ADAM WAS NOT DECEIVED; SO WHAT HAPPENED (three)?
THE LAST ADAM: THE LORD HIMSELF!
*3* (…continued from part two…) Was Jesus alone in the descent into the darkness of the unknown valley of Hades? No! Christ, the uncreated Messiah, was his obbligato accompaniment.
Jesus without the Christ was a mere Adam. The commission of a sin brings you under the hegemony of the first sinner: Lucifer. Having been found in sin, Lucifer’s abode became the ‘shadow of death,’ which in Hebrew is rendered tsalmâveth (tsal-maw’-veth): ‘shade of death, that is, the grave (figuratively calamity).’ An absolutely mission impossible it is for any created being to engage Lucifer in his death enclave and defeat him, who holds the key of death. It will take the involvement only of “Christ, who is over all God blessed for ever.” Amen; [Romans 9:5] to bring the evil ruler of iniquity down on his knees. Amen!
My imagination has raced me to the state of our pristine dad if he had not received and eaten of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. He would have been separated from the woman of sin. It is either God would have to come to her like He did, to save Cain, and be cleansed for a marital reunion, or gone away with Lucifer to build the city of sin, and be populated by the half-man, half-angel giants of the antediluvian age. But for an extant, sinless Adam it would have been a glorious spectacle!
I see the sinless Adam busily at the business of his Father, and overseeing it. I see him as the unbelievable architect of engineering constructions. My inner eyes behold spectacular works of aesthetic arts all under father Adam’s directions and instructions. He will undoubtedly be holding occasional meetings concerning matters of the terra firma with the LORD God here on earth. Above all, Adam would have entered into the earthly office of co-creatorship with the LORD God! His children would, no doubt, follow suit. What glory!
Sadly, that was not to be.
Man’s every step calls for circumspection. Enoch, Noah, Abraham, Moses, David and Paul. Sarah, Deborah, Naomi, Ruth, Mary and Priscilla. They all walked with God. Paul warns in 2Corinthians 11:3, “But I fear, lest by any means, as the serpent beguiled Eve through his subtilty, so your minds should be corrupted from the simplicity that is in Christ.”
It is a phenomenal truth: that which frightens Paul. ‘Lest by any means’ in the Greek is: mēpōs (or) mē pōs (may’-pos) it means: ‘lest, lest somehow, that perhaps’. The word ‘minds’ is noēma (no’-ay-mah): ‘a perception, that is, purpose, or (by implication) the intellect, disposition, itself’. ‘Corrupted,’ in the Greek is, phtheirō (fthi’-ro), meaning: ‘to shrivel or wither, that is, to spoil (by any process) or (genitive) to ruin (especially figuratively by moral influences, to deprave).’ The noun, ‘simplicity,’ haplotēs (hap-lot’-ace), means: ‘singleness, that is, (subjectively) sincerity (without dissimulation or self seeking), or (objectively) generosity (copious bestowal).’
Jesus, no doubt, was au fait with Paul’s apprehension revealed in 2Corinthians 11:3, and knew of a fact that His sojourn on earth was purely in a representative capacity of the fallen Adam. We can get it right like Jesus did. Before the commencement of His ministry, when He was held by the collar of His shirt, and dragged into the wilderness, it was a reenactment of the Eden Garden all over again. Call Jesus a neophyte if you would, which is an excuse we often give for our various failures; He used the very words of scripture to deal with His temptation.
Thrice the evil words of Satanic incursions came to Him to vitiate the perfection of His divine manifestation. Having used the express word of God’s mind, the Spirit of God could easily get Him to take His sovereign stand of “Get thee behind me Satan.” Satan was so useless that he could not take care of the garden he was left in, even by the time Jesus Christ came to the world. It had turned into an uncultivated wilderness! Jesus, ergo, had come to return us back to the Eden of bliss! Amen!
Luke 4:3, “And the devil said unto him, If thou be the Son of God, command this stone that it be made bread.” The tempter took Jesus back to the Garden of Eden with an intent to make Him eat according to his scriptural prompting just the same way he had prompted the eating of the forbidden fruit. Jesus spurned the Devil, on our behalf, in order to effect an amendment of Adam’s failure. Jesus succeeded. Amen!
Get Jesus initiated by getting born again: pray this prayer, believing it with all your heart. Say, “Dear heavenly Father, I come to You now in the name of Jesus Christ. I believe in my heart that Jesus is the Son of God. I believe that Jesus died on the cross for my sin. I believe that You raised Him from the dead. I confess with my mouth that Jesus is Lord and I receive Him now as my Lord and my Saviour. I give God all the glory. Amen!” (…to be concluded…)
Read part two here
Read the concluding part four here
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