Jesus, Lord of Glory

Beautiful Savior! King of creation!

Son of God and Son of Man!
Truly I’d love thee, truly I’d serve thee,
light of my soul, my joy, my crown.

Fair are the meadows, fair are the woodlands,

robed in flowers of blooming spring.
Jesus is fairer, Jesus is purer;
he makes our sorrowing spirit sing.

Fair is the sunshine, fair is the moonlight,

bright the sparkling stars on high;
Jesus shines brighter, Jesus shines purer,
than all the angels in the sky.

The Last Adam

What Adam had, and forfeited for all,
Christ keepeth now, who cannot fail or fall.
George Herbert, “The Hold-fast”

Earlier, we looked at the mystery of sin, specifically the mystery of its irrationality. But we did
not look with any depth at another difficult question, which is how the sin of Adam and Eve
influences us today. Why should another person’s sin make me sinful? It makes sense to us that
another person’s sin might damage us. We even have plenty of analogies in our day-to-day lives
for how another person’s sin might result in my being born damaged; think, for instance, of
babies who are born already addicted to drugs. But we do not hold those babies responsible for
their addiction. We don’t suggest that they are born in a state of guilt for their addiction. We
don’t suggest that addiction is now their very nature, that it’s essential to them. And yet that is
precisely what the Church has said about our state of sin: we are born sinners; we are born guilty;
we are born deserving God’s punishment. That claim is much harder to swallow.

Clearly, something about the sin of Adam and Eve was different from the everyday sins that we
all commit and that influence other people in all sorts of ways. I think that the difference is to be
found in the deep connection that they had with God. Because of that connection, the things that
they did shaped creation and changed the human essence in ways that our actions now cannot.
As fallen people, we aren’t given the same kind of power over the creation that humans were
originally given in God’s design, and we should be grateful for that. It is God’s mercy that we
have been “unplugged,” so to speak, from the creation now that our relationship with God is
broken. We still do many things to damage the world, but we can no longer damage it
essentially.1

Here’s an analogy. My word-processing program has templates for different kinds of documents.
In theory, I should be able to change the default template so that the parameters are what I want,
but in fact I have never succeeded in doing this, no matter how often I try.2 The template, at least
when measured against my will for it, is corrupted. And this corruption is passed on to every
document that I generate. Similarly, the fall of Adam and Eve involved more than two
individuals moving from innocence to sin. It involved the corruption of the human template.
Since they were the beginning of the new kind of being God had called into existence by
breathing into them and making them temples of His Spirit, their fall involved a corruption of the
whole system. A traditional way of saying this would be that the form for human beings has been
corrupted. Human nature, the normative design for being human, has itself been corrupted.

A document has no power to repair its own template, nor can a template fix itself; if I were to fix
the template, I would need to step out of the document and go into the system’s programming. In
the same way, human beings have no power to repair our corrupted human nature. We are inside
our nature and cannot fix it. And, of course, repairing the human template is much more
complicated than repairing the template for a document. We do keep trying. The idea that we
might be able to re-design ourselves to be smarter, stronger, healthier, better in every way is very
beguiling. The terrifying experiments of the Nazis trying to make a super-race were examples of
such efforts. Still today, science is always looking for ways to fix genetic failings, to solve
human weaknesses, and to extend human life. There’s a whole self-help industry devoted to
“hacking” your life. Much of this is good, but it is not yet getting at the basic corruption in our
design, not yet reaching all the way to human sin. Most fundamentally our problem is in the soul,
and that cannot be repaired by genetic manipulation.

Only our Creator, our Designer can fix what Adam and Eve broke. He does this by entering into
His own creation and becoming a human being Himself. This is where our earlier metaphor
breaks down. Unlike the programmer who stays on the outside of the system in order to fix it,
God comes into what He has made. We call this act the incarnation, when God took a human
nature to Himself. This is who Jesus is: the God-Man, who is both fully divine and fully human.
Jesus is God coming into the broken system to repair it from the inside. This is why the Bible
calls Jesus is called the second Adam, or the last Adam. He is Human Being 2.0, the upgraded
and repaired human being who instantiates a repaired human nature.

In 1 Corinthians, Paul announces that Jesus repairs the damage of death in human nature. In the
last chapter we talked about the presence of death in the fossil record before the creation of
Adam and Eve, but no matter what we think of the death of animals or trees or stars, human
beings were not supposed to die in the way that we do – not because God had made us
indestructible, but because we were sharing so directly in His own Life. This is why Genesis
links death and disobedience to directly. In disobeying God, Adam and Eve were cutting their
1
We will see that Jesus still has this sort of human power, in that the connection between His human nature and God
is unbroken. His redemptive human work has the power to reshape creation and remake the human essence. Adam
and Eve had that same sort of power.
2
I am comforted by how many people with whom I have shared this analogy tell me that they have the same
experience. Why is Word so in love with Calibri font?
connection to that abundant life. Jesus defeats death in His resurrection (about which more in a
moment). For now, what’s important is that Jesus doesn’t rise from the dead in His divine nature.
His divine nature didn’t die and so couldn’t come back to life. No, Jesus is a death-conquering
human, which is why His resurrection inaugurates a restored human nature that is capable of
conquering death. Paul says this:

Since death came through a human being, the resurrection of the dead has also come
through a human being; for as all die in Adam, so all will be made alive in Christ. But
each in his own order: Christ the first fruits, then at his coming those who belong to
Christ (1 Corinthians 15:21-23).

We all die “in Adam” because we are all participants in the human nature that he and Eve
corrupted. But we can be made alive “in Christ” when we become participants in the new nature
that He has made both by being the Word from whom all natures come and by being the perfect
human, the New Adam.

The new humanity is not only about not dying; more importantly, it’s about living in a different
way. In creating this new humanity, Jesus repairs the broken connection to God, so that we again
participate in God’s own nature (2 Peter 1:4). Paul expresses this by saying that in Jesus we will
gain “spiritual bodies,” that are imperishable, glorious, and full of power. This is a promise for
the future, on the other side of death, when we will share in the resurrection. Already now the
seed of this transformation has been planted in those of us who belong to Jesus, who abide in
Him the way a branch abides in a vine. Already now, this new humanity is working away from
within.

Thus it is written, “The first man, Adam, became a living being”; the last Adam became a
life-giving spirit. But it is not the spiritual that is first, but the physical, 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 are those who are of the dust; and as is the man of heaven, so
are those who are of heaven. Just as we have borne the image of the man of dust, we will
also bear the image of the man of heaven (1 Corinthians 15:45-49).

Being “spiritual bodies” does not mean that our bodies will be ghostly or unreal. When Jesus
rose from the dead, He could eat, and be touched, and go for a walk. But He could also appear
and disappear at will. He could go through locked doors and solid walls. It seems that His body
has become more solid, not more ghostly, so that the solid things of this world weren’t really
solid to Him. Being “spiritual bodies” means that the image of God will be fully restored in us,
so that we will be genuine temples of the Holy Spirit, genuine participants of the divine nature.

The best consequence of this is one that is an improvement not just on our corrupted, fallen
nature but also on Adam and Eve’s original nature. Although Adam and Eve were connected to
God in an intimate way, that connection was subject to damage. Although Adam and Eve were
made without sin, they were also made with the ability to sin. Sin was not inevitable, but it was
possible. The new humanity in Jesus is not like that because in the new humanity our whole self
– bodies and souls together – will be completely under the domination of the Holy Spirit in a
relationship that Jesus speaks of as “abiding” in God. In Jesus’ new humanity, the connection
with God will be unbreakable. God’s desires for us will be inscribed on our nature. The Bible
often talks about this as having God’s law or will “written on our hearts” rather than something
that is external to us.

Adam and Eve knew God’s will for them, but it was still an external law. It was a rule that they
could consider and either keep or not keep. But someday God’s law will be so much a part of our
own nature that we will no more be able to break it than we would be able to defy any other limit
of our nature. To go against God’s will, that is, to sin, would be to break ourselves in half. It will
not be possible. Jesus’ own experience of being human was like this, already fully surrendered to
God’s will for humanity, already having God’s Law written on His heart. That doesn’t mean that
temptation was effortless for Him, but it does mean that there was no chance He would ever
betray His Father. The new human nature that He has crafted for us will be like this too. Not only
does Jesus repair the damage of death, He also repairs the damage of sin that separates us from
God. [Add that Jesus knew more about temptation than we do? Connect to Edwards on moral
impeccability. Think about whether it makes sense to introduce vocabulary that’s technical
language in the draft you show Bhama, Dad & Mike; then ask them if that was distracting.]

Jesus does all this by being the first New Human. He doesn’t just seem to be human. He has a
full human nature: a real body and a real soul. Although He was born without sin, He still lived
with many of the effects of sin, including experiences of weakness, sickness, sorrow, and
discouragement. He was born a baby and grew to adulthood, experiencing change and time even
as we do. In his human nature, He had a relationship to God the Father and to God the Holy
Spirit that was the same relationship we are supposed to have. His humanity really was a temple
to the Holy Spirit and really was a house for His Father to abide in.

Like Adam and Eve, Jesus faced temptation. Satan came to Him in the wilderness to tempt Him
into sin, and the first temptation involved eating something that was good and yet forbidden.
Jesus experienced hunger and desire for good food, just as Eve did, but He did not surrender to
that desire. He chose obedience. Again, on the night before His death, Jesus was tempted to turn
away from pain and suffering into disobedience, but again He passed the test.
As the Last Adam, Jesus was therefore able to move from a good, sinless human nature to a
glorified, perfected human nature. If Adam and Eve had not sinned, they too would have been
able to move forward to this new nature, in which sin would no longer be possible, in which
God’s will would be written on their hearts. Jesus not only repairs the human template, He also
repairs the whole of God’s creational design, not just for human beings but for the entire cosmos.
The great hymn to Jesus as the Cosmic Christ, found in Colossians 1, is a hymn not just to God
the Son but to Jesus as the Second Adam, who fulfills the creational design for God’s image and
is the beginning of a restored creation.

He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation; for in him all things in
heaven and on earth were created, things visible and invisible, whether thrones or
dominions or rulers or powers—all things have been created through him and for him. He
himself is before all things, and in him all things hold together (Colossians 1:15-17).

In his poem “The Hold-fast” (quoted at the top of this section), George Herbert explores an
additional similarity between the first and last Adam. Just as our participation in the first Adam’s
corruption of our nature was not our choice, so our participation in the last Adam’s repair of our
nature is not our choice. We may think that we share in Christ’s nature through our good works,
or through our decision to trust Him, or even through our willingness to confess our sins, but in
fact all those acts are possible, if we in fact perform them, only because Christ is already making
that possible. Rather than worrying about this, we should delight in it, recognizing “that all
things were more ours by being His.” In other words, we possess all good things much more
securely when we possess them through Christ than if we possess them through our own feeble
efforts. The great difference between the first and last Adam is that Adam failed to preserve our
human nature, but Jesus cannot fail not only to preserve, but to glorify it.