17 | The Lens of the New Creation

As we’ve seen up to this point, God’s process for completing the new creation in the progeny of the first Adam was always based on the role of the last Adam, and was established before the world began. This lens, the revelation of the work of God in us and for us, is the lens by which we can view the history of God’s desire to lead many sons and daughters from the mist and the dust of the earth to the new creation in righteousness and eternal life in Christ the Beloved. It was never the role of the first Adam to secure this way for his progeny who were conceived and constrained to the physical and natural realm. It was always the role of the last Adam, the man from heaven and the life-giving Spirit, who would provide the way, the truth, and the life of the new creation and our eternal inheritance.

 

Since the revelation of the Son of Man and the Son of God, we look to him and his Spirit to discern his ongoing work to reveal the Father to the world and to grasp a glimpse of the future glory he has promised those who trust in him. It is now time to also look to that same Spirit to fully perceive and understand the history of that work, established within this physical realm, and the role of Adam and Eve in it.

• Is it by accident that the last Adam is born of the same seed and lineage of the first Adam? Consider all that has transpired in the thousands of years and many generations where our own carelessness and the efforts of those in the unseen realm worked to destroy or corrupt that seed and that lineage, yet it remains.

• Is it by accident that this lineage would be achieved by Gentile and Israelite alike? Today, that lineage of Adam consists of tens of billions of children that have multiplied and filled the earth and subdued it by the will of God and the pride of mankind. Though the lineage of king David, of which Christ is a direct descendant, is of the house of Israel and Judah, was not Abraham, on whom the children of Israel were founded, first called Abram, a Gentile from Ur of the Chaldeans? Were not all his ancestors before him likewise Gentile in nature?

 

Even without a supernatural worldview, the unbroken lineage from the first Adam to the last Adam, achieved through Israelite and Gentile alike, remains a remarkable feat and a clear indication of a divine hand. This, together with the knowledge that God is starting with the physical and natural first as a process to arrive at the spiritual, one is left with a larger context for the work of Yeshua the Christ to bring about the new creation. In this, we can see the approaching completion of the foremost command and the fulfillment of the first promise hinted at to our first parents.[1]

From this perspective, we’ll continue to delve further into the work of God in Christ and add to those things we’ve already discovered:

• How Adam and Eve exposed humanity to the righteous judgment of God and the resulting condemnation and death as a step toward the new creation in Christ.[2]
• How the lie of the serpent went unspoken amidst the truth claims he made to them; that humanity might attain the full image and likeness of God by their own efforts.[3]
• How the death introduced to the world through the first Adam, when contrasted with the life in Christ, reveals a process of creation from the physical to the spiritual according to the will and purpose of God.[4]
• Though the salvation in Christ is made universally available to all, it is conditionally applied only to those given ears to hear and eyes to see that they might turn from darkness into the light.[5]
• How God’s righteous judgment is not based on the equal and opposite reasoning of men, but on the inequality where his grace is greater-than the sin of man.[6]
• How the work of God in Christ, by the addition of the Spirit of Christ, completes the formula for humanity. Though it began as a living soul constrained to the physical realm, the kernel, Christ completes the spiritual body of the life hidden in the seed planted in Adam; a new creation in the image and likeness of the Son.[7]

 

In this section, we will delve further into the Genesis 2-3 narrative but with a different light and through a different lens than previously possible. Let’s return to the beginning . . .