In Jeremiah 31, in which we hear the promise of the new covenant, there are strong connections between the covenants that God had made with his people in the past, e.g. his covenants with David, Moses, and Abraham, and this new covenant that he promises to establish in the future. To be sure, there are discontinuities between these covenants. The prior covenants were mediated by men who could not infallibly lead God’s people into covenant blessing, and the covenants themselves always pointed to something greater. In that sense, Christ as the mediator of the new covenant is distinctly different because he is infallibly leading God’s people into covenant blessing, and the covenant he mediates is far better in that it fully and finally deals with the root problem of God’s people. Nevertheless, there is still much continuity between the prior covenants and the new covenant, such that in their essence they are inseparably connected.
But something similar could be said about the connections between the covenant of works and the covenant of grace, of which the new covenant is the highest expression. Herman Bavinck expresses this connection in the following way:
[The covenant of grace] must be elucidated, not only in distinction from but also in its connection with the covenant of works. After the covenant of works had been broken, God did not immediately conceive a totally different covenant unrelated to the preceding one and that has a different character. That simply could not be the case, for God is unchangeable; the demand posed to humans in the covenant of works is not arbitrary and capricious. The image of God, the law, and religion can by their very nature only be one; grace, nature, and faith cannot or may not nullify the law. Nor is it so. The covenant of grace is not … the successive abolition of the covenant of works but its fulfillment and restoration. “Grace repairs and perfects nature.” God stands by the demand that eternal life can be obtained only in the way of obedience; and when a person violates his law, it is expanded with another: the law that the violation must be paid for by punishment. After the fall, therefore, God lays a double claim on humans: that of the payment of a penalty for the evil done and that of perfect obedience to his law (satisfaction and obedience).[1]
This expression helps us to appreciate why the law persists as an element of the covenant of grace in its highest expression, namely the new covenant. Even if the law would be written on the heart rather than a tablet of stone, that the law continues to factor into God’s covenant relationship reminds us that the new covenant is not a pivot from God’s past work, including the revelation of his will in the covenant of works. Related to this, we are reminded that, because God is unchangeable, we are still saved by works, even a perfect obedience to the law.
But herein lies the distinction between the new covenant and the covenant works, and it is keyed to the mediator of each of these covenants. Again, Bavinck writes,
The difference between the covenant of works and the covenant of grace therefore consists in the fact that in the latter God asserts not one but a double demand, and that with this double demand he approaches not humanity in Adam but humanity in Christ. The covenant of works and the covenant of grace primarily differ in that Adam is exchanged for and replaced by Christ. … Christ is the second and last Adam who restores what the first Adam had corrupted and takes over what he had neglected. He is the mediator of the covenant of grace, the head of the new humanity.[2]
In this we find the resolution to the question of how God will remember the sins of his people no more in the new covenant, and it is simply that the Lord Jesus Christ paid the penalty for the evil done by God’s people.
All of this, then, helps us to appreciate all the more that the new covenant, under which we find ourselves between the first and second coming of Christ, our mediator, is not a great pivot in God’s plan of redemption but a grand escalation of the past promises of God from the garden to our present day. This is why Paul can exclaim, “For all the promises of God find their Yes in him. That is why it is through him that we utter our Amen to God for his glory” (2 Cor 1:20 ESV).
[1] Herman Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics, ed. John Bolt, trans. John Vriend (Grand Rapids, Mich: Baker Academic, 2003), 3:226.
[2] Bavinck, 3:226-7.
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