The Last Adam stood in our place
The Bible sees things in absolutes. There are things that are good and there are things that are evil. The way God created the world, we generally know what these things. Murder is wrong. Why is murder wrong? Is it just because it is unpleasant? Surely that cannot be the standard we apply. Ask anyone who is training hard for something, be it a test, a race, or some other competition. They will likely tell you that the training itself is not pleasant. It is good, but it is not pleasant.
Murder, theft, lying, adultery, and a host of other things are understood by the majority of people to be wrong. The majority doesn’t make it right anymore than the presence of a minority makes it wrong. There must be an actual standard. Anyone who argues otherwise is just borrowing from another moral standard without acknowledging it.
Often, in western civilization, that standard we steal from is the Bible. We take those parts we want and leave the ones we don’t. We’re selective, which means we still want to be our own standard. This is the core of all sin and evil in the world. When God put Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, he gave them a simple test: trust the Lord for the knowledge of good and evil or take of the tree and try to make it up yourself. We know what they chose because it’s the same thing would choose if left to ourselves.
Ecclesiastes 6 teaches us this reality and drives it home with regards to wealth. He teaches that money cannot bring true joy. Remember that Solomon is the author of this book. He was one of the wealthiest men who ever lived, so he is certainly in a place to understand whether money brings true joy. One of the reasons money cannot bring joy is that it is temporal, and man was created to live forever.
There are other temporalities that can bring joy – such as marriage – but that is the intertwining of two souls who will both live forever. While marriage won’t go on past this temporal existence, those individuals who are married will. At its best marriage points toward the joy that believers will have for eternity with the Lord. Money, on the other hand, is passed down through the generations and is rarely used for anything that is of true joy, at least not for long.
Solomon presses on to show that really nothing in this temporal existence can give lasting joy. This might be why joy is something that is experienced even in the most meager of circumstances. The Apostle Paul speaks of joy throughout his writings, but especially in the book of Philippians. Throughout the letter he speaks of the joy he has as well as inviting his readers to rejoice with him. Most striking is his words in Philippians 4:4, “Rejoice in the Lord always; again I will say, Rejoice.”
Here Paul doubles his imperatives to remind us of our call in this life, to rejoice in the Lord. What is remarkable is that Paul writes these words from a prison after much suffering and abuse. How can Paul have joy and even tell persecuted Christians to rejoice in such circumstances? Is he trying to avoid his reality? The answer, of course, is that he tells them to rejoice in the Lord.
The question comes, though, of how we get from Ecclesiastes to Philippians. How do we move from all the misery of Adam to the joy of Paul? Solomon asks it this way, “For who knows what is good for man while he lives the few days of his vain life, which he passes like a shadow?” (Ecclesiastes 6:12) The word for man is the Hebrew name for Adam.
The answer is found in the last Adam. “The first man Adam became a living being; the last Adam became a life-giving spirit.” (1 Corinthians 15:45) He takes on all the darkness of this chapter to succeed where Adam failed. Adam lost his advantage and brought the world into the estate of sin and misery; it was through Adam that death entered the world, that life passes like a shadow; It was because of Adam that man cannot tell what will be after him under the sun. In the last Adam we find redemption and meaning in life. We suffer, yes, but it is not eternal suffering because the last Adam stood in our place.
Pastor Everett Henes, the pastor of the Hillsdale Orthodox Presbyterian Church, can be reached at pastorhenes@gmail.com.
This article originally appeared on Hillsdale Daily News: Opinion
