Suppose Christ had done for us merely what we said last Sunday afternoon that He did. Suppose He had merely paid the just penalty of the law that was resting upon us for our sin, and had done nothing more than that; where would we then be? Well, I think we can say — if indeed it is legitimate to separate one part of the work of Christ even in thought from the rest — that if Christ had merely paid the penalty of sin for us and had done nothing more we should be at best back in the situation in which Adam found himself when God placed him under the covenant of works.

via The Active Obedience of Christ by J. Gresham Machen.

Machen goes on, rightly, to appeal to the eschatology put before Adam. But I don’t think it fully covers his argument here. He clearly claims that being forgiven is merely to be given Adam’s original place when he was under the covenant of works.

But this is obviously false. Adam was threatened with death and had no provision for forgiveness. A Christian, on the other hand, is promised forgiveness, not only once, for for his entire life.

If God had said to Adam, “You may surely eat of every tree of the garden, but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it you shall surely die–except I promise to forgive you every time,” then Machen would be right that the Christian had the position of Adam under the Covenant of Works.

This same problem appears in another statement Machen makes:

Moreover, we should have been back in that probation in a very much less hopeful way than that in which Adam was originally placed in it. Everything was in Adam’s favour when he was placed in the probation. He had been created in knowledge, righteousness and holiness. He had been created positively good. Yet despite all that, he fell. How much more likely would we be to fall — nay, how certain to fall — if all that Christ had done for us were merely to remove from us the guilt of past sin, leaving it then to our own efforts to win the reward which God has pronounced upon perfect obedience!

But we do fall and God continually forgives us on the basis of the fact that Christ suffered the full wrath and curse of God on sin. I hate to sound like an antinomian, but we sin every day, every hour, every minute, and God continues to forgive us just as often. All that is left for God to consider is our obedience. That is all that is left because there is no sin that can be used to accuse us. God has justified us so no one can claim that our obedience is less than perfect before His Judgment seat.

I think a case for the imputation of the active obedience of Christ can be salvaged, but I don’t think that Machen is at his best in this essay. I’m sure he didn’t mean to, but he seems to denigrate the blessing of forgiveness. He makes it sound more like what I hear about the ancient Church wherein people would delay baptism as long as possible because they thought it was their one and only chance to receive forgiveness. But that was never the true Biblical doctrine of the forgiveness of sins.