THE Adamic Covenant is a conditional covenant. Though there was no written covenant between God and Adam, there was an implied covenant, for Father Adam was created in the image and likeness of God as a perfect human being. God gave him the right to life as long as he would remain in harmony with justice. He also gave him as his life-rights the privilege of having a perfect body with perfect life, the privilege of generating a race with perfect life, the privilege of perfect conditions in climate, health, food, water, home, air, etc., the privilege of controlling this earth as its ruler and all that are in it, and the privilege of perfect fellowship with God and man.
These blessings were all subject to a condition – obedience. As long as Adam maintained his part of this covenant, that long would God continue him in all the rights given him as a present at his creation. The transgression of this covenant is referred to in Hosea 6: 7: “But they like Adam have transgressed the covenant: there have they dealt treacherously against me” (see margin). Adam’s transgression caused him to suffer the sentence of death, being cast off from God and from covenant relationship with Him, alienated from God by the sentence of death passed upon him and mother Eve, who was found with him in the transgression.
God and Adam’s Intimate Relationship
Before Adam sinned, God and Adam had a very intimate relationship. God talked with Adam and Adam talked with God, that is, God talked with Adam through His representative, the Logos, our Lord Jesus in His pre-human condition. But Adam learned to love his wife more than he loved God; and rather than live without her, he made up his mind out of love for her that he would die with her – he deliberately committed suicide. God permitted Adam to have access to every tree in the garden, except the tree of the knowledge (experience) of good and evil. To eat of it would bring an experience with evil; to refrain from eating of it would give him a continued experience with good. Thus, he would have lived forever had he obeyed that command. Doubtless God would have given him other trials and experiences to test him from other standpoints, but this was enough to determine that Adam had learned to make a god of his wife rather than God.
Although Adam’s rights were taken from him instantly, he was permitted the use of vestiges of them until, by the dying process, they were wholly removed from him at death (Genesis 2: 7; 3: 19) (Romans 5: 12-14). While he no longer had the right to life and its life-rights, yet God gave him the privilege of dying gradually instead of suddenly; for a dying life, under imperfect living conditions, was all that Father Adam had after the sentence.