The State of Innocence: Man as God Made Him
“Lo! this only have I found, that God hath made man upright; but they have sought out many inventions.” (Eccl 7:29)
There are four things that everyone who would see heaven needs to know. First, what man was in the state of innocence, as God made him. Second, what he is in the state of corrupt nature, as he has unmade himself. Third, what he must be in the state of grace, as created in Christ Jesus for good works, if he is ever to share in the inheritance of the saints in light. And last, what he shall be in his eternal state, as determined by the Judge of all, either perfectly happy or completely miserable, and that forever. These are weighty matters that touch the heart of practical godliness, from which most people, and even many professing believers in this declining age, are entirely estranged. I intend, therefore, under divine guidance, to open up these things and apply them.
I begin with the first of them, namely, the State of Innocence. By beholding man polished after the likeness of a palace, we may be more deeply moved by the ruins; we may prize all the more that matchless Person whom the Father has appointed as the repairer of the breach; and we may with firm resolve set out on that way which leads to the city with unmovable foundations. In the text we have three things.
1. The state of innocence in which man was created: “God hath made man upright.” By “man” here we are to understand our first parents, the original pair, the root of mankind, the world in miniature, and the fountain from which all generations have streamed. This appears from comparing (Gen 5:1–2): “In the day that God created man, in the likeness of God made he him; male and female created he them, and blessed them, and called their name Adam.” The original word is the same as in our text. In this sense, man was made right, agreeable to the nature of God, whose work is perfect, without any imperfection, corruption, or principle of corruption in body or soul. He was made upright, that is, straight with the will and law of God, without any irregularity in his soul.
By the bearing it received in creation, his soul pointed directly toward God as its chief end. This straight inclination was represented, as in an emblem, by the erect posture of his body, a posture that no other living creature shares. What David was in a gospel sense, Adam was in a legal sense: one according to God’s own heart, altogether righteous, pure, and holy. God made him thus. He did not first make man and then make him righteous; in the very act of making him, he made him righteous. Original righteousness was created together with him, so that in the same moment he was a man, he was a righteous man, morally good. With the same breath by which God breathed a living soul into him, he breathed a righteous soul.
2. Here is man’s fallen state: “But they have sought out many inventions.” They fell away from their rest in God and fell to seeking inventions of their own to mend their condition, and they utterly ruined it. Their ruin came from their own free choice. They would not remain as God had made them, but sought out inventions to deform and undo themselves.
3. Observe here the certainty and importance of these things: “Lo! this only have I found.” Believe them, they are the result of a careful search and serious inquiry carried out by the wisest of men. In the two preceding verses Solomon represents himself as searching for goodness in the world, but the outcome was that he could find no satisfying conclusion, though not for lack of effort, for he counted one by one to work out the sum. “Behold, this I have found (saith the Preacher), to wit, that yet my soul seeketh, but I find not.” He could make no discovery of it that would settle his inquiry. He found good men very rare, one, as it were, among a thousand. Good women he found more rare still, not one good among his thousand wives and concubines (1 Kgs 11:3).
But could that satisfy the grand question, “Where shall Wisdom be found?” No, it could not. (And if others in this matter have had different experiences from Solomon’s, that is no reflection on his discernment, nor can it decide the question, which will remain undetermined until the last day.) Yet amid all this uncertainty, one point has been found and fixed: “This have I found.” You may depend on it as most certain truth and be fully satisfied in it. “Lo this!”, fix your eyes on it as something worthy of the deepest and most serious attention. Man’s nature is now depraved; but that depravation was not from God, for “He made man upright”, it came from themselves, for “they have sought out many inventions.”
Doctrine. God made man altogether righteous.
This is the state of innocence in which God placed man in the world. It is described in the Holy Scriptures only briefly in comparison with the states that follow, because it lasted no time at all, it passed like a fleeting shadow, through man’s abuse of the freedom of his own will. I shall first inquire into the righteousness of this state in which man was created; second, set before you some of the happy accompaniments and consequences of it; and last, apply the whole.
Regarding the righteousness of this state, consider that just as uncreated righteousness, the righteousness of God, is the supreme rule, so all created righteousness, whether of man or angels, has respect to a law as its rule and consists in conformity to it. A creature can no more be morally independent of God in its actions and powers than it can be naturally independent of him. A creature, as a creature, must acknowledge the Creator’s will as its supreme law; for as it cannot exist without him, so it must not act except for him, according to his will. Yet no law obliges until it is revealed. It follows, therefore, that there was a law to which man as a rational creature was subject at his creation, and that this law was revealed to him.
“God made man upright,” says the text. This presupposes a law to which man was conformed in his creation, just as when anything is made regular or according to rule, the rule itself is necessarily presupposed. From this we may gather that this law was none other than the eternal, indispensable law of righteousness, observed in all points by the second Adam, opposed by the carnal mind, and of which some traces remain even among the pagans, who, “having not the law, are a law unto themselves” (Rom 2:15).
In short, this law is the very same one that was afterward summed up in the Ten Commandments and proclaimed on Mount Sinai to the Israelites, what we call the moral law. Man’s righteousness consisted in conformity to this law. More particularly, there is a twofold conformity required of man: a conformity of the powers of his soul to the law, which may be called habitual righteousness; and a conformity of all his actions to it, which is actual righteousness. God made man habitually righteous; man was to make himself actually righteous. The former was the stock God placed in his hand; the latter was the improvement he should have made of it.
To sum up what I have said: the righteousness in which man was created was the conformity of all the faculties and powers of his soul to the moral law. This is what we call original righteousness, with which man was originally endowed. We may consider it under three things.
First, man’s understanding was a lamp of light. He had perfect knowledge of the law and of his duty accordingly. He was made after God’s image, and could not therefore lack knowledge, which is a part of that image (Col 3:10): “The new man is renewed in knowledge, after the image of him that created him.” This was indeed necessary to fit him for universal obedience, since no obedience can be according to the law unless it proceeds from an awareness of the commandment of God requiring it. Adam had no law written on tablets of stone, but it was written on his mind, the knowledge of it being created together with him. God impressed it on his soul and made him a law to himself, as the remnants of it among the heathens testify (Rom 2:14–15).
And since man was made to be the voice of creation in glorifying God in his works, we have reason to believe he had by nature an exact knowledge of the works of God. We see proof of this in his giving names to the beasts of the field and the birds of the air, names that express their very nature. “Whatsoever Adam called every living creature, that was the name thereof” (Gen 2:19). The dominion God gave him over the creatures, to use and dispose of them wisely according to his will, always in subordination to the will of God, seems to require no less than a knowledge of their natures. And beyond all this, his perfect knowledge of the law also proves his knowledge in the management of civil affairs, of which the law of God says, “a good man will guide with discretion” (Ps 112:5).
Second, his will aligned perfectly with God’s will (Eph 4:24). There was no corruption in his will, no bent or inclination toward evil, for that is what sin properly is. The apostle says in Romans 8:7, “I had not known sin, but by the law; for I had not known lust, except the law had said, Thou shalt not covet.” An inclination to evil is truly a fountain of sin, and therefore incompatible with the rectitude and uprightness that the text expressly says man was endowed with at creation. Man’s will was then directed and naturally inclined toward God and goodness, though mutably so. By its original constitution, it was disposed to follow the Creator’s will as a shadow follows a body. It was not left in equal balance between good and evil, for in that case man would not have been upright or habitually conformed to the law, which at no moment can allow a creature to be uninclined toward God as his chief end, any more than it can allow a man to be his own god.
The law was impressed upon Adam’s soul. Now, according to the new covenant, by which the image of God is repaired, this consists in two things: first, putting the law into the mind, which denotes knowledge of it; and second, writing it in the heart, which denotes inclinations in the will answering to the commands of the law (Heb 8:10). Just as the will, when renewed by grace, is by that grace natively inclined toward all the holiness the law requires, so the will of man as God first made him was endowed with natural inclinations toward everything the law commanded. If the regenerate are partakers of the divine nature, as they undoubtedly are according to Scripture (2 Pet 1:4), and if that divine nature includes nothing less than inclinations of the heart toward holiness, then surely Adam’s will could not have lacked this inclination, for in him the image of God was perfect.
