We read in Jeremiah 23:6: “The Lord our Righteousness.”
For it pleased God, after he had made all things by the word of his power, to create man after his own image. And so infinite was the condescension of the high and lofty One, who inhabits eternity, that, although he might have insisted on the everlasting obedience of him and his posterity, yet he was pleased to oblige himself, by a covenant, or agreement, made with his own creatures, upon condition of a sinless obedience, to give them immortality and eternal life.
For when it is said, “The day thou eatest thereof, thou shalt surely die;” we may fairly infer, so long as he continued obedient, and did not eat thereof, he should surely live.
Genesis chapter 3 gives us a full, but mournful account, how our first parents broke this covenant, and thereby stood in need of a better righteousness than their own, in order to procure their future acceptance with God.
And though, after their disobedience, they were without strength, yet they were obliged not only to do all things, but continue to do them which the Lord had required of them: and not only so, but to make satisfaction to God’s infinitely offended justice, for the breach they had already been guilty of.
Here then opens the amazing scene of God’s love to man. For behold, what man could not do, Jesus Christ, the son of his Father’s love, undertakes to do for him.
And that God might be just in justifying the ungodly, though “he was in the form of God, and therefore thought it no robbery to be equal with God; yet he took upon him the form of a servant,” even human nature.
In that nature he obeyed, and thereby fulfilled the whole moral law in our stead (the believer); and also died a painful death upon the cross, and thereby became a curse for those, or instead of those, whom the Father had given to him.
As God, he satisfied at the same time that he obeyed and suffered as man; and, being God and man in one person, he wrought out a full, perfect, and sufficient righteousness for all to whom it was to be imputed.
