1. The distance between God and the creature is so great, that although reasonable creatures do owe obedience to him as their creator, yet they could never have attained the reward of life but by some voluntary condescension on God's part, which he hath been pleased to express by way of covenant. ( Luke 17:10; Job 35:7,8 )
2. Moreover, man having brought himself under the curse of the law by his fall, it pleased the Lord to make a covenant of grace, wherein he freely offereth unto sinners life and salvation by Jesus Christ, requiring of them faith in him, that they may be saved; and promising to give unto all those that are ordained unto eternal life, his Holy Spirit, to make them willing and able to believe. ( Genesis 2:17; Galatians 3:10; Romans 3:20, 21; Romans 8:3; Mark 16:15, 16; John 3:16; Ezekiel 36:26, 27; John 6:44, 45; Psalms 110:3 )
3. This covenant is revealed in the gospel; first of all to Adam in the promise of salvation by the seed of the woman, and afterwards by farther steps, until the full discovery thereof was completed in the New Testament; and it is founded in that eternal covenant transaction that was between the Father and the Son about the redemption of the elect; and it is alone by the grace of this covenant that all the posterity of fallen Adam that ever were saved did obtain life and blessed immortality, man being now utterly incapable of acceptance with God upon those terms on which Adam stood in his state of innocency. ( Genesis 3:15; Hebrews 1:1; 2 Timothy 1:9; Titus 1:2; Hebrews 11:6, 13; Romans 4:1, 2, &c.; Acts 4:12; John 8:56 )
Article 6 of the Fall of Man of Sin and of Punishment Thereof Section 1 Although God created man upright and perfect and gave him a righteous law, which had been unto life had he kept it, and threatened death upon the breach thereof, yet he did not long abide in this honor. Satan, using the subtlety of the serpent to subdue Eve, then by her seducing Adam, who, without any compulsion, did willfully transgress the law of their creation and the command given unto them in eating the forbidden fruit, which God was pleased, according to His wise and holy counsel, to permit, having purposed to order it to His own glory. Section 2. Our first parents, by this sin, fell from their original righteousness and communion with God, and we in them, whereby death came upon all, and all becoming dead in sin, and wholly defiled in all the faculties and parts of soul and body. Section 3.
They being the root and by God's appointment, standing in the room instead of all mankind, the guilt of the sin was imputed and corrupted, nature conveyed, to their posterity descending from them by ordinary generations, being now conceived in sin and by nature children of wrath, the servants of sin, the subjects of death and all other miseries, spiritual, temporal and eternal, unless the Lord Jesus set them free. Section 4, from this original corruption, whereby we are utterly indisposed, disabled, and made opposite to all good and wholly inclined to all evil, do proceed all actual transgressions. Section 5. The corruption of nature during this life doth remain in those that are regenerated, and although it be through Christ's pardon and mortified, yet both itself and the first motions thereof are truly and properly sin.