LAST ADAM/QUICKENING SPIRIT

In a perfect garden, in a perfect world, God placed a perfect couple, innocent, pure, and good. It could not be otherwise, for, being perfect, God could not make anything less than perfect. After each successive day of creation God saw that all was good, until at last, when man was created in the image of God, God saw everything that He had made and behold, it was very good. The head of the human race, whom God called Adam, He shaped out of the dust of the earth, then breathed into the man’s body and man became a living soul.

Yet this perfect man, who came from the hand of God, and was instructed to multiply and replenish the earth with a race as good and perfect as he, chose willingly to disobey his creator. In doing so, sin infected and affected his nature and the whole of his being. He became mortal and sinful. Death entered God’s perfect world. Tempted in a perfect garden, the first Adam failed.

Yet God would still have a perfect race. The first Adam had failed. He would send another - not a second Adam, for that would imply the possibility of a third. He would send the last Adam, the last head of a new race. But this time the material God would have to work on would not be bodies or souls newly created by Him from the dust. His material would be the sinful souls and bodies of Adam’s fallen race. The last Adam would come to save such.

So He came. This time, an ‘Adam’ was again tempted, not now in a perfect garden but in a waste wilderness. But this last Adam would not fail. The last Adam would be a life-giving spirit, where the first Adam had been a life-receiving yet death-bringing soul. Where the first Adam, through his disobedience, had brought death, the last Adam, through his obedience, would bring life. All of mankind are in the family of the first Adam, as all are, like him, created beings. In this first Adam all die. But all who are re-born into the family of the last Adam, all true believers, shall be made alive by this lifegiving One. We all belong, or once belonged, to the family of the first Adam. It is only by faith that we can belong to the family of the last Adam.