Jesus: The Second Adam and Our Salvation

Now this is important because one of the things that I find throughout Christendom is a failure to take seriously what Christ accomplished according to His human nature. We have a tendency to think that God came down and died on the cross in His divine nature, which of course would be blasphemous; but the God-man is the mediator, and again, we're told about Christ's humanity here in 1 Corinthians, with respect to conquering the power of death. [00:01:32]

And so here we are seeing Christ's work as the second Adam, as the man who provides the remedy for the failure of the first Adam. Now again, if you recall when we looked at the Covenant of Creation, the covenant that God made with Adam, we saw that Adam and Eve were placed in a probationary situation where if they passed their probation and have become obedient, then and only then, would they receive the tree of life; and if they violated the terms of that covenant, then the penalty would be death. [00:02:52]

Now if you recall, back at the beginning of the course, I said in the final analysis, the Bible teaches only one way of justification, and ultimately that is justification by works alone. And we had a deep gasp when I said that -- "Surely he has misspoken because this man runs around the country constantly defending the reformation doctrine of justification by faith alone. How can he now tell us that ultimately the only way we're saved is through works? Well the term "justification by faith alone" really, if you scratch it and look beneath the surface, is shorthand for saying that our justification is by Christ alone. [00:03:46]

The object of our faith is Christ, and the reason we're justified by faith as the instrument is that that faith is the instrument by which we lay hold of Christ, who satisfies the covenant of works for us, by whose works we are saved. Now I'm saying that there's only one way to be saved, either by your own works or by the works of somebody else. If you're trusting in your own, you're going to perish because the only works that have ever been performed that meet the standard of the covenant of creation are the works of Christ. [00:04:35]

And that's why it's so important in the New Testament that we see that Jesus is the new, or the last Adam and that He did more than die for our sins on the cross. We've explored the superiority of His sacrifice in the atoning death that He had, but as I've said on many occasions, it's not simply the death of Christ that redeems us, but it is also His life. He didn't just come to earth on Good Friday, die on the cross, and then be raised a couple of days later, and that was the story of redemption. [00:05:15]

So at the heart of our concept of redemption is the sinlessness of Christ, and that's a strange thing to me because when people struggle with the Christian faith, the articles of our faith that they tend to focus their skepticism upon are issues about the virgin birth or the resurrection or the miracles of Jesus, and yet you have to say what is more extraordinary than a sinless human life? I mean we have no other sample of that anywhere in history, and the sinlessness of Christ is so important, not just for one reason but for two reasons. [00:06:35]

In the first instance, to qualify as the one who makes the sacrifice, for Him to be the sacrificial lamb, He has to be the lamb without blemish because if He sins once, He doesn't have what's necessary to atone for His own sin, let alone for anybody else's. So that in the drama of redemption, the redeemer must be sinless; but again, that has another application -- not only to the death of Jesus, but also His sinlessness is of critical importance because it describes the perfection of His obedience, which obedience is applied to us. [00:07:23]

That's why, at the heart of the Protestant controversy in the sixteenth century, and then it goes on to this day and has not been resolved, is the concept of imputation -- that our salvation is based upon imputation in two ways. On the one hand, our sins are imputed to, or transferred, in God's sight, to Christ when He gives His atoning death on the cross. When Jesus dies on the cross He's not dying for His sin. He's dying for mine because mine had been imputed to Him; but there is a double imputation in our redemption. [00:08:09]

Not only is my sin imputed to Christ, but the gospel, the good news, is His righteousness is imputed to me by faith. That's why Luther insisted that our justification is accomplished a ustitsia alien -- that is a foreign or alien righteousness, a righteousness that, properly speaking, is not our own. It's not a righteousness that is inherent in our own persons, but it is somebody else's righteousness. It is that righteousness that is extra nos -- outside of us or apart from us, the righteousness achieved by the last Adam. [00:08:52]

And just like the sin of the first Adam was visited upon his descendents and on his people, so the righteousness of Christ is transferred to His people as the second Adam. Now, and we see that this is manifested here in 1 Corinthians with respect to resurrection -- that Christ, by achieving this justification, not only dies so that we can be justified, but Paul will tell us elsewhere that He is raised for our justification as well, so that my standing before God is rooted and grounded both in the cross and in the resurrection of Christ. [00:09:47]

He not only dies for me; He's raised for me, and as Paul labors at this point, Jesus' resurrection is not only for Himself, but He is the firstborn of many brethren. He's the first fruits, but each in its order -- first Christ and then those who are His at His coming -- so that we participate in His resurrection because in the resurrection God vindicates the perfection of the sacrifice that Jesus made in our behalf. [00:10:20]

And then Paul goes on to say, "But all flesh is not the same flesh. There's one kind of flesh of men, another flesh of animals, another of fish, another of birds." You look around you, and you see myriads of different kinds of bodies of flesh -- animal flesh, fish flesh, you know, bird flesh and everything else. Then he said, "And there are also celestial bodies -- the sun, the moon, the stars, all this -- and terrestrial bodies. The glory of the celestial is one; the glory of the terrestrial is another. There's one glory of the sun, another glory of the moon, another glory of the stars -- one for one star differs from another star in glory." [00:16:00]