Law / Gospel Distinction: Sermon 6 (The Implications of Denying the Covenant of Works)

In this video, Presbyterian author Monty Collier preaches the sixth installment in his series on Law/Gospel Distinction. Specifically in this sermon, Mr. Collier concentrates on the consequences of denying the Covenant of Works—and how a denial of the Covenant of Works is a mixing of Law and Gospel that teaches justification by faith and works.

Those that deny the Covenant of Works (Law) mix it with the Covenant of Grace (Gospel), and so the Law leavens throughout the Gospel transforming it into good advice, rather than good news.

A denial of the Covenant of Works asserts that there is no legal basis for God to charge Adam's posterity with the guilt of Adam's sin. Because God is a covenant God, the Lord will NOT impute guilt or righteousness without a covenant being justly in place. Jehovah is a God of order. In the Garden of Eden, as our Federal Representative in the Covenant of Works, Adam's guilt was justly charged, not only to Adam, but to all of his natural posterity, making it legal for that natural posterity to be born guilty and to inherit Adam's sinful nature.

A denial of the Covenant of Works necessarily implies a denial of Original Sin, Total Depravity and inability, while conversely asserting that all men have free will. It also implies that all men are born on probation.

Furthermore, if there is no Covenant of Works, then Jesus Christ could not have come as our Surety and do what the first Adam failed to do for us—keep the Covenant of Works in our place! Because Christ succeeded for us where Adam failed, Jesus' righteousness can be legally credited to our accounts the very moment we believe the Gospel—and God is seen to be just, as well as the justifier of the elect!

Those who deny the Covenant of Works mix Law and Gospel, while they end up teaching some method of justification by faith and works. Some of these heretics teach that men must do the work of joining an institutional church, obeying elders, and paying tithes to merit their final justification, while others concentrate on transforming belief itself into a work that earns salvation (these hucksters claim that the act of belief is what justifies us before God, rather than the object of our belief [the Gospel alone]).

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