Gracious Covenant of Works

They spoke of the Edenic arrangement as a manifestation of grace, that everything man received from God including his own being was the undeserved gift of God. Grace was not something apart from creation and which only came into being after the fall. Certainly a new aspect of the grace of God in the form of mercy to sinful creatures was manifest after the fall, but this was a further demonstration, in a situation that had not previously existed, of divine condescension and goodness which man had already enjoyed in the relationship arranged by God in his sinless condition.

 

Andrew Woolsey, Unity and Continuity in Covenantal Thought: A Study in the Reformed Tradition to the Westminster Assembly (Grand Rapids, MI: Reformation Heritage Books, 2012), 547