against me.’ Gal. iii. 10. “The break my covenant, and I regarded them not, saith the Lord.” Heb. viii. ‘let them cry, I will not regard them; let them repent, I will not regard them: they have broken my covenant, and done that in which I delighted not; therefore by that covenant I do curse, and not bless; damn, and not save; frown, and not smile; I reject, and not embrace; charge sin, and not forgive it.119
Not only have we sinned in Adam, but we all sin daily. For there to be reconciliation it would be necessary not only to keep God’s commandments perfectly, but also pay the penalty for sin. For all those living before Christ’s death, it was only those who embraced the promise who were removed from their obligation to provide obedience to the covenant. About such as these, Owen states: “When this is actually embraced, that the first covenant ceaseth towards them, as unto its curse, in all its concerns as a covenant, and obligations unto sinless obedience as a condition of life because both of them are answered by the mediator of the new covenant.”120
With sin’s entrance and the imposition of God’s curse, God’s image in man has been largely erased, although a vestige of this remains. Prior to Sinai, although the Ten Commandments had not been explicitly revealed as they would be later on the two tablets of stone, the requirements of what the law demanded were nevertheless written upon man’s conscience, or, as Paul says, “they have the works of the law written upon their hearts” (Rom 2:15). This is essentially what has been called natural law. This amounted to an innate knowledge of what God demanded, along with the knowledge that this was something impossible for sinful humanity to provide. It would require the intervention of another, none less than the very Son of God himself. As Augustine commented: “just as Adam became a cause of death to those who are born of him, even though they have not eaten of the tree, the death brought on by the eating, so also Christ was made a provider of righteousness for those who belong to Him, even though they are entirely lacking in righteousness.”121
109. Wright, Climax of the Covenant, xi, 1.
110. Wright, Paul: In Fresh Perspective, 13.
111. Wright, Revolution, 75.
112. Ibid., 73–87.
113. Wilhemlus a Brakel, Our Reasonable Service, 1:355.
114. Wright, Revolution, 76.
115. As I have already said, while this appears arrogant, it stems from Wright’s faith in his exegesis of the text. He is certainly not being deliberately arrogant.
116. Ibid., 76.
117. Ibid., 77.
118. By Adam I mean Adam and Eve, our first parents.
119. Bunyan, The Doctrine of the Law and Grace Unfolded, 502–3.
120. Owen, Works, 22, 79.
121. Augustine, Contra Julianum, 305.
The Application of Salvation
Before Abraham
The first glimmer of light occurred shortly after the first Man’s sin. At the critical moment, when Adam expected to hear only the sentence of death, the Lord pronounced the fact that he was going to interpose on man’s behalf through one who would be born of woman (Gen 3:15). This first promise “implied that God, instead of appearing against them as their enemy, was to interpose for them as their friend; that He had formed a purpose of grace and mercy towards them.”122 One may well find Adam among the congregation of the saved, providing he embraced the promise in faith. While prior to his fall Adam was a federal head of all his offspring, the promise was to be embraced on an individual basis. As Coxe puts it:
It must be noted that although the covenant of grace was revealed this far to Adam, yet we see in all this there was no formal and express covenant transaction with him. Even less was the covenant of grace established with him as a public person or representative of any kind. But he obtained interest for himself alone by his own faith in the grace of God revealed in this way, so must those of his posterity be saved.123
Throughout the Old Testament period, this promise would become progressively more explicit; culminating in the appearance of the one promised with the formal legal establishment of the new covenant. Although the first promise was somewhat obscure, “it contained enough to lay a solid foundation for faith and hope towards God, and it was the first beam of Gospel light on our fallen world.”124 Salvation was only available by believing this promise, and, as Denault reminds us, “As a result all those who were saved since the creation of the world were saved by virtue of the New Covenant which was in effect as a promise.”125
There was a considerable time span from the fall of Adam to the arrival of Abraham. In this time, both before and after the flood, God’s offer of salvation was present and people were being saved. In those relatively dark days, the promise was universal in that it was not chiefly revealed to a particular nation; there was no distinction between Jew and Gentile. Although the new covenant only existed in the form of a promise, in the words of Owen, “It wanted its solemn confirmation and establishment by the blood of the only sacrifice which belonged to it . . . Before this was done in the death of Christ, it had not the formal nature of a covenant or a testament.”126 The way of salvation, however, was the same as it is today. Those who believed became recipients of new covenant blessings because of its retrospective efficacy. All those who believed were effectually called, regenerated by the Spirit, justified by faith and adopted into the family of God. The only badge of membership, if one can call it that, was faith. Those so-called “boundary markers” as the NPP refers to them, did not apply then, and when they later did so they only related to the conditional covenant made with Israel, with its temporal blessings that were dependent upon the people’s obedience to the law.
Consider the case of Abel. How was he saved? Was the way of salvation different then from what it is today? Was it different from what it was under the old covenant? I emphasize this because it is crucial to the case against Wright and the way he views Israel. Abel knew right from wrong because he had knowledge of the law’s requirements upon his heart. He was by nature a child of wrath, separated from God because of both his own and Adam’s sin. In Hebrews we are told that “By faith Abel offered to God a more acceptable sacrifice than Cain, through which he was commended as righteous, God commending him by accepting his gifts. And through his faith, though he died, he still speaks” (Heb 11:4). No doubt his sacrifice was acceptable to God because it was of a bloody nature, suggesting that he, by a revelation of the Spirit of Christ, saw from afar the blood of Christ. In faith, he would have been united to Christ and made a partaker of the blessings Christ achieved in his redemptive work. And, one must remember that this was before the existence of the nation.
Old Testament saints
