Query 1. Gospel Precepts
QUERY. 1. — Are there any precepts in the gospel that were not actually given before the gospel was revealed?
Answer. — The passages in our Representation, marked as the grounds of this query, are these:
“The gospel doctrine is known only by a new revelation after the fall. Of the same dismal tendency, we apprehend, is declaring that the distinction of the law, as it is the Law of Works, and as it is the Law of Christ (as the author applies it) is altogether groundless. The erroneous doctrine of justification, as something wrought in, or done by the sinner, as his righteousness, or keeping the new and gospel law.”
Now, leaving it to others to judge if these passages gave any just occasion for this question, we answer it as follows, —
1st, In the gospel, as contradistinct from the law, taken strictly as a doctrine of grace or good news from heaven, or help in God through Jesus Christ, for the lost self-destroying creatures of Adam’s race, or the glad tidings of a Saviour with life and salvation in him for the chief of sinners, there are no precepts; all of these—including the command to believe and repent—belong to and flow from the law, which fastens the new duty on us, in the same moment that the gospel reveals the new object.
It seems evident to us from the Holy Scriptures that, taken strictly, there are no precepts in the gospel. In the first revelation of it, made in these words, — “The seed of the woman shall bruise the head of the serpent,” we find no precept, but a promise containing glad tidings of a Saviour, with grace, mercy, life, and salvation in him, to lost sinners of Adam’s family. And the gospel preached to Abraham, namely, “In you,” i.e., in your seed, which is in Christ, “all nations shall be blessed,” is of the same nature. The good tidings of great joy to all people of a Saviour born in the city of David, who is Christ the Lord, brought and proclaimed from heaven by the angels, we take to have been the gospel, strictly and properly so called; yet there is no precept in these tidings. We likewise find the gospel of peace and glad tidings of good things are convertible terms in Scripture; and the word of the gospel, which Peter spoke to the Gentiles, that they might believe, was no other than peace by Jesus Christ, crucified, risen, and exalted to be Judge of the quick and the dead, with remission of sins through his name, to be received by everyone believing in him. Much more might be added on this topic, but so that we are not tedious, we pass by them. We find the body of reformed divines are of the same mind as to this point; to instance a few, Calvin, Chamier, Pemble, Wendelin, Alting, the professors of Leyden, Witsius, Maestrick, Maresius, Troughton, Essenius.
That all precepts (including those of faith and repentance) belong to, and are part of the law, is no less evident to us. For the law of creation, or the Ten Commandments, which was given to Adam in paradise in the form of a Covenant of Works, requiring us to believe whatever God would reveal or promise, and to obey whatever he would command; all precepts whatever, must be virtually and really included in it. So that there never was, nor can there be, an instance of duty owed by the creature to God, that is not commanded in the Moral Law, if not directly and expressly, yet indirectly and by consequence. For instance, the same first commandment which requires us to take the Lord for our God, to acknowledge his essential verity and sovereign authority; to love, fear, and trust in Jehovah, in whatever manner he is pleased to reveal himself to us, and likewise to grieve and mourn for his dishonour or displeasure, requires believing in Jehovah our righteousness as soon as he is revealed to us as such; and it requires sorrowing in a godly way for the transgression of his holy law, whether by one’s self or by others. It is true, Adam was not actually obliged to believe in a Saviour till, being lost and undone, a Saviour was revealed to him; but the same commandment that bound him to trust and depend on, and to believe the promises of God Creator, no doubt obliged him to believe in God Redeemer, when he was revealed. Nor was Adam obliged to sorrow for sin before it was committed. But this same law that bound him to have a sense of the evil of sin in its nature and effects, to hate, loathe, and flee from sin, and to resolve against it, and for all holy obedience, and to have a due apprehension of the goodness of God, obliged him also to mourn for it, whenever it would fall out. And we cannot see how the contrary doctrine is consistent with the perfection of the law; for if the law is a complete rule of all moral, internal and spiritual, as well as external and ritual obedience, it must require faith and repentance, as well as it does all other good works. And we can have no doubt that it does indeed require them, when we consider that without them, all other religious performances are, in God’s account, as good as nothing; and that sin being (as the Scripture and our own standard tell us), any lack of conformity to, or transgression of the law of God, unbelief and impenitency must be so too. And if they are so, then faith and repentance must be obedience and conformity to the same law, which the former are a transgression of, or an inconformity to; unbelief particularly being a departing from the living God is, for certain, forbidden in the first commandment; faith must therefore be required in the same commandment, according to a known rule. But what more do we need after our Lord has told us that faith is one of the weightier matters of the law? And it is not a second tablet duty which is meant there; this is evident to us by comparing the parallel passage in Luke where, in place of faith, we have the love of God. As for repentance, in case of sin against God, it naturally becomes a duty; and though neither the Covenant of Works nor of grace allowed it as any expiation of sin, or federal condition giving a right to life, it is a duty that is included in every commandment, on the supposal of a transgression.
What moves us to be more concerned for this point of doctrine is that if the law does not bind sinners to believe and repent, then we do not see how faith and repentance, considered as works, are excluded from our justification before God, since in that case they are not works of the law, under which character all works are in Scripture excluded from the use of justifying in the sight of God. And we can call to mind that, on the contrary doctrine, Arminius laid the foundation of his rotten principles, touching sufficient grace, or rather natural power. “Adam,” he says, “did not have power to believe in Jesus Christ, because he did not need him; nor was he bound to believe, because the law did not require it. Therefore, since Adam did not lose it by his fall, God is bound to give every man power to believe in Jesus Christ.” And Socinians, Arminians, Papists, and Baxterians, by holding that the gospel is a new, proper, preceptive law with sanctions, and thereby turning it into a real, though milder Covenant of Works, have confounded the law and the gospel, and brought works into the matter and the cause of a sinner’s justification before God. And we reckon, we are rather called to be on our guard here, that the clause in our Representation, mentioning the new or Gospel Law, is marked out to us as one of the grounds of this query which we admit to be somewhat alarming. Besides all this, teaching that faith and repentance are gospel commandments, may yet again open the door to Antinomianism, as it sometimes did already, if we may believe Mr. Cross, who says, “History tells us that it sprung from such a mistake, that only faith and repentance were taught and commanded by the gospel, and that as they contained everything necessary to salvation, so the law was needless.”
On this topic also — namely, that all precepts belong to the law — we might likewise adduce a cloud of witnesses beyond exception, such as Perable, Essenius, Anth, Burgess, Rutherford, Owen, Witsius, Dickson, Fergusson, Troughton, and the Larger Catechism on the duties that are required, and the sins that are forbidden, in the First Commandment. But, without insisting further, we answer,
2dly, The gospel, taken largely for the whole doctrine of Christ and the apostles that is contained in the New Testament — or taken for a system of all the promises, precepts, threatenings, doctrines, and histories, that in any way concern man’s recovery and salvation — in this respect, the Gospel includes not only the Ten Commandments, but also the doctrine of the Covenant of Works. But [if taken] in this sense, then the doctrine is not contradistinct from the Law. In the gospel, taken at large in this way, we say there are doubtless many precepts that were not actually given (that is, that were not particularly and expressly promulgated or required) before the gospel was revealed. Loving our enemies, is one instance in a few of many such precepts: mercy to the miserable, bearing the cross, hope and joy in tribulations (in the prospect of their having a desired issue), love, thankfulness, prayer, and obedience to God Redeemer, zealous witnessing against sin, and witnessing for truth in case of defection from the faith, or defection from the holiness of the gospel, confessing our faults to one another, and forgiving one another. All the ceremonial precepts under the Old Testament, together with the institutions of Christ under the New Testament — faith in Jesus Christ, repentance unto life, with many more, to say nothing of personal and particular precepts — were not actually given before the gospel was revealed. All of these are nevertheless reducible to the law of the Ten Commandments, many of them being plain duties of the law of nature, though they had no due and proper objects, nor any occasions to be exercised in an innocent state.
It is true, there are many of them we would never have heard of unless the gospel had been revealed; yet they are not therefore in any proper sense, precepts of the Gospel, but precepts of the Law, which is exceedingly broad, extending to new objects, occasions, and circumstances. The law says one thing to the unmarried person, and another thing to the same person when married; it says one thing to him as a child, and another thing to him as a parent, etc., yet it is still the same law. The law of God is perfect, and like its Author, it must reach to every condition of the creature; but if every new duty or new object of faith required a new law, how strangely laws must be multiplied! The law itself (even as in the case of a man) may meet with many changes, and yet remain the same as to its essence. Now, as to faith and repentance, though the ability to exercise and accept them is by the gospel, yet it is evident that they must be regulated by the same law, because the transgression of that law made them necessary. The essence of repentance, it is plain, lies in repeating and renewing, with a suitable frame of spirit, the duties that had been omitted, or in observing the law that one had violated. For just as the divine perfections are the rule and pattern of God’s image in man, in his regeneration as well as in his creation, so the holy law of God is the rule of our repentance, as well as the rule of our primitive obedience. And we cannot see why faith, when it has God Mediator or God Redeemer for its object, may not come from the same law as when it had God Creator or God Preserver for its object.