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That [Adam] was subject to the law of God, and therefore a legal creature in this sense, they fully believed, but as pointed out above, they considered the creation of man to be a gracious act and the bestowal of all with which man was endowed as something wholly undeserved. Indeed they affirmed that if man had continued in perfect obedience to God’s law and received the benefits promised to obedience, even these would have been undeserved as obedience was man’s natural duty apart from any promise God condescended to make. Those who infer that the prelapsarian covenant of works and the continuing obligation to its conditions as expressed in the moral law presupposes the priority of law over grace and a continuing binding legalism, can only do so by holding that any notion of law is utterly incompatible with the grace of God. Given the Reformers’ view of the law of God as the expression of his character and will, this would have amounted to them opposing God against himself.