seeking life through performance, God does not reopen it as a saving arrangement.2

The breach of the covenant did not remove Adam’s obligation to obey, because God’s moral authority did not disappear when the creature rebelled. Adam lost the ability to render perfect obedience, but he lost that ability through his own sin, and a self-caused inability cannot cancel a righteous obligation. God therefore remained free from the promise of life attached to the unbroken covenant, while Adam remained bound to the obedience that the Creator had always possessed the right to require.

This is why the law, after the fall, cannot become an instrument of recovery. It continues to reveal righteousness, expose corruption, and pronounce judgment, but it cannot restore the life that Adam forfeited. Fisher uses the image of the flaming sword at Eden’s gate: the law that once marked the path of life for an upright man now bars the sinner from returning to paradise through personal obedience.3 The sinner may attempt to climb back through reform, but the road of law-keeping remains closed.

Man’s Double Debt

Fisher explains the impossibility of recovery through the law by describing Adam as liable for a double debt. Fallen man owes satisfaction for the sin already committed, while he also owes perfect obedience for the whole future course of his life.

The first debt concerns guilt.

Once the covenant had been broken, justice required satisfaction for the offense, and no amount of future obedience could serve as payment for past transgression. Even if Adam had somehow obeyed perfectly from the moment after the fall, that obedience would merely have fulfilled his present obligation; it could not have endured the penalty incurred by the previous act of rebellion. Doing what is required today does not erase the guilt of having failed yesterday.

Fisher further argues that Adam, as a finite creature, could not provide a satisfaction proportionate to the offense committed against the infinite majesty of God. If he attempted to satisfy justice by suffering eternally, he would remain under punishment without ever reaching a point at which satisfaction could be called complete. A condemned sinner can endure judgment, but he cannot transform that judgment into a finished atonement.4

The second debt concerns righteousness.

Adam still owed God perfect, personal, and perpetual obedience, yet his nature had become morally ruined through the fall. His understanding was darkened, his will was corrupted, and his affections were disordered, so that he lacked the spiritual ability to satisfy even the ordinary demands of holiness, much less the comprehensive righteousness required by the covenant of works.

For this reason, salvation requires more than the cancellation of guilt. The sinner needs both satisfaction for disobedience and the positive righteousness that the law demands. A clean slate would not be enough, because eternal life under the covenant of works was promised not to moral neutrality but to perfect obedience.

Why Regeneration Does Not Fix The Problem

The regenerate person has been truly renewed by the Holy Spirit, and this renewal produces genuine faith, repentance, love, and obedience.

Nevertheless, regeneration does not make the believer perfectly righteous in this life, nor does sanctification become the basis upon which God pronounces the believer just.

Fisher states that no mere human being, including the regenerate, keeps the law perfectly in this life. The law requires love for God with the whole heart, soul, mind, and strength, while even the holiest Christian remains affected by indwelling sin. The law also condemns not only the outward act or deliberate consent of the will, but the sinful desire itself, which means that the inward motions of corruption are already contrary to its perfect standard (Marrow, p. 38).

The believer’s obedience is sincere, Spirit-produced, and acceptable to God through Christ, but it remains imperfect and therefore cannot endure the judgment of the law as a covenant of works.

Fisher therefore rejects the apparently modest proposal that the Christian should do his best and trust Christ to supply whatever remains deficient. Such a scheme still combines human obedience with Christ’s obedience as the ground of acceptance. Christ becomes a supplement to the sinner’s contribution rather than the sinner’s complete righteousness.

The sinner must either stand upon his own obedience or stand entirely upon the obedience of another.5

Christ, the Last Adam

The gospel does not announce that God has reduced the demands of the law, replaced perfection with sincerity, or established a milder covenant of works. It announces that Jesus Christ has come as the last Adam to fulfill every demand that the first Adam violated.

Christ entered history as the covenant head and surety of his people. He placed himself under the law, not as a private individual seeking life for himself, but as the representative of those whom he came to redeem. As their surety, he assumed responsibility for the whole debt, including both the righteousness they owed and the punishment their sins deserved.

Through his lifelong obedience, Christ rendered the perfect, personal, and perpetual righteousness required by the law. He loved the Father with an undivided heart, fulfilled every command in thought, affection, word, and action, and completed the course of obedience that Adam failed to perform. His righteousness was not merely exemplary but representative, because he obeyed in the place of his people.

Through his suffering and death, Christ also bore the curse of the broken covenant. The law proceeded against him in its full severity, not because he possessed personal guilt, but because he had taken responsibility for the guilt of others.

The distinction traditionally made between Christ’s active and passive obedience helps display the fullness of this work. His active obedience answers the demand for perfect righteousness, while his passive obedience answers the penalty due to transgression. Christ makes the double payment for the double debt that those fallen in Adam owe.

After sin, Christians should indeed make wise resolutions and pursue concrete reform, but they must do so as children seeking to please their Father rather than as covenant-breakers attempting to reverse their sentence.

Tomorrow’s obedience cannot pay yesterday’s debt, yet Christ’s obedience and death have already answered both the law’s demand and its curse.

The law has no reset button, because it offers no second probation and no arrangement in which future sincerity compensates for past rebellion. But God has provided something infinitely better than another opportunity to succeed where Adam failed: he has provided the last Adam, who fulfilled the law, bore the curse, satisfied justice, and gives his righteousness to sinners who rest in him.

The gospel is not that God lowered the standard or ignored His justice. The gospel is that Christ accomplished what we could never provide.

He fulfilled every precept of the law. He bore its curse for our sin. He walked the entire road home on behalf of His people.

Thomas Boston captures it beautifully: sinners united to Christ are carried back into the presence of God, but their own feet never touch the ground.

We do not return by our obedience, our improvement, or our performance. We are carried back to God in Christ.

🎧 Hear more in Episode 5 of Marrowcast

Sect. 1. — The Promise made to Adam.

Ant. I beseech you, sir, proceed also to the second thing; and first tell us when the Lord began to make a promise to help and deliver fallen mankind.

Evan. It was the same day that man sinned,1 which I suppose was the very same day he was created.2 For Adam, having become the child of wrath by his sin, and being subject to the curse both in body and soul, and seeing that nothing was due him but the wrath and vengeance of God, he was “afraid, and sought to hide himself from the presence of God,” Gen. 3.10. Thereupon the Lord promised Christ to him, saying to the serpent, “I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your seed and her seed;” he (that is to say, the seed of the woman, for so the Hebrew text reads) “shall break your head, and you shall bruise his heel.” This promise of Christ, the woman’s seed (ver. 15), was the gospel; and it was the only comfort of Adam, Abel, Enoch, Noah, and the rest of the godly fathers, until the time of Abraham.3

Nom. Let me ask you, sir, what ground do you have to think that Adam fell the same day he was created?

Evan. My ground for this opinion is Psalm 49.12; Mr. Ainsworth4 makes the 13th verse to be this text, and reads it thus, “But man in honour does not lodge a night; he is likened to beasts that are silenced.”5 That may be taken, he says, both for the first man Adam, who did not continue in his dignity, and for all his children.

Ant. But, sir, do you think that Adam and those others understood that promised seed to mean Christ?

Evan. Who can doubt that the Lord had acquainted Adam with Christ, between the time of his sinning and the time of his sacrificing, even though both were on one day?

Ant. But did Adam offer a sacrifice?

Evan. Can you have any question that the bodies of those beasts, whose skins went for a covering for his body, were immediately before offered in sacrifice for his soul? Surely these skins could be none other but those of beasts that were slain and offered in sacrifice; for before Adam fell, beasts were not subject to mortality or slaying. And God’s clothing of Adam and his wife with skins signified that their sin and shame were covered with Christ’s righteousness. And without question, the Lord had taught him that his sacrifice signified his acknowledgment of his sin, and that he looked for the Seed of the woman, promised to be slain in the evening of the world, thereby to appease the wrath of God for his offence. Undoubtedly Adam acquainted his sons, Cain and Abel, with this when he taught them also to offer sacrifice. Gen 4.4

Ant. But how does it appear that this sacrificing was the very same day that he sinned?

Evan. It is said in John 7.30, concerning Christ, “That they sought to take him, yet no man laid hands on him, because his hour was not yet come;” but after that, when the time of his suffering was at hand, he himself said, John 12.23, “The hour has come.” This day is expressly set down by the Evangelist Mark to be the sixth day, and ninth hour of that day, Mark 15.34, 42, when “Christ, through the eternal Spirit, offered up himself without spot to God.” Heb 9.14 Now, if you compare this with Exo. 12.6, you will find that the paschal lamb, a most lively type of Christ, was offered the very same day and hour, even the sixth day, and ninth hour of that day, which was at three o’clock in the afternoon. And the Scripture testifies that Adam was created the very same sixth day; and this gives us ground to think that he sinned the same day. And do not the previously declared Scriptures afford us warrant to believe that it was the very same hour of that day, Gen. 1.26, when Christ entered mystically and typically upon the work of redemption, in being offered as a sacrifice for Adam’s sin?6

And surely we may suppose that the covenant (as you heard) being broken between God and Adam, justice would not have allowed one hour’s respite before it had proceeded to execution, to the destruction both of Adam and the whole creation, had not Christ, at that very time, stood as the ram (or rather the lamb) in the bush, and stepped in to perform the work of the covenant. And I conceive that this is why Saint7 John calls him the “Lamb slain” from the beginning of the world,8 Rev. 13.8. For as the first state of creation was confirmed by the covenant which God made with man, and all creatures were to be upheld by means of observing the law and condition of that covenant; so that covenant being broken by man, the world should have come to ruin, had it not been, as it were, created anew, and upheld by the Covenant of Grace in Christ.

Ant. Then, sir, you think that Adam was saved?

Evan. The Hebrew doctors hold that Adam was a repentant sinner, and they say that he was by wisdom (that is to say, by faith in Christ) brought out of his fall; yes, and the Church of God holds, for necessary reasons, that he was saved by the death of Christ; yes, says Mr. Vaughan, he certainly believed the promise concerning Christ, in whose commemoration he offered continual sacrifice; and in the assurance of it, he named his wife Hevah [Eve], that is to say, life,9 and he called his son Seth, settled or persuaded in Christ.

Ant. Well, now I am persuaded that Adam did understand that this seed of the woman meant Christ.

Evan. Assure yourself that not only Adam, but all the rest of the godly fathers so understood it, as manifested in the Targum, or Chaldee Bible, which is the ancient translation of Jerusalem. It has it thus: “Between your son and her son;” adding further, by way of comment, “So long, O serpent, as the woman’s children keep the law, they kill you! And when they cease to do so, you sting them in the heel, and have power to hurt them much; but whereas for their harm there is a sure remedy, for you there is none; for in the last days they shall crush you all to pieces, by means of Christ their king.” And this is what supported and upheld their faith until the time of Abraham.

As humans, we instinctively believe that people should only be held responsible for what they can do.

If a person cannot meet a demand, we assume the demand must be lowered, and we often carry this into theology. Fallen humanity cannot perfectly obey God’s law. Therefore, it is assumed, God must no longer require perfect obedience.

The fall did not make God less holy, nor did it make his law less righteous. It did not transform perfect obedience from a moral necessity into trying your best, or being sincere.

That is why the gospel cannot be preached as a modified covenant of works. It is not God lowering the ladder so that weakened sinners may finally climb it. It is God giving Christ freely to sinners who have neither the righteousness nor the strength to recover themselves.

Inability ≠ Innocence

We need to make sure that we have our categories clear before we start to think through the state that fallen man finds himself.

A man born without sight cannot be blamed for failing to distinguish colors; however, his inability is not the result of a moral revolt against the nature of color. This is what makes the inability of fallen man different. It is not the inability of an innocent creature prevented from obeying by some external force. It is the inability of a creature whose nature has become corrupt through rebellion.

Fallen man does not lack the physical faculties necessary to love God; rather, what he lacks is moral rectitude. His mind is darkened, his affections disordered, and his will hostile to God. He cannot obey because he will not obey, and he will not obey because his nature is corrupt.

The natural man does not receive the things of the Spirit of God; the mind set on the flesh does not submit to God’s law and, indeed, cannot do so; those who are in the flesh cannot please God (1 Cor. 2:14; Rom. 8:7–8).

Yet Scripture never treats this inability as innocence.

Fisher reasons that although humanity has lost the strength to obey, “the obligation to obedience remains still.” In short, a debtor is not released merely because he has squandered the money with which he should have paid his debt. His inability to pay may deepen his misery, but it does not dissolve the creditor’s rightful claim.1

Our weakness does not soften the law because our weakness is itself part of our ruin.

The covenant of works promised life upon perfect obedience and threatened death upon disobedience. Adam possessed the natural ability and moral integrity necessary to fulfill its term. He was created upright and furnished for the obedience God required. But Adam broke the covenant.

What followed was not the cancellation of God’s moral authority. God was no longer obligated to grant Adam the promised reward of life, but Adam was not thereby released from the obedience he owed. The innocent creature had become a guilty covenant-breaker, but he remained a creature.

Fisher distinguishes the failure of the covenanting party from the release of the offended party. When one party violates a covenant, the faithful party is released from granting the promised benefit. The violator, however, is not automatically released from his obligation. Adam’s breach forfeited his claim upon the reward; it did not extinguish God’s claim upon Adam.

Thus the covenant of works remained “binding, though broken.”2

This is because the substance of the law reflects the unchanging moral relation between God and his creature. God is still God. Man is still obligated to love him with all his heart, soul, mind, and strength. The fall changes man’s condition, but it does not change God’s worthiness.

The law cannot be reduced merely because man has reduced himself.

Were God to lower his moral demand because we had become corrupt, our corruption would exercise authority over his holiness. Sin would determine the definition of righteousness. The worse humanity became, the less obedience God could justly require.

The Double Debt

Suppose Adam had repented immediately after the fall and resolved to live obediently from that moment forward. Would future obedience have restored him?

No.

Adam now owed what Fisher calls “a double debt”: satisfaction for the sin already committed and perfect obedience for the time yet to come.3

The first debt concerned his guilt, because the law had been violated.

The second debt concerned his continuing obligation. Even after sinning, Adam still owed God complete, personal, and perpetual obedience.

This means that better behavior could never cancel prior guilt. Even hypothetical perfection from the moment after the fall would not satisfy the penalty incurred by the original transgression. Future obedience would merely render what was already due for the future, but it could not become payment for the past.

Nor could suffering the penalty restore Adam to life. A sinner suffering the curse does not thereby produce the positive righteousness required for blessed communion with God.

We need pardon, but not pardon alone. We need righteousness.

The law remains holy, righteous, and good. Its inability to save is not a defect in the law but a defect in us. The law can tell us what righteousness is. It can command obedience. What it cannot do is give the righteousness it requires.

Fisher therefore says that the covenant of works was in no way capable of being renewed as a means of Adam’s recovery. Adam could not return to life by the same road from which he had fallen. He was now both guilty and morally unable to satisfy the demands resting upon him.4

To illustrate this, the law is not a ladder lying on the ground, waiting for fallen man to stand it upright again. Instead, the image that Genesis gives is the flaming sword at Eden’s gate.

Paul makes the same distinction in Romans 8. What the law could not do, weakened by the flesh, God did by sending his own Son. The weakness was not in the righteousness of the command. The weakness was in the sinful flesh upon which the command operated.

The Gospel Is Not a Covenant of Works

Once we grasp the continuing perfection of the law, we can see why the gospel must be more than a softened Covenant of Works.

A modified covenant of works says, in effect: God once required perfect obedience, but after the fall he established more manageable conditions. He now requires faith and repentance as the terms upon which sinners may obtain life.

This scheme may speak often of Christ, grace, and faith, yet its underlying structure is still legal. Something performed in the sinner becomes the decisive condition upon which life is granted. What it says is that Christ makes salvation achievable, but the sinner’s response finally makes it actual.

The Marrow resists this confusion because the gospel does not offer sinners a method of earning life. It offers Christ.

Faith does not replace perfect obedience as a work which God has agreed to accept. Rather, faith receives the One who has rendered perfect obedience.

Christ is not God’s contribution to a cooperative plan of salvation. He is not a supplement added to the sinner’s sincere effort. He does not merely make up what remains after we have done our best. He stands in the place of those who have done nothing that could satisfy God.

Fisher describes Christ as the Surety who willingly came under the law on behalf of his people. The Son was made under the law to redeem those under it. He placed himself in the “room and place” of the faithful and assumed their covenantal burden.5

As the last Adam, Christ answers both parts of the double debt.

He renders the perfect, personal, and perpetual obedience God’s law requires, and he bears the law’s curse. The guilt of his people is laid upon him. He suffers not for sins of his own, but as the covenant Surety of sinners. Christ does what fallen Adam could not do and what Adam’s children cannot do. He fulfills the command and exhausts the condemnation.

The law is not ignored in the gospel. It is honored more fully than it could ever be honored by the everlasting condemnation of sinners. At the cross, God remains just while justifying the ungodly because the demands of justice fall upon the appointed Surety.

Christ fulfilled what we did not fulfill; He suffered what we deserved; He supplies the righteousness we do not possess, and he receives sinners not after they have repaired themselves, but while they stand before him with nothing but need.

The law says, “Do this and live.”

The sinner answers, “I have not done it, and I cannot recover what I have lost.”

The gospel declares, “Christ has done it.”

And it is possible for our preaching to do the same thing.

As we begin to consider Luke 24, Jesus did not rebuke the disciples because they had ignored the messianic prophecies; He rebuked them because their despair revealed that they had misread the basic shape of the entire biblical story.

“O fools, and slow of heart to believe all that the prophets have spoken.”

The emphasis here falls on the word all.

These disciples had believed some of what the prophets had spoken, yet they had failed to receive the prophetic witness in its fullness, because they had separated the promised glory of the Christ from his necessary suffering.

They did not lack a doctrine of the Messiah, but they had constructed a theology of glory from which the theology of the cross had been removed.

The Problem Beneath the Problem

Although we often seem to think otherwise, Christ’s rebuke was not directed first at the disciples’ behavior; rather, He addresses their reading and believing.

Ultimately, His rebuke was that they had read and received the Scriptures selectively rather than submitting themselves to the unified testimony.

This is the problem beneath the problem.

As is our bent, we are naturally drawn toward texts that promise glory, while remaining considerably less eager to believe those texts that speak of suffering. The problem is not that the texts that we want to believe are false; the problem is that truths separated from the full witness of Scripture can be arranged into a theology that Scripture itself condemns.

The disciples were not wrong to expect redemption, but they were wrong to define redemption in a manner that suited or made sense to them.

Jesus not only exposes this selective faith; he corrects it by giving the disciples the logic.

“Ought not Christ to have suffered these things, and to enter into his glory?”

The emphasis here in this verse should fall upon the word ought.

Although the fullness and mode of the suffering of Christ belonged to the eternal counsel of God, Scripture taught that the Messiah would enter his glory through suffering. The prophets had borne a witness to the suffering and glory of the coming Christ.

With these things in mind, and with the way that we find Jesus handling the scriptures, Luke records something that should govern all the instincts of Christian preaching.

“Beginning at Moses and all the prophets, he expounded unto them in all the scriptures the things concerning himself.”

The Bible is not just a warehouse from which preachers may grab Jesus-shaped objects whenever they are writing a sermon. Rather, it is the unfolding history of God’s covenantal purpose, moving through promise and type, toward fulfillment in the incarnate, crucified, risen, and reigning Son.

Scripture possesses this direction as well as God’s work in history possesses direction. Its center is God’s accomplishment of redemption, and this is where supposedly Christ-centered preaching can still miss Christ. A sermon may contain the name of Jesus or even preach Him from a text, while it remains structurally governed by something other than Christ.

The preacher may begin with a biblical character, develop several practical steps, and then attach Christ to the conclusion as the one who forgives us when we fail to follow those steps, and then call it Christ-centered, but the governing logic of this sermon remains moralistic. Christ simply functions as the one who fixes our unsuccessful performance rather than the one in whom the text’s redemptive purpose is fulfilled.

In other sermons, Christ becomes the answer to a need identified before the passage has been allowed to establish its own categories. The text turns from Christ to address anxiety, marriage, or ______ (fill in the blank), and then Jesus is presented as the resource for resolving the selected problem.

Once again, Christ is included, but he is subordinated to a question whose terms were established by the writer of the sermon.

When Christ is merely included in this way, the sermon could remain largely intact without him. The preacher could remove the final gospel invitation, replace it with a general appeal, and preserve the sermon’s point.

However, the method of preaching that Jesus does in Luke 24 does not merely arrive at Christ after the text has already been explained on other grounds. It demonstrates that the text belongs to a redemptive history that was always advancing toward him. Christ is not merely the final point of the sermon because he is the one who gives coherence to every point that precedes it.

He is not an application added after the text has been interpreted. He is the fulfillment within whom the text’s promises and patterns reach their appointed end.

To be clear, this does not mean that every sermon must force a reference of Christ into every verse, nor does it authorize allegorical creativity detached from grammatical and historical meaning. True Christ-centered preaching does not require the preacher to abandon the text’s original context, because the original context itself belongs to the larger history of redemption authored by God.

The preacher’s task, then, is not to leap over history, genre, and authorial intent to reach Jesus more quickly. The task is to read those realities deeply enough to understand how they participate in the movement of promise and fulfillment that culminates in Christ.

A sermon may therefore be full of references to Jesus while remaining exegetically shallow, just as a sermon may carefully explain the historical context while remaining canonically blind.

Faithful preaching must resist both errors. It must honor the passage in its immediate setting while locating that setting within the unfolding purpose of God fulfilled in Christ.

Christ the telos

To say that Christ is the telos of Scripture means more than saying that he appears near the end of the biblical narrative.

The word telos means a goal or appointed end. Thus, to say that Christ is the telos means that He is the one toward whom the movements of Scripture are directed and the one in whom they receive their final coherence.

He is not simply later than Moses, David, and the prophets in the chronology of redemption. He is the fulfillment toward whom their expectations were moving.

The Law, the Prophets, and the Writings are distinct yet coordinated movements within one economy of revelation. Moses, Isaiah, the Psalms, the historical narratives, and the wisdom literature speak with genuinely different voices, but those voices belong to one canonical witness that anticipates the humiliation and exaltation of Christ.

This is why the familiar question, “Where is Jesus in this text?” is helpful but is simply insufficient.

By itself, the question may encourage superficial typology, or the assumption that Christ must be hidden somewhere inside every passage just waiting to be discovered. The larger question is where the text is going within the redemptive story that reaches its fulfillment in him.

The question must be asked, “Where does the passage stand within the movement from creation to new creation?” And once that question is asked, Christ ceases to appear as an addition imposed upon the passage and emerges as the one in whom the passage’s tensions are resolved and its purpose becomes clear.

The Task of Christian Preaching

The disciples’ hearts burned within them because Christ opened the Scripture and disclosed its true coherence.

They understood that the cross was not the contradiction of God’s promises, but the means of their fulfillment, and that remains the task of Christian preaching.

The preacher must do more than mention Jesus, avoid obvious moralism, or identify a handful of messianic connections.

He must preach the Scriptures in such a way that Christ is displayed as their covenantal center, redemptive fulfillment, and eschatological goal.

The task is not to attach Christ to the text; the task is to expose how the text participates in the unfolding purpose of God that finds its fulfillment in him.

The aim is not merely that hearers would know where Jesus appears in the Bible. It is that, through the opening of the Scriptures, they would perceive the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ, understand the fullness of the salvation accomplished in him, and learn to interpret both suffering and glory according to his cross and resurrection.

The greatest danger facing Christ-centered preaching is not that Christ will be absent; the greater danger is that He will simply be present while another message governs the sermon.

A sermon may get to Jesus and still miss Christ, but Luke 24 teaches us that faithful preaching must do more: it must open the Scriptures so that the crucified and risen Christ is seen as the one about whom they have been speaking all along.

Friends,

For much of my life, the judgment seat of Christ was presented to me as something a Christian could survive but could not anticipate with joy.

I was taught to imagine a separate judgment for believers in which every work would be examined, every failure potentially exposed, and every Christian ranked according to what remained after the fire. Sal…

Read more

At the same time, Christian anthropology cannot be reduced to a generalized affirmation of human worth that ignores the devastation introduced by Adam’s fall. Scripture requires us to affirm both the continuing dignity of humanity as God’s image-bearers and the radical corruption of human nature through original sin. The image remains, but humanity no longer possesses the original knowledge, righteousness, and holiness with which it was created.

This is where an important clarification must be made: original sin does not mean that every person is as wicked as that person could become; it means that the whole person is entirely fallen.

The Second London Baptist Confession explains that through Adam’s sin, humanity became “dead in sin, and wholly defiled in all the faculties and parts of soul and body.”¹

Total depravity does not describe the maximum degree of wickedness expressed by every individual. It describes the comprehensive reach of sin into every faculty and part of human nature. Sin has corrupted the mind, will, affections, desires, body, relationships, and the worship of humanity, leaving no neutral corner of the person from which he may independently return to God.

Louis Berkhof cautions that total depravity cannot mean “that every man is as thoroughly depraved as he can possibly become,”² because a person may become more cruel, dishonest, violent, or openly rebellious than he currently is. Nevertheless, even the respectable and outwardly moral person has fallen in the entirety of his nature.

The whole person has fallen, even though every person does not express that corruption to the fullest possible degree.

What Is Corruption?

Corruption does not mean the destruction of human nature or the disappearance of humanity’s created faculties; it means the moral distortion of those faculties.

The mind still reasons, but it no longer reasons without distortion, especially concerning God and spiritual things. The will still chooses, but it chooses according to desires alienated from God. The affections still love, fear, desire, and delight, but they no longer naturally rest in the Creator as their highest good. The body remains God’s creation, yet it is subjected to weakness, disorder, death, and the service of sinful desires.

Fallen humanity can still think, create, build civilizations, form relationships, produce art, display courage, exercise natural affection, and perform acts that are genuinely beneficial to other people.

For example, even Jesus explains in various sections of the gospels that a fallen parent may sacrifice greatly for a child, an unbelieving neighbor may show remarkable generosity, and a ruler may administer justice with real wisdom. These things do not contradict total depravity because total depravity never meant that human beings were incapable of performing any action that was outwardly good.

Michael Horton describes this by saying that there is no “point within us that is left unfallen” from which we can begin repairing our condition.³ Man is still an image-bearer whose entire nature now functions in a disordered relationship to God.

Total vs. Utter

The word total in total depravity refers to sin’s extent, not necessarily its intensity.

A drop of ink placed into a glass of water affects the whole glass, even though the water could become darker still if more ink were added. Similarly, sin has reached the whole person without every person becoming as outwardly wicked as possible.

There are many reasons why human corruption does not always express itself in its most extreme forms. God, through His common grace, restrains evil and the ordinary structures of creation. People are also shaped by differing temperaments, opportunities, cultures, fears, ambitions, and circumstances.

One person may avoid theft because he values his reputation, while another may avoid it because he fears punishment, loves his family, or simply has no opportunity to steal. Such restraint is real, and society could not continue without it, but restraint is not the same thing as renewal.

A restrained sinner is not, therefore, a reconciled sinner. A respectable sinner is not, therefore, a righteous sinner.

This helps explain why corruption can appear in forms that society praises. Pride may present itself as confidence, greed as ambition, self-righteousness as discipline, fear of man as politeness, and the desire for control as responsible leadership. Sin does not always appear reckless or openly rebellious. Sometimes it appears disciplined, religious, respectable, and meticulously moral.

The Pharisee and the publican are both fallen sons of Adam, even though their corruption expresses itself differently.

The Image Is Maimed, Not Erased

To speak of the imago Dei is not merely to describe something that humans possess, as though the image were an accessory that could be detached from human identity.

Humanity was created in God’s image in the world. Genesis presents humanity itself as created “in the image of God” and then describes dominion, relationship, rationality, embodiment, work, and worship as expressions of that created identity.

Herman Bavinck states the point clearly when he writes that “The whole being, therefore, and not something in man but man himself, is the image of God.”⁴ The image is not merely one isolated property within the human person; it encompasses humanity in its created wholeness and calling.

John Calvin likewise writes that although the primary seat of the image was in the mind and heart, “there was no part of man, not even the body itself, in which some sparks did not glow.”⁵

In short, the argument that Calvin is making (which has implications that we will not consider in this topic) is that human embodiment is not a shell surrounding the true human person. All of man was created by God and bears His image.

Anthony Hoekema is helpful here when he describes the image in broader and narrower senses, or in structural and functional terms. In the broader sense, the image includes the gifts and capacities by which human beings exist as rational, moral, spiritual, embodied, relational, and responsible creatures. In the narrower sense, the image consists in humanity’s proper functioning before God in true knowledge, righteousness, and holiness.⁶

This distinction is especially important after the fall.

In the narrower sense, humanity lost its original moral excellence. Man no longer knows God rightly, loves him perfectly, or lives in undivided holiness before him. In the broader sense, however, humanity remains God’s image-bearing creature. Human beings remain rational, moral, spiritual, relational, and embodied creatures who are accountable to God and appointed to live within his creation. These capacities have been corrupted, but they have not been annihilated.

This is the reason why Zacharias Ursinus could say that after the fall man lost the “glorious image of God,” while adding that “some remains and sparks of the image of God” continue even in the unregenerate.⁷ He was not contradicting himself. He was distinguishing between the original righteousness that was lost and the remaining human nature that continues, though greatly disordered and marred by sin.

Scripture itself continues to ground the sanctity of human life in the image of God after the fall. Genesis 9:6 condemns murder because man was made in God’s image, while James 3:9 rebukes the cursing of other people because they are made in God’s likeness.

Fallen humanity remains dignified without being innocent, valuable without being morally upright, and accountable without being spiritually able to repair itself.

The image has been marred, but the human being has not ceased to be human.

Corruption Is More Than Immorality

One of the greatest misunderstandings of original sin is the assumption that corruption can be measured primarily by visible vice. We imagine that the most corrupt person must be the person whose life is most obviously disordered, while the disciplined, respectable, and religious person must be closer to God. As mentioned in episode 4, we often allow this to bleed into our understanding of transformation after conversion.

However, the Marrow of Modern Divinity exposes this mistake by showing that fallen humanity’s corruption is not revealed only in its desire to break God’s law. It is also revealed in its instinctive attempt to use the law as a means of restoring itself to God.

Thomas Boston explains the fallen heart’s natural orientation when he writes that “In all views which fallen man has towards the means of his own recovery, the natural bent is to the way of the covenant of works.”⁸

This legal disposition is one of the deepest expressions of human corruption because it can coexist with all kinds of morality. A person may abandon scandalous sins, become outwardly religious, and reform his conduct while remaining fundamentally opposed to the gospel. His behavior has changed, but his confidence remains in himself.

Nomista, the legalist, and Antinomista, the antinomian, travel in opposite directions, but both reveal the same fallen desire to live independently of Christ. One attempts to establish righteousness through obedience, while the other attempts to enjoy salvation without holiness.

Both errors arise from a corrupted nature that will take almost any path except resting wholly in Christ.

The Image Renewed in Christ

The gospel does not announce that Christ came merely to make people more respectable. He came to reconcile sinners to God and renew them after the image of their Creator.

Christ is himself “the image of the invisible God” (Col. 1:15), the true and faithful man in whom humanity’s original calling is fulfilled. Where Adam distrusted God, Christ obeyed. Where Adam grasped, Christ humbled himself. Where Adam brought guilt, corruption, and death upon those he represented, Christ brings righteousness, renewal, and life to those united to him.

Salvation, therefore, addresses both the guilt and the corruption of sin.

In justification, the righteousness of Christ is counted to the believer, and the believer is accepted before God apart from his works. In regeneration, the Holy Spirit gives spiritual life to the person who was dead in sin. In sanctification, that renewed life increasingly reaches through the whole person as the mind is renewed, the will is liberated from sin’s dominion, the affections are redirected toward God, and the body is presented as an instrument of righteousness.

The whole person fell in Adam, and the whole person must be renewed in Christ.

This renewal remains incomplete in the present life, but it is real. The believer is not restored through the law functioning as a covenant of works, because the law can command righteousness without creating it. Renewal comes through union with Christ and the gracious work of the Spirit, who writes God’s law upon the heart and produces the obedience that the law itself could never generate from fallen nature.

Hoekema describes sanctification as the progressive renewal of humanity in the image of God, by which the Spirit redirects the believer toward God, neighbor, and creation.¹⁰ Grace does not destroy human nature or replace the human person with something else. It restores and renews what sin has disordered.

Bavinck summarizes by stating that sin has affected the whole person, and therefore the grace of God in Christ restores the whole person.¹¹

The gospel does not flatter humanity by denying the depth of corruption, nor does it leave humanity without hope. It tells the truth about the ruin of sin so that it may proclaim the sufficiency of Christ.

Humanity is not as wicked as it could be, but it is more comprehensively fallen than it understands.

That distinction enables us to affirm the dignity of every person without minimizing sin, to recognize outward goodness without confusing it with saving righteousness, and to proclaim Christ not merely as an assistant to human improvement but as the only Savior of the whole person.

The fall has reached the whole man, but so does the grace of God in Christ.

1. The Second London Baptist Confession of Faith (1677/1689), 6.2. The confession cites Romans 3:23; 5:12; Titus 1:15; Genesis 6:5; Jeremiah 17:9; and Romans 3:10–19.

2. Louis Berkhof, Systematic Theology, new combined ed. (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans, 1996), 246–47. Berkhof explains negatively that total depravity does not mean that every person is as depraved as possible, lacks all knowledge of moral distinctions, is incapable of natural affection, or commits every possible form of sin.

3. Michael Horton, The Christian Faith: A Systematic Theology for Pilgrims on the Way (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2011), 433.

4. Herman Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics, vol. 2, God and Creation, ed. John Bolt, trans. John Vriend (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2004), 553–54.

5. John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, ed. John T. McNeill, trans. Ford Lewis Battles, 2 vols. (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1960), 1.15.3, p. 188.

6. Anthony A. Hoekema, Created in God’s Image (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans, 1986), 67–73. Hoekema describes the broader image as the structural gifts and capacities belonging to humanity and the narrower image as humanity’s proper functioning in true knowledge, righteousness, and holiness.

7. Zacharias Ursinus, The Commentary of Dr. Zacharias Ursinus on the Heidelberg Catechism, trans. G. W. Williard (Columbus, OH: Scott and Bascom, 1852), 31–32.

8. Edward Fisher, The Marrow of Modern Divinity, with notes by Thomas Boston (Fearn, Ross-shire: Christian Focus, 2009), 35.

9. Second London Baptist Confession, 9.3.

10. Hoekema, Created in God’s Image, 85–86.

11. Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics, 2:553–54.

The gospel is not advice for becoming better. It is the announcement of what Christ has accomplished for his people.

Marrow Theology, Practically Applied.

Nom. But sir, would it not have been possible for Adam to help himself and his posterity out of his misery by renewing the same covenant with God, and keeping it afterwards?

Evan. No, by no means; for the Covenant of Works was a covenant in no way capable of renovation.1 Once he had broken it, he was gone forever, because it was a covenant between two friends, but now fallen man had become an enemy. And besides, it was an impossible thing for Adam to have performed the conditions now, which the justice of God necessarily required at his hands; for he had now become liable for the payment of a double debt; namely, the debt of satisfaction for his sin committed in time past, and the debt of perfect and perpetual obedience for the time to come; and he was utterly unable to pay either of them.

Nom. Why was he unable to pay the debt of satisfaction for his sin committed in the past?

Evan. Because his sin in eating the forbidden fruit (which is the sin I mean)4 was committed against an infinite and eternal God,2 and therefore it merited an infinite and eternal satisfaction: either some temporal punishment equivalent to eternal damnation, or eternal damnation itself. Now Adam was a finite creature. Therefore, between finite and infinite, there could be no proportion; so Adam couldn't make satisfaction by any temporal punishment. And if he had undertaken to satisfy by an eternal punishment, he would always be satisfying and never have satisfied it, as is the case of the damned in hell.

Nom. And why was he unable to pay the debt of perfect and perpetual obedience for the time to come?

Evan. Because his former power to obey was utterly impaired by his fall. For by his fall, his understanding was both enfeebled and drowned in darkness; and his will was made perverse, and utterly deprived of all power to will good; and his affections were set completely out of order; all things belonging to the blessed life of the soul were extinguished, both in him and us; so that he had become impotent, indeed, dead — and therefore he was not able to stand in the lowest terms to perform the meanest condition. The truth is, our father Adam, in falling from God, so dashed himself and all of us into pieces by it, that there was no whole part left either in him or in us, that was fit to base such a covenant upon. And the apostle witnesses this, both

Nom. But, sir, might not the Lord have pardoned Adam’s sin without satisfaction?

Evan. Oh no! For justice is essential in God, and it is a righteous thing with God that every transgression receives a just recompense:3 and if recompense is just, then it is unjust to pardon sin without satisfaction. Though the Lord had pardoned and forgiven his former transgression, and thus restored Adam to his former condition of amity and friendship, yet having no power to keep the law perfectly, Adam could not have continued in it.4

Nom. And is it also impossible for any of his posterity to keep the law perfectly?

Evan. Yes, no mere man in this life can keep it perfectly; indeed, even if he is a regenerate man. For the law requires from man that he “love the Lord with all his heart, soul, and might;” and the holiest man alive is but flesh as well as spirit, in all the parts and faculties of his soul; therefore, he cannot love the Lord perfectly. Yes, and the law forbids all habitual concupiscence, not only saying, “You shall not consent to lust,” but, “You shall not lust:” it not only commands the binding of lust, but it also forbids the existence of lust: and who can say in this case, “My heart is clean?”

Ant. Then, Nomista, take notice, I ask, that as it was altogether impossible for Adam to return into that holy and happy estate in which he was created by the same way that he left it,5 so it is impossible for any of his posterity. Therefore, I remember one says very wittingly, “The law was Adam’s lease when God made him a tenant of Eden; and when he did not keep the conditions of that bond, he forfeited all for himself and us.” God read a lecture of the law to him before he fell, to be a hedge to him to keep him in paradise. But when Adam would not keep within its compass, this law has now become like the flaming sword at Eden’s gate, to keep him and his posterity out.

Sect. 5. — The Covenant of Works binding, though broken.

Nom. But sir, you know that when a covenant is broken, the parties that were bound are freed and released from their engagements; and therefore I think both Adam and his posterity should have been released from the Covenant of Works when it was broken, especially considering they have no strength to perform its condition.

Evan. Indeed, it is true that in every covenant, if either party fails in his duty and does not perform his condition, the other party is thereby freed from doing his part; but the party that fails is not freed until the other party releases him. Therefore, even though the Lord is freed from performing his condition, that is, from giving man eternal life, man is not freed from his part, even though the strength to obey is lost. Having lost it by his own default, the obligation to obedience remains. Thus, Adam and his offspring are no more discharged from their duties because they lack the strength to do them than a debtor is acquitted of his bond because he lacks the money to pay it. And thus, Nomista, according to your desire, I have endeavoured to help you to the true knowledge of the Law of Works.

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