ointment of the Most High, and by his authority. At
his fall the whole human family became exposed to the curse at once of a
broken law and a violated covenant. Then and thereafter the law was a
broken covenant. It had been propounded as a law, and offered as the
condition of a covenant. As a law and as a covenant it had been
acquiesced in, and thus stood as a covenant; but by reason of apostacy
it passed from the rank of a law and a covenant to that of a mere law;
and as a law proceeded to put forth on the unregenerate the claims for
punishment, of a law that should still continue, but also of a covenant
that had been broken, and could never again exist in its original state.
To the ungodly still it is a law demanding obedience to it, and
punishment for past transgression of it as a law, and requiring also not
obedience to it as a covenant, but punishment for the breach of it as a
covenant. What was the Covenant of Works is not now a covenant to any;
to the wicked it is a law which by reason of their sin tends to their
ruin. The work of the law is written upon the hearts of men in sin, but
not as if it were now a covenant law; for now the Covenant of Works as a
covenant, has no demand of obedience to it on men. The tendency that
there is in the unrenewed heart to seek life by the works of the law
shows, not that the law is there written as a covenant, but that there
is there an attachment inconsistent with the will of God, to the law as
a covenant, which, while there is not felt the desire either of good
flowing from a covenant relation to God or of willingness
conscientiously to obey his commands, leads vainly to seek, merely
exemption from punishment, or undefined good. Certainly the blinded
heathen have not that law which was broken proposed to them as the
terms of a covenant; and so neither have others.

The will of God revealed to men in a state of sin, has the character of
a law, but not of a covenant. "The law is not made for a righteous man,
but for the lawless and disobedient."[472] The impenitent transgressor
continues under the curse of the law. If not subdued by Divine grace, he
will continue to feel here the effects of the wrath of God "revealed
from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men, who hold
the truth in unrighteousness;" and in the future state will experience
the effects of the curse in "everlasting destruction from the presence
of the Lord, and from the glory of his power." The