The covenant of life opened, or, A treatise of the covenant of grace

2. He is a full doer and fulfiller of the Covenant of Works most perfectly, by doing. 1 Joh. 3.7. He who does righteousness is righteous: As he who suffers for the broken Law, fulfils the Law. Rom. 6.7. He that is dead, [Greek or Hebrew] is freed, justified from sin, in the obligation of it to punishment. So Paul, vers. 8. If we be dead with Christ, we believe that we shall live with him. This dying is to believe that he died for us, at least it excludes not that. And if we keep the Law, we are not obliged to suffer: for the Law does not oblige man in absolute sense, both to perfect doing ⟨p. 226⟩and to perfect suffering copulatively, but to one of them. But if we be (legally) dead with Christ, ¹(as his death so excellent doth exhaust sins punishment and is a perfect satisfaction therefore) we are freed or justified from sin, not to suffer or satisfy by suffering for it, as Rom. 8.3. For what the Law could not do, so that it was weak (by accident, not of it self) through the flesh, God sending his own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh, and for sin condemned sin in the flesh. [Greek or Hebrew] the righteousness of the Law, the passive righteousness in suffering for the breach of the Law, might be fulfilled in us, 2 Cor. 5.2. And Isai. 53.5. But he was wounded for our transgressions, &c. — 6. The Lord laid upon him the iniquity of us all. But though some suffer, as the reprobate do, and suffer in this life the beginning of satisfactory judgement, yet are they not loosed from active obedience to the Law as the Law, though they cannot, having once sinned, be under the Law as a Covenant of Justification and life: nor is any flesh under that Covenant now.

2. He is a full doer and fulfiller of the Covenant of Works most perfectly, by doing.