The Two Kingdoms: Adam and Christ

SPEAKER 01 : 0:05

So we’re beginning a new series in the Book of Romans starting as of today, and I want to share a few insights with you before we get into the details of the Book of Romans, just to give you a little appetite for this incredible book. It’s a book that really reinterprets, or I won’t say reinterprets, but interprets the Bible for us. You know, we’ve all read the Bible and we read the Bible and sometimes things seem to be contradictory or confusing, or we don’t get the inner message that is secretly hidden there in the stories of Scripture. Paul gives us that inner message. He was an avid student of the Bible. He was a Pharisee. He was a member of the Sanhedrin. He was a scholar. And he kept the law as touching the outward form of the law perfectly, he says. And so he’s somebody to be reckoned with. Above all, of course, he met Jesus Christ, and he was given a revelation of things in heaven. And so what he talks about in Romans is enormously important to us. You know, one of the things that in my observations for you is Romans chapter 1. Romans chapter 1, in my opinion, helps you to understand who you are and what’s wrong with you and what’s wrong with me. There’s something terribly dysfunctional about the human race. What is it? Well, Paul states in massive overviews that the humankind, the humanity that we live in, is in a state of denial and suppression. And that suppression is the suppression of God. Right from the beginning then, Paul teaches us that God is the center of our soul. He is the meaning of all existence. And yet, humanity has denied him. And as a result, we have gone off the rails. We can’t understand ourselves anymore. We have thoughts, feelings and emotions that are completely out of whack. We don’t understand our depression, our anxiety. We take drugs for it, medical drugs. And it still doesn’t solve the problems. Paul explains to us that that state of suppression is about God. And it’s about God because we are descendants of Adam. And Adam suppressed God by walking away from him in disobedience, in a state of unbelief, willful unbelief, and it had disastrous consequences. It led to the sin and death that we all know about. Now, what did God do about all this? Well, Paul then startles us with an incredibly insightful view of history. God hands or gives people over to their choices to suppress him. God gives people over to their alternatives to God. Why does he do this? Is it because he’s abandoning us? Is it because he doesn’t like us anymore and he’s mad with us? No, it’s part of the process, a very terrible and difficult process, of reaching humanity. by letting humanity understand and know the terrible consequences of what we have done. In handing us over to our alternatives of God, we are being handed over to our idols which are dead. They have no life in them. They cannot breathe, they cannot see, they cannot think, and yet we offer them worship. Now, don’t just think of wood and stone and idols of metal. Anything that is put before God as a security, as a source of hope and peace, is an idol. Well, when we begin to understand this, we begin to understand how God is working with the human race, and it’s a marvelous revelation that Paul gives us. we begin to understand that the suppression that we have exercised is not simply something that we chose, but that we have inherited the mental dynamics, the emotional dynamics of Adam. What were those dynamics? Well, you can study them in the book of Genesis, and they were guilt, shame, and fear. Mankind, once he took of that fruit, became guilty, and he became afraid of his guilt, and hid from the Lord, and ashamed, and covered his nakedness. All of these are tremendous messages of the psyche that has gone wrong, the universal psyche. It’s gone wrong. It’s out of harmony. So this is one of the great revelations that we get from the book of Romans. Another one is found embedded in chapter 5, the latter part, the second half, beginning at verse 12 of the book of Romans. Some scholars have thought that this particular passage about that in Adam came sin and death, and then in Christ came righteousness and life, have thought it was a sort of sidetrack that Paul got into, that he just lost his point. But others know, and I’m following their direction because I believe they’re dead right, others know that this passage in Romans 5, verses 12 to 21, is the core of the book of Romans. Paul is presenting to us two ages of existence, aeons as they’re called in the Greek, but we can’t use the word aeon because it means age, and the word age has to do with time when we translate it into English, but the word age is not being used that way in the Greek. It’s being used as a sphere of existence. Adam brought a sphere of existence into the world, and it was the sphere of sin and death. All death spread to all men. And yet those men and women who came from Adam did not commit the sin of Adam, yet they suffered the consequences of it. And thus Paul compares Adam with Christ. He actually implies that Adam, in fact he says so, is a type of Christ. How could Adam be a type of Christ when Adam was the one who brought in sin, when Jesus was the one who brought in righteousness? Well, by those very facts, Adam brought in universal sorrow and death. It came upon everyone, even though no one had any part in Adam’s sin. And Christ brought in universal life. and righteousness for all, even though nobody had a part in Christ’s life and righteousness and death. And so we have two Adams, although the word two Adams is an expression from 1 Corinthians 15, not Romans 5, but the same idea is there. There are two Adams, two heads of the human race. One head of the human race is Adam. The second head of the human race is Christ. In the first Adam, we are all under the condemnation of death. In the second Adam, we are all reprieved. We are declared innocent. We are justified. This marvelous concept is carried on throughout the whole of the book of Romans. And once you grasp it, it is enormously enlightening to you. Because, you see, you and I live in one age or the other. Actually, we live in both ages. In our humanity, in our natural fallen humanity, our flesh as the Bible calls it, we are in the kingdom of Adam. But in Christ, that kingdom of Adam is no longer charged to our account. We are no longer under its condemnation and the power of its death. In Christ, we are counted as righteous. In Christ, we are counted as justified, declared innocent, and we have in him the kingdom of life. And then all that Paul teaches from there on out is about living by faith in that sphere of existence, that kingdom of Christ. Don’t think that before you were converted, you were in the kingdom of Adam, and now you’re converted, you’re in the kingdom of Christ, as if you were thinking in terms of time, before and after. No, our bodies and broken minds are still in the kingdom of Adam. But by faith in Christ, we are counted as if we were in the kingdom of Christ. And there is no condemnation for our existence in the kingdom of Adam. This is an astonishing truth. and it helps us to understand why Paul uses phrases like, we died to sin and we are freed from sin, in Romans 6. How can we be free from sin? It’s terrifying, the idea, because it seems way beyond any of us. And that’s why so many people avoid the book of Romans, because it just seems too far out. But once you understand the kingdom of Adam and the kingdom of Christ, once you understand these two spheres of existence that exist side by side, you begin to realize what Paul’s talking about. Paul is saying we are freed from sin in the sense that we are freed from the kingdom of Adam, the judgment and condemnation of the kingdom of Adam. And we are freed from death. That is, we are freed from the judgment and condemnation and the ultimate effect of death, because though we die, we shall rise again. And so this presents to us an enormous boon, an enormous gift from Thou Heavenly Father. And it is the gift of living in a new kingdom. It’s ours by faith right now. It’ll be ours in full reality at the coming of Jesus Christ. But by faith is a fascinating experience because we take all the things that are going on in the kingdom of Adam, all the disappointments and the frustrations and the failures and even our sins and addictions, and we bring them over into the kingdom of Christ. Well, you say they can’t exist in the kingdom of Christ if they’re sinful, but the condemnation and judgment and identity of them and judgment for them and identity of them is no longer ours anymore because Christ has taken that identity on the cross. And therefore, all the things, all the disappointments, the worries, the struggles, the failures, they now become instruments of grace in the kingdom of Christ for us. This is the monumental perspective of the book of Romans. It is so big that our minds simply cannot embrace it altogether. We embrace it in bits and pieces. We go at it as best we can. But I’ll tell you, it’s a delightful and wonderful journey. Thanks for listening today, and I hope you will join me every Monday through Friday at 10 o’clock in the evening, repeated at 4 in the morning, on KLTT AM 670 in the Denver and Colorado and surrounding states areas to explore this book of Romans, which will brighten your heart and startle your mind. You can also hear it, though, any time of the day or night on your smartphone. Simply download a free app, soundcloud.com or podbean.com and key in how it happens with Colin Cook when you get there. And would you consider supporting the program? Because it’s listener-supported radio, you can make your first donation or your many donations or your single one-time donation at faithquestradio.com. Thanks, I’ll see you next time. Cheerio and God bless.