A57966:117
The covenant of life opened, or, A treatise of the covenant of grace
The covenant of life opened, or, A treatise of the covenant of grace containing something of the nature of the covenant of works, the sovereignty of God, the extent of the death of Christ ... the covenant of grace ... of surety or redemption between the by Samuel Rutherford ...The covenant of life opened, or, A treatise of the covenant of grace containing something of the nature of the covenant of works, the soveraignty of God, the extent of the death of Christ ... the covenant of grace ... of surety or redemption between the by Samuel Rutherford ...
Edinburgh: printed by Andro Anderson for Robert Brown, 1655
Modern spelling is a reading aid: the words are the author’s, only the spelling is modernized. Original shows the page as printed, with the transcription marks.
They seem therefore, with eyes of flesh, to look upon God, who say that God by necessity of justice must punish sin, yea that the most High cannot be God, except he punish sin, and that he should ⟨p. 25⟩not be God, if all his Laws imposed upon men, were only promissory and void of all threatenings.
They seeme therefore, with eyes of flesh, to look upon God, who say that God by necessitie of justice must punish sin, yea that the most High cannot be God, except he punish sin, and that he should ⟨p. 25⟩not be God, if all his Lawes imposed upon men, were only promissorie and void of all threatnings.
What? could not God have said,1 eat not of the tree of knowledge, for if ye eat not, your obedience shall be rewarded with life eternal, and no more? might he not have laid aside all threatening? What Scripture or reason teacheth to say, that God, if he create a reasonable creature, and under a moral dependency, which it hath and must have of God, then must God, by necessity of nature, punish the sinner, yea so as, if he punish not, he should not be God, nor just, but must fall from his natural dominion, except he make penal laws, and so he should not be God, except he say to Adam (if thou eat thou shalt die) or (shalt be punished for eating) but this is not proven by one word, except this, the reasonable creature is not, nor cannot be subject to God Creator, except God punish the sinner; But that is denied: Adam should have had a Moral dependence upon God, and God should have been God, and essentially just, if sin had never come into the World, and if God had kept Adam under a Moral Law, as he did the Elect Angels, who never felt or knew the fruit of a Moral Law broken and transgressed. And God, if he imposed any penal Law upon the Elect Angels as penal (which shall be an hard work to prove) yet had a natural dominion over the Elect Angels,