The following message was given at Grace Community Church in Mendon, Nevada. And we'll read the first two paragraphs. And I don't think we have notes, so whatever was left over from last week is all we have. So paragraph one, and I'm reading the older edition. God gave to Adam a law of universal obedience written in his heart. a particular precept of not eating the fruit of the tree knowledge of good and evil by which he bound him and all his posterity to personal entire exact and perpetual obedience promised life upon the fulfilling and threatened death upon the breach of it and endued him with power and ability to keep it The same law that was first written in the heart of man continued to be a perfect rule of righteousness after the fall and was delivered by God upon Sinai in the Ten Commandments and written in two tables, the first four containing our duty toward God and the other six our duty to man. So let's pray and ask for the Lord's help. Father, thank you so much for gathering us here that we can Learn and study your word, and we pray for your help now as we think about your law. We pray, Father, that it would be a reflection of your greatness and your majesty and what we owe to you. In Jesus' name, amen. Well, one of my heroes, I have a lot of heroes. They're all dead, though, mostly. It's better to pick dead heroes. You know how they made it to the end, right? And one of my heroes is J. Gresson Machen. And Machen had, he wrote a wide variety of things. And even though he was a scholar par excellence, seen in such works as St. Paul's Religion or The Virgin Birth or any number of his academic works. He really was a pastor at heart, and so he wrote a lot on a popular level, had a weekly broadcast for many years. And he has a talk on the majesty of the law of God. And there was one, the whole thing is good, but there was one paragraph that I thought was just a fitting introduction to our study. Machen wrote, he says, consider for a moment, my dear friends, the majesty of the law of God as the Bible sets it forth. One law over all, valid for Christians and valid for non-Christians, valid now and valid to all eternity. How grandly that law is promulgated amid the thundering of Sinai. How much more grandly still and much more terribly is it set forth in the teaching of Jesus in his teaching and in his example? With what terror we are fain to say with Peter in the presence of that dazzling purity, depart from me for I am a sinful man, O Lord. Nowhere in the Bible, in the teaching of Jesus our Savior, Do we escape from the awful majesty of the law of God, written in the constitution of the universe, searching the innermost recesses of the soul, embracing every idle word and every action and every secret thought of the heart, inescapable, all-inclusive, holy, terrible? God the lawgiver, man the subject, God the ruler, man the ruled, The service of God is a service that is perfect freedom, a duty that is the highest of all joys, yet it is a service still. Let us not forget that. God was always and is forever the sovereign king, and the whole universe is beneath his holy law. So as we started chapter 19 last week, I gave sort of an introduction, an overview of the law. And so I thought what we could do is, well, if I could find the right page, there it is. So we started just by citing 2 Timothy 3, 16 and 17, right? All Scripture is God-breathed, profitable for doctrine, correction, reproof, instruction, and righteousness, that the man of God may be thoroughly furnished, equipped for every good work. So how does that apply, actually, to our understanding of the law? Okay, all right, good, yeah. Yeah, so everything that you can say about Scripture from 2 Timothy 3, 16 and 17 you can say about the law because the law is part of scripture, right? So the law is God-breathed. The law is profitable for doctrine, correction, reproof. The law is profitable for instruction in righteousness, right? So in that sense, 2 Timothy 3, 16 and 17 is an important passage for us to understand the law. Then we pointed out, and Tony alluded to this, that the Decalogue itself, the Ten Words, the Ten Commandments, actually have not only a central place in the Mosaic Covenant, but they also have, in a sense, a pride of place. Now, they're no more inspired than any other portion of Scripture. All Scripture is equally inspired, but the Ten Commandments actually have the pride of place of being the only portion of Holy Scripture to be said to be written by the finger of God. Then we talked about the New Testament and the law, and I said that when you read the New Testament, you have negative statements about the law, and you have positive statements about the law. So what, I know this is putting you on the spot, and for some of you, this is still really early. For others of you, your day's half over. So we'll just see what you can recall. In what way does the New Testament speak positively about the law? You can cite a passage or a principle or, Okay yeah so Jesus in in Matthew 5 17 I didn't come to abolish the law but to fulfill it that's a positive statement didn't come to abolish it came to fulfill it Jesus of course what he does in the Sermon on the Mount is he gives the as it were, the spiritual intent of the law, right? He internalizes it to where the Jews had mastered externalizing it, all right? So yeah, so there's a good example. So Paul says that the law is holy and the commandment is holy and just and good. And so why is the law holy? Well, because it reflects the character of God, okay? This is the consistent testimony of Old and New Testaments is that the law in and of itself is actually good. There's nothing that's bad or broken or deficient about the law itself insofar as the purpose of the law. Right? And so the law, for instance, reflects what it means to love God and to love your neighbor. Is that a good thing? Yeah, absolutely. In fact, the very sum of the law is reflected, as we'll see in paragraph two, to love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength, and to love your neighbor as yourself. the law of God, in a sense, gives you concrete rails to fulfill those commandments on, right? It doesn't just leave it up to your sentiment or to your emotion or to your own ideas, it gives you concrete ways to love God, to love your neighbor, right? And so, It's also good in the fact that it reveals sin, right? Very clearly the law reveals sin, and is that a good positive function of the law? And the answer is absolutely, because I wouldn't have come to know sin except through the law. Is it important for us to know sin? And the answer is yes, because you can't know the Savior unless you know your sin, right? If you don't actually have a sense of your own sin, then what is Jesus, right? Well, he ends up being a life coach or something like that, or your buddy, but not Savior and Lord. So the law is crucial, and so it serves that positive function. But the law is also spoken of negatively at times in the New Testament, right? You read, and Paul seems to be sort of dissing the works of the law, and sometimes what appears to be the law itself. And I pointed out that there's a consistent context where Paul does that, and it's particularly Paul, all right? And that is in the context of justification. So in other words, by the works of the law, no flesh shall be justified in God's sight. So the law actually condemns, but the law cannot justify. the law cannot give life, okay? And so there's a sense in which the negative comments are in the context of the law's condemning power, okay, or in its power to, or its lack of power to justify, all right? Then we talked about the new covenant and the moral law. So in the new covenant, what's written on our hearts, Yeah, the law is written on our hearts. I mean, wouldn't it have been interesting if the new covenant promises would have been something like, and I'll write the Beatitudes on your heart. See, that's what we would, we'd wanna do something like that, like write the Beatitudes. But it's the law that's written on our hearts. And as we pointed out last week, it's not civil law or even ceremonial law that's written on your heart, right? What is written on your heart is do not boil a kid in its mother's milk, right? Don't you just intuitively know that that's just wrong? No, it's actually the moral law, and of course the moral law is summarized in the Ten Commandments. And then we looked at one last part, and that was what is often called the third use of the law, and that is the law in sanctification, which we'll talk about a little bit more later. But let me just say that the New Testament perspective is not that Christians are lawless, okay, but that Christians are now filled with the Spirit and empowered by the Spirit to fulfill the law by love. So the Spirit of Christ indwells us, and the fruit of His Spirit is love, and it is love which is the fulfillment of the law, Romans 13, eight to 10, Galatians 5, 14, and other passages, all right? Okay, so that brings us actually to the, the first paragraph, which is interesting because it goes back to Adam, right? So why in the world would the confession in a chapter about the law of God go back to Adam? Jesse just said because the law of universal obedience was written in his heart. And right, just like the confession says. Yeah, so there's a sense where what might be the misrepresentation of the law if we just started with Exodus 20 at Sinai. So let's say the confession's gonna deal with the law of God, and it starts out not with Adam, but it starts with, and Moses received on Sinai. What could be the possible misrepresentation of the law, Heiko? Okay, I think that's one very, very possible misrepresentation. If that's your starting point, then it could look like what God is doing is just sort of starting right there, right? And that's certainly not the case. Dinah. Okay. Okay? And what's interesting is Paul kind of deals with that in Romans 5, and what we made clear when we went through that section in Romans 5 is that the point that Paul's making is not that there was absolute lawlessness, right? That's just not true. But there wasn't a codified law like we end up having at Sinai, all right? So, but by the way, which means To understand that, you have to go back to Adam, all right? What other misunderstanding might arise if we just started with the discussion of the law on Sinai? There's one more big one, I think. Tony? What's that? Missing what? Okay. Yeah, it would create a question about What was the nature of the fall if law doesn't start until Sinai? Absolutely. Tony. Okay. Okay. Okay, fair enough. Good. CJ. Okay, okay, you wanna flesh that out a little bit? Maybe when you're talking about law, flesh it out is not the best metaphor, but. Okay, oh, okay, I see what, yeah, yeah. Okay, yeah, yeah, sure. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah, good, good. Okay, okay, good, good. Yeah, so I'm still hunting for something. Phil. Yeah, so yeah, so I think, and of course that's absolutely true, but I think a careful reading even of Exodus 20 does not lead us to believe that justification comes by the law. Why would I say that? Because of the prologue to the Ten Commandments. I am the Lord your God who brought you out of the land of Egypt. In other words, before the Ten Commandments are even given, God identifies himself as Israel's Redeemer. He doesn't give them a law for them to be redeemed, he gives them a law because they are redeemed. So there's one more, so I'll just jump to it unless anybody else wants to try to read my mind. Charlie, you want to read my mind? You're pretty good at that. Okay, so if a discussion of the law just simply starts with Sinai because let's just say that's where the Bible starts. So law just begins at Sinai. You might misunderstand that or you might think that the law is given strictly to the nation Israel, okay? Is that what you were thinking? You know what, yeah, yeah. Right, so could you sort of, right, so by the way, are there going to be facets of the law that are peculiar to the nation? Absolutely, right? But to simply start a discussion of the law of God at Exodus 20 or with the Ten Commandments would give it the idea that maybe this whole thing of law is just peculiar to Israel, and by starting with Adam, it shows that all humanity is under the law of God. You do realize that every human being that comes into this world is under obligation to their creator, whether they acknowledge that or not. And what are they under obligation to? They're under obligation to render him worship and obedience. And where is that obedience defined? In God's law, right? So, the confession starts with basically, God gave to Adam a law, right? Now, that law is defined, and this is, by the way, this is all important stuff, but it's stuff that we've covered in different ways. Those of you that went to the covenant theology seminar that we did with Reformed Baptist Seminary up in Reno, I did few lectures on the covenant of works, and so you can access those. We're not going to go into great detail, but it is important. So God gives Adam this law of universal obedience that's written on his heart, and so what the confession is saying is that Adam, as an image-bearer, created with this fundamental instinct that God is not only the loving Creator, but he's also to be obeyed in all things, right? And so there is a fundamental, and this is think the best way I can describe it, a fundamental human instinct that recognizes that it is God himself who is not only the lawgiver but the regulator of all life. In other words, if you want to put it in relational terms, God is the king, I am the subject. God is the creator, I'm the creature. And even before the fall, you could say, God is father, Adam is the son. And by the way, in all of those subordinate relationships, the fundamental underlying assumption is that a son obeys a father, a subject obeys a king, a creature obeys the Creator. Now, I don't think that this is exactly what Paul has in mind in Romans 2, but I think Romans 2 does help us here. In other words, I don't think this exhausts what Paul means. Paul says in Romans 2.14, he says, for when the Gentiles who do not have the law do instinctively the things of the law. These not having the law are a law to themselves. So what does he mean not having the law? He means not having the Mosaic law, not having the codified law as Israel had it, in that they show the work of the law written in their hearts. their conscience bearing witness and their thoughts alternately accusing or else defending them, all right? And so there's this internal innate sense that God has put into Adam, and by the way, all of Adam's posterity, that is a law of universal obedience, and that internal law is a gift from God, and as it was given to Adam, it was given in the form of a covenant, and so remember, God is a covenantal God, and he creates man to be in covenant with him, so it would make sense that that's the context in which the covenant comes. But let's just make one point that just needs to be made, and that is that every human being that comes into this world actually is born with a conscience and with an internal moral monitor that tells them what's right and what's wrong. Now conscience is not infallible in the sense that the codified law is infallible, but conscience is reflective of the law on our hearts at creation. And so, goes on and it says, a particular precept in not eating the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. So what the confession is saying is that God puts this universal principle in Adam, okay, which is obey God in everything, and then there's this particular precept of not eating the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, and this is what theologians would call a positive law, okay? So is this language familiar, a positive law? So in other words, so think of it this way, did God instill in Adam's heart not to eat of the tree of the knowledge of good or evil? No. A positive law is actually a law that is based simply on the premise God says so. All right? They're not arbitrary, but they could have the appearance of being arbitrary, all right? So you have, by the way, you have positive law in your household. You have certain restrictions or certain mandates that as parents you have the right to make, but actually may not reflect anything of the moral law. But you have the authority to make them. So, There's like nothing in the moral code written upon your heart saying don't eat dessert before dinner, right? That actually does not fall under the purview of any of the commandments. But as a parent, do you have the right to say you won't do that, right? The answer is of course. that is within your right, within your authority. And so here's God, he puts Adam in the garden, and the test is you shall not eat of the tree of the knowledge of good or evil. And the test is a probationary test. Adam is put on probation, all right? And if we say somebody is on probation, what do we mean? So, and don't ask Seth, he'll have a different answer than what I'm about to give. If Jesse starts a new job and they say you're on probation for three months, what does that mean? You'll go back to jail? No. Okay, what does it mean? Any point of infraction or failure or anything like that, you didn't make it to the period, all right? And where then you could screw up all you want because then you're a part of a union and your job's secure, all right? So. Yeah. Yeah, Charlie, do you want to help me here? Why do we call it a positive law? Right, so positive law would be, and I'm just using the language of historical theology at this point. So a positive law would be anything that God actually says that is not inherently rooted in his moral law, okay? So in other words, there was nothing moral or immoral about eating, okay? It was positive in the sense that it goes beyond what is rooted in the moral nature of man and the moral authority of God, all right? Yeah, I don't know if that's the background of it, but that's a good way to think about it, all right, okay? Okay, so just an established law, just so it goes back to because God said so, okay? So, positive law, possum, toddy, commodus, or whatever she said, and yeah. So, now, Gerhardus Vos, says, if man sinned against this command, so think about this, so you've got this moral law of universal obedience, which means I obey God in everything, right? And then you've got this positive law where you're not to eat of the tree of the knowledge of good or evil, all right? Probationary law. So if man sinned, Vos says, against this command, that it could be for no other reason than that he chose evil as evil and rejected good as good. So in other words, God says, here's the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, you shall not eat from that tree. So if man chooses to eat from that tree, he chooses to eat from that tree for no other reason than he's defying the authority of God. So if I take a cookie, and I put it in front of one of my grandkids, and I say, Papa says, do not eat that cookie. And they look at the cookie and then they just eat it, okay? That is explicit defiance. against something that I have just said, right? Whereas the universal law of obedience binds me to obey God in all that he says, there's a moral import to that. Here, it is a positive law, it's a positive command, and to violate it is actually just simply an act of pure defiance. So, God establishes this law, in a sense, of not eating, and the universal law, and the confession says, by which he bound him in all of his posterity to personal, entire, exact, and perpetual obedience. Now, by the way, that is a reference to the internal law, not the particular precept given to Adam. And so here is the principle of that internal law of obedience, and that is, What kind of obedience does God expect as He puts that law into our hearts? Perfect, personal, perpetual obedience. By the way, this will be This will be the ongoing principle of obedience, right? So Paul will cite Deuteronomy in Galatians chapter three, and he will say, just as it is written, cursed is everyone who does not obey all things that are written in this law to do them. This is why James can say that to violate the law in one point is to violate, as it were, the whole thing. And so the very idea is that God, in Adam and in Adam's posterity, puts this law this law of perfect obedience. Now, back to the positive law of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, God actually, it says, promised life upon fulfilling it and threatened death upon the breach of it. Where does God actually promise life in Genesis 2? Yeah, so if I say to Jesse, you eat this cookie, you're gonna die, okay? What's the implication? If you don't eat the cookie, you're gonna live, okay? Just remember that, all right? Okay. So this is why, by the way, Francis Turretin and other Reformed theologians talked about this arrangement between God and Adam in the garden as a covenant of life. was a covenant of life. Some refer to it as the covenant of works, but God gives Adam that command, and obedience to that command was to result in life, all right? So obedience in the test, which would have meant resisting the temptation, would have opened up access to the tree of life. And it would have confirmed Adam in his righteousness, it would have confirmed Adam in life, and Adam would have been, are you ready? So you don't need to Google this, I'll tell you what this means, all right? Non passe, non peccare. Or I should say non passe peccare. Adam would have been confirmed in not able to sin. That's what he would have been confirmed in. And by the way, not only non passe paccare, but non passe mori, which is not able to die. So here's just something interesting, and I saw this in Voss, and it was just fascinating to me. He says the very idea of a covenant of life where there's a goal, and that goal is to confirm Adam in life, okay, and righteousness. shows actually that creation was not just static. God didn't just create things and then just sort of get the ball rolling as sort of a status quo, but rather what God did is God had built into the garden and built into this arrangement with Adam in a sense an eschatology, that is, there was a goal that that was pointing to. In other words, there was something that Adam was to attain to. By the way, there's a lot of eschatology in those opening chapters of Genesis. I mean, you could think about the Sabbath, right, the seventh day. There's an eschatological structure to that seventh day. It wasn't just a day of rest. It points to something else, and that's because The end is like the beginning, only better. So, here's Adam and the, now, you have to understand this, this is important. So the reward for obedience to Adam, right? Although it would have been a just reward, it was completely, it wasn't a just reward, it was a completely gracious reward because it would have been out of proportion to the obedience rendered. So in other words, what God sets before Adam is obedience unto life, the reward is life, but that in and of itself is gracious. because life for simply obeying a positive law is disproportionate. It's like saying to your kid, I'll get you a new car if you clean your room. It's disproportionate, right? Because when you have obedience to God, remember that passage in Luke 17 where the servants simply say, you know, they serve the master And at the end it says, we've only done that which... In other words, you just do what's expected, right? So the promise of life was disproportionate, so it's gracious, but the penalty for disobedience was in fact just and proportionate. You violate the command, you fail the probation, dying you will die. And so why is that just? Because disobedience to an infinitely holy and infinitely glorious God is worthy of eternal punishment. Doing what God asks is not worthy of eternal life, okay? In other words, it's disproportionate, that's grace, but when God simply says, if you disobey me, we have to understand this is not just failure to clean your room, this is disobedience to the majestic, infinitely holy God, and what is the just, proportionate penalty for disobedience to an infinitely holy God? Well, infinite punishment. The magnitude of the sin, by the way, is not measured by the duration it takes to commit it or the depth of the offense. the magnitude of a transgression is measured by the majesty of the one offended. Is there a difference? Yeah, in Romans 5, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah, so there is, and I think that ends up being, in a sense, Paul's point, is that you have an internal universal law of obedience that people are aware of, but then when the law comes, now you actually have specific delineated commands and prohibitions, right? So when you actually violate those, you're sinning, the likeness of Adam, who had a very specific law that was given to him. So there's an interesting little phrase in the confession. I want you just to see it. It's the last clause. God endued him, that is Adam, with power and ability to keep it. By the way, are you endued with the same as Adam? No, no, not at all. So, Ecclesiastes 7.29, God made man upright. Afterward, he has sought out many devices. By the way, if you want a really great book on covenants, Arthur W. Pink, Divine Covenants, is fantastic. And there is this section in Pink, right there, the Adamic Covenant, and he says this so well, he says, so this relates to, Adam endued with the power and ability to keep it, all right? He says, yes, Adam, fresh from the hands of his creator, with no sinful ancestry behind him, with no depraved nature within him, man made in the image and likeness of God pronounced by him very good in fellowship with heaven." And then Pink says, who could have been a more suitable representative for us? In other words, Adam, in his representation of us in that covenant of works or covenant of life or covenant of nature, whatever you want to call it, was the best of all possible representatives for us because he wasn't fallen, he was, in Pink's words, fresh from the hand of his creator. actually in communion with God in a way that really, I mean, have you ever walked with God in the cool of the day? Even if you do sing, Andy walks with me and he talks with me and all, you know. I always wondered who Andy was, but anyway, that's beside the point. But here you end up having this person that has no sinful ancestry. He doesn't come from fallen stock. He doesn't have a depraved nature. In fact, there has been one human being, apart from our Lord Jesus Christ, one human being of whom it could be said that he truly had freedom of the will. And it was Adam. and Adam, of course, fell. Well, that's the first paragraph. Why is it important for us to understand the law? Well, it's important, and I'm gonna ask Charlie another question. Do you have any quibble with the term natural law? Okay. Right, right. So there's a, we'll just call it, and I'll look to Charlie for affirmation. Let's just say a straightforward, basic idea of natural law that is what we're talking about here of the implantation of a universal law of obedience to God the Creator. That ties into conscience, it ties into basic understanding. In fact, the very foundations of creation are woven into natural law, which means that you have an innate sense of man as male and female, of the institution of marriage, of the requirement to work. Those things, right? Heiko? Oh, yeah, yeah. Blame Lily. No, no, no, no, no. You're right. Right, what can we blame Adam for? Plunging all of humanity into a state of sin and misery. Okay, right. But it would be flawed to say I'm not responsible for my sin because of Adam, right? Because there's another principle in scripture, the soul that sins will die, okay? Right, so yeah, absolutely, okay? So why start here when you're talking about the law, right? Well, it establishes God as not only creator but lawgiver, and it establishes not only Adam, but all of humanity as those subject to the Creator as the lawgiver. All right, Charlie, I hate to do this to you, but would you include some of the creation ordinances as a part of natural law? Right, right. Right, right, okay, good. All right, thank you, Charlie, for helping me out. Thank you, Lily, for reminding me that there was actually a woman one time that was actually flawless. Yes, two human beings, all right. Okay, well, so next week, maybe we'll pick up. I have a different idea for next week, but we'll see. So there you have it. Well, let's pray. Lord, thank you for the fact that you're the King. And Father, you rule over not only just the cosmos, the world, the universe, galaxies, you rule over us. And Father, it is stunning to us that inanimate creation obeys you far better than we ever could. And so, Father, we pray that you would help us to come to grips with our own sin, our own inability. We pray that you would help us to come to grips with what is owed to you as moral obligation as your creation. And we pray, Father, that our hearts would just sing with praise because Jesus Christ has come and has fulfilled that covenant of life for us. and now we're under His grace, abounding grace. Receive our praise and our thanks this morning in Christ's name, amen. We hope that you were edified by this message. For additional sermons as well as information on giving to the ministry of Grace Community Church, please visit us online at gracenevada.com. That's gracenevada.com.