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sovereign and a benevolent God, but also, and especially, as a gracious and forgiving Father,
willing to pardon sin and to restore sinners to His blessed communion.
It is not easy to determine precisely who the second party is. In general it may be said that God
naturally established the covenant of grace with fallen man. Historically, there is no definite
indication of any limitation until we come to the time of Abraham. In course of time it became
perfectly evident, however, that this new covenant relation was not meant to include all men.
When God formally established the covenant with Abraham, He limited it to the patriarch and
his seed. Consequently, the question arises as to the exact limits of the covenant.
Reformed theologians are not unanimous in answering this question. Some simply say that God
made the covenant with the sinner, but this suggests no limitation whatsoever, and therefore
does not satisfy. Others assert that He established it with Abraham and his seed, that is, his
natural, but especially his spiritual, descendants; or, put in a more general form, with believers
and their seed. The great majority of them, however, maintain that He entered into covenant
relationship with the elect or the elect sinner in Christ. This position was taken by earlier as well
as by later representatives of federal theology. Even Bullinger says the “covenant of God
includes the entire seed of Abraham, that is, the believers.” He finds this to be in harmony with
Paul’s interpretation of “the seed” in Gal. 3. At the same time he also holds that the children of
believers are in a certain sense included in the covenant.[Cf. the quotations in A. J. Van ‘t Hooft,
De Theologie van Heinrich Bullinger, pp. 47, 172.] And Olevianus, co-author with Ursinus of the
Heidelberg Catechism, says that God established the covenant with “all those whom God, out
of the mass of lost men, has decreed to adopt as children by grace, and to endow them with
faith.”[Van het Wezen des Genade-Verbondts Tusschen God ende de Uitverkorene, Afd. I, par.
1.] This is also the position of Mastricht, Turretin, Owen, Gib, Boston, Witsius, à Marck,
Francken, Brakel, Comrie, Kuyper, Bavinck, Hodge, Vos, and others.
But now the question arises, What induced these theologians to speak of the covenant as made
with the elect in spite of all the practical difficulties involved? Were they not aware of these
difficulties? It appears from their writings that they were fully conscious of them. But they felt
that it was necessary to contemplate the covenant first of all in its most profound sense, as it is
realized in the lives of believers. While they understood that others had a place in the covenant
in some sense of the word, they nevertheless felt that it was a subordinate place, and that their
relation to it was calculated to be subservient to the full realization of it in a life of friendship
with God. And this is no wonder in view of the following considerations:
1. They who identified the covenant of redemption and the covenant of grace, and considered
it un-Scriptural to distinguish the two, naturally thought of it first of all as a covenant
established with Christ as the representative Head of all those whom the Father had given Him;