.................................................................................................................................................
The Story of Two
Adams
Thanksgiving
offerings relate to the kind of life God always intended humanity to live in
His presence and are what Adam should have offered in the garden. Guilt
offerings become necessary only after the fall and relate to the kind of life
we now experience. We see the fulfillment of both types of sacrifice in Christ,
the second Adam. Throughout His whole life, Christ offered Himself as a
sacrifice of praise to His Father and in His death, He offered Himself as a
sacrifice of atonement for sin.
FROM DAVID GIBSON
The message of salvation is the
story of two Adams.
“For as
by the one man’s disobedience the many were made sinners, so by the one man’s
obedience the many will be made righteous” (Romans 5:19).
What the first Adam undid, the
second Adam repairs.
But who is this second Adam, and
what kind of person must He be to do this?
Why is He — and only He — able to
obey in this way?
The Chalcedonian Creed (AD 451) says the purpose of the incarnation was
“for us and for our salvation.”
The creed is a statement of
profound truths about the person of Christ that have been embraced by the
church and form the bedrock of how we understand the work of Christ.
Unless we understand who Jesus
is, we will fail to see the wonder of what He has done to save us.
Obedient
in His Human Life
In Romans 5:19, the similarities
and dissimilarities between Adam and Christ highlight important aspects of
Christ’s person.
Let’s start with a similarity,
then consider a dissimilarity, and come back, finally, to a
further similarity.
First similarity: it is not
incidental that Adam and Christ are both men.
It is necessary that our Savior
be a man, truly human like us.
Scripture is clear that God is
the only Savior, and yet, because humans have sinned, God’s justice demands
that only a human can pay for sin.
In the
words of the Heidelberg Catechism, because of His righteousness, “God will
not punish another creature for what a human is guilty of” (Q&A
14).
This is stunning. If God saved us
without punishing a human being, it could have destroyed the moral fabric of
the universe.
We need a Savior who is human.
The creed
makes clear that when the eternal Son, “begotten before all ages of the
Father,” joined Himself to human nature in the womb of the virgin, that
same Son — our Lord Jesus Christ — was “truly God and truly man, of a
reasonable soul and body … in all things like unto us.”
He was not a divine being who
appeared to be human.
Jesus was not “God in human
skin.” He was a man, fully human in every way.
But the
creed also adds a crucial point: “in all things like unto us, without sin.”
As the
Heidelberg Catechism puts it, “God’s justice demands that human nature,
which has sinned, must pay for its sin; but a sinner could never pay for sin”
(Q&A 16).
To be a
fallen human being is to “increase our guilt every day” (Q&A
13).
We need a Savior who is like us
(human) to be able to pay for sin, and we need a Savior who is unlike us
(sinless) for this payment to be acceptable to God.
This is where the dissimilarity
between the work of Adam and the work of Christ flows from a proper
understanding of the person of Christ.
It is common in modern theology
to argue that in taking on a human nature, the Son of God took on fallen human
nature.
The assertion is that because we
have fallen natures, Jesus cannot be truly like us unless He also has a fallen
human nature.
But this short-circuits the
magnificent beauty of Christ’s obedience.
Fallenness is not intrinsic to
being human; if it were, Adam would not have truly been a man.
The Word became flesh to go right
back to the very beginning, so to speak, and to do as a man what Adam failed to
do.
In the womb of His mother, He is
both completely identified with us — being fully human — and distinct from us —
being free of all Adamic guilt.
The language of the Spirit “overshadowing”
Mary in the miracle of the incarnation (Luke 1:35) hints at
both new creation and new exodus themes.
It is best to say that Christ
re-lives Adam’s life not from the point of the fall onward but from the point
of creation onward.
He is the new Adam and the new
Israel, facing their temptations and fighting their battles, except He triumphs
at every point where they failed.
And so we come full circle to
another similarity between Adam and Christ in Romans 5:19.
Neither is a private individual.
They do not act alone. What each one does, he does for those who belong to him.
Like a husband as head of his
wife is fully responsible for her welfare, so Adam and Jesus as heads of their
families bear complete responsibility for them.
The actions of the one implicates
those who are theirs, either in disobedience or in righteousness.
Just as Adam made all who are in
him sinners, so Christ makes all who are in Him righteous. How does He
do this?
Obedient
in His Substitutionary Death
Evangelicals are sometimes guilty
of reducing the message of salvation to Christ’s atoning death without
describing how or why it atones.
In fact, the obedience of Christ
is the overarching biblical concept for explaining how Christ saves us.
When the author of Hebrews brings
the discussion of Christ’s priestly work to a climax in chapter 10 — after
telling us that the animal sacrifices of the old covenant only reminded the
worshiper of his sins and did not remove his guilt — he makes a surprising
point: sacrifices and offerings were not what God wanted anyway.
“Sacrifices
and offerings you have not desired” (Hebrews 10:5, quoting Psalm 40:6).
This is surprising, of course,
precisely because the sacrificial system was instituted by God Himself. But the
next lines explain what is going on in this passage:
Sacrifices and offerings you have
not desired, but a body you have prepared for me; in burnt offerings and sin
offerings you have taken no pleasure.
Then I
said, “Behold, I have come to do your will, O God, As it is written of me in
the scroll of the book.” (Hebrews 10:5-7; Psalm 40:6-8)
God wants human beings who are
covenant partners, who do His will.
Delighted devotion, wholehearted
love, humble submission, and joyful, intimate relationship — this is what Adam
was invited to return to God.
What God sought from the very
beginning was pristine shalom,
covenantal wholeness, in the garden and to the ends of the earth; what His
covenant partner returned instead was pride, suspicion, unbelief, and rebellion
— and all was lost.
The sacrificial system was
instituted to remedy the problem of human disobedience, but it could not
produce human obedience.
Yet what about the second Adam?
Wonderful beyond words is the fact that before He came to die, Jesus came
to live.
We know from the book of
Leviticus that the sacrificial rites contained thanksgiving offerings and guilt
offerings.
Thanksgiving offerings relate to
the kind of life God always intended humanity to live in His presence and are
what Adam should have offered in the garden; guilt offerings become necessary
only after the fall and relate to the kind of life we now experience.
In the second Adam, we see the
fulfillment of both types of sacrifice.
Throughout
His whole life, Christ offered Himself as a sacrifice of praise to His Father —
”I have come to do your will” — and in His death, He offered Himself as
a sacrifice of atonement for sin.
The life Jesus lived prepared for
the death He died because His obedience reached its climax in His crucifixion (Philippians 2:8).
Here, a
glorious truth about the person of Christ — ”truly God and truly Man” — sheds
light on the wonderful truth that He saves us from eternal loss.
Philippians 2:5-11 makes
clear that the obedient self-offering of Jesus is not just the offering of a human
life. He who died remains “in very nature God.”
The
Heidelberg Catechism says, “no mere creature can bear the weight of God’s
eternal anger against sin and release others from it” (Q&A
14).
Sin against an infinite God
requires an infinite payment, but a finite human cannot render this to God
outside of an eternal hell.
(And even in a hell of eternal
duration, finite sinners never reach the point where the payment is complete
because the finite cannot pay the infinite price.)
We need a Savior who is more than
a man. Christ’s death, because of who He is as the God-man, is of infinite
value and fully satisfies the righteous demands of an infinitely holy God.
We can see how closely the
doctrines are connected to each other.
To concede that hell is not eternal
punishment would be to concede that Jesus did not need to be divine in His
self-offering on the cross.
Theologians talk about the
offering of Christ’s life as His active obedience and the offering of His death
as His passive obedience, and both are necessary to save us.
In His death, Christ gave Himself
up and received the judicial punishment for sin (passive), but He was an
acceptable offering because He was a guilt-free and wholly obedient man
(active), and so was worthy of taking the place of guilt-laden, thoroughly
disobedient sinners.
John
Calvin said that “from the time when he took on the form of a servant,
Christ began to pay the price of liberation in order to redeem us.”
Notice how Calvin’s words
anticipate the creed. The divine Son joined human nature to Himself, and He did
it for us and for our salvation.
He came to live and die
obediently. His obedience makes not just forgiveness possible, but
righteousness available.
Because He is our representative
head, Christ’s obedience is ours.
Ligonier Ministries exists to proclaim,
teach, and defend the holiness of God in all its fullness to as many people as
possible. To that end, Ligonier’s outreach today is manifold and worldwide.
Having been founded by Dr. R.C. Sproul in 1971, Ligonier’s teaching
fellowship consists of theologians, pastors, and scholars who teach
through Renewing
Your Mind broadcasts, the Reformation Study
Bible, Tabletalk magazine,
books through the Reformation Trust Publishing division, and hundreds of
teaching series. The ministry also offers an undergraduate degree program
through Reformation
Bible College.
https://www.ligonier.org/blog/story-two-adams/
No comments:
Post a Comment