Topic 1: Our Woeful Condition that All People Are in Naturally Due to Breaking the Covenant of Works

“It is your destruction, O Israel, That you are against Me” (Hosea 13:9 NASB).¹¹

The Almighty and Eternal God is three distinct persons¹²—the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, equally infinite in all perfections—in one and the same undivided Godhead. Before time,¹³ God most wisely decreed for His own glory whatever comes to pass in time. He most holily and unfailingly brings about all His decrees, but without being a partaker of the sin of any creature.¹⁴

In six days, God made all things out of nothing, all very good in their own kind.¹⁵ In particular, He made all the angels holy, and He made our first parents, Adam and Eve, the root of mankind, both upright and able to keep the Law¹⁶ written in their heart. This Law they were naturally bound to obey under pain of death, but God was not bound to reward their service. Yet God bound Himself when He entered into a Covenant or contract with them and their posterity to give them eternal life upon condition of perfect personal obedience, but threatening death¹⁷ if they should fail. This is the Covenant of Works.

Both angels and humans were subject to the change of their own free will as experience proved. (God has reserved to Himself the incommunicable¹⁸ property of being naturally unchangeable.) Many angels, of their own accord, fell by sin from their first state and became demons. Satan, one of those demons, spoke in a serpent and enticed our first parents into breaking the Covenant of Works by eating the forbidden fruit. By this sin, our first parents and their descendants (being in their loins, so to speak) as branches of the root, and thus included in the same Covenant with them, became not only liable to eternal death, but also lost all ability to please God.¹⁹ Indeed, they become, by nature, enemies to God and to all spiritual good, and inclined to only evil continually. This is our original sin, the bitter root of all our actual transgressions, in thought, word, and deed.

11 In the NASB and NKJV, words that do not appear in the original language text are in italics. This does not mean that those words should not be there. Both Hebrew, and especially Greek, are inflected languages. The forms of the root words and the grammar convey information that is not in the bare root words; this additional information must be conveyed in additional English words for the translation to be complete.

12 The term, persons, does not imply humanity. Some writers prefer to use subsistances or other terms. Because we cannot really understand the Trinity, persons expresses our ignorance at least as much as our understanding.

13 We now know that time, in any one place, is subject to change by gravity and speed. This shows that the time we experience is a part of this created universe, not part of the eternity that God “inhabits.” Even ancient writers understood the difference without the help of Relativity. Because we are made in God’s image, it may be that God knows some analog in His eternity to our created time, but unlike us, God’s eternity does not in any way control Him; quite the reverse.

14 Today, we mostly use creature as a synonym for animal, but in this Sum, the word refers to anything that God created, that is, anything in this universe.

15 In spite of the widely accepted misinterpretations of observable phenomena by mainstream scientists, we must make the choice to trust that God is perfectly honest and capable of telling a straight story in a simple narrative. If we think we cannot trust God in Genesis Chapters 1 and 2, how can we know that we can trust Him in the beloved John 3:16 promises? For further information, the reader may consult the quite accessible Simple Proof of 144 Hour Creation, https://beforgiven.info/ContemporaryWorks.htm#Bookmark%202 accessed June 10, 2025, and https://answersingenesis.org.

16 Throughout this Sum, Law or Moral Law (capitalized) refers to all of the moral law commanded by God in the Holy Bible, summarized in the Ten Commandments, and by “And he answered, ‘You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength and with all your mind, and your neighbor as yourself’” (Luke 10:27 ESV). However, in the New Testament, especially Paul’s Epistles, “the Law” often refers to the ceremonial and Levitical ordinances that were fulfilled and abrogated by the Lord Jesus. Prior to Christ’s fulfillment, these laws were part of the moral law.

17 It is clear from the context of Scripture as a whole that life is used to indicate life on earth in some places, but eternal life in Heaven with God in other places. Likewise death may refer to either death from earth into an eternal state (Heaven or Hell) or eternal death in Hell. In this paragraph, death refers both to death from earth and death into eternal Hell. Had Adam obeyed perfectly, he would have not experienced either earthly death or eternal death. Scripture seems silent as to whether Adam ever savingly repented. Life may also refer to being born again from above, followed by spiritual awakening on earth and eternal life in Heaven. Context must determine which of all these meanings applies.

18 An incommunicable property or attribute is one that is intrinsically unique to God, whereas a communicable property is one that God has perfectly in Himself, but can create into his some of His creatures, for example, the ability to love in mankind (but absent in bacteria).

19 Both of our first parents did sin and brought death and a depraved nature upon themselves. But Scripture is clear that original sin and its horrible consequences also passed from Adam to his sons and daughters, and likewise, original sin is passed down from father to sons and daughters in each generation (but not from mothers). The propagation of original sin is not by physical or biological means, but spiritual. Hence, there is no hope of excising original sin by, for example, manipulation of DNA.