Do you ever think about how wonderful it would be if you could be like Adam or Eve before they fell? Wouldn’t it be fantastic to live in perfect harmony with God and others? During the holy week when our hearts are so focused on Jesus and the end of his life it is helpful to remember why he came: so God could restore our Adamic nature and our Adamic relationship with God. In fact, Jesus does this and more!
Remember that the old arrangement, or Mosaic covenant, that God had with his people did not succeed in producing a nation of people who loved God and followed his ways. The people could not produce a new garden on earth where everyone lived in harmony and prosperity. This was all rooted in the fact that they could not eliminate the corruption from their nature. The condemnation from the Garden remained.
Yet in God’s wisdom and design, he was working in all of this to move humanity towards a new creation. He would begin by starting with a new uncorrupted Adam. God himself, in his being as the Son, was born of a virgin mother in an incarnation and emptied himself of divine infinities and so a new human race began. This was the beginning of God’s work of new creation on earth.
“He would begin by starting with a new uncorrupted Adam.”
Through Jesus God inaugurated the prophesied kingdom of God on earth, which had always existed in heaven. But the kingdom on earth began with something that never existed before: a new creation in the form of the new Adam. This new Adam, Jesus of Nazareth, relived a perfect human life as he grew with his Father.
After teaching, ministering, and providing an example by his life of how the new Adams should live in this world, he offered himself up as the final perfect atoning sacrifice for human sin and condemnation. He took the punishment for humans so they could be free of the justice of God’s law. Then he completed the new creation of the new Adam by rising from the dead with a new glorified body, triumphing over sin and death and destruction.
After he rose God enthroned Jesus as promised king on the throne of David (Acts 2:30-36) where Jesus now reigns from heaven over the kingdom of God and all other authorities and powers (Eph. 1:20-23). He is making new Adams out of those who believe in Him. He is king over these new Adams; he is the head and they are the body. All of this is the beginning of the fulfillment of the many promises in the Old Testament of a coming king, a coming people of God, and a coming kingdom. Thus, the resurrection of Jesus is the completion of the beginning of God’s new creation and kingdom on earth and is central to all of God’s work in history.
