2 Corinthians 3:6 Commentary and Bible Study

There are two covenants spoken of in the Scripture. There is the old and there is the new but it goes a little more deeply than this. We speak of the covenant of works and the covenant of grace and you must understand the difference. Back in the Garden of Eden, God gave man, our first parents, everything they could have desired and was ready to give them very much more but there was a condition and the condition amounted to this: ‘You must obey me.’ In fact the condition was whittled down to one act; that is all they had to keep and do. God was saying, ‘I give you all these things and will give you so much more, but you must obey me.’ It is a kind of covenant. God and man will be related but there is a condition in the covenant. The greatest, greatest tragedy of creation and mankind is that he broke that covenant and fell. However that wasn’t the end of it. As soon as that covenant failed, God began to reveal another covenant. Some call it a covenant of mercy, more often it is the covenant of grace, in which God deals with man on an entirely different basis. Instead of requiring obedience as the condition for blessing and salvation, God gives salvation freely. He pours out his blessing, because the arrangement is that the obedience and the righteousness that is required by God will be performed instead by a representative. God will come himself, the second Person of the Trinity, into this world and he will live a life of perfect obedience and he will suffer and die on Calvary to bear the punishment due to men and women for their sin and so this covenant will be different. God the Father, as it were, says to the Son, ‘If you will go and be their representative and subordinate yourself to me, enter into human make-up and personality, live a perfect life and suffer and die for their sins, then I will give all those people who will be saved to you. I will not require perfect obedience from them but I will forgive them freely because you have succeeded as their representative and their sin-bearer.’ What we call the covenant of grace was announced and began to operate as soon as man fell. There would be a great descendent of Adam and Eve, who would crush the serpent’s head and then when Abraham came, promises were made to him: there will be a great descendent through whom all nations of the world shall be blessed. No one could any longer obtain life through covenant of works, and God began at once dealing with people in grace and mercy, forgiving their sins as they repent. But the covenant of works wasn’t finished because God brought it back. Though it was broken, though nobody could be saved through it, it was necessary that it came back with the covenant that God made with the Jews on Mount Sinai, the giving of the Law, the giving of the Ten Commandments. God said, ‘Here are my standards of holiness. Perform these perfectly and you will live. Fail and you will be condemned.’ Why did God bring it back? First of all because his law and his character needed to be published to the human race. But more than that man needed to be shaken up; man needed the warning. He needed a stern schoolmaster to turn him to Christ. He needed to be told, ‘If you will not have grace, if you will not repent, if you will not trust in my providing a Saviour one day and trust in him, this is the only alternative. These are the Ten Commandments and you must keep them perfectly. Sinai was, without doubt, a legal covenant, so now you have two covenants, operating side by side. The old covenant of works has been repeated in greater detail, and is what Paul calls ‘the ministration of death.’ Then, alongside it, there is the preaching of the gospel, preached by the patriarchs, preached by the prophets of old, preached through the ceremonial law: the sacrifices and the beautiful imagery of the temple worship that spoke of Christ and his work. Well, Paul says we have become able ministers of the new covenant, ‘not of the letter, but of the spirit.’ The letter kills because, if I am trusting in that, it condemns me. The Ten Commandments, of course, are good and as Christian people, once we are saved by the help of the Holy Spirit we are to do our utmost to obey them. They still rule our lives but they are not the means of our salvation. If we have no Saviour, then that law is a letter of death to us, because it will condemn us.