Samuel Rutherford’s 1655 treatise on covenant theology, setting the covenant of grace against Adam’s covenant of works and tracing the covenant of redemption — the eternal “suretyship” between God the Father and Christ the Son as Mediator — across forty-one chapters of close, scholastic argument.
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The Covenant of Life Opened, or A Treatise of the Covenant of Grace was first published in 1655, written by Samuel Rutherford while he was professor of divinity at St Andrews. It belongs to the seventeenth-century Scottish covenant theology that set the whole of redemption within a framework of divine covenants. Rutherford divides the work into two parts — “Of the Covenant of Grace” and “Of the Mediator of the Covenant” — and forty-one chapters, opening the covenant of grace by contrasting it with the covenant of works God made with Adam.
Rutherford argues that Adam’s covenant of works was always a “time-dispensation” — “a summer-house built to be demolished” — meant to give way to a covenant of grace founded not on human merit but on Christ. The treatise’s distinctive contribution is its handling of the covenant of redemption, or suretyship: the eternal agreement between God the Father and the Son in which Christ consents to stand as Mediator and Surety for the elect. Reasoning in the close, distinction-drawing manner of the schools, Rutherford works through the intent of the threat in Genesis 2:17, the limits of Christ’s satisfaction, the case for infant baptism, the marks of a true covenanter, and whether living or persevering faith is the condition of the covenant.
Rutherford states in his preface that his real aim is the question he judged most neglected and most practical: the “application of covenant promises, and the influences of the Spirit under the covenant of grace” — what a soul can do “under deadness” so that it may lie open to God. Alongside the polemic against Arminian and universal-grace positions, the book turns repeatedly to self-examination: how to try your own covenant state, how a child of God fears the law’s threats, and why Christ died not to erase the sense of sin but to deepen it.
The Author’s Preface to the Reader
Christian Reader,
Many have written to the edifying of the godly on this excellent subject. I cannot do much to add to it, but have contributed some further thoughts to what has already been said, intending a more practical treatment of the last point in another treatise — namely, the application of covenant promises, and the influences of the Spirit under the covenant of grace. Of these two, especially the latter, few have written practically.
It is a matter of great importance to show the union of our duty and the breathings of the Lord, and what can be done under deadness: whether to fetch the wind, or to be placed in a spiritual condition so that the soul may lie open to the influences of God. My desire in this is to speak for truth, neither for nor against any persons — their names I keep silent, concealing any opponent — judging that truth is all the more desirable when it may possibly be had with peace, and with as little blowing or stirring of the fire of contradiction as can be. What is said here by way of dispute, the moderate reader who is not drawn to that approach may pass over and read what is practical.
The author has been, lest truth should suffer by him, somewhat darkened — as report has it — with the name, I knew not what, of a Protester, as one who has deserted the government and discipline of the Church of God in Scotland. But my humble thoughts are the same as they were before, though I can add nothing to the truth. I look on those men whom the world names Protesters, Schismatics, and Separatists as sinful men who stand in need of a Saviour, and as such who desire to fear God and love his name, and who would gladly have our practice and walk come a little nearer to the rule of the gospel, and that our land might mourn for all the abominations committed in it. I desire this to be said without any reflection upon any of the godly in the land who, on that point, are of another judgment.
It is my desire to the Lord that he would let us experience the reality of that word in Isaiah 65:8: “Thus saith the Lord, As the new wine is found in a cluster, and one saith, Destroy it not, for a blessing is in it: so will I do for my servants’ sakes, that I may not destroy them all.” The Lord Jesus be with your spirit.
Yours in the Lord Jesus, S. R.
Chapter 1: What the Covenant of Life Covers: Four Heads
The topics to be addressed concerning the covenant of life fall under four heads: Of these, especially the last, not much has been treated by anyone in a practical way.
1. The nature and differences of the covenant of works and the covenant of grace.
2. The Mediator of the covenant of life.
3. The application of covenant promises.
4. The covenant influences of grace under the Gospel.
Chapter 2: Propositions Touching Abraham’s Covenant State
1. The Apostle writes in 1 Corinthians 15:47, “The first man is of the earth, earthy; the second man is the Lord from Heaven.” He speaks of two great public figures, the noble heads of great families. The condition of the first Adam is animal and earthly; that of the second Adam is spiritual and heavenly. Without doubt, to be born of the house and seed of the second Adam (John 1:12-13) must eclipse the glory of the first birth — there is no great ground to boast of the outward lustre of nobility and good blood. Yet when the creature called “I” and “self” creeps in to lodge in a poor, feeble piece of clay, that gilded clay must become something of a god to itself.
2. The finest of Adam’s Paradise state is an earthly condition, as is evident from his eating (Gen. 2:9, 16), his sleeping (v. 21), his being placed in a garden to tend it (vv. 8, 16-17), his marriage (vv. 23-24), and his lordship over birds, beasts, and fishes (Gen. 1:28). But in the second Adam, beyond all these, we are gifted with a life of more worth than many acres of vineyards.
Those who would conquer again the many lands our first father Adam sold, who “join house to house and lay field to field, till there be no place” (Isa. 5:8), who disinherit all others as though they were bastard heirs while fancying themselves the only rightful heirs of Adam, that they may be placed alone in the midst of the earth — these declare that there is much of the first Adam in them and little of the second. The more spiritual any person is, the more they rise above this world of nothings.
3. Mortality may be called supernatural to the earthy part of Adam, since it is not naturally due to a body of earth to claim life forever. Yet immortality is due to whole Adam, consisting of soul and body and endowed with the image of God, for the soul cannot die.
4. But if we speak of such a life as heavenly communion with God — the life Adam would have had as one who had run well and won the gold and the crown — such a life was due to Adam not by nature but by promise.
5. Adam in his first state was not predestined to a law-glory, nor to the inward influences of God to carry him through to perseverance. Nor could he bless God that he was chosen before the foundation of the world to be law-holy, as in Ephesians 1:4. But was Adam then not predestined to eternal life through Jesus Christ? He was — but not as a public person representing all his sons. Rather, he stood as another single person, such as Abraham or Jacob. For Gospel predestination concerns not a nature held in common but this or that particular person. Therefore we were not predestined to eternal life in Adam, but in Christ (Rom. 8:29-30).
6. Therefore Adam fell totally and finally from the state of law-life, but not from the state of Gospel election to glory. For the Lord had in the law-dispensation a design of love: to set up a theater of free grace. The way of works was always a time-dispensation, like a summer-house built to be demolished, as though the Lord intended that works and nature should be a transient arrangement and no permanent court for righteousness. Hence the law is now the relic of an old standing court, a day of assizes for condemning those who will acknowledge no tribunal of grace but only one of works. It is a just court to terrify robbers and restrain outlaws and vagabonds; but for believers it now serves a far different end.
Chapter 3: The Intent and Sense of the Threat in Genesis 2:17 and Genesis 3
We must distinguish between the intent of the one making the threat and the intent and sense of the threat itself.
Law-threats may be well explained by how they are executed against the persons to whom they are directed. For example, in 1 Kings 11:30 compared with 1 Kings 12:15-16, ten tribes are taken from David’s house according to the Word of the Lord. Because the threat of death was executed upon Christ (1 Pet 3:18; Gal 3:10-14), the threat in Genesis 2:17 and Deuteronomy 27:26 must have been intended against the man Christ. And because believers die, as all do (Heb 9:27), the threat must also have been intended against them, since they sinned in Adam. And because it is beyond question that the reprobate die the first and second death, the threat must have been intended against them as well.
Therefore, in the intent of the one making the threat, the threat was mixed, partly legal, partly evangelical, according to the respective persons the Lord had in view. He had in his heart both Law and Gospel. It is thus pointless to ask what kind of death, and whether it was purely legal, that the Lord threatened to Adam, for that question assumes that the covenant of works was to stand and that the Lord was to deny a Savior to fallen man. What we can say is this: the death the Lord actually inflicts is the death he intended to inflict. The Lord did not decree to inflict a merely legal death, both first and second, personally upon Adam and all his race.
Objection: Adam was to believe he would certainly die, for the threat in Genesis 2:17 was conditional on his sinning. Otherwise we must say that Adam was to believe he would not actually die, but that cannot be said, since it would mean he was to believe the direct contradiction of the Lord’s true threat, which was the lie of the serpent (Gen 3).
Answer: He was to believe neither of the two as a certain outcome, because there are two sorts of threats. Some are pure threats only, which reveal what God may do by law, but not what he has decreed and actually intended to bring about. These threats contain some condition, either expressed elsewhere in Scripture or reserved in the mind of the Lord.
1. The Lord threatened Adam while remaining free and absolute either to inflict the punishment or to provide an evangelical remedy. Even so, Solomon said to Shimei (1 Kgs 2:37), “In the day thou passest over the brook Kidron, thou shalt surely die”, that is, you shall be guilty of death. Yet it cannot be denied that Solomon reserved his own kingly power either to pardon Shimei, or to soften or change the sentence.
2. The words of the law reveal what the magistrate may rightly do, and what the guilty deserves by law. They do not reveal the absolute decree of the lawgiver, nor what punishment shall actually be inflicted upon the guilty as a thing decreed by the Lord. So in Genesis 9:6, the murderer shall die by the sword of the magistrate; and in Exodus 22:18-20, the witch, the man who lies with a beast, and the one who sacrifices to a strange god shall die, by right and by law-deserving. But it does not follow that all who commit these abominations actually die for it, as is clear in the kings of Assyria, Chaldea, and many in Israel, who were not put to death but lived, though this was contrary to the Word of God.
3. The express precepts of the Decalogue, “Thou shalt have no other gods before me,” “Thou shalt not kill, Thou shalt not steal,” etc., show what we ought not to do by Law, but not what shall actually come to pass. For there are not a few who do actually worship strange gods, kill, and steal. But there are other threatenings which are both threatenings and also prophecies: these reveal both the Law and the fact, showing what the Lawgiver may by right inflict, and what shall actually come to pass upon transgressors if they continue in impenitence (Rom 2:1-3; Rom 1:18; 1 Cor 6:9-10).
Objection: Then in all threatenings and promises we are not to believe that, though we sin, we shall actually die, nor that, though we obey and believe, God shall fulfill his promise and that our salvation shall come to pass, we are only to believe by right that we deserve to die, and that we shall have eternal life by right of promise, but not actually and according to the event.
Answer: Something must first be said of the threatenings, and then of the promises.
As for the sense in which we are to believe: in conditional threatenings (such as “yet forty days and Nineveh shall be destroyed,” or “in that day you eat you shall surely die, in your person and all yours, the first and second death”) we are not to believe the event, nor is it carnal security to disbelieve such an event. We are only to have a godly fear and to tremble at the dreadful punishment those threats declare is deserved. Such threatenings, as they always apply to all within the Visible Church, are to be understood and believed with an evangelical exception of repentance. If, therefore, Adam believed that he and all his should in their own persons actually suffer the first and second death irrecoverably, he had no warrant for any such belief.
The same may be said of Nineveh. For when the Lord said, “In the day that you eat you shall die, the first and second death, you and all your children personally,” his meaning was: except I provide an evangelical remedy and a Saviour. Godly fear trembles more at the darkening of God’s glory in a broken Law than at the event of inflicted wrath, were it even hell’s fire.
Objection: Adam was to believe no such exception.
Answer: True. Because it was not revealed. Nor was he to believe the contrary, that he should irrecoverably and eternally perish, because that was not revealed either. The threatening of the Law does not deny the evangelical remedy, just as it does not affirm it.
Objection: Then was Adam to believe that what the Serpent said was true: “You shall not surely die” according to the event, but “you shall be as gods, living and knowing good and evil”?
Answer: That does not follow either. In the meaning of the liar, it was not true that they should not die, whether in terms of desert (for Satan was disputing the equity and righteousness of the Law and its threatening) or actually in the event. Both were false, and neither was revealed, and faith is not to go beyond what is revealed of God. Satan disputed against both the equity of the threatening (as though it were unjust by right) and against the event (as a fiction that should not come to pass). In the event, it did indeed not come to pass, but not according to the Serpent’s lying and false principles.
Objection: Was Adam then to despair and believe nothing of a Saviour?
Answer: He was not obliged to despair, but to rely, by virtue of the first Commandment of the Decalogue, upon a God infinitely powerful, merciful, gracious, and wise to save. That was revealed and written in his heart, and it is far from despair. But in the interval between the fall and the Lord’s announcement of the blessed Gospel and the news of the seed to come, he was to trust in God for possible deliverance in general, as the Law of Nature requires. He was not, however, to believe anything of unrevealed particulars, still less of the mystery of the Gospel, “which was kept secret since the world began” (Rom 16:25).
Objection: Then may not also the damned in hell, who are not loosed from their obligation to the Law of Nature and the first Commandment, be obliged to rely on an infinite and almighty God for their deliverance? For they are not obliged to despair, nor is there an obligation to any sin.
Answer: There is not the like reason. Though the damned remain bound by the Law of Nature and must look even from their despair to God’s whole all-sufficiency, they must do so with the exception of his revealed Justice and Truth. He has expressly revealed “that their worm never dies, and their fire never goes out.” And to believe that is not to despair.
Objection: What then are those Heathens to believe as touching that threatening, who have never heard of the Gospel?
Answer: They are under the Law of Nature, and are to believe that sin deserves wrath proportional to the infinite majesty of the one against whom it is committed, and to obey the Law of Nature and read the Book of Creation carefully. But if news and rumor of a Savior reaches their ears, their sin cannot but be evangelical in not pursuing the reality and truth of so sovereign a remedy. Yet it should not be supposed, even though the Gospel has come to all nations (Rom 16:26), that this means, first, every generation of every nation, or second, every individual person, whether young or of age, in every nation under heaven. Both experience and Scripture speak against that reading.
Objection: But is not the covenant of grace contrary to the Law and covenant of works?
Answer: There is a diversity between them, but contrary wills cannot be asserted of the holy Lord. Indeed, the Gospel may be proved from the Law, and from the first commandment of the Decalogue, if any act of the Lord’s free will and infinite wisdom is added to prove the assumption. Thus:
If the first commandment teaches that God is infinitely wise, merciful, gracious, just, and able to save, then, if it so pleases him, he shall save.
But the first commandment teaches just that. And the Gospel, revealing the unsearchable riches of Christ (Eph 3:8), says as much expressly. Therefore.
Doctrine: As to the promises, they contain not only the equity and goodness of the thing promised, but also that the Lord shall actually perform, and intends to perform, what he has promised, on condition that we fulfill the required condition. In this the promises differ considerably from threats that are only threats of what God may do in law, but not from those threats that are both threats and also prophetical predictions of what shall come to pass. We must therefore distinguish between threats simply as threats and threats of this particular kind.
The promises are to be considered both as they are preached and announced to all within the visible church, and as they are made in God’s intention toward the elect and the children of the promise. The threats admit of a similar twofold consideration.
The promises to the elect, as God intends them, reveal that the Lord both minds to give the blessing promised and gives the grace to perform the condition. In this sense they are evangelical promises both in their matter and in the Lord’s intention.
As they are set before the reprobate, who from birth to death are always under a covenant of works as touching the Lord’s holy decree, those promises are materially evangelical but formally and in the Lord’s intention legal. Every dispensation to the reprobate is legal, because the Lord has decreed to deny them the grace by which they might fulfill the condition of the promise. This is what is proper to the Law, just as it is what distinguishes the Gospel: that the Lord both gives the mercy promised and gives the grace to fulfill the condition of the promise.
The threats to believers, especially legal ones such as “if you believers fall away, you shall eternally perish,” are to believers materially legal, peremptory, and admitting no exception. Yet they are formally and in the Lord’s intention directed to believers with an evangelical purpose. They do not say that the Lord intends or decrees that believers shall eternally perish, for he has predestined them to the contrary, namely to grace and glory (Eph 1:4).
Nor do the threats require believers to believe either their eternal damnation or their final and total falling away, which inevitably leads there. For believers, knowing that they are in Christ (2 Cor 13:5; Rom 8:16-17) and freed from condemnation (Rom 8:1), are to believe the contrary of the former, that is, life eternal (John 4:14; 1 Thes 5:9; John 3:16), and the contrary of the latter, that is, the promise of perseverance made to them (Jer 32:39-40; Isa 59:21; John 10:27-28; John 17:20-21; 1 Pet 1:3-5; Mat 16:16-17, 19).
Therefore these threats are not to be believed by the regenerate as certainly to come to pass in their own persons, but only as legal motives to press them to work out their salvation in fear and trembling, and to cleave so much the closer to Christ, insofar as the condition of those who are under the Law is apprehended to be dreadful.
But reprobates and unbelievers are not to believe that God decrees and intends for them the thing promised and the grace to fulfill the condition. They are to believe only their obligation to trusting reliance on, and Gospel faith in, God as revealed in the Mediator; and that if they continue in opposing Christ, they not only deserve by Law (which Law-deserving believers are also to apprehend) to be broken, but actually and as to the outcome shall eternally perish. Believers are to believe the Decree of God to save them, even when they hear the threatenings, for it is revealed. But the reprobate are to believe only the sense, the Law-deserving, and the outcome of the threatening if they do not repent, and are to believe no decree to save them.
Chapter 4: The Elect Before Conversion, Faith, and the Limits of Christ’s Satisfaction
Whether the elect who are not yet converted are under wrath is a question many find difficult. It is true that they are servants of sin (Rom. 6:17), blind and under the power of Satan as reprobates are (Acts 26:18), and by nature children of wrath, even as others (Eph. 2:3).
Answer: Their sins committed before conversion are, under the covenant of works, such as deserve everlasting condemnation, and they are by right, in relation to that covenant, heirs of wrath as much as anyone else.
2. But we must distinguish between two states: the state of election and everlasting, though unseen, love that they are under with respect to their persons, and the state of a sinful way that they are born into and walk in as others do, until they are converted. As to the former state, it is true what is said in Jer. 31:3, “I have loved thee with an everlasting love.” See also Rom. 9:12–13 and Eph. 1:4. God therefore never hates their persons.
3. The punishment of their sins and the wrath they are under must be considered in two ways.
1.) First, materially and in the bulk: in this sense they are under law-strokes and law-wrath, that is, law-punishment, as others are (Eph. 2:3), and the other passages cited are to be understood in this way.
2.) Second, the wrath must be considered formally: in this sense it is denied that the punishment of the non-converted elect, on account of their sinful way of life, is any part of the law-vengeance or curse that Christ bore for the other sins they would later commit after conversion.
[1] This is denied, first, because when Christ says in John 5:24 that the believer has passed from death, meaning death as a curse, and shall never come to judgment and condemnation, he cannot mean that they have half passed from the curse and half not.
[2] Believers are delivered in Christ from the victory, sting, and power of sin, from the curse of the law, and from every curse in affliction, and from condemnation, not in part only but in whole. Otherwise their triumph would be only partial, contrary to 1 Cor. 15:54–56, Hos. 13:14, and Isa. 25:8. Nor would they be washed from all their sins and the stains thereof in his blood, if they might wash themselves from any stain by bearing a part of the law-curse in themselves, contrary to Song of Solomon 4:7, Jer. 50:20, John 1:29, 1 John 1:7, and Rom. 8:1.
[3] Whatever Christ was made for the redeemed, he was made it fully for them, in part and in whole, for he is their perfect Savior. But Gal. 3:13 says “He is made a curse for us,” and he is able to save to the uttermost all who come to him (Heb. 7:27). Therefore half or part of satisfactory vengeance cannot rest upon us and the other half upon Christ, for that would make men and martyrs joint satisfiers of justice with Christ by their own blood and sufferings, as if to ward off the scaldings of purgatory. For although we teach, against the Antinomians, that the godly are punished for sins according to justice, that punishment is evangelical justice, not law-justice; they do not bear so much as a dram’s weight of satisfactory wrath and curse jointly with Christ. The Antinomians say that sin, root and branch, is taken away in justification, so that there is no sin nor punishment for sin in the justified man.
[4] Believers are blessed through Jesus Christ (Gal. 3:10, 13; Ps. 32:1–2; Rom. 4:6; Ps. 2:12; Ps. 119:1). Their afflictions and death are blessed and precious in the eyes of the Lord, not qualified with any law-curse (Job 5:17; Ps. 94:12; Matt. 5:6; Luke 6:22; 1 Pet. 1:6; 1 Pet. 4:13; Ps. 21:3–6; Ps. 34:17–19; Rev. 14:13; Ps. 116:15; Ps. 72:14; Ps. 37:37). They are asleep in Christ and die in the Lord (1 Thess. 4:14, 16). Nor can the Antinomians and Socinians say this applies only under the New Testament, for dying Jacob said in Gen. 49:18, “Lord I have waited for thy salvation”; and Isa. 57:1–2 says that when the righteous man is taken away he shall enter into peace. The Lord is the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob even when their bodies are rotten (Exod. 3:6; Matt. 22:32).
[5] This comes too near to the opinion of those who make faith a cause of satisfaction for sin — which is what they must teach if they hold that Christ paid a ransom on the cross for the sins of each and every person. For whatever, being added, makes a satisfaction count and be formally reckoned as satisfaction in order to expiate a man’s sins (so that justice cannot then require him to suffer for them), and whatever, being removed, makes that paid satisfaction and ransom — though never taken back by the payer — no longer a satisfaction for that man, nor for devils: that thing is too close to being part of the very nature of the satisfaction itself.
Consider an illustration. Suppose someone pays a sum that fully exhausts the debt of a bankrupt man, on the condition that the bankrupt man say Amen to the payment; otherwise it shall count as unpaid. If the bankrupt man refuses to say Amen, the payer must take the sum back. For if he does not take it back, but it stands paid and fully satisfies the debt, then the man’s debt is paid, and the creditor in justice cannot exact one farthing from him. Now nothing given to the justice of God by way of satisfaction for the sins of unbelievers was ever repeated or taken back again by Christ.
But, they say, the ransom was not paid at all for Judas, but only on the condition that he believe; he never believed, and therefore it was never paid for Judas. The answer is that this is precisely what we say: that Christ gave no real ransom at all for the sins of Judas by way of satisfaction. But they say that a ransom was paid as truly for all the sins of Judas (final unbelief excepted) to free him in justice from eternal strokes, as for all the sins of Peter to free him — only it is not accepted by the creditor because Judas did not assent to the bargain by faith.
But the act of assenting or not assenting, accepting or not accepting, which comes after the payment, adds or removes nothing with respect to the completeness and perfection of the satisfaction made to exhaust justice. Justice does not receive two satisfactions or ransoms for Judas: one on the cross from Christ, and another in hell from Judas. It must therefore follow that real payment was made to justice for all the sins of Judas on the cross, and that he suffers in hell for none of them except final unbelief alone, which is no sin against the covenant of works and its justice, but only and formally against the covenant of grace. In that case, the satisfying of divine justice for sins must be split and shared between Christ and Judas, which Scripture does not teach.
Furthermore, the Father either accepts the ransom of Christ because it is intrinsically and in itself sufficiently satisfactory, or because Judas believes it to be so. The latter cannot be said, for believing adds nothing to the intrinsic sufficiency of the satisfaction, just as not believing takes nothing from it. So the Father’s formal reason for accepting Christ’s satisfaction would have to rest upon our poor act of believing, whereas the formal ground of that acceptance is the intrinsic excellence and worth of the sacrifice, “being an offering of a sweet smelling savour to God” (Eph. 5:2). It is accepted because he offered the ransom of the blood of the God-man, of the Prince of life (Acts 20:28; 1 Cor. 2:8), and offered himself to God (Eph. 5:25–26; Heb. 9:14; Matt. 20:28; 1 Tim. 2:6; Rev. 1:5). There is no sufficiency in his death derived from the worth of believing. And the reason he accepts the ransom for Peter and not for another is the election of grace.
It is true that the blood is a price that could have been refused, but it is refusable only in this sense: the Lord might have dealt with Adam and all his sons by a law-way and declined to give his Son as a ransom for us. It is not refusable because of any insufficiency in the ransom itself. Faith stands to satisfaction as the bringing near and laying of dry fuel to a fire. The fuel is only the condition of burning; the fire is the formal cause of burning.
Indeed, if we speak precisely, faith is not even a condition without which offended justice is unsatisfied, nor is it a condition, established by any Scripture in the world, without which God did not lay our iniquities on Christ. For whether we believe or not, “God laid our iniquities upon him, and made him sin for us” (Isa. 53:6; 2 Cor. 5:21). Therefore, by necessity of justice, he must accept that ransom as intrinsically sufficient, a ransom that restored more glory to God than the sins of all for whom Christ died had taken from him. Nor is it possible to say that any act of obedience or believing can perfect the satisfaction of Christ and make it sufficient, or causatively make it ours.
For God requires faith as a condition of our actual reconciliation not by any necessity of justice, but of his own free pleasure. He might have required other acts of obedience such as love. He might have accepted the ransom without requiring any act of obedience on our part at all, just as the Lord bestowed calm seas and deliverance from shipwreck upon the idolatrous sailors by the very act of casting Jonah into the sea, without any saving faith on their part. Or as a gracious prince may send a pardon to free a condemned criminal from death and command that it be valid in law, without the man’s knowledge and far less his acceptance of it on bended knee. This is especially so since, by a special covenant of redemption between the Father and the Son, Christ restored abundantly more glory to God by suffering for all those for whom he died than they had taken from God by their sins, and that restitution was made to justice without any intervening act of the creature’s obedience.
But the truth is, it is much to be doubted whether those who hold that such a satisfaction was given to God for the sins of all, elect and reprobate alike, and yet that it shall not be valid in law nor effectual to quiet justice, so that all must still suffer eternal vengeance and perform personal satisfaction in hell unless some act of the creature’s obedience intervene to make it effectual, do really and sincerely acknowledge, against the Socinians, a real satisfaction and compensation made to offended justice by Christ. For how is it real, and not rather theatrical and merely formal, if it may and should be null and void unless the creature makes it real by believing? And especially if God, out of his absolutely free grace, himself works the condition of believing in us, can he give his Son as a ransom for us on condition that we believe, when he himself absolutely works that condition in us? They will not admit this.
Samuel Rutherford (c. 1600–1661) was a Scottish Presbyterian theologian, minister of Anwoth in Kirkcudbrightshire from 1627, and, after the Covenanting movement overthrew episcopal government in 1638, professor of divinity at the University of St Andrews. He was one of the Scottish commissioners to the Westminster Assembly in London (1643–1647). In 1644 he published Lex, Rex, arguing that the law stands above the king and that resistance to tyranny is legitimate — a book burned by the hangman after the Restoration. His prison letters from his 1636–1638 exile in Aberdeen were published after his death as Joshua Redivivus. He died at St Andrews on March 29, 1661, while under summons to answer a charge of treason.
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