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Covenant history

The law through the covenants.

The commandments did not begin at Sinai. This page traces them through the covenants, from Eden, the holy mountain of God (Ezek. 28:13-14), through Moriah, where Abraham's faith was tested, and Sinai to Mount Zion, where Christ is the mediator of a new covenant (Heb. 12:22-24).

The first covenant

Eden: the first covenant.

Tree of life

“You may surely eat”

Gen. 2:16

Tree of knowledge

“You shall not eat”

Gen. 2:17

God made humans in His own image, which the Westminster Shorter Catechism describes as knowledge, righteousness, and holiness, with dominion over the creatures (Q. 10; Gen. 1:28; Col. 3:10; Eph. 4:24). He placed the first man in the garden "to work it and keep it" (Gen. 2:15). The two Hebrew verbs mean to serve the ground and to guard it: a task of development and a task of protection, given to mankind together. God made the first humans with His law written in their hearts (Rom. 2:14-15; Larger Catechism 17).

God blessed Adam and Eve before He gave them any command. God blessed the man and the woman with life and then told them to be fruitful and multiply (Gen. 1:28). He then gave the man every tree in the garden for food except one (Gen. 2:16-17). The commands gave purpose to a life that was already a gift.

God made the first covenant in Eden (Westminster Confession 7.2; see also Hos. 6:7). There God gave a command, promised life upon obedience, and threatened death upon its breach (Westminster Confession 19.1). The life promised was pledged in the tree of life (Larger Catechism 20), and the death threatened came on the day they ate from the forbidden tree (Gen. 2:17). The tree of life was the sign and seal of that covenant of life. Paul treats Adam as the representative of all mankind, whose one trespass brought condemnation to all (Rom. 5:12-19). For that reason, the Confession calls the arrangement a covenant of works (7.2), and the Shorter Catechism describes it as a covenant of life on condition of perfect obedience (Q. 12).

Two trees stood in the garden. The tree of life stood as the pledge of the life God promised, and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil was forbidden. The forbidden tree looked good for food, pleasing to the eye, and desirable to make one wise (Gen. 3:6). Yet nothing visible marked it as forbidden. The only ground for the prohibition was God's word (Gen. 2:17), and the command therefore tested whether the man and the woman would trust God's word or rely on their own judgment of what was good. Waiting on God for the life He promised was a way of trusting Him, and eating from the forbidden tree was a decision to define good and evil for oneself. The Shorter Catechism describes the fall as the eating of the forbidden fruit and, following Paul, affirms that all mankind sinned in Adam and fell with him (Q. 15-16; Rom. 5:12).

After the fall, God guarded the way to the tree of life (Gen. 3:22-24), and the Bible's last chapters show the tree again, with leaves for the healing of the nations (Rev. 22:2). Moses sets before Israel the same choice that Eden set before the first humans, between life and death and between blessing and curse (Deut. 30:15-20). The tree of life is the Bible's picture of what God's commands lead toward, and Christ is its substance (John 14:6). Because the commandments lead to the life Christ gives, the duties they require and the sins they forbid test every use of AI and its outcomes.

The covenant of grace

Abraham: the covenant of grace.

After the fall, God made a second covenant, the covenant of grace. The Shorter Catechism asks whether God left all mankind to perish in the estate of sin and misery, and answers that God, "having, out of his mere good pleasure, from all eternity, elected some to everlasting life, did enter into a covenant of grace, to deliver them out of the estate of sin and misery" (Q. 20). God first announced it in the promise that the offspring of the woman would crush the serpent (Gen. 3:15), and the Westminster Confession describes it as the covenant that freely offers sinners life and salvation through Jesus Christ (7.3).

The covenant of grace took its clearest early form in the call of Abraham. God promised him a great nation and blessing for all the families of the earth through him (Gen. 12:1-3). John Murray defined a covenant as "a sovereign administration of grace and of promise," and Abraham's call shows it plainly, since God made His promise before Abraham had done anything (Murray, The Covenant of Grace, 30). Abraham believed the LORD, who counted it to him as righteousness (Gen. 15:6), and Paul points out that this happened before circumcision and before the law (Rom. 4:9-15).

God tested Abraham's faith at Mount Moriah. He commanded Abraham to offer Isaac, the son of the promise, and Abraham obeyed, reasoning that God could raise him from the dead (Heb. 11:17-19). But God stopped his hand and provided a ram in Isaac's place (Gen. 22:1-14). Where Adam had not trusted God's word in Eden, Abraham did, and Moriah points ahead to the Father who did not spare His own Son but gave Him up for us all (Rom. 8:32).

The covenant with Abraham was not without law. God told him to walk before Him and be blameless (Gen. 17:1), and Genesis 26:5 says that Abraham obeyed God's voice and kept His charge, His commandments, His statutes, and His laws. Obedience followed the promise and did not earn it, which is the order that the Decalogue later takes. Mankind knew the commandments before Sinai, since God judged Cain for murder (Gen. 4:10-11) and Joseph refused Potiphar's wife because adultery would be a sin against God (Gen. 39:9). The Confession says the same: the law given to Adam continued after the fall as a perfect rule of righteousness (19.2).

The promise looked beyond Abraham to a single descendant, who is Christ (Gal. 3:16), and the law that came four hundred and thirty years later did not cancel it (Gal. 3:17). The Confession describes how the covenant of grace was administered under the law, by promises, prophecies, sacrifices, circumcision, the paschal lamb, and other types and ordinances, all of which pointed to the Christ who was to come (7.5). Calvin had made the same point: the covenant with the patriarchs is "so much like ours in substance and reality that the two are actually one and the same," and they differ only "in the mode of dispensation" (Institutes 2.10.2).

The law given

Sinai: the commands written down.

God rescued Israel from slavery in Egypt and brought the people to Mount Sinai, where He administered the covenant of grace to a whole nation (Westminster Confession 7.5). If they kept it, they would be His treasured possession and a kingdom of priests who would represent Him before the nations (Exod. 19:5-6), and the people agreed to do everything He had said (Exod. 19:8). This covenant carried its own blessings and curses (Lev. 26; Deut. 27-28), but unlike the covenant in Eden it did not offer life as the reward of perfect obedience, and God provided sacrifices for the sins His people would commit (Lev. 4-5; 16). Its blessings and curses belonged to the covenant of grace as God administered it to Israel. Herman Bavinck held the same view: Sinai did not set up a second covenant of works beside the promise, and the law given there served the covenant of grace (Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics, vol. 3, "The Covenant of Grace," 193-232). Murray reached the same conclusion: the Mosaic covenant "also is a sovereign administration of grace" (Murray, The Covenant of Grace, 22). Obedience was the fruit of a redemption already given, and Israel did not earn the land, so the blessings were not wages (Deut. 9:4-6). The curses were the discipline of a redeemed people, and for those who finally rejected the covenant, the curses ended in exile.

God then spoke the ten words from the mountain and wrote them on tablets of stone (Exod. 20; 31:18). The name "Decalogue" is Greek for "ten words," the phrase the Hebrew Bible uses (Exod. 34:28). The Decalogue opens with the words "I am the LORD your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery" (Exod. 20:2). That sentence is the historical prologue of a covenant treaty, in which the great king names Himself and then tells those He addresses what He has already done for them (Frame, ch. 3, 20-21, 24). Rescue comes first. The commands follow, addressed to people whom God has already freed. Calvin reads the preface the same way: God recalls the deliverance from Egypt so that gratitude for it would move the people to obey (Institutes 2.8.15). The Shorter Catechism draws the conclusion: "because God is the Lord, and our God, and redeemer, therefore we are bound to keep all his commandments" (Q. 44).

The law given at Sinai also did work that went beyond directing Israel's obedience. It was added because of transgressions and served as a guardian until Christ came, so that it could produce knowledge of sin but never a standing before God (Gal. 3:19, 24; Rom. 3:20). When Paul sets the law against the promise, he quotes Leviticus 18:5 to state what the law demands when it is taken by itself as a way to life: the one who does them shall live by them (Gal. 3:12; Rom. 10:5), and the Westminster Confession cites these same verses for the covenant of works made with Adam (7.2). Christ alone meets that demand (Gal. 3:13-14).

The law fulfilled

Christ: the tree of life and the law fulfilled.

The first Adam broke the covenant in Eden, and Scripture presents Christ as the last Adam, who does what the first did not do (Rom. 5:12-21; 1 Cor. 15:45). Adam took from the tree that God had forbidden. But in the wilderness, Christ answered each temptation by trusting what God had said (Matt. 4:1-11).

The tree of life points to Christ. Proverbs says that wisdom is a tree of life (Prov. 3:18), Paul calls Christ the wisdom of God (1 Cor. 1:24, 30), and He said of Himself, "I am the way, and the truth, and the life" (John 14:6). The cross was the tree of the curse. The law says that a man hanged on a tree is under God's curse (Deut. 21:23), and Paul says that Christ redeemed His people from that curse by becoming a curse for them (Gal. 3:13; 1 Pet. 2:24). Yet the tree that carried the curse became the source of life, and Revelation promises the fruit of the tree of life to the one who conquers (Rev. 2:7).

Jesus came not to abolish the Law and the Prophets but to fulfill them (Matt. 5:17). Born under the law to redeem those under it (Gal. 4:4-5), He kept it perfectly (Westminster Confession 8.4), and He taught that the commandments reach the heart, since anger is the root of murder and lust the root of adultery (Matt. 5:21-30). Fulfillment does not remove them. Christ obeyed them for His people, bore the penalty for their breaking them, and sends the Spirit to write them on their hearts (Rom. 5:19; Jer. 31:31-34; Ezek. 36:26-27; Rom. 8:3-4). Christ builds His people up in holiness through the word, the sacraments, and prayer (Shorter Catechism 88-89), and since the church may not bind the conscience or rule civil affairs, each Christian applies the commandments in his own calling (Westminster Confession 20.2; 31.4). Believers are no longer under the law as a covenant of works, but it remains a rule of life the Spirit enables them to keep willingly (Westminster Confession 19.6-7). Paul calls that obedience the law of Christ (Gal. 6:2; 1 Cor. 9:21).

Christ is also the perfect display of God's character, the image of the invisible God (Col. 1:15) and the exact imprint of His nature (Heb. 1:3). The commandments display God's character in words, and Christ displays it in a life. People who build a system to be honest, safe, fair, and subordinate obey in a limited way what He kept completely. For those in Christ, obedience in the use of AI is a response to redemption, as obedience at Sinai followed the rescue from Egypt, and the Spirit gives the power to carry it out.

The Bible ends with a garden and a city: the tree of life standing again beside the river, its leaves for the healing of the nations (Rev. 22:1-2), and the kings of the earth bringing the glory of the nations into the city (Rev. 21:24-26). Hebrews contrasts the mountain that burned at Sinai with Mount Zion, the city of the living God, where believers come to Jesus, the mediator of a new covenant (Heb. 12:18-24). The mandate to work and keep the garden has this end in view. That end is certain, since God has appointed a day on which He will judge the world by Jesus Christ and will receive His people into everlasting life (Westminster Confession 33.1-2). Even so, Scripture does not tell us in detail which human works will enter the new heavens and the new earth. Christians do this work in hope.

  1. Creation: God gives the first commands as a gift, with life as the blessing and death as the curse (Gen. 1-2).
  2. Fall: Adam takes what God had forbidden, and the curse falls on mankind and on the ground (Gen. 3).
  3. Abraham: God makes the covenant of grace, and Abraham believes the promise and walks in obedience (Gen. 12; 15; 17).
  4. Sinai: God redeems Israel from Egypt and writes the ten words on stone (Exod. 19-20; 31:18).
  5. Christ: He fulfills the law, bears the curse, and is the tree of life (Matt. 5:17; Gal. 3:13; Rev. 2:7).
  6. The church: The Spirit writes the law on the hearts of God's people, and they obey it as the law of Christ (Jer. 31:31-34; Gal. 6:2).
  7. New creation: The tree of life stands again and the nations are healed (Rev. 22:1-2).