When Wright is Wrong. Phillip D. R. Griffiths

provisions, and its grace.”128

      The Reformed Baptist position completely rejects this. We do not see the old covenant as being one of grace, and, although it contained elements of grace, there was certainly no salvation under it. Salvation is found only in Christ, the mediator of the new covenant. The Second London Baptist Confession tells us something about those in the new covenant:

      All believers are a holy and sanctified people, and that sanctification is a spiritual grace of the New Covenant, and an effect of the love of God manifested in the soul, whereby the believer presseth after a heavenly and evangelical obedience to all the commands, which Christ as head and king in His New Covenant hath prescribed to them.129

      By “all believers” is meant all the saints of God from both before and after Christ’s finished work. As Owen reminds us, “the covenant of grace was contained and prepared only in the promise, before it was solemnly confirmed in the blood and sacrifice of Christ, and so legalized or established as the only rule of worship for the church.”130 As there is only one covenant unto salvation revealed in both testaments, so there has only ever been one true church:

      Hence it was, that at the coming of the messiah there was not one Church taken away and another set up in the room thereof, but the Church continued the same in those that were the children of Abraham according to faith. The Christian Church is not another Church, but the very same that was before the coming of Christ, having the same faith, and interest in the same covenant.131