The Seed of Substitutionary Atonement is Sown in the Soil of Covenant Theology

Preface

The truth of the substitutionary atonement is at the very heart of the gospel, and this truth cannot exist consistently except in some degree of the acceptance of federal theology; a theology that affirms Adam's failed representation of the entire human race in the covenant of works as our federal head, and Christ's successful representation of the elect as a fulfillment of the covenant of works, also as our federal head.

From the beginning (Genesis 3:15) redemptive history has foretold the coming of The Seed of Abraham, Jeshua ha Messiah, God among us, The Anointed One, The Holy One of God, the Christ through the prophetic Word of God and that history has also shown all of us pictures of this Coming One through: the types and shadows of Old Covenant symbols. So even Adam and his immediate posterity had, through God’s curse of the Serpent, the gospel, a promise of good news and ever since then, God by His merciful grace has progressively revealed to the world this Jesus through His special revelatory work.

Perhaps most eloquently summed up in the words of Paul to the Corinthians, substitutionary atonement is described this way: “For our sake he made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.” (2 Corinthians 5:21). So the idea invested in the term substitution is that Christ did not merely do this thing for us—so as to only set an example, or to us—so as only to provide the foundation for a righteousness which in us would inhere. Certainly He did do it for us and eventually by His Spirit, to us, but not only that, He has done this thing in our place so we would not have to, and because we could not do it, even in the slightest. Substitution is that doctrine which teaches that, because of our deadness to spiritual things, Christ obeyed the commands of God’s Law perfectly—for us and in our place; He fulfilled the Law in every respect, and He endured all the wrath of God that would be due every elect individual had God not predestined them to good works and glory.

Covenant Theology

Christ came as the second, or last Adam (1 Corinthians 15:44-46); in that passage, Paul shows us the progression of the “two Adams” from the natural to the Spiritual. Christ fulfilled the covenant of works on our behalf—in our place. That which Adam failed to do in the covenant God made with Him, Christ succeeded in doing by His life of perfect obedience and His death of satisfaction which in turn displayed the intentions set forth in the covenant between The Father and Son and Holy Spirit for redemption. In the quote below, John Owen speaks of this eternal covenant:

“The will of the Father appointing and designing the Son to be the head, husband, deliverer, and redeemer of his elect, his church, his people, whom he did foreknow, with the will of the Son voluntarily, freely undertaking that work and all that was required thereunto, is that compact (for in that form it is proposed in the Scripture) that we treat of.”

The Covenant of Works

The covenant of works, or the covenant of life some have called it, is that covenant made with Adam and through which God offered life to Adam on the basis of Adam’s obedience to the law which God had revealed to him. The conditional nature of this covenant can be summed up in the formula, “Do this and you shall live”. Much like the covenant God made with Israel’s representative head Moses on Mt. Sinai, God promised Adam life if he obeyed, if he would not eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil; conversely, God promised to curse Adam and his posterity if he did not live up to the stipulations of that covenant. Before Adam had fallen, as he had been created by God, he had the ability to sin and the ability to not sin. Augustine of Hippo termed his state in Latin as, posse peccare, posse non peccare. We know Adam had the ability to sin because he did sin. We know that Adam had the ability to not sin because God created man and said His creation was very good; God created Adam and Eve holy and happy as the catechism says. We know that Adam failed to uphold the stipulations of this covenant but that Christ fulfilled them.

The Covenant of Grace

God made another covenant with man, this time with the man Abraham specifically and the promises of this covenant are to all his seed in Christ. We call this covenant the covenant of grace, and this covenant is unconditional. We know by the comments God made to Abraham in Genesis, and the nature of the cutting of the covenant itself that, God intended to fulfill the stipulations of this covenant on our behalf. As a luminous picture of this trans-historical covenant, God commanded Abraham to take his only son Isaac, his heir, heir of the promise to the top of Mount Moriah to sacrifice him on an alter for worship. Unknown to Abraham, God had prepared a substitute for Isaac. So after that day, Abraham and all subsequent generations of redeemed individuals are called to look upon this picture and see, first: that God the Father sacrificed God the Son on the cross, and that the knife blade that was raised to cut us off was stayed, we were loosed and taken down off the alter and Christ was bound, beaten, and cut off in our place.

The Grand Inconsistency

When those who have no idea what covenant theology is or those who berate covenant theologians co-opt the concept of substitutionary atonement, they do so at the expense of inconsistency in their own systems (or lack thereof). The inconsistency is this, that many who have rejected the covenantal view of redemptive history: that Christ merited the grounds of our justification by being the substitute Law-abider; He did this by meeting the stipulations of the covenant of works, the same covenant Adam failed to fulfill thus plunging his posterity into death, consequently will normally support a "Dispensational" system: that God relates to men in different economies of time by giving them specific revelation, conditions which they (even though by God's grace) are required to meet in order to please God and thus the end of such an economy usually occurs near the time when God determines that the stipulations of His special revelation of law has been adequately violated and/or disregarded, yet dispensational theologians still embrace the doctrine of substitution even though they largely reject the idea that a particular covenant and the trans-economical continuity thereof, was made with Adam (wherein he represented the entire human race) which he disobeyed as our representative, and that Christ (being the "Second Adam") obeyed all the stipulations of that covenant as our representative and effected redemption for His people. So you see that the idea of substitution grows out of the covenantal concept—Christ obeyed for us the covenant that Adam disobeyed for us. On the contrary, historic dispensational theology obviously does not sow in the soil of federal theology, nor do they have the grounds to systematically affirm Christ’s work as our substitute in covenant with God. I suppose in one sense this inconsistency is good, I'd rather see many redeemed and inconsistent evangelical dispensationalists who dislike "Covenant Theology" proper (for whatever reason) but who love the reformed doctrine of substitution than to see many consistent evangelical dispensationalists who reject, in hatred, the idea of substitution.