Jesus, Son of Adam: Indebted to a Forgiving God

Sermon Transcript

Read the news this week of a young Massachusetts schoolboy who loved dogs, he just loves dogs. And every day on his way home from school, he would walk by this fenced off construction yard. And he would stop to interact with the two dogs that were there. And he, as you can imagine a schoolboy would do, he would whistle at them. He talked to them, he crouched down, and the dogs would often lick his fingers that he stuck through the chain link fence.

Well, one day this week, he decided he wanted to play with the dogs up close. Of course, the gates, as you can imagine, were locked up, sign on the gates “keep out.” But he daringly climbed up the chain link fence and down the other side and approached the dogs to play. I don’t think I mentioned these dogs or Rottweilers—did I mention them—in a construction yard behind a locked chain link fence.

Well, sadly, as you can imagine, those two Rottweilers attacked this young boy this week and just mercilessly mauled this kid. You can kind of picture the hopelessness of the scene. He’s screaming and flailing around as these two just ruthless dogs are going at this boy. Just a matter of minutes, really, until these dogs were going to end this boy’s life.

Good news is that they didn’t. Just when you think all hope was gone, Police Officer Michael molan pulls up in his patrol car, he hears the commotion, he gets out, he quickly scales this chain link fence. He enters that vicious arena where the dogs are going out this boy and he wages war on those two Rottweilers, and at great personal risk and with some injury to himself, he is able to rescue that boy from the clutches of those two dogs and bring him eventually to the corner of that yard into safety. And I’m happy to report the boy is recovering this morning at the Massachusetts General Hospital just outside of Boston.

Question: you’re the boy or the boy’s parents—how you feel about officer mullet? Your thoughts? I mean, how grateful are you to think about that man and what he did for you or your boy? I mean, would you say you’re indebted to this guy? Maybe he had a request or a favor or some kind of need—would you step up to meet it?

You know, it’s pathetic how attracted we are to sin. We imagine it to be something that it’s not. We think it’s just—it’s just—it’s just fun. Oh, I know it’s prohibited and God says don’t do it. But come on, it’s not—it’s not all that bad, certainly never going to really bite us. After all, how often we stuck our fingers through the chain link fence and it just, I mean, lovingly beckons us to come and play. It’s hardly a terrible thing, at least at first.

And yet, we can testify, can’t we, all of climbing the fence in whatever the transgression might be and recognizing there’s a price to pay. As Jesus said, I mean, whoever sins becomes a slave of that sin. And it doesn’t take a lifetime, and it doesn’t take a great deal of brilliance to recognize after we begin the mauling that only seems to get worse as we get entangled in sinful behavior, that we need rescuing. We need help.

The Bible is all about a God who is merciful. He’s a merciful God who intends to rescue people from the penalty and the clutches of sin. The Bible says he’s gone to great lengths and great personal sacrifice to rescue you from the problem of sin. But unfortunately for most of us, we don’t really begin to appreciate that for what it is because we don’t take the time to really think about the peril or the gravity of the problem. I mean, we still, even though we’ve incurred problems in our lives because of sin, we don’t view it the way we ought. And we certainly don’t see the end game as severe as it actually is.

And to compound that, most of us don’t spend enough time, or at least not frequently enough, considering the great cost that was involved, the profound sacrifice that was involved for God to enter the arena of sin and solve the problem for us that we don’t quite think about as intently as we ought.

The third segment and final segment of the genealogy in Luke 3 is helpful in this regard. We have in the third segment of this genealogy a bit of a reminder of what a big deal it is, the severity of the problem, and the cost of the solution. And then even something, as we continue the theme of this third connection that we make here in the genealogy, of how great the release actually is, and how grateful we should be, even though we may feel like we’re recovering in a hospital bed, how good it is that Christ would love us enough to save us.

If you’ve been with us, you know this has been looked at in three distinct segments. We took the first week to look at how Luke traces Christ all the way to David. And he’s called there the Son of David, as he often is called in the New Testament, because he fulfills the Davidic Covenant—God makes a promise to David, the Davidic Covenant, and through this promise there would be this future King, a real King, a tangible, visible King sitting on a real throne, in a real palace, in a real capital, in a real city, on a real place called the New Earth. And that’s what we’re supposed to be anticipating and praying for every day, “Your kingdom come.”

And then we saw Luke trace him all the way back to Abraham, which Matthew does as well—both to David and Abraham—because there’s this very important promise God makes we call the Abrahamic Covenant, where God said, through the offspring of Abraham, he would have this very mercifully broad and numerically large plan to save people from every tongue, tribe, and nation. And we examined that last time.

Well, now Luke does something Matthew doesn’t even do, and that is he takes it back even further and drives all the way to Adam. I mean, it’s almost unnecessary. Of course, he’s related to Adam; he’s, you know, entered the human race. But for Luke to go to the trouble to do that should give us enough pause to say, what’s the connection here? And the Bible has some very important things to say, which remind us of the problem of Adam and the solution that Christ provided simply by entering the arena of humanity.

You don’t need to turn there because we’re just going to glance through the list. It’s not noteworthy for us other than just the fact that this morning we’re going to show that the connection to David and the connection to Abraham really isn’t a complete picture for us as we think through the work and ministry of Christ until we think about him as related to Adam. A lot of names you probably don’t even recognize—it’s printed there on your worksheet in verse 35: Serug, Reu, Peleg, Eber, Shelah, Cainan, Arphaxad, Shem, Noah—there’s some names we recognize—Lamech, Methuselah, Enoch, Jared, Mahalalel, Kenan—another Kenan—Enosh, Seth, the son of Adam. And as we’ve said, that word “son” is not in each of these. And “of God”—of course, God created Adam. And we see here that from the creation of God to Adam, we have humanity, and of course Christ, if he’s going to enter the human race, is going to be connected to Adam. But to bring us back to that brings us back to the problem that Christ came to solve. And for us to appreciate the full extent of that, it’d be good for us to spend a few minutes this morning looking at the problem as it began in Genesis.

So take your Bibles and turn with me to Genesis chapter three just to review the problem, and maybe a little bit more of the profound nature of what came as the cascading consequences of that. This is no small problem.

Now, as we enter into Genesis chapter three, you can remember a few things here. One is that we see this from such a relativistic perspective. We see this as sinners who have committed many sins in our lives. And so for us to read of Adam sinning, it’s like, well, yeah, we are familiar with breaking God’s laws. But to put yourself there on the scene in the garden, this is so catastrophic, that God has created in this situation someone that has done something so absolutely contrary to everything that will cause catastrophic repercussions for the rest of time, or at least until God finishes this by Christ delivering the kingdom over to the Father.

Now, we talked about the Davidic Covenant, Abrahamic Covenant—let’s call this, as theologians rightly discuss, let’s call it the Adamic covenant, because there was a covenant that sets this fall up. And here’s the simple covenant; let me just quickly throw it out. And it’s, you know, it’s not explicitly spelled out as a covenant, but it’s clearly an arrangement that God makes with Adam, and that is this: that I’m going to tell you to do something, which is my right as God, and you do it. And if you do it, you’ll be blessed, and everything will be fine. If you don’t do it—if you do do it—you will die. There’s what we see in Genesis 2. And of course, the familiar passage we’re going to look at in Genesis 3 is when Adam decides to disregard that order of the universe.

And I say it that way because if you think about it, the test that God provides for Adam is simply a clarification of what should be so obvious, and that is that there’s only two categories in the universe. You’ve got the Creator and everything else, right? The created. You’ve got the Lord and those who aren’t. You’ve got the boss, if you will, and all the employees, the king and all the subjects. You’ve got the master and the servants. You’ve got God and everyone who’s not God. And if you’re God, you have the position of making the rules, and the subjects, the created people, the servants, the employees, if you will, they keep the rules of the boss. That’s just how it works. And if you keep those rules, everything will be fine, Adam, you and Eve will be blessed, everything will go great, you’ll have all that you ever need. You’ll have all your desires met, it will be perfect. There’s the Adamic covenant: just do as I say, and we’ll keep the aligned order of the universe.

The backdrop for this, we don’t get in this passage, but in Ezekiel 28 and Isaiah 14, we learn about a rebellion that’s already taken place among the angelic beings. Only two classes of created beings, right? You’ve got angelic beings who are spirit beings like us, but they’re not made to be encapsulated into physical, tangible things. God creates the physical world; he creates more spirit beings, if you will, like the angelic class, but we’re made to be this composite—this humanity, if you will, this flesh, this physical reality that’s encasing spirit.

Now, the spirit class, if you will, this angelic class, has already had a rebellion, and a third of the angels have fallen, followed one primary deceiver, right? Satan, we call him. We call him the deceiver, the tempter, the serpent he’s called, because in this passage, if you look at verse 1, he shows up as a serpent. Now, don’t picture the Renaissance paintings, and don’t even picture your kids’ Sunday school curriculum that they bring home, where you’ve got Adam and Eve there with some very strategically placed fig leaves, and they’re being tempted by a snake wrapped around a branch on a tree. Because if you look at verse 14, we don’t get the snake image until after God curses the embodiment of Satan that tempts Adam and Eve in the passage. So what this creature looked like, we don’t know. It’s odd enough to have talking animals in this text, I get that. But whatever is going on here, you’ve got that spirit being—that rebellious angel—now coming on the scene to see if he can tempt and corrupt humanity. And you’ve got Adam and Eve simply told to keep first things first and let God be God and everything will be fine.

So in verse number 1, the serpent—whatever the pre-fall serpent looked like, who knows—all we know is that that serpent, because he’s embodied here by the tempter, he’s encasing the tempter. He’s more crafty than the other beasts of the field that the Lord God had made. That’s why Satan chose that animal to embody, and perhaps working both directions, it’s one of the reasons that animal was so crafty.

Satan says to the woman, “Did God actually say…” Now notice this, we’ve pointed it out every time we read it. Satan says, “You shall not eat of any tree in the garden.” Now look at how that starts. As you’re walking by the construction yard, thinking about why you can’t go in and hearing in the back of your head, “Well, you know, Mom said you can’t have any dogs ever,” right? Well, that’s not the command—that you can’t eat from any tree in the garden. Of course you can. But that’s how it’s posed, this sense of you’re being deprived of what you want, and God is a God that wants to keep you from what you want.

And the woman rightly clarifies in verse number 2, “Well, that’s not true. We may eat from the fruit of the trees in the garden, but God did say, ‘You shall not eat from the fruit of the tree that is in the middle or the midst of the garden.’” Then she adds this: “Neither shall you touch it, lest you die.” Unless that’s an added phrase that we don’t have recorded in chapter two, that’s certainly not what God said either. It was not like you can’t walk on that side of the street and don’t even touch the chain link fence or look the other way. That’s not the point. The point is, don’t climb into the yard. You can’t go in there. You can’t have that fruit. Nevertheless, she recognizes, yeah, there is something we can’t have.

The serpent said, “Well, why not? God said you’re gonna die.” “You’re not going to die. For God knows,” verse 5, “that when you eat of it, your eyes will be opened.” He’s keeping something from you that’s gonna be good for you. It’s gonna make you smart. You’ll be like God. It’s advancement. It’s promotion. You’ll know good and evil. Well, there’s some truth to that, but not in the way he was pitching it.

Verse 6: the woman then says, “Well, great, I want that.” Then she saw that the tree was good for food, she stood there staring through the chain link fence, if you will; it was a delight to the eyes—sticking her fingers through the chain link fence—the tree was a desire to make one wise, at least that’s what she was told. So she took the fruit and she ate it. And she also gave some to her husband who was with her, and he ate.

Now look what happens, verse 7: the eyes of both of them are opened, and they knew that they were naked. I don’t have time to exegete the whole passage or the implications of all this, but their view of themselves changed at this point. So then they covered themselves with fig leaves that they sewed together, and they made themselves loincloths.

Verse 8: then they heard the sound of the Lord God walking in the garden in the cool of the day. Now, here’s a strange situation: we’ve got God who is spirit somehow manifesting himself in the garden, and he comes to fellowship with his creation. That should all be fine, as long as God is God. But in their lives, God is no longer God. And they—this is worth underlining—they hid themselves. The man and the wife hid themselves from the presence of the Lord God among the trees of the garden.

Now, think this through. “If you keep God God, and you do what I say, it’ll all be fine, and all my commands are reasonable, just do what I say, and we’ll keep the order the way it ought to be, and it’ll be great. But the day that you choose to rebel you’re going to die.” Now we think of that so one-dimensionally—about biological death, sitting there on a gurney or in a casket or whatever. Now, that is certainly one expression of death. But death—the idea—is separation. Even when we think about physical death, we think about the spirit leaving the body and not being animated, and I get all that. But death was much more than that.

And in the context here, the promise is kept, and that is that you’re going to die—you’re going to be separated in our relationship. There’s going to be relational death. All is not going to be well in the universe. It will not go well between us if you don’t keep the order the way it is. Now, the angelic class got cast out of heaven; the barrier, the separation, was at least described as physical—you’re no longer welcome here. And here it was already being manifested: “I want to hide. Here comes God. I don’t want to talk to him. I’m embarrassed.” God comes on the scene and says in verse 9, “Hey, where are you?” And that was not for information’s sake. Clearly, he knew. He knows everything. But he’s trying to point out the problem.

And he said, “I heard the sound of you,” Adam says, “in the garden, and I was afraid because I was naked, and I hid myself.” “Who told you,” verse 11, “that you were naked? Have you eaten from the tree which I commanded you not to eat?” I’ll take notes on this, verse 12—want to get out of a jam? Here’s at least how your forefathers did it. The man said, “The woman whom you gave to be with me, she gave me the fruit of the tree.” And we’ve been doing that for four millennia now—making excuses.

So God here in this scene turns to her—or God says to the woman—“What is this that you’ve done?” And the woman said, “Well, listen, don’t blame this on me, right? It was the serpent that deceived me, and I ate. I was beckoned to climb the fence. I mean, it just—I was deceived.”

By the way, you can’t watch a modern court trial or go to one and not see the defense bring up someone. If the facts of the case are established—that the violation, the transgression, the crime has been committed—coming up to try and lessen the culpability of the one who’s done the crime by saying, “Well, you know, they may have done it, but they’re not responsible.” I mean, we are experts at that in our generation. And we’ve got syndromes and disorders and everything else to get you off the hook of not being responsible. That’s nothing new. We’ve just perfected it in the courtrooms and even, you know, in the living rooms of every kid that’s ever been called on the carpet for doing anything wrong.

We’re great at making excuses, but you need to understand this about the problem of Adam. We can never really recognize the depth of the problem, not to mention the solution, until we fess up to our culpability, our responsibility—that we’ve done wrong. And the fact that so much of what the problem is all about—recognizing that you did wrong, and don’t blame your wife, and don’t blame the tempter, and don’t blame anything else but yourself.

Let me give you the point yet—number one, let’s just put a heading here so we can give some sense to how we’re moving through this connection between Christ and Adam. Number one, we need to understand the Adam problem. The Adam problem is not only that there was rebellion, but there’s a sense of skirting responsibility. “I’m not responsible; it’s not my fault.”

Think through the gospel in the New Testament—how much time is spent in Paul’s magnum opus on the gospel? I mean, if you really want to look at when he describes the gospel in Romans, it’s Romans 1 through Romans 8. If you take all those verses and lay them out on your desk and you say, how much of this is about faith? How much of this is about repentance? How much is about Christ? How much is about Christ on a cross? How much is it about the resurrection? I mean, you’d have to parcel that out, and you’d make percentages there. And I’ve done this with aspects of the gospel, and you know, you’ve got 5% here and 7% there and 12% over—27% of the explanation of the gospel, more than any other topic, Paul talks about is sin. And the whole point of Paul camping and dwelling on sin as he tries to tell us, “Listen, there’s a solution for the problem, but first you need to recognize the problem and own the problem,” is the fact that it keeps coming back with this line: “so that they are without excuse,” “so that they’re without excuse,” “so that you have no excuse.”

See, for us to understand the problem is to recognize that the consequence of our own sin—when we feel the sense of responsibility, and the sense of consequence, and the Rottweilers, if you will, are starting to threaten our well-being and we sense sin as a problem—the first thing we need to do is to recognize what Adam and Eve didn’t recognize, or at least wouldn’t recognize at this point in the narrative, and that is that they are fully responsible. This is not anybody’s fault but yours.

Now, if you know anything about biblical theology, you’re gonna raise your hand and go, “Well, wait a minute. But isn’t that the whole point of original sin, that we reap the consequence from Adam’s sin problem? Isn’t this the point that humanity got thrown into a problem of death and ongoing sin because Adam and Eve made this mistake in the garden?” Now, I understand that, and we’ll touch on that. We don’t have time to get into the details of that. But I would love for you, on the back of your worksheet—I always try to give you sermons that can unpack parts of the sermon we don’t have time for today. The first one I listed there “Understanding Your New Break From Adam”—I think that’s a sermon, oh 930, is that what it is? That’d be a good one for you. If you’re throwing a flag on the play, that it’s not fair that we all get born into this situation of sin because Adam committed the problem—the debate that’s gone on through church history from Pelagius to Augustine—and in that whole debate early in the church, it’s important we come down on the right side of that, the biblical side of that, which is of course there are cascading ramifications for this. It’s why death, as Paul says in Romans 5, has reigned from Adam’s time on. Even little babies are subject to death who have made no culpable decisions, no conscious decisions to rebel and sin against God, because the consequences of Adam had a cascading effect through the descendants of Adam.

And by the way, before you get all uppity about that, I don’t think you and your wife would have done much better in the garden. Really, we’ve all done it. The way I like to picture it is Adam had a path to walk down. Let’s put it as—make him the bus driver. He had a road to drive down, and he decides to take the clear signs of God and ram through the chain link fence and drive into sin. Now, we are born in the back of the bus. We didn’t make the same decision that he did, but as we’re born in the back of the bus careening down into the ditch of Rottweilers, if you will, we wake up to this whole thing and think, well, what’s the deal? We’re on a bus full of sinners; Dad’s driving the bus and he got us into the problem. I get all that. But we’ll find that from the very beginning of our lives, you don’t need to teach us anything about rebellion. We’re cheering old Dad on from the back seat. We love to do what we want to do. We love to choose something that looks good to our eyes, that seems desirable and advantageous for us. And of course, we’re like Adam and Eve. And because of that, there’s consequences.

The consequences in this text—in verse 14, if you just want to think through the totality of what’s happening here—we ought to at least look at how God responds to the serpent, and that’s at least the embodiment here of Satan, the physical manifestation. And he changes the forms. This beast, whatever it was pre-fall, I don’t know, but it’s cursed from this point on above all the livestock, that it slithers around now on its belly and its tongue goes out and slaps the dust of the earth all the days of its life. And that’s the imagery of this creature, this reptile.

But as to Satan himself—now, this is the important text—verse 15: “I will put enmity”—there’ll be hostility, there’ll be a problem—“between you,” Satan, right, the chief rebel, “and the woman.” This is why women scream at snakes—no, this—we’re not talking about the reptile anymore. We’re talking about the tempter, the rebel who’s baited Adam and Eve into sin and rebellion. “Well, there’s going to be enmity between you and the woman.” But that’s not exactly what we’re talking about. He clarifies in the next phrase: “Actually, what we’re talking about is between your offspring and her offspring.” Now, who are the offspring of Satan? Some passages you might want to write down and remember: John 8, for instance—Jesus says to his opponents, “You know, the way you’re acting and the way you lie, you’re like your father, the devil.” Remember that passage. Everybody who’s in league with Satan—his offspring, if you will—are those that are willingly and willfully involved in the rebellion against God’s law. It’s the distinction that John makes in 1 John chapter 3 when he talks about children of God and children of the devil. They’re not literal offspring, but they’re the chip off the old block. They’re rebels who, like in Romans 1, they not only do the things that God says you shouldn’t do, but they give hearty approval to those who do the same. They’re on, cheering people, “Come on, climb the fence, climb the fence, it’s great.” That is the image of the offspring of Satan.

Now, those folks are going to be at enmity—at odds with—they’re going to be hostile and against the offspring of the woman. It’s not the woman, right? It’s the offspring of the woman. Specifically, next word—pronoun, singular, masculine. Now we go from “offspring,” as though it seems like a lot of people—we’re talking about a lot of people that are offspring of Satan, the people that are in league with the chief rebel. We’re not talking about a bunch of people; we’re talking about one person. And it’s a “him”—a “he.” He, the offspring of the woman, “shall bruise”—the word shuph in Hebrew—to strike, to crush, to smack, to even sometimes it’s translated “to destroy”—“to crush, to bruise your head,” rebel’s chief rebel. “And you, rebel, you’re not going to come out unscathed. You’re going to”—you—“are going to crush, smack—you’re going to smack, you’re going to bruise his heel.”

Now, here’s the other side of the Adamic covenant. I’m going to say phase one was “obey God and everything will be fine.” They choose to not do that. Here’s another—if you want to put it this way, and some theologians, they’re a little overlapped in how they refer to this—I mean, you want to look at a covenant that looks a lot more like Abrahamic and Davidic covenants, it’s that someone who is a descendant of Adam and Eve would be the offspring that crushes, bruises, smashes the head of the rebel and the offspring of the rebels. If you’ve got a choice between getting your head crushed or your heel crushed, choose your heel.

There. Well, of course the picture here though is that there will be complete and utter destruction of the rebellion against God being God. But there will be an injury to the deliverer. The rescuer will also, if you will, go to the hospital and have to have recovery, because this isn’t a painless transaction. The rescuer will pay the price. The rescuer will be damaged, but not killed. He will be injured, but he will not be defeated and vanquished. So the picture of the cross—this is the first prophetic picture of the coming offspring of Adam that will be the second Adam, if you will, who will solve the problem of the first Adam.

Genesis 5—just across the page there, you may have to turn the page for that. We look at Adam and the problem of Adam, and again, I’m just trying to say, I don’t want you to get Adam too far at arm’s length. I want you to bring him close. Bring old Dad a little bit closer, because you’re just like him. Look at verse 3: when Adam lived 130 years he fathered a son in his own likeness and after his image. Now, you didn’t have to say all that. I mean, there’s more here than just “Seth really looked like Adam.” This is not about, you know, “He looks like old Dad; the guy’s got Dad’s eyes.” The picture here is that when we’ve got this description of the ongoing progeny, the descendants of Adam, we’ve got people—we’ve got chip off the old block; you’ve got a bunch of Adams living life.

I guess I should read verse 4 because I get this question posed every quarter or so. Look at verse 4: “And the days of Adam after he fathered Seth were 800 years; and he had other sons and daughters.” Because eventually someone asks me—four times a year probably you will—“Who did Cain and Abel marry? Because they only had two sons.” Well, you’ve got to read the whole Bible to figure out some things like this—that they had sons and daughters, many sons and daughters, for hundreds of years. “Ooh, they had to marry their sister.” Listen, if your parents are cranking out children for 800 years, when you’re at the mall there’s lots of gals that you’ve never met, right? I’m just saying. It’s not as weird as you think. “Oh, it’s still incest.” I understand the gene pool. There’s a lot of things we could say about it, and I’m not here to preach on that. But all I’m telling you is they had lots of children for hundreds and hundreds of years. Yes, we’ve preached on that before as well—the pre-flood world far different than the one we’re in now. No time for that.

What’s the point? I guess that—to sum it up—if I can turn you real quickly to Job. Let me just sum up: we’re a chip off the old block. We’re just like Dad. We continue from the back seat to cheer on the kinds of things—if not in our spirit now, at least in our flesh—saying, “Rebel, rebel, be your own man. Make your own decisions, do what feels good.” That’s the wiring of mankind.

Job—it’s easy to find. Psalms, Job, Psalms, Proverbs—find Psalms and turn back one book to Job 25. Job 25, real short chapter. Now, I know we bag on Job’s friends all the time, because Job did and God did too at the end of the book, but it doesn’t mean everything that Job’s miserable comforters said was wrong—certainly wasn’t. And here’s a passage that’s full of some truth that’s good for us to recognize when we consider the Adam problem.

Bildad the Shuhite answered Job and said, “Dominion and fear are with God”—clearly, who’s going to argue with that? God has all the power; he’s in charge; he’s the Sovereign of the universe. If you stand before him, you ought to respect him with a kind of biblical fear. He’s God. “He makes peace in his high heaven.” We’ve got that in the Lord’s Prayer as well, right? “Your will be done on earth as it is in heaven.” God gets everything done the way he wants; it’s the way God wants things happening in heaven. The problem is down here on earth. He makes peace in his high heaven.

“Is there any number to his armies?” I mean, his angelic armies—even if you’re saying he’s only left with two-thirds of the righteous angels—I mean, he’s got plenty of might at his disposal. “Upon whom does his light not arise?” God is the giver of all things. He makes his rain, you know, on the crops of the good and the evil. Sun rises on the evil and the good. God gives life to everything—gave man life and breath and everything else, as Paul said to the Athenian professors there in Acts 17.

Now this: if God is all that—verse 4—“How then can man be right before God?” Now again, he’s responding to Job trying to justify himself, which, by the way, Bildad was right—Job should not have been justifying himself before God. He wasn’t without sin. “How can he who is born of woman be pure?” “Behold, even the moon is not bright and the stars are not pure in his eyes.” None of that is acceptable to God, because they’re all tainted with sin and fallen. “How much less,” look at verse 6, “man who is a maggot, and the son of man, who is a worm.”

Now, there’s another verse the DaySpring card company has not ever put on a card—Job 25:6. “Have a nice day, maggot.” You know, I don’t know. There’s just no way to work that into your card line, your greeting card line. But it’s true. What do you do with maggots? You find a maggot somewhere and you don’t adopt it, put a little sweater on it or whatever, bring it in as a pet. I mean, what do you do? You crush them. You dispose of them. You say, “Ew, gross, get out.”

I often illustrate with a skunk analogy. I know we’re often sitting around saying, “Well, you know, he’s a lot worse than me. God must like me because I’m not as bad as that guy.” It’s like that—it’s like the skunks having a conversation about, “Oh, Harry—have you smelled Harry this week?” Oh, I’m sure there’s a really stinky, stinky skunk among the skunks that the skunks just think are awful. But that doesn’t mean when they walk into your patio during your little afternoon picnic that you’re going to go, “Oh, great! Love you—come on up!” Right? “So glad to see the skunk family here.” Why? Because you’re repulsed by the smell of skunks.

Get that. You’re not as bad as the next maggot. I’ll give you that. But to God, right? The God who—even his beautiful universe is not pure—he can’t tolerate it. The prophets say it over and over again: his eyes are too pure to look on evil. He’s too holy and righteous to approve and have fellowship with sin. He just can’t. “I just wish God were more tolerant, nicer.” Listen, it’s like saying something that is so repulsive to you, ontologically, as a part of who you are—your own makeup. I mean, no one faults you for, like, let’s say you swallow wrong, a little water down your windpipe. I don’t sit back and—“Look how intolerant! Look at you—can’t you just be a little more open-minded? Just let some liquid down your windpipe every now and then. Why can’t you have a few ounces in your lungs? Just come on, be a little more accepting.” Or fire, right? When you burn your hand on the stove, why do you have to retract your hand? I mean, the fire—“You should be more tolerant of things like that.” Why? “I’m not made that way.” I mean, the natural enemy of my hand is clearly fire. And my windpipe is never going to warm up to having water pour down it. And God will never be able to look at sin and approve it. It’s just who he is.

So let’s get off this kick that God should be more like us. Put ourselves in the garden and recognize the rebellion that took place there was catastrophic, and death entered the world through that, and the judgment of God. How can anyone be pure before God? Not even Job, who is definitely less stinky than the rest of us.

Understand the Adam problem. Appreciate it for what it is. See the severity of it and the gravity of it. But then, let’s recognize that Jesus is the Son of Adam to fix the problem of Adam. Turn to this passage with me, please—Romans chapter five—and then once you get there, write this down on your worksheet, if you would—number two.

Romans chapter five, the way that Paul puts this is so helpful to get us to recognize so many things about the parallel—if not, by 180-degree contrast, it’s still a parallel—between Adam and Christ. Why is he the Son of Adam? Because what he did was a lot like what Adam did, only in the complete opposite direction. Adam did it in terms of disobedience; Christ now entered into the yard not to play with sin but to conquer sin. He didn’t scale the wall so that he can mess around with the Rottweilers. He came in there to wage war against them to deliver and rescue us.

Or to put it in the bus scenario: Adam gets on the bus and careens off the road and goes down the embankment, taking the rest of us with him. Christ now has to enter the realm of humanity as what the Bible would call the second Adam or the last Adam. And he would now take humanity on himself, and the second person of the Triune Godhead would become man and put on human flesh so that he could drive the bus the way it’s supposed to be driven. And he could now take people—this is getting real complicated in the illustration right now—his little helicopter, and he would snatch people out of the bus that’s going down the embankment and put them on his bus, and turn people that are cheering on a lifestyle of doing it your own way and doing whatever feels good, bringing them into Christ, as Christ now lives out humanity the way it’s supposed to be lived out—the second Adam.

Paul is celebrating here in Romans 5 the second Adam. And he says here that we ought to recognize what a huge deal this was. It’s not at all like what Adam did, in that it led to destruction and punishment. But it’s exactly like what Adam did, in that he himself affected for us something we did not ourselves earn.

Matter of fact, number two on your worksheet—let’s, even before we read a little bit of Romans 5, jot this: we need to be grateful for what we’ll call “Adam take two.” It’s Adam all over again. And by the way, while you’re writing that, before we read Romans 5, I need to give you a preview for what we’re doing after Easter. We’re going to get to Luke 4, which—if you’re doing our DBR, Daily Bible Reading, every day—you know we read that this morning, or you’ll read it tonight, or if you’re behind you’ll read it sometime. So in Luke 4 we have the temptation passage. What you need to notice about Luke chapter 4 verse 1 is that we’re not having Christ kind of run into Satan as he happens to be traveling through the desert. He’s not baited into sin or lured into sin by Satan kind of taking him off the path. He’s not being enticed by Satan. This is not something that he just happens upon. It starts—very clearly—he’s full of the Holy Spirit, led by the Spirit into the desert, so that he can do what? He can do Genesis 3 all over again. He can face the tempter and do the right thing. He comes right up to the fence, with the dogs licking behind the fence, if you—beckoning sin in any way they can. And he looks at the “keep out” sign and the locked padlock on the fence and says “no” to sin, to do what humanity should have done. So if you would put your trust in Him, he’d transfer you to his bus, and you now would have the advantage of humanity done right. That’s Christ living for us, not just dying for us. Adam, take two.

Here’s how Paul put it in verse 12, Romans 5:12: “Therefore, just as sin came into the world through one man”—thanks, Adam—not that you or I would have done much better—“and death through sin,” the consequence was death—relational death. We’re all born in relational death, and subject to biological death. “And so death spread to all men.” Now, we’re not neutral in this—we all sin, continue to sin, as we cheer on humanity’s independence from God and his law.

Verse 13: “For sin indeed was in the world before the law was given,” right? We didn’t have all the specific laws there people were breaking, but “sin was not counted where there is no law.” There’s not individual culpability perhaps on every infraction of the law because we don’t have the law spelled out for people until Moses came along. “Yet death reigned from Adam to Moses, even over those whose sinning was not like the transgression of Adam,” and that’s a helpful clarification. People did sin, but they didn’t have in their own language, if you will, a sign that said “Keep out.” Everybody sins against their conscience, sins against nature, if you will, but Adam had a very clear “Don’t do this,” and he did it anyway. Even so, sin reigned, and death reigned.

“Now, Adam”—by the way, bottom of verse 14—“was a type of the one who was to come.” Adam take two, if you will—Adam again, the second Adam.

Verse 15: “But the free gift is not like the trespass.” Now, it’s so unfortunate sometimes when we read that we think, okay, these are two totally different things—they go in two totally different directions; one bus goes that way, one bus goes this way. But that passage is all about the parallel. “For if many died through one man’s trespass, much more have the grace of God and the free gift by the grace of that one man Jesus Christ abounded for many.” See, it works the same. You’re saying, “It sure isn’t fair that I got born into a bus in the back seat here, careening down a path into sin, and I was sitting there wired already to rebel against God—that’s not fair.” Nor is it fair that Christ would come and live life correctly and then say, “Trust me; I’ll transfer you from that bus to this bus. You’ll be counted perfect before God, acceptable before the Father. There’ll be no condemnation for you when you face the Judge, if you just trust.” That’s not fair either. And that connection to either Adam or Christ is the connection that this passage is trying to say, “Look at how grateful we are to be that Christ came and did it right and that we can be allied with him.”

Verse 16: “And the free gift is not like the result of that one man’s sin. For the judgment following one trespass brought condemnation, but the free gift following many trespasses brought justification”—made us right before God. “For if, because of one man’s trespass, death reigned through that one man, much more will those who receive the abundance of grace and the free gift of righteousness”—how much more “shall we reign in life through the one man Jesus Christ?”

That’s why Paul loves that phrase “in Christ.” I’m going to be in Christ, in Christ. I’m going to be on his bus. I get credited all of his righteous decisions.

“Therefore,” verse 18, “as one trespass led to condemnation for all men, so one act of righteousness leads to justification and life for all men.” Right? Does that mean everybody’s saved? Clearly not. Matter of fact, he just switches the word to “many” in verse 19: “For as by the one man’s disobedience the many were made sinners, so by one man’s obedience many will be made righteous.” “Now the law came in to increase the trespass.” I want everyone to see it. I want all the rules put up so that everyone can recognize their culpability to the law. “But where sin increased,” and people saw it for what it was, “grace abounded all the more, so that, as sin reigned in death, grace might also reign through righteousness leading to eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord.”

Now, that’s a mouthful of theology—good for you to listen to if you haven’t—and read a little bit more; books on the back, but the sermons 0930, 0931 would be a good place to start to untangle some of that. Bottom line is, let’s think about the Christ who was willing to lay aside the privileges and prerogatives of heaven to enter the arena and get chewed on by the Rottweilers of sin, if you will—him who knew no sin to be sin for us, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God. That is the transaction that is celebrated in Philippians 2: emptied himself, became a servant, found in the likeness of man. Being found in human form, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to death, even death on a cross.

Or another one, if you want to take notes—Hebrews chapter 2, verses 9 through 17—or 18 actually, through 18—another great text, we have no time for. He shared in the humanity of lost people so that he might conquer the problem for us and live right.

Now, again, that’s not even enough time for us to fully appreciate what Christ did to solve the problem, or even really recognize the extent of the cost that it took. I mean, just to think of Officer moland scaling the fence and thinking he’s willing to go to the hospital with dog bites all up and down his leg to save a kid—it’s nothing compared to what Christ did—to be not only mocked by human beings, but to have his Father take all the penalty of our sin and lay it on him. That’s the part we need to celebrate more often, by thinking through the profundity of your sin on his back.

But I want to turn the corner—one more passage—1 Corinthians chapter 15. The connection between Christ and Adam is not only for us to remember the problem that Adam caused and the solution that Christ brought, but the benefit that aligning with Christ will bring—the reversal of the Adam problem, and not just the current one. Because there is phase one of the solution that’s already invoked—think about it. When Christ came at the first coming, he came, and here’s what the Bible words are: things like reconciliation, justification, adoption. Those are things that speak to the relational death being solved. I can now have real relationship with God—I’m reconciled; hostile parties reconciled. I can be adopted; I can now be his child. I can have that relational life. I can pray and God hears me. I can, in my spirit, have fellowship with the real God of the universe.

But there’s one more part of this, and that is that I’m still separated from God, in my humanity. I’m on a sin-laden world and in a sin-laden body, and I have a body that’s corrupted because of the consequences and penalty of sin. And I’m not in his presence, and I don’t see him face to face. That is the final fix of the Adam problem.

Number three in your outline—let’s put it that way: you need to anticipate the final Adam fix. It’s yet to come. And you’re never going to get excited about it—maybe you won’t even appreciate the cost of the remedy or even the severity of the problem—until you start getting excited about what the fix looks like. And one of the reasons it hasn’t been fixed yet is God’s got a lot more work to do to collect a team of people, and he’s been doing it for 2000 years now after the coming of Christ. But he proved that he’s going to fix the problem by his own biological resurrection. Let’s start there.

Verse 20: “In fact, Christ has been raised from the dead.” This is 1 Corinthians 15:20. And when you think through what happened after his resurrection—now going up to the place of being glorified and honored—and living in that body for all eternity, and even now the same body he took from the grave is the one he has now, a different kind of body than the one we’re used to—that becomes the prototype, or the word in our text, verse 20, “the firstfruits of those who have fallen asleep”—euphemism for death. We die. And we think about our demise. The Bible says Christ’s resurrection—that’s the template of what he’s going to do for the rest of us.

Verse 21: “For as by a man came death”—there’s Adam again, thanks Adam—not that we would do much better—“by a man has also come the resurrection of the dead.” Christ was fully human; had to engage in the arena of humanity. “For as in Adam all die”—all right, that’s what we learned over there in Romans 5—“so also in Christ shall all be made alive.” Little footnote on that—clearly, even the wicked will be resurrected into bodies that will last forever. There’s a resurrection—as Paul preached—of the wicked and the righteous. There’s a resurrection of the Great White Throne Judgment for those who will be assigned a place of punishment, and there’s a resurrection for everybody.

But, verse 23, they’re all going to have the same experience—“each in his own order: Christ the firstfruits, then at his coming those who belong to him. Then comes the end, when he delivers the kingdom to God the Father after destroying every rule, every authority, every power”—every tempter, every rebel, everything that is pitted against God and his righteousness. “He must reign until he has put all his enemies under his feet.” Now the last enemy to be destroyed is death. Now, the “death” in context here is not relational death; it’s physical death. It’s the sin-laden world we live in. As Paul put over there in Romans 8, creation itself is groaning to be released from the bondage. And in our own lives, we experience it personally every day in a fallen body.

Let’s get excited a little bit about this fix—verse 42. Drop down to verse 42. This is—I mean, I hope this will help us with the foolishness we’ve been ranting on recently about the cotton-ball clouds and the see-through people floating around with, you know, golden harps singing hymnals for eternity. This is not the reality of the new kingdom, of the coming New Earth. Four quick things he tells us here.

Verse 42: “So it is with the resurrection of the dead.” What is—here it comes—“what is sown perishable is raised imperishable.” You go to your grocery store—you’ve got perishable and non-perishable things, right? You’ve got cans of Spam and SpaghettiOs, and then you’ve got fruit. Let’s talk about bananas, because if anything is perishable, it’s bananas. They’re only good for about 37 minutes, really—I mean, at least in my book. They’re green and then they ripen, and then they’re gone. They start spotting and then they get mushy. And, I mean, I hate all that stuff to start with. But it’s hard to like bananas unless they’re in that perfect range—perishable.

The body that we have now, that has been—because of the consequence and indictment of sin in Genesis 3—subject to being perishable, and it does perish. And it all starts with spots, if you notice that. And it’s all downhill from there. When you’re raised, your body is like the prototype that we celebrate on Easter resurrection morning, that Christ comes back, and the same body that he had that he brought out of that tomb is still the one—active and oxygen—oxygen in his blood today. He’s in physical form and a body that is impervious to death. He’s ageless—that’s the way I like to summarize this line—ageless. He doesn’t perish. There’s no entropy; there’s no thermodynamics, you know, decaying and corrupting the body. It continually lives in that perfect 27–37 minute window.

Verse 43: “What is sown in dishonor is raised in glory.” That’s the word that’s used when Jesus is talking about the flowers of the field, and he says even Solomon in all of his glory didn’t have the splendor of these flowers of the field, which, by the way, only have a shelf life very short. He says, “It’s here today; tomorrow it’s thrown into the furnace.” But the picture of that word in this context is that picture of beauty—something in all of its splendor—robust, healthy. Now, I know we’re only talking about skin-deep things, it seems, at this particular point. But if you talk about the body that you’re going to get—it’s ageless and it’s beautiful. I don’t know what the window is—I don’t know if it felt like between, like, 17 and 22, I don’t know, it was very short—but whatever that peak was, that’s it. And God recreates things that were dishonorable when they’re put in a casket, and it is created with honor, splendor, glory.

“What is sown in weakness”—let’s get past the cover of being on the cover of a magazine now—“what is sown in weakness is raised in power.” I mean, if you really want to talk about the issues that we struggle with being encased in a sinful, fallen body—I mean, most of it is the fact that whenever we purpose to do good, our body rebels against us. It’s the word Jesus used when he was in the garden. He took Peter, James, and John with him and he said, “Pray here before I go to the crucifixion,” and he grieved, and he was sweating so much it was like his forehead was bleeding, and they kept falling asleep. And remember, they were well-intentioned, were they not? And he says to them, “The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak.” It’s the problem—even when you want to do good, you’ve got a body that doesn’t cooperate, doesn’t have the “oomph,” it doesn’t have the power. I know you think, if your life is like mine, “I want to get to heaven because I just want to sleep.” You won’t want to sleep, right? Manufacture those—no night. Sorry. I mean, you’re done with that feeling of weakness, that uncooperative body that we’re in because it’s subject to weakness. I like to say it’s tireless. It’s ageless; it’s beautiful; it’s tireless.

Verse 44: “It is sown a natural body.” Now get this now—natural, post-fall, subject to temptation. We talk about natural things—things of the flesh, things of the world, the propensity to do wrong. “It is raised a spiritual body.” Now, this is where people go wrong—“spiritual body.” Oh, that see-through Casper the Friendly Ghost floating around on a cotton-ball cloud. It’s not what we mean here. Matter of fact, that’s not what you mean when, in your home fellowship group, there’s some guy there and you say to her, “He sure is spiritual.” You don’t mean, “I could see the guy sitting behind him when I looked at him.” We’re not talking about ghosts or spirits. We’re talking about the fact that it does the right things. I mean, part of the problem with being human is our body is constantly rebelling against our good intentions, wanting to do whatever it wants to do. The natural body will be gone. You’ll get this body—a spiritual body, a godly body. If it’s ageless, it’s also beautiful—it’s beautiful. It’s tireless—it’s tireless. It’s godly.

“Now, there is a natural body”—a body that’s temporal, corrupted, fallen—“but there’s also a spiritual body.” And Christ is the only one that has one right now—perfected, glorified, godly. “Thus it is written, ‘The first man Adam became a living being’”—passed on his problem, by the way—“the last Adam,” that’s Christ, “became a life-giving spirit.” Christ is the Son of Adam in part because he came to do it the way Adam didn’t do it, but also to return us to a state that Adam initially had—that place where he lived in a body that was ageless, beautiful, tireless, and godly.

Verse 46: “But it is not the spiritual that is first but the natural, and then the spiritual. The first man was from the earth, a man of dust; the second man is from heaven. As was the man of dust, so also are those who are of the dust”—remember Genesis 5:3—everybody’s a chip off the old block post-fall, right? We’re just like him. “But as is the man of heaven,” you want to align now with him; you want to be on his bus—“so also are those who are of heaven.” It’s coming. We may be reconciled now—the relational death is fixed—but look at verse 49, really we’re zeroing in, though, on the biological fix: “Just as we have borne the image of the man of dust, we shall also bear the image of the man of heaven.”

Impervious to death, impervious to sin, impervious to temptation—we’re going to bear that image. That’s really good news. As a matter of fact, it’s such good news that if you understand the gravity of the problem and you appreciate the value—the profound value and cost—of the solution, and you can start to get excited about the fix that God really has reversed all the problems with this life and all the cascading effects, reverberating effects of sin, you will begin to so value the next life—I hate to put it this way, but maturing Christians will have an increasing and emerging death wish. I mean, hate to say it, but you will. You will desire to depart and be with Christ, as Paul said, which is far better. You will—you will begin to roll your eyes around the immature or uninformed Christian that says things like this: “Well, I want to go to heaven, but, you know, I just first want to enjoy my retirement years. I just want to play golf.” Or the young Christian—young, immature Christian—“I just want to live long enough to get married and have kids. I just—I don’t want to go to heaven until we get to have that happen.” All right—“I’ve got a great vacation lined up this summer; we’re going—I just, I don’t—let Christ come back in the fall, not the summer.” You know, that is so stupid. I mean, it’s so stupid. Think about it.

Let me illustrate this. It’s like you having a room at the Roadway Inn off the I-15 with all the trucks barreling by it every five seconds—all the while you’ve got a reservation at, I don’t know, the St. Regis, the Ritz-Carlton—ocean view, people waiting to serve you there—and you say, “Well, I know I got that reservation; I just want to stay at the Roadway a little bit longer. I mean, the Froot Loops at the morning buffet are so fresh and good. I just saw Todd chatting with Flo in the lobby—she’s such a sweet old lady. I mean, I know—can it be after breakfast—we’ll move over to the Ritz?” What are you talking about? Do you have any clue what you’re saying? No, we really don’t.

Paul was so convinced of this—and I’m quoting the verse that comes after the most famous verse in Philippians 1:21—“For me to live is Christ, but to die…” Okay. I know it seems odd, and if you’re a non-Christian or new Christian, you don’t get it yet. But let me just tell you, the more you live in Christ, the more you will long to step across the threshold of this life into the next. And if this is starting to scare you—“Is this guy related to Jim Jones? Is there Kool-Aid out in the lobby?” I mean, if you’re starting to be afraid that this death wish is going to turn into some mass suicide here at Compass Bible Church this morning, then you don’t know the rest of Philippians 1, because certainly your pastor knows the rest of Philippians 1. In Philippians 1, after he says, “I’d much rather desire to depart to be with Christ, for that is far better,” “but it is more necessary for you that I remain on in the flesh.” Put it this way: you’re at the Roadway Inn not on vacation; this is a business trip. You’re here to do some work. Oh, you do have a reservation at the Ritz-Carlton, but you cannot check out of the Roadway Inn until the work is done.

So for all you on the brink of suicide this morning—don’t blame your suicide on me. You have no moral right to kill yourself—though if you’re a mature Christian, we’ve all been there. Every day we cry out, “Maranatha—your kingdom come.” We can’t wait to step across this life into the next life, where we get this reality instead of the one we have now. I’m ready. So I often say, let’s do our work and go home. That’s what Paul meant by “For me to live is Christ”—I’ve got an agenda Christ has given me. This is a business trip—let’s get the work done. Not the least of which, by the way—just to be germane to the timeframe of our church—not the least of which is filling up this campus with people next weekend for Easter. I mean, that’s part of the job. You understand, the work is done when the last convert comes to Christ and puts their trust in Christ—then we get to go home. And part of that—I mean, what an opportunity we have next week to fill this campus up with people who need to hear the gospel from John 4. Let’s do the work. Let’s hope that the thing is done and we get to go on, I don’t know, 12:01 next week—because the last convert has come to Christ.

Please don’t love this world. Don’t even love walking by the chain link fence. Don’t think about the problem—as Paul said, “The world is crucified to me, and I to it.” I’m not trying to be cynical or angry or any of that. I’m just saying, God has got something prepared for us we can’t even yet imagine. The problem—worse than most of us think. The solution—more costly and profound than most of us can even process. But the fix—the end game—man, it is more glorious, more fantastic, more fulfilling than any of us can possibly imagine.

It’s a lot for us, I would hope, to be motivated with as we move into the next chapter here in Luke chapter four.

Would you stand with me? Let’s dismiss us with a word of prayer.

Pray with me, please. God, I know it’s just a connection here that we’ve tried to elaborate on from your word, but to think about Christ as the Son of Adam, the creation of God that, frankly, went wrong—working all into, obviously, your sovereign plan to redeem us and bring your grace into the spotlight that we can glorify in that and praise you for it for eternity—it’s still something that we need to pause frequently and just think about, the gravity of it all. Because of sin in this world, we are subject not only to disease and death and all that, but the condemnation and the exile from the God who’s the Father of all blessings. And that should just bring a chill up our spine and should make us think what a terrible thing it is—sin and its consequence.

But God, as we’ve tried to remember here from this connection to Adam that Luke makes, it’s so important that we remember our rescuer and how he, at great personal risk and with great sacrifice, entered the arena of humanity to save us. And he will bear the marks—sovereignly keeping the scars that he incurred on the cross—the Lamb as though he’d been slain. We’ll still see that when we get to be in your presence. We’ll remember the profound cost.

But then, God, for us, I don’t think any of this really adds up in our minds until we start to see that palpable excitement about the next life that you have shown us in the early church as they cried out, “Maranatha—come quickly, Lord Jesus.” Let us have that sense in our own hearts, that we’re just here on a business trip, if you will; our citizenship is in heaven; our reservation at the Ritz, it’s already set up, it’s ready for us. But we’re gonna—we’re gonna work till the clock sounds that the work is over. We’re gonna run through the tape. We’re gonna give it our best to the very end to do your will on earth. And then, God, we look forward to seeing you, leaving behind the sin-laden world and stepping into a place that you’ve created for us. Give us that sense of anticipation as is so indicative of the godly people of the Bible.

And God, may we even feel a song this week—we’ve got work to do this week: promote the gospel, drag people into a place where they can hear the message of forgiveness that was articulated 2000 years ago at that well outside of Sychar. Give us a heart for evangelism, a concern for the people at our workplace, in our neighborhoods, and our extended families. Give us a heart for that, that we might please you—being busy about your work when you return.

Thanks for this reminder from this connection made for us that Jesus is the Son of Adam.

In Jesus’ name we pray. Amen.