How God’s Plan will be Accomplished through His son, Jesus

A prominent feature of Paul’s Christology involves the portrayal of Jesus as the “last Adam”, the counterpart of the “first Adam.

The idea of God’s man as the fulfiller of God’s purpose is a recurring one in the Old Testament; he is the man of Your right hand,… (the son of man whom You made strong for Yourself, so we will not go back from You: make us alive, and we will call upon Your name.  Turn us again, O YHVH God of hosts, cause Your face to shine; and we shall be saved - delivered),  for whose prosperity and victory prayer is offered in Psalm 80:17-19.

When on one man fails to accomplish God’s purpose (as, in measure, all did), God raises up another to take his place - Joshua to replace Moses, David to replace Saul, Elisha to replace Elijah. However, who could take the place of Adam? Only one who was competent to undo the effects of Adam’s sin and become the inauguration of a new humanity. The scriptures; and, and indeed the history of the world; knows of only one man who has the necessary qualifications. Jesus stands forth as ‘the Proper Man, who God Himself has called forth’

For those whom He has put right with God the old solidarity of sin and death, which was theirs in association with the first Adam, has given way to a new solidarity of righteousness and life in association with the ‘last Adam’.

So we understand Adam to be a counterpart or type of Jesus. As death entered the world through Adam’s disobedience, so new life come in through Jesus’ obedience. As Adam’s sin involves his posterity in guilt, so Jesus righteousness is credited to his people.

Adam we know was the first man, but he was more: he was what his name means in Hebrew - ‘mankind’. The whole of mankind is viewed as having existed at first in Adam. Because of his sin, however, Adam is mankind in alienation from God. The whole of mankind is viewed as having originally sinned in Adam.

So we see that through the lord Jesus the Messiah a new creation has come to birth; the old ‘Adam solidarity’ of sin and death has been broken up to be replaced by the new Jesus solidarity of grace and life. However there is an overlap between the two. ‘As in Adam all die’ applies in the physical realm to believers just as much as ‘even so in Jesus shall all be made alive’ does, so long as this mortal life endures. But here and now they do have the assurance that because they are ‘in the Messiah Jesus’ they will indeed ‘be made alive’, because here and now through faith in him they have received from God that justification [not guilty verdict] which brings life in its train.

The obedience of the Messiah Jesus to which his people owe their justification [not guilty verdict] and hope of new age life is not to be confined to his death. His death is viewed as the crown and culmination of that ’active obedience’ which characterized his life throughout its course. It was a perfectly righteous life that he offered in death on his people’s behalf. That righteous life in itself would not have met their need had he not carried his obedience to the point of death, ‘even the death on the stake’; but neither would his death have met their need had the life which he thus offered up not been a perfect life. See Isaiah 53:11... ‘by his knowledge shall My righteous servant make many righteous; for he shall bear their iniquities’.

So we see that if the fall of Adam brought all his descendents under the dominion of death, the obedience of the Jesus has brought a new race triumphantly into the realm of grace and life.

In Genesis 3, we see that by one man - Adam - sin entered into the world, and once sin entered into the world death followed, and death spread to all mankind because all men/woman sinned, that is to say in, Adam. It is not simply because Adam is the ancestor of mankind that all are said to have sinned in his sin, it is because Adam is mankind.

We understand from the scriptures that Adam was ‘the figure of him that was to come’, that is Adam, the first man, is a counterpart of ‘type’ of Jesus, who is referred to in scripture as ‘the last Adam’ and ‘the second Man’ 1 Cor:15:45,47). It is noteworthy that the only Old Testament character to be called explicitly a ‘type’ of Jesus in the New Testament is Adam. Jesus replaces the first man as the archetype and representative of a new humanity, even as Adam was the Federal head of all mankind, Jesus is the beginning of the new creation of God and those in him are under a new Federal head Jesus, as members of a new humanity.

Member of the new humanity having yielded their lives to the risen Messiah Jesus and the power of his Spirit working in them and through them are as a result being radically transformed; becoming new creations. They receive a new nature which delights to produce spontaneously the fruit of the Spirit - Jesus, whose graces are manifested in their striving to become perfect, even a Jesus the Messiah.

What is I written has been quoted from “The Epistle of Paul to the Romans’ by F.F. Bruce - part of the Tyndale New Testament  Commentaries. I have edited throughout where it seemed good to do so.

I cannot recommend "The Epistles of Paul to the Romans" by F.F. Bruce highly enough. If you don't have this book as part of your regular study then you are missing out on a great opportunity to know more about how we as believers are to live in this sick and dying age, with the constant motivation to have a part in the new age coming as members of the congregation of God.