The Law of God and the Human Being

 By Pastor Benjamin Glaser - Posted at Thoughts From Parson Farms:

How the Moral Law is to Be Rightly Understood in Creation

Good Morning,

On the Lord’s Day evenings the past month or so we’ve been looking at the Covenant of Works. As part of that we’ve sought to define what a covenant is (an agreement between two parties that includes stipulations and promises) and why God chose to use that form (because He is God and needed a way to deal with His creatures by grace). The Q/A’s today are explaining to us why the LORD did this with Adam and the reason why it applies to us right now regardless of what Adam did with the command given in Genesis 2:16-17. Our Heavenly Father is not in the business of making things up as He goes along. There is a sense in which we were covenantally related to God regardless of whether or not He made this specific covenant with our earthly father. Since He cannot relate to us as peers all the work He does with us is by way of condescension. Now, we usually use that word only in a negative sense, but in this case it is a great blessing for the Lord did not need to either make us or promise us anything. Both He did out of love and mercy. This condescension is to be understood in the way that an all-powerful being stoops to help out one who cannot help themselves. By giving us the moral law we know what God expects and also through it we see His wisdom and His person. Why can we trust the Lord? Because He does not steal, nor does He commit adultery. He gives what He promises and He is faithful to His word. These are great and wonderful helps as we think about the reasons why He provided the testimony of the moral law.

We presume too much about ourselves whenever we look back at our God and require of Him anything. It is as if your child woke up one morning and declared to you that he or she was now in charge and from now one there would only be chocolate cake for breakfast, no school, and YouTube on the TV forever. No loving parent would put up with such rebellion. How much less do you think that the One who made the Universe would react to any creature who thought they could dictate the terms of life to the Maker of life? Here we see one of the reasons for the Covenant of Works. It was an opportunity for Adam to show to God His thanksgiving and felicity to the one who breathed existence into His soul. We must be able to see the mercy of the Lord in providing an opportunity for Adam to testify to his thanksgiving to Him if we are to understand why God reacted in the way that He did when Adam failed to keep this covenant.

Continue here.