After a Christian sins, the instinctive response is often a mixture of guilt, fresh promises, and renewed determination.
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.
Marrow, p. 101
Ibid., 37-38
Ibid.
Ibid.
Ibid.