Jesus: The Second and Greater Adam

In countless ways, our lives are interwoven with the lives of others. Other people have shaped my personal history, impacted my daily work and well-being, and held sway over my future prospects. The ingenuity of Thomas Edison or Steve Jobs, the poet or musician who summons sublime stirrings in the heart, the broken car window and emptied glove box left by a faceless thief, the patient reminders of a mother teaching her child etiquette’every human life is profoundly affected by hundreds and even thousands of others.

In Holy Scripture, however, we encounter two individuals who have a direct and defining impact upon every person in the world, every member of the human family throughout history. The first is Adam, the father of us all. The second is Jesus Christ.

In Adam we glimpse the goodness and the greatness that God intended for human creatures. Yet we only glimpse these, because Adam spoils them for all humankind, forfeiting them in the first moments of the world. In Christ, we behold a second and greater Adam, the restorer of human goodness and greatness. What Adam squandered in a moment, the second Adam regains for all and bestows forever. As Paul writes in Romans 5:18: "As one trespass led to condemnation for all men, so one act of righteousness leads to justification and life for all men."

Death to All, Life to All

Adam is the first human. He stands in a unique relation to all other humans. Even Eve, the mother of us all, was taken from him. Like her, every man and woman who has come after is "flesh of his flesh, and bone of his bone." Adam's very name suggests this: the Hebrew word adam is both his proper name as well as the generic noun meaning "human, humanity." And the Genesis narrative makes clear that Adam is the father of every nation of the world.

For this reason, when Adam disobeyed the single command of God, the devastating consequences extended not only to himself but also, through him, to the entire human lineage. When Adam defied God, he brought corruption, death, and divine judgment to all. He whom God blessed and intended to be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth with human goodness and life instead will now be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth with human wickedness and death.

Adam, however, is not the only man who stands in a direct and defining relationship to all humanity. When the Son of God came down from heaven and, incarnate by the Holy Spirit of the Virgin Mary, was made man, he shared in the same human nature as all of us. God sent him out of love for all humanity (John 3:16). But Jesus' direct relationship with mankind consists especially in this: that the Lord laid on him the iniquity "of us all" (Isa. 53:6). He is the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world (John 1:29). He is the propitiation for the sins of the whole world (1 John 2:2). Like Adam, Jesus Christ thus stands in direct relation to every human. Adam sinned and bequeathed sin and death to all. In turn, Jesus takes upon himself the sin and death of man, and he bestows instead the gift of eternal life.

Goodness Lost, Goodness Restored

After his sin, Adam's true identity and nature become horribly disfigured. His sin has been wildly transformative. He is exposed in nakedness and covered in shame. He dreads the presence of God. Though Adam and Eve were created in the image of God himself, in his likeness, corrupt Adam now fathers sons "in his own likeness, after his image" (Gen. 5:3). Adam's offspring starkly display this transformation. His firstborn son, Cain, envies and slays his own brother, and Cain's descendent Lamech waxes poetic about his own exponential brutality. By Genesis 6, God sees that "all flesh had corrupted their way on the earth" and that "the earth is filled with violence through them."

Of all the theological implications of the biblical Adam, this is the dimension most highlighted by the Lutheran Reformers. Luther describes the impact of Adam's sin upon our nature as the "Old Adam" in us. In his Large Catechism, Luther writes: "It is what is born in us from Adam, irascible, spiteful, envious, unchaste, greedy, lazy, proud’yes’and unbelieving; it is beset with all vices and by nature has nothing good in it." (1) Enter the second Adam, who is himself "the image of the invisible God" (Col. 1:15). Christ bears God's image both as the eternal divine Son sent by the Father and also as a true man, who in his humanity incarnates the original "image of God" in man and who restores this image in all who believe. The nineteenth-century theologianC. F. W. Walther once preached:

Christ not only wants to forgive all men their sins, but also to free them from their sins. He not only wants to declare them righteous by grace, but he also wants to make them truly righteous. He not only came to comfort and soothe their hearts, but also to cleanse and sanctify them. He came not only to reconcile them with God, but also to reunite them with God, not only to make them acceptable to God, but to make them like God. In short, he came to restore the entire lost image of God in them. He came to lead them back into the state of innocence, to make them perfectly healthy in body and soul, and thus finally to bring them to the blessed goal for which God destined them from eternity and called them into existence.(2)

Already now, through his Word and sacraments, Christ is restoring the image of God’Christ's own image’in those who believe. Just as Adam's trespass engendered an Adam-like train of violence, strife, and suffering, so Christ's obedient death for sinners is followed by a train of Christ-like fruit in the world: compassion, reconciliation, generosity, hospitality, justice, and above all, trust in God. Still, in this life, Christ's restoration of the image of God in us is a mere beginning. Again, Walther:

Here Christians have only the first-fruits of Christ’s harvest….The time of full maturity comes only with eternal life. But blessed are all Christians! The time will surely come. As Christ…restored the deaf-mute not only in part but completely, so he will also restore in the world to come the image of God in which they were originally created in all who truly believe in him. Yes, there by his grace the redeemed will shine more gloriously than they would have had they not fallen. (3)

A Former Dominion and Greatness’Lost

How different things once were. In the day that God created all things and declared them good, the first Adam stood as unique among God's creatures, the pinnacle and lord of all the rest. Luther writes that, before sin,

[Adam’s] intellect was the clearest, his memory was the best, and his will was the most straightforward—all in the most beautiful tranquility of mind, without any fear of death and without any anxiety. To these inner qualities came also those most…superb qualities of body and of all the limbs, qualities in which he surpassed all the remaining living creatures. I am fully convinced that before Adam’s sin his eyes were so sharp and clear that they surpassed those of the lynx and eagle. He was stronger than the lions and the bears, whose strength is very great; and he handled them the way we handle puppies.(4)

In our fallen state and disordered world, it is difficult to comprehend or imagine the glorious, exalted creatures we were created to be. God gave Adam and Eve "dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over every living thing that moves on the earth" (Gen. 1:28). But since the Fall, everything is different. Pestered by mosquitoes and gnats, cringing before barking dogs, stalked by lions and wolves, oppressed by heat and cold, starved by drought and locust, devastated by storms and floods, drowned by raging seas, humankind restlessly scratches out our daily bread by the sweat of our brow amid thorns and thistles.

In our modern health-obsessed culture, we imagine that we at least have dominion over our own bodies; but in truth, even this little domain escapes our will and rule, invaded by pathogens, taunted by obesity, debilitated by injury, and, finally, destroyed and disintegrated by death. Ever since the day when Adam colluded with the serpent to invert the dominion of humanity over other living things, man has groaned’and all creation with him. The whole creation longs for the restoration of humanity's dominion, the greatness that Adam lost.

Dominion and Greatness Regained

In restoring us to the image of God, Jesus has regained not only humanity's original goodness, but also humanity's original greatness and dominion. Conservative Protestants have not always accented this dimension of the gospel and, at first, it may seem to run against the grain of Scripture's warnings regarding human pride: "The haughty looks of man shall be brought low, and the lofty pride of men shall be humbled, and the Lord alone shall be exalted in that day" (Isa. 2:11). "Put not your trust in princes, in a son of man, in whom there is no salvation. When his breath departs he returns to the earth; on that very day his plans perish" (Ps. 146:3-4). All such passages, however, reference humanity after the Fall’a corrupt, dying, impotent, and groundlessly boastful race. As such, the law of God reveals to us our true present standing: we are low, weak, shameful, damnable.

But from the womb of Mary has come a second Adam. This new Adam exercises true dominion over the seas, over the fish, over the fig tree, over disease, over the angels and the demons. "Who is this, that even the wind and the waves obey him?" Jesus' disciples ask. And the answer is not merely, "This is God, in human flesh," but also, "This is God, in human flesh!" A second Adam has come to restore the human dominion and greatness that Adam lost in Eden.

Jesus has promised that when he comes again at the end of this age, the present disordered creation will be rolled up like a garment, refined, purified, renewed and reconstituted’and humankind will reign. It is true that the Lord alone will be exalted on that day and that the eternal kingship will belong to God and to the Lamb forever and ever. To his anointed Son, God declares, "Ask of me, and I will make the nations your inheritance, and the ends of the earth your possession. You shall rule them with an iron scepter" (Ps. 2:9). Yet the one given this dominion is the man Jesus Christ, the second Adam. God will "judge the world in righteousness by a man whom he has appointed," Paul announces (Acts 17:31).

In Christ, God has appointed a man as the judge, heir, and Lord over his creation, and he will restore humankind to its former greatness and dominion as co-judges, co-heirs, and co-regents with Christ. Paul writes, "Do you not know that the saints will judge the world’¦.Do you not know that we are to judge angels?" (1 Cor. 6:2-3). "They shall inherit the earth," Jesus says about the blessed people of his kingdom. "If we endure we shall also reign with him," Paul writes (1 Tim. 2:12), and John hears Jesus himself declaring, "The one who conquers, I will grant him to sit with me on my throne" (Rev. 3:21).

With joy we will superintend the new earth and all its creatures. "No longer will there be any curse" (Rev. 22:3), and the soil will joyfully and obediently grant us our daily bread. God's trees will yield us their healing and life-giving fruit. The living creatures will live together with us and in subjection to Christ's wise and loving rule’and ours. "The wolf shall dwell with the lamb, and the leopard shall lie down with the young goat, and the calf and the lion and the fattened calf together; and a little child shall lead them" (Isa. 11:6). The sun will never again beat down on us for our harm; the raging seas will not threaten us. The glory and dominion of God and his Christ will endure forever, and the glory and dominion of those re-created in the image of God to rule, serve, and guard the creation in righteousness will be secured forever. Humankind will "shine like the sun in the kingdom of their Father." Adam will shine again, and Eve. We, too, will shine, reflecting the glory of the Son of Man, the second Adam, who is Lord and lamp of that eternal country.