"Adam" Tagged Sermons
The topography and direction running between God and man get traced as Adam and Eve’s faith is tested by God’s own withdrawal. Eve’s impatient naming of both sons contrasts sharply with the true faith that marks Abel alone.
Reviewing the fall narrative as a whole, real faith turns up in Adam’s naming of Eve ‘life,’ itself a confession of hope in the promised seed. The clothing God provides pictures grace over works, with its own quiet eschatology built in.
The theophanic glory of God’s appearance in Genesis 3:8 sets up what might be called God acting as pastor toward the fallen pair. Even as Adam and Eve blame each other, the serpent, and God himself, grace is already at work in the simple fact that God does not destroy them.
Adam and Eve’s eyes are opened to their own limitations and nakedness, a natural experience of the created state now turned to shame. Our goal, following Paul in 2 Corinthians, is to be clothed with Christ so that we are never found naked again.
Adam bears real responsibility for the fall, with his headship over humanity defining our very covenant with God. Adam is guilty of Eve’s sin as much as his own, a selfishness thrown into relief by the utter selflessness of Christ’s sacrifice.
Satan uses the serpent’s own natural strengths against Eve, deceiving her through a speaking snake while Adam is conspicuously absent. In doing so, Satan reverses God’s created order entirely, and Eve’s response amounts to a denial of God’s rule.
Four distinct lessons turn up in God’s delay before creating Eve, picturing her as a true bride for Adam. Adam’s own pursuit of independence is exactly what causes his failure to love her as he should.
The creation of Eve is itself covenantal, even Trinitarian, with God’s deliberate delay in creating her meant to increase Adam’s own joy at her arrival. For man to rightly be lord over creation and over woman, he must first serve the Lord himself.
The provocative case is made that Adam was, in a real sense, a Calvinist: student before God his teacher, learning what Christian education actually means. God bringing man into the garden sanctuary already prophesies the resurrection to come.
Continuing from God’s sovereignty over time, the focus turns to how we ourselves are meant to use it. Adam is more than a mere creature; he is a son, and the garden he is given anticipates, with real similarities and differences, the paradise of Revelation 22.