Sword & Trowel 2016: Issue 2
accepted by me, but here also is sal- vation by grace. If you will not have grace, you must be judged by the law. And this law, holy and perfect, but formidable to sinful men, hangs like a great sword over your head.’
All about the heart When we read Deuteronomy 29 and
30 it strikes us immediately there is only passing reference to law. It is all about circumcision of the heart. It is all about grace. It is all about evan- gelical experience, and loving the Lord with all our being. The two cov- enants ran side by side, on the one hand law, on the other grace. If you thought you could perform God’s will, you would be judged by the law, but if you bowed to grace you would be saved. No wonder Moses completed his
preaching of this covenant of grace with the stirring appeal – ‘See, I have set before thee this day life and good, and death and evil; in that I com- mand thee this day to love the Lord thy God,’ and in that experience to keep his commandments (Deuteronomy 30.15-16). For generations the Baptists of old
saw matters this way, and enshrined it in their Confession of 1689. This was the view of the great names of old, the Bunyans and Spurgeons. This is the contrasting or parallel- covenant view, that works and grace run side by side down through Bible history, with the covenant of grace being increasingly revealed in glorious ways in the promises and prophecies of the Old Testament, approaching a climax in Isaiah, Jer- emiah and Ezekiel. Their message to
the children of Israel was that they could obtain mercy and forgiveness by trusting in the great Descendant. The law of Sinai, though holding the moral standards that would always be the rule of life for believers, could never save. As I remarked earlier, this was what I was taught in spiritual infancy. The 1689 covenant view was still alive in the 1950s. I remember as a very young man being surprised on first running into dispensationalism, and then being even more surprised to find that some Calvinistic Baptists had adopted a modified Presbyterian view, accepting the Mosaic order as an administration of the covenant of grace. They took the view that after the Fall there has been only one cov- enant – that of grace – administered in different ways in the Old and New Testaments. In other words, they took the ‘one-covenant two-adminis- tration’ view. The heyday of dispensationalism almost crowded out the old view, then in the 1950s a renewed enthu- siasm for good systematic theology swept in, but being largely from a Presbyterian stable, it led many Baptists to adopt their one-covenant position. The authentic Baptist view was not rendered altogether extinct, however, and it is grand to see it en- joying a considerable revival, several excellent studies having emerged in the USA in recent years.†
† Eg: The Distinctiveness of Baptist Covenant Theology by Pascal Denault (Solid Ground); Recovering a Covenantal Heritage: Essays in Baptist Covenant Theology, Ed: Richard C Barcellos (RBAP).
God’s Parallel Covenants page 7
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