THE
ATONEMENT
CHAPTER II.
The Last Adam and the New Creation.
WE are going to look at the truth of atonement in the way
in which Scripture develops and puts it before us; beginning with the Old
Testament and proceeding, in the regular order of its books as we have them,
onward to the New; except that we shall necessarily take the light of the New
Testament to enable us to read the Old Testament lessons aright, remembering
that the "vail is done away in Christ." I choose this method, rather than what
might seem the simpler one, of stating the doctrine after the manner of the
creed or theological text-book, for many reasons.
Gods method of
teaching plainly has not been by the creed. He could surely have given one, not
only better than any human could claim to be, but one absolutely perfect,
avoiding all the errors and all the incompleteness of the best of creeds, and
giving what would be indeed a royal road to knowledge in divine things. It has
pleased Him otherwise; and in this there must be wisdom worthy of Him, and care
too for the real need of His people. Gods way has been to speak to us in
a far different manner. He has given us truth in fragments, which at first
sight seem even to have little orderly connection - which gleam out upon us
from history, psalm, and prophecy, as well as in more detached statement
sometimes in an apostolical epistle. Even here we have seldom what the
systematic theologian would call a treatise; certainly nothing at all
resembling the articles of a confession of faith or of a creed.
Understand me, I am not denying that such things have their place.
Unfortunately they are valuable precisely when stripped of that in which to
most lies all their value. As authoritative expositions of doctrine, they
substitute human authority for divine; the confession, with all its admitted
liability to error, in place of the unfailing, infallible Word, by which the
Holy Spirit, the sure and only Guardian of the Church in the absence of Christ
its Head, works in the hearts and consciences of men. Stripped of the false
claim, and left as the witness of what individual faith has found in the
inspired Word, they may be used of God as the voice of the living witness.
However, to that Word, with all its perplexities of interpretation, as men
speak, we must come for that which can alone give certainty to the soul; these
very perplexities used of God to give needful exercise, to deepen the sense of
dependence upon Him, and discipline us by the exercise.
The truth given
in this way, moreover, only to be learnt fragment by fragment, by constant
research into and occupation with the precious book in which the treasure lies,
enforces its lessons by that needful frequent "putting in remembrance" of which
an apostle speaks. We realize its many sides and internal relationships; we
discern how little all our systems are, compared with the truth itself; that
the completeness we desired was only narrowness. Finally, that Gods
method of teaching is divine, as the truth taught is; His way to lead us out,
at least into more apprehension of the infinity of that which, cramped into the
human measure. necessarily becomes dwarfed and distorted by it.
In the
historical part of the Old Testament, the lessons given to us are mainly those
pictured lessons which we call types. But before we come to the types of
atonement proper, there is one we must consider, which, although not that, is
in the deepest and most intimate relation to it, and the right or wrong
conception of which will influence correspondingly our view of atonement
itself. The apostle tells us, with regard to the first man, that Adam was "a
figure of Him that was to come" (Rom. v. 14.); and in i Cor. xv. 45, he speaks
of Christ as the "last Adam." He is again spoken of by the same apostle as the
"First-born of every creature," or, "of all creation" (Col. i. 15.); and speaks
of Himself, in the address to Laodicea, as the "beginning of the creation of
God." (Rev. iii.14) So again, "If any one be in Christ, he is a new creature
[or, "it is new creation"]: old things are passed away; behold, all things are
become new (2 Cor. v. 17.); and this is insisted on as the governing principle
of a Christian life; "for in Christ Jesus neither circumcision availeth any
thing, nor uncircumcision, but a new creation; and as many as walk according to
this rule, peace be on them, and mercy." (Gal. vi. 15, 16.)
The fallen
first man and the old creation are thus, according to Gods thought,
replaced by the last Adam and a new creation. There is no restoration of the
old; it is set aside, or becomes the material out of which the new creation is
to be built up; and this last is Gods creation - what was in His mind
from the beginning. So, when the Psalmist asks, "What is man, that Thou art
mindful of him or the son of man, that Thou visitest him?" The answer is, "Thou
madest him a little lower than the angels. Thou hast crowned him with glory and
honour." This the apostle interprets for us in the epistle to the Hebrews, -
"But we see Jesus, who was made a little lower than the angels for the
suffering of death, crowned with glory and honour."
This last Adam,
true man as He surely is, is emphatically the "Second Man." "The first man Adam
was made a living soul; the last Adam was made a quickening spirit." "The first
man is of the earth, earthy; the Second Man is of heaven [so all the editors
read it now]. As is the earthy, such are they also that are earthy; and as is
the heavenly, such are they also that are heavenly. And as we have borne the
image of the earthly, we shall also bear the image of the heavenly." Here, as
elsewhere, the type is the shadow only, and therefore in many things the
contrast, of the antitype; and so precisely as to what is connected with each.
Here is the great and fundamental mistake with the general mass of
theological systems. They make the first man Gods real thought instead of
the Second, and bring Christ in to restore the first creation; to gain what
Adam should have gained or kept. Thus many now think of no more than earthly
blessing for the saint, while those who are not able to resign their heavenly
inheritance would make this Adams natural birthright also. The so-called
evangelical creeds of christendom put Adam under the moral law to win heaven
for himself and his posterity, and write "This do, and thou shalt live" over
the gate of entrance. The Lords suffering in death, they say, puts away
our sins; His obedience to the law is our title to heaven. But in this way, not
only is the full blessedness of the Christians place unknown, but
Christs work is necessarily however unintentionally degraded.
To
Adam in Eden God spoke nothing of heaven, nor ever connected going to it with
the keeping of the law. "This do, and thou shalt live," He did say; never,
"This do, and thou shalt go to heaven." God never proposed to the creature He
had made to win by His obedience a higher place than He had put him in at
first. To have proposed it would have been to have made man from the start what
sin has so long made him - a worker for himself rather than for God. He who has
said, "When ye have done all, say, we are unprofitable servants," could never
have taught him any thing so perilously like a doctrine of human merit.
Under law Adam was, as is evident; but not under the moral law, which
an innocent being could not even have understood. The commandment to him was
simply not to eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil; the terms, not
"This do, and thou shalt live," but "Do this, and thou shalt die." He had not
to seek a better place, but enjoy the place he had. Men may reason and
speculate, but they cannot find one word of Scripture to justify the thought
that unfallen Adam was what sin has made man now - a stranger, or what grace
has made the saint - a pilgrim. He was made to abide, and his punishment not to
abide, where God had put him.
It is to man fallen, not innocent, that
God speaks of heaven; and by grace, not law at all. It is the fruit of
anothers work, who, not owing obedience for Himself, as a creature must,
could give thus to what He undertook, a real and infinite merit. Christs
work alone has opened heaven to man; the value of the work being according to
the value of Him whose work it is. Apart from any question of the fall, the
first and the last Adam are in this way contrasts: "the first man Adam was made
a living soul; the last Adam was made a quickening spirit;" "the first man is
of the earth, earthy; the Second Man is the Lord from heaven;" or rather, as
the editors read it now, "the Second Man is of heaven."
Here the first
man, as a type, images however the Second, where God breathes into his nostrils
the breath of life. This is an essential difference between man and the beast
below him: he has by the inspiration of God what the beast has not; and thus
Elihu has the justification of his claim. That his "lips shall utter knowledge
clearly" refers back to the original creation: "The Spirit of God hath made me,
and the breath of the Almighty hath given me life." In the doctrine of
Scripture elsewhere we find distinctly what the breath of the Almighty has
given to man which distinguishes him from the beast. It is the "spirit of man
which is in him," and by which alone he knows the things of a man. (i Cor. 2.
II.) He has a spirit, as "God is spirit," and thus by creation, as Paul quotes
from the Greek poet to show the general sense of man, declares, "We are
Gods offspring." *
*See "Facts and Theories as to a Future State," or
"Creation in Genesis and in Geology," for a fall exposition of this.
And yet "the first man Adam was made a living soul," as this history in
Genesis itself declares - "Man became a living soul." In this he was what the
beasts were. In this, Scripture anticipates all that is real in what the
science of the day vaunts as its own discovery. Man is as the beast is, a being
bound within the limits of sense-perception, through which all the stores of
the knowledge upon which he so prides himself have to be painfully acquired.
The spirit of man is in this way, by the necessity of his nature (I speak not
of the fall), subjected to the soul. And the apostle connects this, in the
passage before us, with the possession of a "natural body," as he does the
"spiritual body" of the resurrection with the "image of the heavenly" last
Adam. This "natural body" is rather, literally, a soul-body (the English
language has no adjective for "soul"), - that is, a body fitted for the soul,
as the spiritual body will be for the spirit. Hence it is that with the body
the mind grows, and with it languishes and apparently decays; and hence in
Scripture the title for one absent from the body is higher than for one in it.
In the body, he is a "living soul;" absent from the body, he is a ghost, or
spirit.
From hence arises an important consideration. For while ever
the Second Man, and as such "of heaven," it is plain that the Lord was pleased
to be subject through His life here, as man, to the conditions of man. Ever
"apart from sin," save as in grace bearing it upon the cross, the limitations
springing from disease and decay He could not know, of course; but of His
childhood we read expressly that He "grew in wisdom and in stature"- mind
unfolding with the body as with men in general. How differently inspired
Scripture speaks from what a mere human biographer would have written of the
"Word made flesh"! But what such words decisively prove, in opposition to
mens thoughts about it, is that while Second Man from the beginning of
His human life, as I have said, He ever was, He did not take the place of last
Adam until His sacrificial work was finished and in His spiritual body He rose
from the dead. "Except a corn of wheat fall into the ground and die, it abideth
alone," such are His own words; "but if it die, it bringeth forth much, fruit."
This explains the Lords significant action when after the
resurrection He appears to His disciples. and, breathing on them, says,
"Receive ye the Holy Ghost." For the first Adam had as a living. soul been
breathed into when quickened of God; the last Adam as a quickening spirit
breathes into others. Not, of course, that it was quickening here: they had
surely been already quickened; but now He puts them formally into the place of
participants in a life now come through death, and to which justification
attached as fruit of the death through which it had come. They are to be in a
definite place of acceptance and peace with God, according to His words before
He breathes on them - "Peace be unto you," twice spoken. "Justification of
life" is thus assured to them, the doctrine of which the apostle develops in
the fifth of; Romans.
The same chapter distinctly brings forward the
first Adam as the "figure of Him that was to come." The contrast between the
two does not affect the comparison: it is a comparison of contrasts. In the
first Adams case, "through the offence of one the many have died," and
"by one that sinned" "the judgment was by one to condemnation;" and "by the
disobedience of the one the many have been constituted sinners." The point here
is the bearing of the act of the one, the father of the race, upon the state of
the many, his children: corruption of nature, death, the present judgment,
tending to final condemnation, have come to them in this way. So in the case of
the Second Adam has His obedience resulted in blessing to those connected with
Him. Only, "not as the offence is the free gift." God is not satisfied with a
mere obliterating the effect of the first mans sin, He will go far beyond
that in His grace: "If through the offence of one the many have died, much more
has the grace of God, and the gift by grace, which is by one Man, Jesus Christ,
abounded unto the many. If many offences have been added by Adams
posterity to the primal sin, "the free gift is of many offenses unto
justification;" "if by the offence of one death reigned by one, much more shall
they which receive abundance of grace and of the gift of righteousness reign in
life by One, Jesus Christ."
It is this "much more" of divine grace,
which has been so forgotten, and which we must ever bear in mind. The value of
the person of the Second Adam gives proportionate value to His work. The work
itself, moreover, is such as none but He could possibly have accomplished. And
the value of person and work together gives those in whose behalf it is
accomplished a place of acceptance with God of which He Himself, gone into His
presence, is the only measure. It is not now the time to speak at large of
this, but it is essential to keep it in mind. Christ and the new creation must
get their due place for our souls, or all will be confusion.
The two
verses which follow in the fifth of Romans we must carefully distinguish in
their scope. The eighteenth verse contemplates "all men, the nineteenth, the
"many" who are connected with the one or the other of these two heads. The
first gives us the tendency of Christs work; the second, the actual
result. It is as impossible to make the "all men" mean just those in effect
saved, as it is to extend the "many" with whom Christ is connected into the
whole human race. The tendency of the "one offence" was "toward all men to
condemnation" (I do not quote the common version, which has here supplied words
which the original has nothing of); the tendency or aspect of the "one
righteousness," "toward all men to justification of life." On the other hand,
in actual result, "as by the disobedience of the one man the many were
constituted sinners, so by the obedience of the One the many shall be
constituted righteous."
The result contemplates all those, obviously,
of whatever age or dispensation, who obtain salvation through our Lord Jesus
Christ; and it should be as evident that the connection with Christ that is
spoken of is with Him as the last Adam, that is, vital connection. The many
being constituted righteous gives, I have no doubt, the fullness both of
imputed and imparted righteousness. For as the life communicated by the last
Adam is necessarily such as He Himself is, so also it carries with it the
efficacy of the work accomplished - of the death through which the corn of
wheat could alone bring forth fruit. "The gift of God is eternal life in Jesus
Christ our Lord "(ch. vi. 23, Greek): justification is therefore "justification
of life." These go together. How completely this connection harmonizes with the
apostles argument in the next three chapters will be plain to those who
are happily familiar with the doctrine there, - a doctrine which comes in as
the answer to the practical question with which they begin: "Shall we continue
in sin that grace may abound?" Upon this, however, I cannot enter here.
We
are only upon the threshold of the subject which is before us yet, and all that
we have done is just to indicate certain connections of atonement, which will
find their development as we take up, as we have now to take up, in its gradual
unfolding from the beginning, the doctrine of atonement itself.
Go To Chapter Three
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