Harmony of the Gospels
Program #110
July 17, 2005
God, in whose image Adam was made, also had that within Him which was man
in His likeness and could be to Him what woman was to man. But God could not
separate that part of Himself from Himself by creation as He had done when He took Eve
from Adam and formed her. The only way that which was in the bosom of God could
come out of God and be distinct from God was by birth. God, The Father of Fathers and
The Male of Males, could sire someone in His own image, but in order to do that there
had to be a female. Insofar as the physical aspect of that was concerned, there was a
female in His likeness with whom God could intercourse and who could bear that which
would come out of His own bosom. The woman whom He had taken out of Adam was
created both in the image and likeness of man and the image and likeness of God. This
would not be a violation of the divine mandate that every nature take after its own kind
because God and man are the same in kind.
I am not a medical man and I do not want to dabble in areas that are outside of my
purview so what I am going to say here is to be taken theologically, because it is biblical.
What I want to focus on is the biblically declared truth that the race fell in Adam, not in
Eve, because the soul1 (or the life) of the flesh is in the blood, according to Leviticus
17:11, and the children carry the blood of Adam, not Eve. This One Who came out of the
bosom of the Father (St. John 1:18) would not be a child of Adam. He would be
conceived by God through the Person of the Holy Ghost coming upon Mary as a man
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The Hebrew nefesh means life or soul.
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comes upon a woman. In this way that which was in the bosom of the Father could be
separated from Him and made distinct from Him as Eve was made distinct from Adam.
Then He, being Man and the Son of Man, could intercourse with God as a bride with her
husband. It was through His travail, according to Isaiah 53:11, that children would be
born into the family of God. Being physical and being finite is not the same as being
evil. Evil comes from the sinful nature, not from the body. The body that God created
from dust of the ground in the Garden of Eden was mortal and finite but it was not sinful
when it was created. It was one of the works of creation that God pronounced to be very
good. It was only when Adam sinned that death was pronounced as a judgment on the
body of man by God.
All bodies sired by Adam would be under the curse of death but Jesus of
Nazareth, the Seed of the Woman, though inhabiting a mortal body made in the likeness
of sinful flesh, would not be a sinner as a result of inheriting Adam’s nature because
Adam was not His father. His body would only be defiled and sinful if He Himself
sinned against God. He would be the Seed of the Woman in that the woman would carry
Him in her womb and nourish him with her own body and strength. He would be the
Seed of the Woman in that the Child would not be conceived by Adam. And He would
be the Seed of the Woman in that it would be through her that He would be born into, and
find identity with, the human race. But He would be the Son of God, not the on of Adam.
The Angel Gabriel told Mary that the Holy Child she was carrying in her womb was to be
called the Son of the Most High God.
In one sense, Adam had nothing to do with redemption. And yet, through Adam’s
decision to stand by his woman, Mary was born and without Adam, Mary would not have
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been born and there would have been no redemption. But though Adam’s actions had a
part to play in the plan of redemption, salvation was not of the first but the Last Adam.
He was the Seed of the Woman and the Son of Man, but not Adam’s child.
Let me remind you that this is not all that there is to say about Christ. Let no one
feel that this aspect of revealed truth denies any other, because it does not. There is a
defined biblical sense in which Christ has forever been the Son of God and God himself.
Even so, in this part of our study, it was His Being born as the Seed of the Woman and
the Son of Man on which we need to focus.
The time-and-history Incarnation of God in the likeness of sinful flesh is indeed
what the Bible foretold from antiquity. He would be our Emmanuel—God With Us, or
God Among Us. This One who was to be born of the virgin was to be called the Mighty
God, the Everlasting Father, the Prince of Peace—not peace between nations or people
but peace between man and God. When the fulness of the time was come, God sent forth
his Son, made of a woman, made under the law. He was Jesus, which means,
JEHOVAH, our Savior. The One who came to us was the One who made us and
breathed life into us. He was the Giver of Life and He was The Life.
In Hebrews 1:5, 6 the Messianic prophesies of Psalm 2:7, 89:26 and 97:7 are
quoted to show that Christ was begotten into this world by the Father, Who said “Today
have I begotten you and you are My Son.” That He was God is attested to in verse eight
of that chapter where the Father says to the Son: “The throne of You, Thee God, is
forever.” John 3:16 says that He was the only Son that God the Father begat, or sired.
This is the Son, Whom, we are told, was in the bosom of the Father in John 1:18. Luke 3
presents Christ as the Son of Man and traces His earthly lineage (some think through the
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woman’s side of the family) back to Adam. This God in the Flesh and this Son of God,
sired by God through the Virgin, came into the world by way of birth. He was a babe in
swaddling clothes. He nursed at his mother’s breast. He learned to read and write. He
learned to do carpentry and He learned about His calling from God through reading the
Scriptures. If there was ever a situation that dispels any doubt that God and man are in
the same image, this is it. He was The Man and He was The God.
Throughout history there are certain theological enigmas that can find no
resolution in the humanistic disciplines of dialectics and reason. One such issue revolves
around the question of whether man has a free will or whether God is sovereign. Another
related issue is whether truth is supralapsarian or infralapsarian. Do not be hasty in
dismissing this subject because the issues raised by it are very important if you want to
know the answer to our question about why God made Adam and allowed him to sin and
the race to fall. I am going to pursue a little the subjects of supra and infra lapsarianism.
Supra derives from Latin and it means: on the outside of, like superstructure.
Infra means: within or on the inside of, like infrastructure. Lapsarian comes from the
Latin word “lapse” which means “collapse or fall.” In theology, the debate is about the
edicts of God. The Supralapsarians believe the Bible to teach that God decreed the Fall
and declared the plan of redemption through His sovereignty before the Garden of Eden,
outside of time and history. The Infralapsarians believe that God planned and set in
motion the redemption program immediately after the Fall. The argument goes on from
there. Infralapsarians say that everything God did with respect to redemption was in time
and history and was in reaction to developing situations. They believe that God did not
devise the systems of laws, for example, until it became evident that the program of man
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living by his conscience had failed in the first dispensation. They believe that God did
not plan for the Old Testament to fail and that He did not plan for the New Testament to
replace it until the Old Testament had failed. They say that Jeremiah 31:31 teaches this.
The Supralapsarians say that God planned redemption, and all the events of time
and history, in eternity before creation and the Fall.
I do not intend to argue either of these two positions but rather to give you the
position of Historic Christian Orthodoxy on this issue, as well as the orthodox position on
the the free will of man and the Sovereignty of God. Who is right in this controversy?
The answer is that neither side of the argument is right. The truth is that the Bible
teaches both. God's plan was from before the world, but God’s plan reacted to time and
history.
All of the things that God did and said in time and history are real and
meaningful. Nothing is staged like a play with actors walking through their memorized
parts. Nothing is superfluous. Even so, God knew from the beginning, so He made His
plan from the beginning. And God’s sovereignty is not tied to His foreknowledge. If it
was, He would not be sovereign, He would be an observer of, and a reactor to, time and
history. God did not plan the redemption because of the Fall. Man fell because of the
Plan of God which, like every thing else in the Covenant of Grace, functions on the
principle of death, burial, resurrection and new life by new birth in the new creation.
And yet, in time and History, God did not want man to Fall, He warned man against it,
and God punished man when he disobeyed. Which of theses two propositions is true?
Both are true. That is only a problem for man because of his inability to pass it through
his creaturely mind and rationally comprehend it. But man would not have that problem
if he would listen to God who has told us in his Word, “do not try to comprehend and
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explain my ways. My thoughts are as much higher than your thought as the heavens are
above the earth. My ways are beyond you and you are never going to be able to figure
them out while you are finite and in this world.
Why do we bring this up at this time? It is because it is essential to a Christian,
New Covenant understanding of the meaning and application of the Sermon on the
Mount. When Jesus was in this world He established a meaningful relationship of love
and fellowship with the Church, which was His Body and His bride. It is true that He had
not yet died for the sins of the world. While walking with His disciples on this earth He
had not yet been resurrected and the new birth, by which mankind would become bone of
His bone and flesh of His flesh, had not yet become a dispensational reality. But because
Jesus Christ, who was God, knew the end from the beginning, He loved this body—this
Wife of His—as if it had already happened. And He, like Adam with Eve, was not
willing to give up this one of His own kind that He had been lonely without and for
whom He had waited so long. As typified by Adam, He decided that it was better to take
her sins upon Himself and to give up his life, than be separated from her and go on living
forever without her. This was the only way that the Old Creation, made by the hands of
God and fallen into sin, could be destroyed and new birth into the New Creation could
become a reality. It had to be by death to the Old and the birth of the New through
resurrection. It could not be by reformation or recreation; it had to be by resurrection and
regeneration.
Why did God make Adam and Eve and put them in the Garden, knowing what
they were going to do? It was because it was only by way of Eve's eating of the fruit of
the tree and Adam's going along because of an unwillingness to lose her that the process
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of redemption could be set in motion. Through Christ we have the prospect of a utopian
new world—free from evil and death, where we will be good because we, like God, will
know what evil is but have the resolve, the wisdom, the power, and the character to leave
it alone. But that would never have happened without the Fall.
If all of these things are true, does that then mean that Adam really did good
instead of evil? Should he be condemned for what he did? Well, certainly he should not
be condemned by you and me because he was our father and we owe our existence to
him. Even so, he had to be condemned by God because he broke the Law of God and did
evil. The foreknowledge and sovereignty of God does not relieve any man of the duty to
do what God commands him to do and to not do what God commands him not to do.
Even in human terms we understand that, if we desire to be honest and fair.
Let us say, for example, that you are contemplating going down and buying your
16 year-old son a new car. But you have watched that boy drive and there is a conflict in
your mind. As you think about it, all of the painful possibilities, many of which will
become realities, flash before you: Speeding tickets, maybe getting in with the wrong
crowd, maybe driving while drinking, loose women and disease, and possibly a fatal
accident. But you reason it out that this is a phase that he has to go through in order to
grow up and you are unwilling to keep him from growing up in order to eliminate the
dangers. Your goal for him is to see him grow to manhood and maturity. And so in a
sense, while you do not want him to hurt himself, you want him to go through this stage.
He has to in order to reach maturity. Also, in a sense, it is your fault, because you bought
him the car.
One night you get a call from the Sheriff's Office. They have him in jail for drunk
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driving. You bail him out and in time he comes up before the court. The judge takes his
license away for a year and sentences him to 100 hours of community service. On the
way home he says to you, “Dad, it’s not fair. I should not have to lose my license and do
this community work. It is really your fault. You got me the car. You knew it was going
to happen. You really planned for it to happen, in a way.”
What would you say? You might well say something like this: “No, that is not
true.
I did know it was going to happen in a sense, and maybe in a way, I was
responsible. But that does not alter the fact that you broke the law and justice demands
that you pay. I warned you, your mother warned you, you knew what the laws were, and
you did it anyway.” And you would be exactly right, if that is what you said. That is just
the way things work when you are dealing with children growing up, and with the desire
not to destroy free moral agency in the process of raising the children. You cannot
change it because you do not have the right or the power to change it. It is either a matter
of finding a way to cope with it, or not having a family—one of the two. Even so, you
realize that he is apart of you and you are a part of him. He would not be in this dilemma
if you had not sired him and if he had not come into this world through your actions. In a
sense you are responsible for getting him the car and turning him loose with it. And,
while not wanting to let him off the hook or to teach him irresponsibility and not wanting
to do damage to the morality of justice, you knew that you are going to help him out and
do for him what the cannot do for himself.
Adam made a judgment decision and a value decision. He knew what he was
doing. He knew what it meant. But he decided that life was not worth living without a
mate and without a family. He went into it with his eyes open. He deliberately and
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calculatedly broke the Law of God. God had to punish Adam. Justice demanded it, just
like with the boy who got caught driving under the influence. If God was wise enough
and good enough and loving enough to turn that to His advantage and ours, so much the
better for Him and for us. But it does not take Adam and his children off the hook for
breaking the law of God.
Even so, God knew that man was in this dilemma because of Him. He had
devised the plan, He had created the heavens and the earth, He had made Adam and put
him in the Garden, God had made the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, and He
had given the serpent access to Eve. And so God took the responsibility and did for man
what man could not do for himself. He would not and could not destroy the morality of
justice. If He did, not only man and eternity, but God himself, would lose the battle to
the enemy. But He, as the Man and the Seed of the Woman, could take man’s place in
judgment. He could suffer and pay the price to redeem man back from the evil shops of
pawn where Adam and Eve had hocked them. And that is what He did.
In II Corinthians 5: it is written
Wherefore henceforth know we no man after the flesh: yea, though we have
known Christ after the flesh, yet now henceforth know we him no more.
Therefore if any man be in Christ, he is a new creature: old things
are passed away; behold, all things are become new.
And all things are of God, who hath reconciled us to himself by Jesus Christ,
and hath given to us the ministry of reconciliation;
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To wit, that God was in Christ, reconciling the world unto himself, not
imputing their trespasses unto them; and hath committed unto us the word of
reconciliation.
Now then we are ambassadors for Christ, as though God did beseech you by
us: we pray you in Christ’s stead, be ye reconciled to God.
For he hath made him to be sin for us, who knew no sin; that we
might be made the righteousness of God in him.
In his marvelous and unsurpassed devotional book, Beneath the Cross of Jesus, Reginald
Earnest Oscar White tells of a painting of the crucifix by Leonardo Di Vinci. When
looked at in a certain light and from a certain angle there appears to be another person on
the Cross behind the figure of Jesus. This was Di Vinci’s way of bearing witness to the
biblical fact that God was in Christ. The intellectuals and the Christian Gnostics are
wrong. It was more than the Man Jesus on the Cross. God was on that Cross. If the
skeptics and the critics of Christianity and the Bible want to blame God for all of this, if
they want to say that He started it and He should take the blame for it, the Bible says that
God did accept the blame. He did suffer. The nails the pierced the hands of the man
Jesus, pierced the hands of God. God was in Christ, not holding the world sins against
them but reconciling them to Himself. He committed no sins. He was not a sinner by
nature because He was not of the seed of Adam. He could have gone on living because
death had no dominion over him. But the Christ had no interest in, nor any intention of
doing that. The Incarnate God came down here to die so that He could put an end to the
mortal world with its created beings and bring man to God through birth—sons of God
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into an infinite, immortal, and incorruptible world. God made Christ, the Son of man and
the Seed of the Woman, to be sin for us so that we could be made the righteousness of
God in and thorough Him. And now the message of the Church is, “be ye reconciled to
God.”
But what does this have to do with the Sermon on the Mount and how those teachings
apply Church? It has everything to do with it. The development of this plan of
redemption had to play out in time and history in order to bring man to God and do it in
such was way so as not to destroy free moral agency. That it is what it means to be man
in the image of God. That is what the sovereign plan of God from before the world was
is all about. It is also what the unfolding of time and history is all about. God’s plan of
redemption called for the human race to pass through the various dispensations of history.
In broad terms, the era of the Covenant of the Flesh, of Works, and of the Law had to run
its course and come to its end before the New Covenant of Promise could be established.
There is that it in the Sermon on the Mount which pertains to the Old Covenant of the
Law and to the nation and the children of the flesh. That is no longer valid. That is what
Jeremiah 31:31 predicted. When Jesus took the Kingdom from the nation and left heir
house desolate, He cancelled the Covenant of the Flesh and of the Law and it will never
return. But there is also that in the Sermon on the Mount which pertains to the Law of
God. The Law of God has not passed away and will never pass away for it is a written
declaration of the nature of God and His Kingdom. We will talk about that next time if
the Lord is willing.
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