[0:00] We will examine different models or ways of thinking about all that Christ has done. Way back in the day before my wife was the TV star you know her to be, she was a stay-at-home mom.
[0:15] And so that meant that I would come home and ask her, what did you do today? Or how was your day? And there were essentially two ways that I as a husband could listen to that.
[0:26] And anybody who's been asked such a question or asked such a question knows exactly what I'm saying. I could say to my wife, what did you do today? And I could then enter into a selfish husband mode where I'm only listening for those things that have something to do with me, that will benefit me, that have made commitments for my weekend or whatever.
[0:49] So there's this sort of filter I put on as I listen to my wife saying all that she has done. And that filter is a self-centered filter. But if I actually love my wife and I'm actually interested in her, then I want to hear all that she has done and not just the things that have direct connection to me.
[1:11] Over time, we have as Christianity, as Western Christianity anyway, shrunk down the accomplishments of the atonement to be mostly about all the things that have complete and direct connection to us, specifically our stance before God.
[1:32] But this was not always the case. Throughout church history, there were lots of ways of thinking about what Christ has done, many of which had nothing to do with us in a direct personal sense.
[1:44] But again, observe the difference in heart. If you have a heart that is mostly focused on yourself, then you're interested in what God has done for you.
[1:55] But if you're interested in God, if you have a heart that's interested in God, then your interest is in what he has done, all that he has done, not simply what he has done for you.
[2:08] So over time, we have probably overly shrunk our discussion of the gospel and of what Jesus has accomplished in his incarnation, life, death, and resurrection to fit this more narrow band.
[2:23] And so one of the things I'm trying to do pastorally is just to help you worship and to help you escape the terminal velocity of self-interest and turn your eyes upward to the one who has done all things well.
[2:37] Now, the reason why we have different models or metaphors for the atonement is partly because the Bible does. The Bible talks about the work of Jesus in a lot of different ways, with a lot of different metaphors and categories and so on and so forth.
[2:53] But another reason that we kind of have all these different models are because we're just looking at this incredibly momentous event from different angles.
[3:04] You know one topic I don't think gets discussed enough in terms of history, and that is germ theory. It is really one of the most incredible things to seriously think about.
[3:20] There was this long period of human history where we had no concept of an invisible world of living creatures that had a ton of say in our health and our well-being.
[3:34] It just wasn't even a category for the longest time. And really it took about 200 years from the first discovery of these microscopic animals in the 1600s when a lens grinder was just kind of fooling around and he'd made a really strong lens and he looked at something and saw these micro-animals, I think is what he referred to them as.
[3:57] I think he called them, he combined them molecule and animals. I forget, but it was a funny name. It was like molecular animals or something. Anyway, he sees these things and that's in the 1600s.
[4:08] And then we really have to get to Pasteur in the 1800s to begin to apply what we now know as germ theory, this idea that there's this whole microscopic world and that it exists and it has this huge influence on our health.
[4:24] Up until then, the popular theory was that there was something in the air that made us sick and there were different kinds of air that you would want to be around and so on and so forth. And so we discovered the reality of this microscopic world in the 1600s we began to discover something more about the nature of it in the 1800s through Pasteur and even began to understand antibiotics and so forth.
[4:46] But I bring all that up to say when there's these like momentous events, there's not that many of them in history that you could describe as truly momentous in this sense.
[4:57] When these huge things drop, they change everything and at every level. So, you know, germ theory creates new disciplines.
[5:07] It creates a new understanding of what architecture should be about, new models for cities, new culture, new behaviors, new ethics. Like it changes everything, not just scientifically, but just really culture itself.
[5:21] And so you could talk about germ theory at almost any level. You could talk about it at a scientific level. You could talk about it at a philosophical level. You could talk about it at a spiritual level. You could talk about it also at an individual level.
[5:33] So we could say, yeah, like basically all of modern biological science is built on this thing that's been around for about 200 years. So there's momentous shockwaves because of this thing.
[5:44] And we could talk about it at that level. But then we could also say, this week a little boy somewhere in the United States is going to have a compound fracture. He's going to slip. He's going to have a compound fracture. And the reason he won't die is because of germ theory, right?
[5:58] Like you could get it, you could shrink it all the way down. A poor little girl gets her appendix taken out at Children's this weekend. And the reason she won't develop a fatal staph infection is because of germ theory.
[6:08] So these momentous things have impact at every layer of society. And I think I'd say this, with germ theory, it's like this. It's basically changed every aspect of everything in the world.
[6:22] And the places where it hasn't changed are really gross. Something like that, okay? Hold on to that because we'll revisit that. So when we're talking about the incarnation of Jesus Christ, we're talking about the creator of the cosmos entering into his own existence and taking on his own creational properties, becoming man.
[6:42] And that's the most momentous event that has ever happened or will ever happen. You really couldn't come up with anything as hard as you would try to come up with something that will trump that.
[6:52] The most amazing, profound, impactful thing has happened. God entered the world. And not only did he take on flesh, he did that with the express purpose of being crucified for the forgiveness of his enemies.
[7:08] Everything else is like even something as profound as germ theory is less impactful than that. And the tendency in modern church is to reduce everything for the dumbest person in the room.
[7:22] And so this is the tendency in modern education, right? And so we've reduced this momentous thing to something that's just like the simplest version of it that affects the simplest aspirations in your own life, which are self-centered and so forth.
[7:37] And so for 2,000 years, people have been trying to describe the impact of God taking on flesh, coming to earth, dying, being raised. Like they've been trying to describe the impact of that.
[7:49] The Bible is describing the impact of that. And it's just necessary to have different angles and different levels to look at something that humongous with.
[8:00] You just can't use one model. But again, in the modern church, we typically do use one model. So we're going to go over the next three weeks into the different models.
[8:10] And my only hope is really just to help you to see. This is a huge deal. And to see some glories that don't often get described for one reason or another. We're talking today mostly about what is known as the recapitulation theory.
[8:25] And that just means this idea that Jesus came and relived human life as a new representative, a new kind of Adam. And this is popularized by Irenaeus very early on in church history.
[8:41] And people like Athanasius took it up. And it's remained a theory in good favor in theology ever since, so long as it doesn't cancel out other things we want to say about the cross, which we're not going to do that today.
[8:54] We're going to talk about its compatibility with everything else we believe about salvation, about the gospel, and so forth. So we're going to talk about recapitulation today. That was a very early theory, and it was a dominant theory for a really long time.
[9:08] And it's rooted implicitly in all kinds of Bible passages. But the main thing is that it's always kind of rooted in this basic idea of two Adams, of two founders of two creations.
[9:24] And so that's like all over the Bible in an implicit way. But explicitly, it's in two places for sure. And Irenaeus really latched onto these two passages in particular.
[9:35] One is 1 Corinthians 15, which we won't look at today. You can look at that in your own time. And then today we'll look at the second one, which is Romans 5. So if you've got your Bibles open to Romans 5, we're going to start reading in verse 12.
[9:49] Therefore, just as sin came into the world through one man and death through sin, and so death spread to all men because all sinned. For sin indeed was in the world before the law was given, but sin is not counted where there is no law.
[10:03] Yet death reigned from Adam to Moses, even over those whose sinning was not like the transgression of Adam, who was a type of the one to come. So one of the things you'll hear me try to do, I might make a mistake here or there, is I don't like the phrase second Adam.
[10:21] That's the popular term. And I don't like that phrase to refer to Jesus because it sounds like Jesus' plan B Adam. So the Bible actually uses the last Adam, and that's a better way of talking about this.
[10:33] So that's one thing I draw your attention to. Some of the quotes we'll read probably we'll use second Adam, but probably last Adam's the better way to talk about that. Okay, go to verse 15, Romans 5.
[10:46] But the free gift is not like the trespass, for if many died through one man's trespass, much more have the grace of God and the free gift by that grace of that one man, Jesus Christ, abounded for many.
[10:57] And the free gift is not like the result of that one man's sin. For the judgment following one trespass brought condemnation, but the free gift following many trespasses brought justification.
[11:10] For if because of one man's trespass, death reigned through that one man, much more will those who receive the abundance of grace and the free gift of righteousness reign in life through the one man, Jesus Christ.
[11:26] Therefore, as one trespass led to condemnation for all men, so one act of righteousness leads to justification and life for all men.
[11:38] For as by the one man's disobedience, the many were made sinners, so by the one man's obedience, the many will be made righteous. Now the law came in to increase the trespass, but where sin increased, grace abounded all the more.
[11:55] So that as sin reigned in death, grace also might reign through righteousness, leading to eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord.
[12:05] So the first concept that you've got to grasp to understand this model is just this two atoms concept. And that's rooted in something that literally no other generation of Christians would have ever had trouble with, but it's rooted in something we don't like very much typically, and that's headship.
[12:24] And headship is really just this idea, the ancients understood it intuitively, that tribe and clan and ethnicity and paternity were destiny.
[12:35] You were what you were born into more than anything else. Did you have choice? Did you have individual options?
[12:46] Yes. All of those though existed within a kind of snow globe of options that you were born into. And that is your ethnicity, your paternity, who your dad was basically, who your people were.
[13:00] That's the way the ancients thought about destiny without dismissing the idea of free will and choice. They said that a lot of what we are gets decided before we get to decide anything.
[13:12] Simply the world, the culture, and the people we're born to. And that's actually not just something that the ancients believed. That's something that God believes. The most important thing about you, in so far as God sees, is not what kind of coffee you like, not what kind of music you like, not what your major was in college, not your fashion choices or your aesthetic preferences.
[13:39] All the things that the world that's trying to sell you things presents to you as individuality, that's all secondary to this one main thing that God looks at when he decides who you are.
[13:52] And that is essentially, who's your dad? Who's your head? In which tribe do you belong? And there are two big tribes, thanks to Jesus' coming.
[14:07] There was only one to begin with, and that was the tribe, the headship of Adam. And if you think about it this way, you've got these two big daddies in history.
[14:19] And Adam is a feckless, impotent screw-up who passes on all of his proclivities to his offspring.
[14:29] And Christ is the mature, provider, protector, self-disciplined, in control, fully integrated dad who passes on those proclivities to his children.
[14:44] That's the kind of fundamental architecture of this theory that we're talking about today. There are two potential heads. We live in an aggressively egalitarian and individualized age, and we recoil at the idea that someone else's actions could determine our destiny, but that's just the way it is.
[15:07] And apologizing for that, for the ancients, would have been like trying to apologize for the wetness of water. It's just a self-evident truth that God endorses himself as he talks about who we are throughout Scripture.
[15:23] You ever wonder, you read these genealogies, you know, you're going to start your Read the Bible in a Year program. It's destined to fail in Leviticus this year. I hope not.
[15:35] But, you know, genealogies are where Bible reading plans go to die. And you're like, none of this has any relevance to me. Well, you're being that selfish dad, first of all, or your selfish father, husband, sorry, who's like only listening to his wife's stories that have anything to do with him.
[15:51] Like, that's what's going on there. We call that Narcegesis instead of exegesis. Like, what does this say about me? So one of the things going on with your frustration with genealogies is you're doing that. But the other thing is you just don't understand that in the actual economy of the cosmos, created by the creator of the cosmos, who your dad is is like a really big deal.
[16:10] By the way, study sociology from someone who's not woke and lying, and you'll see all the statistics still point to that very real principle.
[16:21] Who your dad is matters a great deal. So at a spiritual level, God looks at each one of us, and this is the big question. Who's our head?
[16:33] Who is over us? And the thing about that, and this is, if you've been a Christian for a while, and you've heard, you know, solid preaching for a while, you've heard all this before. But the main thing that you'll hear when this is described typically is, this is just a salvation issue.
[16:52] And you see that in the text, because Paul uses the word justified. He's like, if you are in Adam, the new Adam, the final Adam, you are justified. It's like, yeah, that's absolutely true.
[17:04] Everyone who's saved is saved because they were born again. And they were born again by Jesus, suffering and bringing many sons to glory. That's Hebrews 2. That's absolutely true.
[17:15] But, the text goes deeper than justification. It actually says that your dad dictates your way of being. Like, actually who you are, and how you act, and what your life's about, and so forth.
[17:29] So what we really need to think about, if we're trying to understand the way that Irenaeus was reading this stuff, all the way back, beginning, we need to not just think of justification, that's important, but we need to think of basically two ways of being.
[17:44] Two ways of being. Not just some kind of legal status, are you guilty or are you innocent? Are you guilty or are you forgiven? But, what kind of being are you? Okay?
[17:54] That's more of the fundamental question that Jesus is pointing to, that John really picks up on, in John 3 and 1 John, and we looked at a lot of that before. So two ways of being, and you can see this in like verse 17.
[18:06] Go back to the text, Romans 5. Verse 17. Look for the word reign, R-E-I-G-N. For if because of one man's trespass, death reigned through that one man, much more will those who receive the abundance of grace and the free gift of righteousness reign in life through the one man, Jesus Christ.
[18:29] Verse 18. You could see this word, I'm sorry, verse 21. So that as sin reigned in death, grace also must reign through righteousness, leading to eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord.
[18:42] So the word reign, it means it's like a government idea. Different kings, different kingdoms, different cultures in those kingdoms. Reign isn't just check off the box that I'm forgiven or I'm guilty.
[18:56] Something is reigning over you. It's dictating who you are and how you live and how you act. And it really comes down to which Adam is reigning over you.
[19:08] There's another word that is in this passage that describes the same concept that it's just the word life. Look at verse 18. So one act of righteousness leads to justification and life for all men.
[19:22] Verse 21. So that as sin reigned in death, grace might also reign through righteousness leading to eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord. Look at chapter 6. Just keep going down through the end of 5, the beginning of 6.
[19:35] Verse 1 of chapter 6. What shall we say then? Are we to continue in sin that grace may abound? By no means. Paul's argument isn't free grace.
[19:46] You shouldn't sin because grace is free because that would be a bad thing to do. Paul's argument is ontological. He's like you can't, you can't have been truly saved by grace and keep on sinning because you're a new kind of person now.
[19:59] You have a new kind of heredity. You're a participant in the divine nature. Shall we continue to sin that grace may abound? Verse 2. By no means. How can we who died to sin still live in it?
[20:13] Do you not know that all of us who've been baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death and we were buried therefore with him by baptism into death in order that just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, we too might walk in newness of life.
[20:27] I'm trying to dislodge some categories. I don't know how necessary this dislodging is, but let me just put this another way just to make sure we're all on the same page. The glory really comes through a little effort in understanding and expanding our way of thinking about these things.
[20:45] We're reading through, some of us are reading through the Westminster Larger Catechism right now. Not because we agree with everything there, but it's just a great source of biblical theology and wisdom.
[20:56] Question 28 asks, what are the present punishments for sin? Not the eternal punishments for sin, just like what does it mean to live in sin? And the answer is, the punishments of sin in this world are either inward as blindness of mind, a reprobate sense, strong delusions, hardness of heart, horror of conscience, and vile affections, or outward as the curse upon the creatures for our sakes and all other evils that befall us in our bodies, names, estates, relations, and employments together with death itself.
[21:26] And so let's just focus on the inward. What does it mean to be one of Adam's kids? Blindness of mind. You'll have a spiritual inability to see the true good and beautiful.
[21:37] Strong delusions. You'll believe lies with confidence. You'll lose the ability to discern things. Hardness of hearts, a resistance to God, to correction, and to love, a moral callousness.
[21:55] Horror of conscience, a tormented sense of inner guilt, shame, anxiety that can never be relieved. So, in short, if you're born in Adam, you're just a mess inside.
[22:10] You're a disintegrated, chaotic mess. But, because Christ has come, he has offered us a way to get back to the true humanity that he intended all along.
[22:22] Under Adam, all live under the reign of sin. And all of these brokenness in ourselves, it makes us something almost less than human. Well, not almost.
[22:33] It does make us something less than human. But now Christ comes on the scene, and instead of blindness of mind, we have spiritual sight. And instead of strong delusions, we have sound judgment.
[22:43] And instead of hardness of heart, we have a soft heart. And instead of a horrific, anxious-filled conscious, we have peace. So, it's not just like you're hearing salvation talked about nine times out of ten as if it's just get forgiven, go to heaven, stay unforgiven, go to hell.
[22:59] It's like, no. If Jesus saves you, you're a new person. Because you're living under a new head, and you have a new destiny associated with this, like, new spiritual ethnicity.
[23:13] That's what Irenaeus was leaning into. Not just that Jesus came to save you in your sin, but that Jesus came to give you a new headship, a new way of being to restore what humanity had lost in sin and in the fall.
[23:28] I was reading through the book of Job this week. It's my least favorite book in the Bible. I find all of the terrible theology in chapters 1 through 37 absolutely annoying.
[23:40] And I find I'm just like, guys, could you shut up and ask God? You know. And we don't get there until Elihu, the youngest of all the friends, speak up. But first time ever, now I have avoided Job a little bit in my life, but first time ever, I noticed something about the prose.
[23:58] So I've been studying, I've been trying to get better at writing. And I noticed that from chapter 1 through chapter 37, the way that you, the writing, the way that the language is, it's all choppy and weird and circular and illogical and it's sort of like a misfiring car.
[24:16] Like, thinking is happening, it's just not really good thinking. They're starting down a trail, it gets interrupted and goes somewhere else. The prose itself reflects the state of humanity in a sinful condition.
[24:30] We're a bunch of dead ends. We're a bunch of good intentions with dead ends. We're a bunch of aspirations that deflate like a six-day-old birthday balloon, like we're just a mess and inside we're full of passions that war against us and our minds don't perceive truth well and so on and so forth.
[24:47] And even when someone presents the right thing to us in our broken sinfulness, we might get more offended than see it as a gift, it's a lifeline that it is. We recoil at the light instead of lean into the light.
[24:59] Like, human beings are just a mess and the prose of Job reflects this. Then, chapter 38, God appears and the literal writing changes. From this disorganized, spaghetti-on-the-wall kind of rhetoric, God just drops in with this absolute cadence.
[25:17] Couplets. Where were you? Are you able? Boom, boom, boom. And you can actually feel a rhythm. This chaotic, annoying book goes all the way through to verse, chapter 38, and you feel a rhythm emerge.
[25:31] A real structure. Real reality. Friends, when Jesus appeared on the earth, he's the first fully integrated human that's not full of inner chaos and disintegration.
[25:49] He's the first human that isn't a box full of Christmas lights that you will absolutely never unwrap. So just buy new ones. He is uniquely ordered.
[26:05] If you'll read the Gospels, you'll see this. Nobody else is even thinking well. Not consistently. And definitely no one is really understanding well.
[26:18] But Jesus is like the backbeat of the entire cosmos. He's the one thing that is rhythmically progressing without error.
[26:30] And when Jesus comes, this is what Irenaeus and Athanasius are seeing. When Jesus comes, he allows humanity to pick back up into that long-forgotten rhythm, that long-forgotten cadence, that long-forgotten order.
[26:46] He brings order out of chaos. And he brings what is truly a new way, which is kind of an old way, of being a human.
[26:58] I sometimes buy books that just have really controversial titles. And also, I buy books that are by good authors. And so one day when I was in a thrift shop years ago, I saw a book that I had to buy and it's by J.I. Packer.
[27:12] And it has the controversial title Christianity, True Humanism. Christianity, True Humanism. Listen to what he says.
[27:24] To be fully Christian is to live. It is to be fully human. And this is the message taught to us by the scriptures and the Christian tradition. We hear this message from some of the most luminous and titanic minds ever to appear on the human scene, as well as from peasants and shopkeepers, kings, hermits, Easterners, Westerners, Africans, Americans, and people of all sorts and all conditions.
[27:48] And they all share this vision of what it means to be fully human because they know that to have followed Christ, the Savior, is to have been brought into wholeness, freedom, and joy.
[28:01] Albeit often through great struggle and pain, these Christians all believe that in Jesus the Christ, God became the second Adam. not so that they could escape from their humanness, but on the contrary, so that they could become human, since Christ was the perfect example of all that humanity was meant to be.
[28:25] It's all the, you're going to see transhumanism for the next 10 years. It's just going to be everywhere, and I'm not even going to define it for you. It's just a bunch of weirdos, tech-oriented weirdos, who are looking somehow for a new way to get back into integration they believe, rightly, existed at one point or ought to exist in humanity.
[28:47] And our transhumanism is simply God becoming flesh, becoming the God-man, and bringing that life into the world and offering us an opportunity to live in that, to be that, to be a fully restored, non-chaotic human being.
[29:11] C.S. Lewis loved these rich repitulation themes. He really centered on a lot of this stuff in his writings. And one quote I think I read pretty much every Advent season is from his book Miracles, where he talks about the nature of the incarnation.
[29:28] And he writes this, In the Christian story, God descends to reascend. He comes down from the heights of absolute being into time and space, down into humanity, down to the very roots and seabed of the nature he has created.
[29:43] But he goes down to come up again and bring the whole ruined world up with him. One has the picture of a strong man stooping lower and lower to get himself underneath some great, complicated burden.
[29:59] He must stoop in order to lift. He must almost disappear under the load before he incredibly straightens his back and marches off with the whole mass swaying on his shoulders.
[30:13] Or one may think of a diver first reducing himself to nakedness, then glancing in midair, then gone in a splash, vanished, rushing down through green and warm water into the black and cold water, down through increasing pressure into the death-like region of ooze and slime and old decay, and then up again, back to color and light, his lungs almost bursting till suddenly he breaks surface again, holding in his hand the dripping, precious thing that he went down to recover.
[30:46] That's recapitulation language about the incarnation. And what he went down to recover was this thing he loved because he made. And that is true humanity.
[30:57] that's what Irenaeus and Athanasius would want to talk about on Christmas. Is that Christ descended to reascend but with the precious prize of those created in his image who had become chaotic and disintegrated.
[31:17] He emerges with this prize recovered from the primordial ooze of sin and decay and Satan and now it's in the light and it's clean and it's clear and it's the new creation that Jesus has made possible.
[31:35] So that's that theory and we can apply this at a couple of levels. So if the last Adam has come and created a whole new way of being that is actually closer to what a true human was always supposed to be then this is that kind of momentous thing that we can apply at different levels like I was talking about with germ theory.
[31:59] In fact let me say this before I forget. Germ theory this incredibly amazing thing that is applied almost everywhere and in the places where it hasn't been applied those places are really gross.
[32:13] The reign of Jesus this incredibly potent thing that has changed almost everything and the few places where it has not changed are incredibly gross.
[32:25] Like it's this when we're trying to understand what Jesus has done it's absolutely the most momentous thing and we can look at it at different levels just like we did and said well in one sense germ theory founds John Hopkins University and a million other universities.
[32:41] On the other sense it keeps Sally down at Children's from getting staffed after she gets her appendix taken out. So with these massively momentous things we can just like pick our levels of application and one of the goals for this series is to let's pick some levels that are beyond us you know but I do have to share one that is absolutely because I was on a Lewis tangent this week I have to share one that is absolutely something you need to hear and it is about you and that is is that if this new Adam this last Adam has come and made a new people who are walking in newness of life Romans 6 5 something incredible is offered to you in so far as who you are as a person and and Lewis nails this in mere Christianity at the end he talks about the new man but listen to this this is if you are on the fence about following Jesus listen to this this is the most reasonable logical and true thing you'll hear that ought to get you off that fence the more we get of what we now call ourselves out of the way and let him take us over the more truly ourselves we become in that sense our real selves are all waiting for us in him it is no good trying to be myself without him the more I resist him and try to live on my own the more I am dominated by my own heredity and upbringing and surroundings and natural desires in fact what I so proudly call myself becomes merely the meeting place for trains of events which I never started and which I cannot stop what I call my wishes become merely the desires thrown up by my physical organism or pumped into me by other men's thoughts or even suggested me by the devils
[34:41] I would I would love to grab every single person who thinks that following Christ means the denial of themselves and say you haven't been yourself since the day you were born what you really are is a bunch of other people's ideas and thoughts other traditions and then your own stupid desires you haven't been yourself since the day you were born and if you would only understand that if you will deny yourself this is what Jesus is talking about when he talks about not loving yourself and losing your soul but hating yourself and gaining your soul if I just could grab every person who's like I don't want to lose this aspect of my sexuality I don't want to lose this aspect of my personality I'm a fierce strong woman I'm this I'm that would you just stop you are literally just an almanac of other people's ideas and Jesus wants to give you freedom from all of that B stuff biblically suspect stuff and give you who you really were always created to be
[35:48] Lewis continues I am not in my natural state nearly so much of a person as I like to believe most of what I call me can be explained very easily it is when I turn to Christ when I give myself up to his personality that I first begin to have a real personality of my own now that's mere Christianity the final chapter there's a bunch if you if that connected with you go back and read that whole section creation because he talks about you are living under an illusion of individuality that is not real but when you unite with your maker he is ready to make you an extraordinarily unique one of a kind one off image of him because he is so big he could fill the whole world with individual images of him forming together this is kind of the vision of the church forming together into a mosaic that describes the glory of God if you would just get under the new
[36:50] Adam you would be you in a way you don't even understand is possible right now you're mostly right now a compilation of platitudes and genetic determinism and appetites Christ came to make you free really free so we can zoom in and I can talk to you about your personality and how it will just absolutely bloom if you find yourself in Christ but now let's zoom out because what happens just at a kind of fundamental level when the world gets full of people who are more like Adam before the fall what does it mean when we say that Jesus has come and restored the ministry the identity the potentiality of Adam well what were humans made to do what was Adam made to do he was made to rule and subdue the earth that doesn't mean anything violent it's not a violent term it's just to manage to care to cultivate to create we were made to be we were kings and queens of this created order as an act of worship unto the
[38:10] Lord co-creating with him he makes the wheat we make the bread he makes the olives we make the oil we're taking his raw materials and we're building out blessings for the world that's what Adam was made to do and if we start understanding this capitulation idea as Jesus bringing back the original Adam both for us as individuals but also just the existence of true kings and queens of creation onto the earth a lot of things change like for instance Dorothy Sayers one of my favorite authors talks about the nine tenths problem and the nine tenths problem is described here in nothing has the church this is Sayers in nothing has the church so lost her hold on reality as her failure to understand and respect the secular vocation she has allowed work and religion to become separate departments and is astonished to find that as a result the secular work of the world is turned to purely selfish and destructive ends and that the greater part of the world's intelligent workers have become irreligious or at least uninterested in religion but is it astonishing how can anyone remain interested in a religion which seems to have no concern with nine tenths of his own life in other words in our effort to be simplistic with the gospel and our continual revisitation of the one theme justification by faith not of works and neglecting all of the other aspects of what Christ has come to do we have effectively shrunk the way that our religion interacts with most of our lives with how we do work with what we create with whether or not we do create restoring this understanding this fundamental understanding that Christ is the new
[40:16] Adam in a fundamental way across all categories of existence that's what Romans 6 4 is saying we were buried therefore with him in baptism into death in order that just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the father we too might walk in newness of life and if you want to understand where my optimism and eschatological optimism come from I just ask a simple math question what would happen if the world became consistently more populated by new people born in the new Adam that's that's why I am where I am Peter Lightheart all the way back in 1988 if you want to have your heart broken I can give you a bunch of books that were published in the late 80s that you're like man if anybody had listened to this stuff we'd be in a completely different place and I'd put Lightheart and Pat Buchanan and some others like dude Roger Scruton we missed some good voices in that particular era Peter
[41:16] Lightheart describes it this way man was created to rule the earth as a subject of the heavenly king when Adam sinned he lost dominion but when Jesus Christ entered history he came as the second Adam he came to regain that dominion in his temptation Satan offered him the kingdoms of the world Christ refused choosing instead to win his inheritance by obedience to the father in his resurrection and ascension he regained what Adam lost dominion is restored in Christ now the church as his body exercises that dominion this is Ephesians 3 not apart from Christ not independently and certainly not carnally but as those united to him sharing in his reign so friends when Christians withdraw from the trades or from the arts or from public life they are refusing to take up the very things that Christ secured through his suffering the last
[42:16] Adam didn't just come to restore individuals he came to restore humanity's meta vocation to rule and subdue to be fruitful and multiply the overarching calling under which every one of our jobs exists whether it be scientist doctor stay at home mom is what Adam received when he was created and what Adam lost when he fell into sin but Christ has come not only to restore our true humanity our true individuality in a real sense but also our true calling and now everything we do in this world including the time we spend at work including the time we spend on our lawn some of us more than others is unto the Lord just as God intended for human beings to live we no longer live in a secular and sacred divide because Christ is reconciling all things to himself and he's made a new people who walk through all creation as priests offering service to
[43:24] God in all that they do it's like it's like a business has been run into the ground under corrupt leadership and then a new owner the rightful owner maybe returns and posts a sign out front that reads under new management and you need to know there's no reason for you not to go out and work hard and build beautiful long lasting things because the world is under new management the last Adam has come and he's restored the original dominion the call to rule and subdue and now everything not just not just one tenth all tenths of your life can now be lived the way that you were intended to live all along the way you were created to live these are the things that built christendom these potent heady glorious eminently hopeful ideas were potent in the early church and they had to be how else are you going to overcome
[44:27] Rome and take over most of the known world in mere centuries not through the retreatist and minimalistic gospel we typically talk about but through what Jesus really has come to do that's the big idea of recapitulation christ is the final Adam he restores a kind of true humanity to those that are united with him and that true humanity gives us a unique individuality we never had before we were far more sheepy before we were saved true humanity gives us as a group the opportunity to return to the fundamentals of our creation to go out into the world as kings and queens of creation ruling and subduing by being fruitful multiplying and you can study Hebrews 1 and 2 more for that but all of this is built into this little phrase we read this morning in the call to worship when the angel
[45:30] Gabriel says to Mary this is what's going to happen through you I'll close in this Luke 1 31 and behold you shall conceive in your womb and bear a son and you shall call his name Jesus he will be great and will be called the son of the most high and the Lord God will give to him the throne of his father David verse 33 and he will reign over the house of Jacob forever and of his kingdom or government there will be no end the last Adam has come and offered himself as a payment in order to secure you as a new son or daughter born again into him have you been born again have you been brought into this new glorious tribe have you been given the chance to be who God truly created you to be if not call upon the name of the Lord and be saved the communion we'll celebrate now is the
[46:35] Lord's covenantal sign that he has offered himself to secure all of this for us and so after I pray if you're a follower of Jesus come and partake of the elements come grab them and sit down and I'll lead us through partaking together let's pray Father God we praise your holy name that you have come not only to redeem us as individuals but to redeem the world and the race the people the humans that you've made Lord as Paul progresses in his discussion of these glorious truths he terminates winds up in Romans 8 where he talks about creation itself groaning for the kings and queens of creation to fully be redeemed and come in so that the new heavens and the new earth can be created that's a glorious future promise but even now in Romans 8 we're told we're more than conquerors in Christ Jesus all of this because of your great humility who being equal to God did not consider equality with God something to be grasped but you humbled yourself to the point of death even death on the cross and even now Lord through your glorious work you're reconciling all things to yourself things in heaven and things on earth praise your name dear
[47:44] Lord Jesus the name above all names at which every knee will bow and tongue confess that you are indeed Lord now bless our time of visiting your table fill us full of grace and truth in Jesus name amen