Sword & Trowel 2016: Issue 2 


typical church of old. Early Baptists saw clearly that a mistaken view of the Mosaic cov- enant carried the Christian church back to the old order in ways that se- riously clashed with New Testament teaching. We shall show in this article that the Mosaic covenant was not essen- tially about grace but about works, although it has many types and pictures of grace in the ceremonies and in the furniture and decorations of both the Tabernacle and later the Temple. Grace was pictured as the better way, but the covenant itself, through the demands of the law, amounted to works (as we have noted in Leviticus 18.5).


Did the Jews, not to mention the


rest of the world, have to wait until Christ came before salvation by grace, through faith, became avail- able? Certainly not, because the covenant of grace – free salvation by the mercy of God – operated from the time of the fi rst promise of a great Descendant-deliverer in the Garden of Eden. Grace began to be revealed from that moment, and people were saved by trusting in it. The key to understanding the covenants is to realise that from that moment the covenant of grace ran alongside the covenant of works. The two were distinct, yet in a way they were parallel. The demands of the law stopped the proud human heart in its tracks and, by


page 6 God’s Parallel Covenants


the work of the Spirit, people were compelled to look to the promise of grace. Even as the law was proclaimed by Moses (the covenant of works), an- other, quite distinctive message was preached alongside it – heart salva- tion by grace (the covenant of grace). This is clearly seen when Moses describes and expounds the parallel covenant of Deuteronomy 29 – 30. The biblical narrative says he made this covenant in the land of Moab ‘beside’ the covenant which he made with them in Horeb. The Hebrew means separately, distinctively. It was not a reiteration of Sinai, but something different and very special. It has long been known as the ‘evangelical cov- enant’, and so it is. This is the passage referred to


by the apostle Paul in Romans 10, where he quotes from it and calls it ‘the righteousness which is of faith’, contrasting it with ‘the righteousness which is of the law’. In other words, the Sinaitic law covenant is works, but the covenant presented in Deu- teronomy 29 – 30 (in the plains of Moab) is grace. Paul distinguishes between the two. It is as though God were saying, ‘Here is the holy law which you must do to be


John Owen – ‘Here is a question of great impor- tance, namely, whether the old and the new are two distinct covenants, or simply different dispensa- tions or administrations of the same covenant.’


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