"Now I make known to you,
brethren, the gospel which I preached to you, which also you
received, in which
also you stand, by which also you are saved, if you hold
fast the word which I
preached to you" (1 Cor.
15:1,2).
With these
words the greatest apostle
that Jesus Christ ever had draws his mantle together over his
shoulders and
sets himself to gather everything that he has been saying into
a climax and a
consummation. We can almost hear him breathe a sigh of relief
that he has got
through all the unpleasant business that was imposed upon him
in the writing of
this letter, and, having got through it, he says: "Now I make
known to you,
brethren, the gospel which I preached to you."
The Conditions at Corinth
He had been
compelled to write about a
whole lot of unpleasant and difficult matters. He was at the
time in Ephesus,
about to conclude a very wonderful time of ministry there.
Then his
fellow-labourer, Apollos, had arrived and told him of the
state of things at
Corinth, and three other people, probably slaves of the
household of Chloe in
Corinth, had also arrived and had poured out the story of a
very deplorable
state of things in the church there. It was a sad story of
divisions, schisms,
quarrels, disorders, moral evils, social wrongs, spiritual
immaturity, of
Christian unkindness one to another, and so on; it is all
here. By either
Apollos or these others they had sent a letter to Paul, asking
him to answer a
number of questions on a lot of matters about which they were
troubled, and, as
you know, this letter is his answer to that whole situation
and of all those
aspects of it.
A laborious
thing! You cannot read it
without feeling how the apostle was labouring with this
situation. Well he
might be! Troubled, heartbroken, deeply moved, he passed on
from point to
point, covering the whole, and then, with what is the end of
chapter fourteen,
he finished it, and finished it gladly. And he said in effect,
"Having dealt
with all that, I am not prepared just to leave it there. Let
me take you back,
brethren, right to the beginning of your life and history as a
company of the
people of God, and remind you of that basis upon which you
came to be a church
and a company of God's people; what I preached unto you and
you then believed,
and upon which you stand, the basis of your very existence and
by which you are
saved." Having written all the rest, with a sick heart, he
concluded that he
must restate the 'gospel', as he called it, which he had
preached and which was
the ground of their existence as a church.
Now, while
all the conditions at Corinth
may not obtain today in many churches - thank God! - there are
some things that
persist and are, at least, the abiding peril of companies of
God's people. In
any case, there is something that comes out of this final
resolve of the
apostle which is of inestimable value to the church, and the
church in all
ages. We are not glad that the Corinthians were what they
were, but here is the
wonderful sovereignty of God: He takes hold of a most
deplorable situation and
makes it the means of drawing out some of the most sublime
things in divine
revelation. And who would be without what we call the
fifteenth chapter of the
first letter to the Corinthians? Thank God for His power to
use the darkest
background to bring forward the most glorious revelation!
Well, you
notice that this chapter, or
this section, is a summary, and is a consummate restatement
and a climax. Paul
uses this word 'preach', as you see, several times, in verses
1, 11, 12, 14;
the thing 'preached'. And if you look to see what was the
heart, the essence of
that preaching, you have only got to underline one word:
'Christ'. You will
find yourselves right at the beginning, in the presence of a
mention of Christ
no fewer than thirteen times! I say 'at the beginning' to show
what the
foundation really is, what the preaching really is. Now into
this consummate
restatement the apostle gathers a revelation which is well-nigh
unparalleled in
Holy Scripture.
(If I may
make this parenthesis: you read
through this long chapter and you are amazed. You hold your
breath and you say,
'Where did the apostle get that? How did he come by that?' The
things that he
is telling you here about glory, and the differences in glory,
and the
resurrection body, and what it will be like, and so on! You
say: 'Well, this is
something that no man ever concocted. This never arose in a
man's brain. There
is something here of unparalleled revelation.')
Christ,
the Second Man - the Last Adam
The apostle
gathers up all this wonderful
unveiling and unfolding into a designation of Christ. It is
summed up by him in
a title, a double title: "So also it is written, The first
man, Adam, became a
living soul. The last Adam became a life-giving spirit" (1
Cor. 15:45). "The
first man is from the earth, earthy; the second man is from
heaven" (1 Cor.
15:47). There is your title, your designation: "The second Man...
the last
Adam".
And in
itself that double title of the
Lord Jesus is a summary of human history from the beginning.
In the immediate
context it is a summary of human history on both sides: that
of the first Adam,
the human history of tragedy, and that of the last Adam, the
story of human
history in recovery and glory. Christ Jesus, the second Man,
the last Adam!
Always be correct in how you put that. Even such a scholar as
John Henry Newman
has slipped up on it in his hymn. It is not a second Adam;
it is a last Adam. It may be a second Man,
but it is
a last Adam.
Finality is reached in Christ in human history.
In the
first place, that is an
explanation of Jesus. And it is quite right to say that the
whole of the New
Testament is a combined operation to declare and explain Jesus
Christ and it
should never be used, in part or as a whole, for any other
purpose. Because it
has been used for all sorts of things - for anyone who has
some particular bee
in his bonnet will quote something in the New Testament to
support his view -
it has lost its mighty authority. The New Testament may be
used for one thing
and one thing alone, and that is to explain Jesus Christ: to
explain why there
ever was a Jesus Christ; why Jesus Christ ever came into this
world; why He
lived, thought and worked; why He died and rose again and why
He is in heaven.
One question should always govern our reading, in part or in
whole, whenever or
wherever we read in this Book, and that question should be:
'What has this to
say about Jesus Christ? What light does this throw upon Him,
either by direct
statement or by right and true implication or inference? What
does it say about
Him?'
Now these
words in verses 45 and 47 are a
very important instance of this very thing, the explanation of
Jesus Christ.
How is He explained by the words, "the second Man... the last
Adam"?
It does not
require profound scholarship
or great intellectual ability to see that such a title puts
the One referred to
into a position of unique relationship to the whole human
race. A "second"
implies a first. A "last" implies an original. And by the two
everything in
human life and history is compassed. You cannot get before the
first. There is
no such thing as 'before the first' in anything, anywhere. And
you certainly
cannot get behind the last. There is nothing beyond the last.
And so, here we
have human history, for that is the subject compassed by this
title.
But what
does it imply? Clearly, the
conclusion is that two different humanities stem
from two different racial heads. One humanity
stems from the first man, Adam. Another, and quite another -
and that is the
theme of the New Testament - stems from the second Man, the
last Adam. Two
distinct lines, two distinct kinds. But mark again in this
very connection, the
teaching of Scripture is that the second Man, the last Adam,
stepped into
humanity in order to supplant and displace the first and the
original; to set
aside all the damage which the first had brought into humanity
by his sin, by
his wrongdoing. The second, and the last, was a necessity
because of the utter
breakdown of the first and the original.
Paul has,
as you know, a corresponding
paragraph on this very thing in his letter to the Romans, in
chapter five, from
verse twelve to verse twenty-one. He dwells on this: "Just as
through one man
sin entered into the world, and death through sin... For if by
the transgression
of the one, death reigned through the one, much more those who
receive the
abundance of grace and of the gift of righteousness will reign
in life through
the One, Jesus Christ" (Rom. 5:12,17). It is a good, strong
section on the
function of the two racial heads. You can read it. But in that
chapter Paul, in
referring to the first Adam, says, "Adam was a type of Him
that was to come."
Adam's typological position was just this: in his being the
first and the
progenitor of a kind. And I think that is where it ended.
Before his fall he
was the first of a race; he was the progenitor of a race. And
in that sense he
was a type of Him that was to come. There may be other
features of that type,
but that is the significance of Adam being a type.
But there
was a gap in his history, the
gap of probation and testing. He was placed with the intention
to become all
that he was meant for, made for, but between the placing and
the fulfilment
there was this gap of probation when he was put to the test.
Oh, the immense
potentialities which were crammed into that gap, that
probation! That is what
we are going to see, I trust, now: the immense potentialities
that were there
in the balances of that gap, that probation. What tremendous
things hung upon
one thing... how he would use the great trust of
free will!
On the one
side, all that God meant,
intended and hoped for in the creation of man demanded that
man should be a
free agent; not compelled, not forced, not just a piece of
machinery going
without its own volition, desire or thought. You would never
be satisfied with
anyone giving you anything on those terms! You would only be
satisfied if by
the choice of their own heart, reason and desire, they
gave
it to you. So God made this great trust in the man and gave
him - at the same
time - the trust and responsibility of free will. Everything
was in the balance
as to how he would use that trust. There was a law governing.
Not the law of
compulsion at all, but the law of dependence upon God: whether
he would use that
trust of free will in dependence
upon God, or whether he would
use it in
independence of God. What
immense things, unspeakably great
things were bound
up with that test! All heaven might have been holding its
breath at that time.
We know all too well what happened. We will now see what is
involved for us in
this.
We know the
story, how he used that
trust, how he broke that line of dependence upon God. He
severed that link and
took his trust into his own hands, to realise all his
potentialities out of
relation to God, in independence of God. And because of that
and all the
terrible consequences of that, a second Man, a last Adam
became necessary if
the world and humanity were to be saved.
Now, look
at some of the essential facts
about this last, this final Adam, this second Man. In order
really to undo all
the tragic consequences (which we have not yet touched upon),
He himself must
be the negation of the violated law. If the law was everything
by dependence
upon God, and that law was broken (and Adam said, 'Everything
without
dependence upon God', for that was the issue and the upshot),
the Redeemer must
Himself be the embodiment of that law of absolute dependence
upon God and upon
nothing else. Nothing to help, in himself humanly or in the
world; anywhere, of any
kind... nothing but God. To the very last breath... only God.
The First of a New Type
Do you tell
me that that is the Adam
race? Not a bit of it! Not as you know yourself and I know
myself. It is not
like that, is it? This is another order of being, which is
like that, and will
go that way, even unto death - and the most ignominious death
- where, by
deliberate choice, He refuses any kind of deliverance that
could come to Him,
because He is a committed Man to the will of God. He, then, as
such a last one,
such a second one, is the progenitor of a race which is to be
like Himself in
this very respect. It is a race of people who, on this very
principle of His
life, will be constituted on the basis that everything, to
the
last fraction, is by dependence upon God.
Does not
that in itself open up the first
letter to the Corinthians? Read from the beginning again and
see these
Corinthians and all their self-sufficiency, self-strength,
self-glorying,
glorying in worldly wisdom, and what not. That is an aspect of
the whole that
we must leave for the moment. I just mention it to let in
light on why Paul
preached Christ and said, "For I determined to know nothing
among you except
Jesus Christ, and Him crucified" (1 Cor. 2:2). What does that
mean? Does it not
mean crucifixion of all that independence of God which came in
through the
first Adam, all that taking into his own hands, all that
seeking for himself,
drawing to himself, that acquisitiveness, that possessiveness,
that
assertiveness, that pride, that is characteristic of all who
have come from
that first one? But there is none of it in Him. And as the
second, in this new
movement of God, He must reproduce after His own kind.
Now that is
only introductory. But it is
very important that we get our foundation well laid.
That brings
us right to our present
point. There are some things that every seriously-minded
person will be
concerned with (and sooner or later everyone will be
seriously-minded about
life), but Christians are supposed to be
seriously-minded people who are
really concerned about this matter of Life. And there are four
things that
comprise that concern.
One is the
meaning of human history.
(Have you ever sat down with your Bible to seek from it the
explanation of
human history?) The second is the meaning of Christianity. The
third is the
meaning of spiritual experience. And the fourth is the meaning
of the Christian
life.
The meaning
of those four things is
gathered into one Person, Jesus Christ, and He as the second
Man, the last Adam.
As such, He explains human history. As such, He explains
spiritual experience.
As such, He explains Christianity, and as such, He explains
the church.
Now I don't
propose to try and cover all
that ground! But I am tremendously concerned and burdened.
This is no mere
subject that I am interested in or occupied with. If you are a
seriously-minded
person, this really does concern you. And are you
not, are we not,
being forced in our time to have a serious question about
human history? The
human race, mankind, and all the history of mankind - what
does it all mean?
You know, we are being confronted with that question today.
Leave that
for the moment. As a
Christian, are you not increasingly confronted with the
question as to the
meaning of Christianity? After all, what is this thing? As we
view it in
general or in particular, what does it mean?
Further, if
that is too objective, are we
not being forced more and more to face the question of the
meaning of spiritual
experience? Is there not in our hearts a recurrent question,
'Why?' 'Why are we
going the way we are going? Why is God taking us this way and
through this? Why
is this being allowed? Why is this happening to the children
of God?' If that
is not a really pressing question in your heart, I am not
giving very much for
your spiritual life, dear friends. Anyone who is really alive
to ultimate
things is very concerned about what our spiritual experience
in the hands of
God really means. What is God after? What is God explaining?
What is He doing?
Human History
Now, on the
one side, then, human
history. We must see that God has taken all time - human
history embraces ten
thousand years, at least - to demonstrate the meaning of the
results of the
wrong use that man made of his trust of free will, when he
took that trust into
his own hands and it became self-will instead of God's will.
It is here
that we come to a point which
is very full of the most important instruction. What was God
left to do? You
say: 'Why, when man did that, broke that law of dependence,
took his will into
his own hands and out of God's hands and violated his trust,
why did God not
destroy him once for all and start again there and then?' Of
course, it is easy
to talk like that. Perhaps that is what you would do. Perhaps
that is what you
think He ought to have done in view of all that we know. Do
you not see that if
God had done that, it would have been to have simply said that
He never did
give man free will? It would have nullified the whole
principle of option. He
would have destroyed at once the primary thing - free will. It
is never free
will if, when you use it, you are destroyed for doing so. That
is not free
will. But what did God do? Ah, that is history.
The Lord's
way has been, and still is to
let the choice have full course and destroy itself, bring its
own judgment upon
itself. It is a long-term business, and long-drawn-out
business. And now let me
just say a very intimate thing to you and to my own heart.
There are some
prayers that God answers which we wish He had never answered!
It is because man
would not take a 'no' or an alternative. There is a little
fragment about
Israel when, after much stiff-neckedness and hardness of
heart, "He gave them
their request, but sent a wasting disease among them" (Ps.
106:15). Have you
ever prayed, and insisted, and refused to take a 'no' or an
alternative, and
then wished He had never answered your prayer? That is
possible, it depends
upon where your will is, on your own side or on His side.
There is a lot of
spiritual history bound up with that.
We were
saying that the Lord has taken
all time to demonstrate the folly, the madness, the iniquity
of a wrong use of
a sacred trust. Note, then, the development of this. All the
immense
potentialities to which we have referred in man have been
allowed to express themselves,
have been drawn out by history, and today we are amazed and
marvel at the
potentialities of man! Make no mistake about it. In five
hundred years we have
moved from the making of iron cannon balls to the atomic bomb.
You call that
progress, do you? But look at what has happened, what man can
do, what is in
man to do! We are all wondering what he is going to do next.
If things go on
for another fifty years as they have gone for the last fifty,
where shall we
be? This is no Jules Verne imagination, is it? These things
are realities. And
all this is in the man that God made.
But do you
recognise that, with the
acceleration and intensification of this process, man has
never yet either made
a discovery or made an invention but what there has come along
a parallel curse
with it and a new problem that almost, if not altogether,
bedevils the
discovery? It is true in any realm you like. Oh, that we were
here long enough
to survey the ground adequately! These potentialities which
were in the man
that God created have been given full play by God through all
time to express
themselves, but always with a curse. What is a
curse? I
could put the curse into one word - fear! The further man goes
the more fearful
he becomes. It is fear that is alive to the greatest
discoveries and inventions
of man. It is fear that is ruling men's hearts today. They are
conscious of
insecurity. They are striving for some kind of security in
order to overcome
this fear. The Bible is right, you know. It always is, but it
is right on this -
that a mark of the end time will be "men fainting from fear"
(Luke 21:26).
You only
have to read some of the books
that have been produced by the discoverers of nuclear energy, and
they will tell
you in unvarnished language that it only wants the touch of a
finger to end the
whole human race by this very thing that they have discovered
and are
exploiting. It would be the end of the human race - and an
awful end! If you
have read the story of Hiroshima, spread that over the whole
human race! Now, I
don't want to be a sensationalist, but these are facts. We are
informed about
them by the men who are mostly associated with this very
matter. Men are
afraid. This fear is accentuated and intensified the further
men go in their
inventions and discoveries and in the development of the
potentialities in
their own beings. That is the end. It is coming very near.
God has
taken all history - and what a
lot that word 'history' covers - past, present and future, if
it is not a
contradiction to speak of the future as history. But there is
history that is
being made for the future. History is on the one side,
demonstrating, beyond
any question or doubt, that man has made a mistake somewhere!
He has gone wrong
somewhere! He has defaulted somewhere - no, worse than that -
he has done
something infinitely evil, and it has come out of himself by
the wrong use of
his own will.
Do we not
see? Are we blind? Are we not
taking account? I said that seriously-minded people are
concerned about
history. Are you not taking account of this, that where this
state of things in
development, intensification, discovery, invention, is most
pronounced, you have the most awful
strength of human will against God? Is that not true? It is
soul-strength, a
strength of human soul.
And how we
fail to see that the one thing
that history has revealed is this contradiction, this strange
but so patent paradox:
the greatness of man and, at the same time, his smallness. The
greater he seems
to be, the less he seems to be able to cope with his own
dreams. Is that true?
He has wrought it out, and now he is a mere puppet, a mere
plaything of his own
greatness. How little he is at his greatest!
Well, that
is the way of history, and
that is what is happening, dear friends. The greatness of man
- yes... as God
made him! But now, because of this one thing, a greatness that
is cancerous.
There is no other word to explain and define it. What is
cancer? Well, I cannot
answer all the research on that matter, but I will tell you
what is known: that
cancer exists because of the loss of one central governing and
regulating
authority. It is something that has broken away from authority
and ignores
controlling and regulating authority in the organism, and
becomes an authority
in itself, becomes some thing that is something in
itself, and has
absolutely refused that central authority regulating and
governing within the
organism. It has taken things into its own hands. It is
cancer, the scourge!
This greatness of man is like that. Look at it! It has broken
right away from
the great controlling authority of God and God's will. The
result is a scourge
on humanity!
Now at that
point, were it possible, I
could put in a tremendous section, by way of illustration. I
only have to
mention the things without any additional words. What about
international
relationships? Oh, the tentacles of this cancerous human life,
in humanity!
Why, you cut one off and half a dozen more spring up at once!
Is it not like
that in international relationships? Why, you think you have
just got the
problem nicely settled and it breaks out in more than one
other place. You
cannot cope with it. You have got all the potential of a
prosperous and happy
world. It is all there, but in reality there is curse and
destruction instead.
All the instruments and the institutions for peace, and yet
there was never so
much loss of peace in human history as there is today. Think
of all your
gadgets to save work and of all the inventions to make life
easier! There were
never so many amenities and facilities for rest and leisure -
and never in
history so much discontent! There is something wrong with this
humanity, this
world. We might look at industry, we might look at science and
we might even
look at religion... but I must leave it there for the moment.
That is one side.
But we are
not talking just objectively.
That is you, that is me, by nature. The deepest, truest thing
about you and
about me naturally is self-will, pride, possessiveness
and the desire for
power. You don't agree with me? All right! If you allow the
Holy Spirit to take
you any way at all, you will discover that that is true. That
is the first man.
That is the old Adam. And you will see at once how that opens
the door for the
Second Man and the Last Adam to start things all over again on
another basis,
to be the racial Firstborn and Head, and progenitor of another
kind. And you
will see a lot more when once you have seen that.
I am very
well aware that all that I have
said may be oppressive. It may be the heavy side, but you and
I have got to
understand what history, and present history mean. What are
the forces. and
what are the things that are producing this wonderful,
startling, terrible world? And where is it
leading? Well, God
has said: 'All right, you have made your choice. You have
decided this and you
would not have it otherwise. Very well! The history of a kind
of person or race
like that will lead on until the final verdict of sin is
wrought out.' It is sin.
There is
something that you will do well
to store up. You know, one of the things that is going to
amaze us, perhaps
more than most other things - and a few things will amaze us
when we get to
heaven! - will be this: our discovery of how much more,
infinitely more, there
was in any one statement of God than ever we imagined. Oh,
when God speaks, He
does not speak just platitudes; He does not speak just
observations and make
casual remarks. In anything that God says there is the
infinitude of His
knowledge and His wisdom. And if any life comes into the hands
of the Holy
Spirit, you will discover that there is an unfathomable depth
of meaning in
anything that God has said and you will never exhaust it.
Preach on the same
thing all your long life, and you have not exhausted that same
thing if it has
come from God. There is still something more. And I say that
we are going to be
amazed when we get to heaven to see the infinitude that was in
some things that
were almost commonplace with us. Oh, if God uses the words
sin, disobedience,
rebellion, self-will, there is all of time gathered into that
in tragedy! You
will never fathom that... the Last
Adam did! He went to the bottom of
it, drained it in His cross.
But that is
where the other side opens
up.