Sermon Tone Analysis

The Cosmic Trial

Three States

Adam was originally created with the ability to sin or not to sin.

He could do either one.

If Adam passes the probationary period, his ability to not sin and his inability to sin would have been established forever.

If Adam failed: he would lose the ability to not sin.

Adam failed the probationary period, losing his ability

If Adam passed: he would become unable to sin.

6:1 God created humanity upright and perfect.

He gave them a righteous law that would have led to life if they had kept it but threatened death if they broke it.

Yet they did not remain for long in this position of honor.

Satan used the craftiness of the serpent to seduce Eve, who then seduced Adam.

Adam acted without any outside compulsion and deliberately transgressed the law of their creation and the command given to them by eating the forbidden fruit.2

God was pleased, in keeping with His wise and holy counsel, to permit this act, because He had purposed to direct it for His own glory.

Verdict and Sentence: Solidarity in Adam

6:2 By this sin our first parents fell from their original righteousness and communion with God.

We fell in them, and through this, death came upon all.

All became dead in sin4 and completely defiled in all the capabilities and parts of soul and body.

6:3 By God’s appointment, they were the root and the representatives of the whole human race.

Because of this, the guilt of their sin was accounted, and their corrupt nature passed on, to all their offspring who descended from them by ordinary procreation.

Their descendants are now conceived in sin7 and are by nature children of wrath, the servants of sin, and partakers of death9 and all other miseries—spiritual, temporal, and eternal—unless the Lord Jesus sets them free.

1 cor.

15 21 22

What did Pelagian teach?

Adam’s offspring is unaffected by the fall.

Man is still free to obey God or not obey God in the same fashion Adam was.

What is the distinguishing factor of Semi-Pelagianism?

Man is not free to obey God or not obey God but man can make the first move toward God.

Man is not free to do good in his fallen nature but he is at least able to come to God on his own strength.

How is Arminianism different from Pelagianism?

Classical Arminianism says that prevenient grace is extended at the preaching of the gospel and men are enabled at that moment to respond positively to Christ.

Classic Arminianism was quickly replaced by the view that the effects of the fall in Adam are universally reversed in Christ at Calvary.

This amounts to a practical denial of original sin.

1. TESTIMONY TO THE COVENANT OF CREATION FROM NON-CHRISTIAN SOURCES

Along with its creation story (Enuma Elish), ancient Babylonian civilization produced the Code of Hammurabi, which bears striking resemblance to the Ten Commandments delivered to Moses centuries later.

In fact, it was probably under King Hammurabi (1792–1750 BC) that the Enuma Elish poem was commissioned.

Reformation theology emphasizes that while the gospel is revealed only in the proclamation of Christ (verbum externum), the law is the native property of all human beings (verbum internum), the very law of their being which, though suppressed in unrighteousness, cannot entirely be purged from the conscience.

What was the Catholic view?

Adam’s sustenance—and therefore that of the created order—depended at every moment not on the integrity of freedom in created righteousness, but on a donum superadditum—a gift of grace added to nature, elevating p 422 it toward the supernatural.

By contrast, the Reformers taught that both the integrity of human nature and its depravity after the fall were total, encompassing the mind as well as the body, the soul as well as its passions, the intellect and senses alike.

The fall cannot be attributed to humanity’s having been “ensnared by the inferior appetites,” says Calvin, “but abominable impiety has seized the very citadel of his mind, and pride has penetrated into the inmost recesses of his heart; so that it is weak and foolish to restrict the corruption which has proceeded thence to what are called the sensual appetites.”

“Original sin” is the term that the Western church has employed to refer to our collective human guilt and corruption.

No doctrine is more crucial to our anthropology and soteriology, and yet no doctrine has been more relentlessly criticized ever since it was articulated.

Protestant liberalism has always had an optimistic view of human morality.

Adolf von Harnack called original sin “an impious and foolish dogma.”

That, however, was before two world wars, to which Harnack’s own contribution should not be forgotten

However, if one does not take Adam (i.e., the human as human) seriously, two serious problems ensue: first, sin must be attributed to creation itself (and therefore ultimately to the Creator); second, there is no longer any historical basis for Christ’s work as the Last Adam, undoing the curse and fulfilling the terms of the covenant of creation.

A covenantal account of original sin focuses on the representative, federal, covenantal structure of human existence before God.

Like a nation represented by the decrees and actions of its head of state, the human race is one-in-many and many-in-one.

As goes the king, so goes the kingdom.

To be sure, there are metaphysical and ontological consequences of covenant transgression, such as human death as the judicial sentence, but the essence of sin itself is legal, forensic, and ethical: “The sting of death is sin, and the power of sin is the law” (1 Co 15:56).

The Permanence of the Image

The image of God is properly functioning when yielding common testimony to God’s character, will, works, and ways.

Furthermore, it is in the church and as the church that the new humanity is being justified and sanctified, anticipating the day when it will be glorified together with its risen head.

It is in the church as the community of the covenant of grace that the powers of the age to come break in on this present evil age, beginning already to make all things new.

“Thus the image of God,” for Eastern Orthodoxy as opposed to Lutheran and Reformed orthodoxy, “is both ontic and actual, and it is viewed in a manner which relates it closely to a semi-Pelagian view of man’s will.”

Nevertheless, Lutheran theology teaches that the image of God was lost in the fall, while Reformed theology teaches that it remains, albeit marred, disfigured, and corrupted in every way.

Or at least this is a common contrast that is drawn, usually on the Reformed side.

Gen

Stay of Execution

Creation was but the origin.

The destination was the Tree of Life, with humanity confirmed in everlasting glory, immortality, and righteousness.

“That door, however, was never opened,” notes Kline.

It was not the Fall in itself that delayed the consummation.

According to the conditions of the covenant of creation the prospective consummation was either/or.

It was either eternal glory by covenantal confirmation of original righteousness or eternal perdition by covenant-breaking repudiation of it.

The Fall, therefore, might have been followed at once by a consummation of the curse of the covenant.

The delay was due rather to the principle and purpose of divine compassion by which a new way of arriving at the consummation was introduced, the way of redemptive covenant with common grace as its historical corollary.

The ensuing biblical narrative does not attempt to produce either a comprehensive chronology or a comprehensive genealogy but rather hits the highlights of redemptive history between Adam and Abraham.

By decentralizing the power, wealth, population, and technology through linguistic differentiation, instead of destroying the city, God restrained the devastating potential of evil.

All of this is meant to introduce us to the line of Noah, Shem, and Terah, father of Abram.

Isreal, My Beloved: Between the Two Adams

So decisive is the call of Abraham in Genesis 12 that it initiates the history of Israel and renders all that has preceded it a mere prologue to that story.

In fact, Bavinck goes so far as to conclude that special revelation begins with the call of Abraham.

Redemptive history begins now to move swiftly toward the Messiah, first by type and shadow and then, in the fullness of time, in reality.

We cannot find this gospel in nature, creation, reason, or conscience: “It is an historical product; the initiative came from God; he so reveals himself as, by the act of revelation, to receive a particular person and people into communion with himself.”

As Adam had been cast out of the garden, Israel was exiled by none other than Yahweh himself, the suzerain whose treaty had been reduced to shattered tablets by his covenant partner.

“Like Adam they transgressed the covenant”

But how will God be faithful to both covenants, to the law and the gospel?

How will he be “just and the justifier” (Ro 3:26)?

It will be by causing his own Son, the Last Adam and True Israel, to fulfill all righteousness and yet to pass through the judgment—cut off from the land of the living—for our sins, so that his righteousness becomes definitive for the solidarity of his new creation in and with him.

Our focus now turns, therefore, from the dark night of human rebellion to this sunrise of the Messiah: the one who comes as Lord and Servant of the everlasting covenant.