In the summer of 1925, J. Gresham Machen delivered a series of lectures at the Grove City Bible School in Pennsylvania—lectures that subsequently formed the content of his book What Is Faith? In these lectures, Machen explained the nature of what he believed to be one of the most prevailing religious problems of his day. He wrote, “It is one thing to hold that the ethical principles that Jesus enunciated will solve the problems of society, and quite another thing to come into that intimate, present relation to Him which we call faith; it is one thing to follow the example of Jesus and quite another to trust in Him.”

Machen was confronting the problem of the self-righteous, humanitarian spirit of the age in which he lived. Needless to say, this was not simply a problem of his day; it is a problem in our day as well. In fact, it is a problem in our hearts and minds on a daily basis. The heart of the natural man and woman is deeply self-righteous and self-trusting. Jesus and the Apostles constantly wrestled against the self-righteous spirit of the false teachers of their day, and they warned the early Christians of the danger of embracing a false gospel that seeks to slide good works into our standing before God.

The Scriptures are clear that there are only two possible ways of salvation—one by works and one by grace, one by law-keeping and one by faith. As we noted in the last post in this series, God entered into a covenant with Adam before the fall by which He required perfect, personal, and continual obedience to the law of God. If Adam were to have attained to a secure standing in holiness and blessedness before God, both for himself and his descendants, it would have been based solely on his obedience. At the outset of Scripture, however, we learn that Adam failed to obey in the first test in the garden. The broken covenant of works pronounced covenant curses rather than covenant blessings on Adam and his descendants. Yet, the Lord did not leave all of humanity without hope. God graciously revealed another covenant to our first parents, the covenant of grace, offering a new way of life and blessedness—a way of salvation by grace alone through faith alone in the Redeemer alone.

In the covenant of grace, the legal conditions of the broken covenant of works are still binding on Adam’s descendants. God cannot change; therefore, His demand for the perfect holiness of His image bearers cannot change. The words “If a person does [God’s commandments], he shall live [i.e., attain life] by them” (Lev. 18:5) carry with them all of the legal demands and promises of the covenant of works—now embedded in the covenant of grace in the giving of the law at Sinai. The problem? No mere descendant of Adam can keep the demands of the law. Why? Because all those who descend from Adam by ordinary generation sinned in him and fell with him; thus, they are born dead in sins and trespasses and are under the wrath and curse of God (Eph. 2:1–4). Because of man’s natural condition since the fall, we need a sinless descendant of Adam to keep the demands of the law for us. Jesus Christ, the last Adam, the God-man, does this by living a sinless life—keeping all the precepts of the law of God perfectly for us. Jesus kept the legal conditions of the covenant of grace as the representative of His people.

There are, however, also evangelical conditions of the covenant of grace that must be met if we are to be the recipients of the blessings of the covenant of grace. Seventeenth-century theologians often distinguished between the legal and the evangelical conditions of the covenant of grace. For instance, Francis Turretin explained, “Faith and repentance (which are the conditions of the new covenant) were not enjoined in the first covenant.”¹ Turretin was speaking about the covenant of works when he referred to “the first covenant.” He elsewhere explained, “Faith is an evangelical condition after the manner of supernatural grace, terminating on God, the Redeemer.”² Again, he stated, “In this . . . sense, faith is the sole condition of the covenant because it alone embraces Christ with his benefits.”³ The reason why faith is the leading evangelical condition is that it enables us to lay hold of Christ as Redeemer, and so to receive all the benefits that God has secured for us in Him.

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