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Abstract

Table of Contents

Introduction

Chapter  1

Part I
Chapter  2
Chapter  3
Chapter  4
Chapter  5
Chapter  6
Chapter  7
Chapter  8
Chapter  9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12

Part II
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Part II: Embodiment —and Redemption

Chapter 13

Two Men: Two Adams

The first Adam, as truly the first Man, ONLY SINNED ONCE.
The last Adam, as truly the second Man, NEVER ONCE SINNED.

     Should you ask how the First Adam, as truly the first Man, only sinned once, then consider this fact. When Adam was created, he was created in the image of God. When he sinned, he surrendered that image and the specific nature that it signified. He literally sinned into being a new kind of creature, a species quite different from that which God had planned when He first said, "Let us make man" and then defined his creation by the words 'in our image' (Genesis 1:26). The first man Adam, as truly representative Man, committed only one sin because with that one sin he ceased to be representative Man. All his other sins are of no significance to us because they were not sins of Adam as Man judged by God's definition of the word Man. Adam's first sin as truly man was his only sin as truly man. Thereafter Adam sinned as a creature who was not truly man any more.
     That this creation of God did surrender that image is borne out by two facts. First, because the sons and daughters of Adam and therefore all the descendants of the first man were no longer "made" in the image of God but

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in Adam's image. It will be noted that Genesis 5:1 states very specifically that God created man in His own image, but in Genesis 5:3 it is stated equally specifically that Adam begat sons and daughters in his image. And secondly, the New Testament indicates that God's image now has to be re-constituted (2 Corinthians 3:18).
     It will also be noted that in Genesis 9:6 we are told that Adam WAS made, not that he IS made, in the image of God. The Hebrew of the original here is very specific and quite unambiguous. The past tense is used, not the present. Man lost that image when Adam sinned and in losing it ceased to be Man by God's definition. Yet, although man has indeed lost the image, he has not lost the capacity for its re-creation; for which reason the killing of a man is such a criminal offense, for fallen man has remained redeemable. Fallen angels did not remain redeemable: fallen man did.
     But with the Incarnation of the Lord Jesus Christ a Man was born once again into the world bearing the express image of God (Hebrews 1:3); and He, unlike the First Adam, never lost that image because He never once sinned. Thus, Man as originally made in the image of God, still constituted the perfect vehicle for the revelation of God by incarnation, since by that Incarnation could be demonstrated God's love for his creature even though that creature had lost His image.
     We thus find a sequence of events as follows.

Man was created in God's image:                                Genesis 1:26
Man sinned and lost that image.
Man is now procreated in fallen man's image                Genesis 5:3
God was made in man's original image:                       Hebrews 1:3
Man may be re-constituted in God's image:        2 Corinthians 3:18

      Now I want to address in this chapter a fact of history that evolution cannot account for. First: fallen man with all his destructive and suicidal propensities, and secondly, unfallen Man in all his consummate magnificence. Both Adams are truly representatives of human nature. How

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have these opposites come about? Do they really spring from a single root? What kind of a root could give rise to two such extremes, man as seen in ourselves and man as revealed in the person of Jesus Christ? Does not this signify something quite unique about the origin of that root?

           1. FALLEN MAN.

     On one occasion C. S. Lewis quoted a famous couplet from Bobby Burns' poem Man Was Made to Mourn.

Man's inhumanity to man
Makes countless thousands to mourn.

     His comment on these two lines was very perceptive. He said the truth is that "it is not man's inhumanity to man that is the problem." No! It is man's "humanity" that is the problem. His awful behaviour is now "human behaviour." This is his nature. This is what man now is.
     The popular view that man is essentially good dies hard. The concept of a steady improvement of human nature by education received a severe shock when two world wars showed that one of the most educated nations in the world could behave on an unprecedented scale in barbaric ways that were far worse than man had ever witnessed in terms of the numbers hurt by them and the depth of degradation to which they were subjected — and indeed in some countries are still being subjected.
     It was Rousseau who had held up the noble savage and argued that here was a picture of unspoiled human nature which only civilization had destroyed. He advocated a return to such "native nobility"; and many have tried it. Not one of these returns to nature has resolved the problem of man's innate selfishness and the plague of a stricken conscience that remains to trouble the community and the individual alike.
     Many studies of the Nazi concentration camps have been made since World War II. The incredible cruelties

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which were commonly inflicted or authorized with sadistic pleasure by people who then went home to enjoy fine art, classical music, and elevating literature, only go to show how terribly human nature has been warped by the Fall. Concentration camps and torture chambers are a human invention. The rest of nature displays nothing that could even be remotely viewed as the foundation of this.
      The horror of those concentration camps was so awful that normal civilized people who witnessed them simply could not believe their own eyes. These were not visitors who thus reacted, but themselves victims of the horror. One doctor, seeing the lurid flames of a large fire some little distance away, wondered what was being burned — rubbish, he supposed.
(100) A truck backed up and men with ordinary pitch forks were tossing small bundles of garbage, one forkful at a time, into the flames. It was night and their silhouettes stood out like demons feeding the flames of hell.
     Suddenly he realized what those small bundles of garbage actually were. They were babies, and he was certain that some of them were still alive — they were struggling on the tines of the fork. What happened to him, as he watched? He merely turned off; it was all a dream. It was simply relegated to fantasy. He knew it was true: he refused to believe what he knew. . . .  Human beings are not capable of such actions. He would, he was sure, later find it was a dream.
     Another scene. Women who became pregnant were treated mercilessly. They were kicked in the stomach, dragged by the hair or, worse, by one leg to the furnaces and after more physical abuse cast alive into the furnace.
(101) People who witnessed this, too, simply did not believe. Yet later they knew it was really done.
     It seems that man alone of all creatures seeks to hurt his victim, deliberately, eagerly, furiously, viciously, with incredible cruelty — and with maniacal delight. Governments choose sadists to conduct their torture sessions and supply them with the "latest" technological devices, most

100. Pres, Terrence, D., The Surivor, Oxford University Press, 1976, p. 84.
101. Ibid., p.86f.

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of them intended for extreme physical abuse short of death. And the civilized nations market many of these devices. They are violent or slow and excruciating. They are applied to those parts of the human body which we consider more private and which are most sensitive. They are the most degrading devices in terms of the victim's reactions. But even so, perhaps human excrement plays the most terrible part of all. . . . Forced into the mouth, the nose, the ears, forced as drink and food. . . . It is incredible.
     
All nations have been guilty, the civilized as well as the uncivilized. If we do not believe in demons it is only because we are so ignorant of what man can do to man when inspired by hatred.
     William Temple was absolutely right when he said that the worst things that happen do not happen because of a few people who are monstrously wicked but because we all are what we all are. It is almost accidental that only a relative few in any society do these things. In the same circumstances the mildest of men can become worse than animals by far, for animals do not tear each other's flesh for the mere pleasure of hearing their screams.
     We have found in the Nazi era an easy target and a ready source of illustration but they are no worse than we are in potential. Animals do not hate; only man does. And human hatred is inspired by the devil.
     George Steiner was right when he said of those places of horror: "Art, intellectual pursuit, the development of the natural sciences, and many branches of scholarship, flourished in close spatial proximity to massacre and the death camps."
(102) It is a fact that these pursuits were being followed with devotion and enjoyed in such close proximity to these horror camps of pure bestiality: and they were fully aware of this proximity.
    Aesthetic feeling, moral indignation, inventiveness, scientific competence, intelligent preparation for action, even concern for others — all these can be found sitting side by side, as it were, with such places of horror. So totally

102. Steiner, George, "In Bluebeard's Castle — A Season in Hell," The Listener (BBC, London), 25 Mar., 1971, p.361.

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inconsistent is man's moral sense that an individual under oath will tell the most blatant lies in order to prove that he is innocent, a man of honour and integrity!
     Such inconsistency is borne out by the fact that many normal and enjoyable neighbours living in the environs of these camps pretended not to know what went on. Yet many of these same people changed the furniture of their rooms to place the daily living quarters on upper floors so that they had a better view. . . . When asked why, their only answer was silence. We do not know ourselves; none of us really do.
     It may be thought that only the Germans, "they" from our point of view, ever acted so atrociously. This is quite untrue. Dostoyevsky records an incident from Russia that is just as monstrous: the scale is smaller, but the phenomenon is the same.
(103)
     One day, a serf boy, a little child of eight, threw a stone in play and hurt the paw of the local general's favorite hound.
     "Why is my favorite dog lame?" he asked. He is told that the boy threw a stone that hurt its paw.
     "Take him," he ordered. The child was seized from his mother and kept shut up all night. Early next morning the general came out on horseback, with his hounds, his dependents, dog-boys, and huntsmen, all mounted and in full hunting dress. The servants, too, are summoned for their edification, and before them all stood the mother of the child.
     The child is brought out. It is a gloomy, cold, foggy autumn day — but capital for hunting. The general orders the child to be undressed and the child is stripped naked. He shivers in the cold, numb with terror, not daring to cry.
     "Make him run," commands the general.
     "Run! Run!," shout the dog-boys. And the child runs.
     "At him!" yells the general, and he sets the whole pack of hounds on the child. The hounds catch him and tear him to pieces before his mother's eyes. . . .  

103. Dostoyevsky, F., Brother's Karamasov, translated by Constance Garneit, New York, Modern Library, no date, p.251.

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     But even this is "they" — the Russians, not us. Yet is there really any difference between the pleasure they derived from such utter brutality and the pleasure that the "professional" cock-fighters get out of their cruel sport, sanctioned in America in a number of States and fully protected by law? Is cruelty to animals, for pleasure, really any less an exhibition of man's innate fallenness? No animals do this to each other for mere amusement.
     Such wickedness is everywhere in our own society. It is not overt and therefore is not so offensive to us, but it is there. The poor who abuse the welfare system, the lazy who abuse the unemployment insurance; the people who give "donations" that don't exist and receive an "official" receipt which is submitted as an income tax deduction and then share their tax savings with the non-profit organization that issued the receipt — all by prior arrangement.
     The fact is that while some sin is so awful because it is public, most sin is private and therefore concealed or by many "overlooked". The fallenness of man is deep and wide, it is universal, for "all have sinned". It is only by accident that we personally may have escaped doing these more horrid things, because we were never placed in the position of being driven by hate or anger to do them — or if we were, we were not able to do them at the time of our anger or hatred. Only kings can traditionally do what they like, being a law unto themselves. David, Israel's best king, and Ahab, Israel's worst king, both turned coveting into murder. One coveted another man's wife and murdered her husband; the other, another man's vineyard and murdered its owner (2 Samuel 11:1—27 and 1 Kings 21:1—16). This is what we are capable of, the best and the worst of us alike — given the power. David utterly repented, Ahab was utterly indifferent. Nevertheless, both behaved murderously because both were fallen men.

     But why did those who were still free and outside the Camps, whose relatives and friends were being so dreadfully

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mutilated, not continuously protest? Ignorance of the truth, or fear of the consequences? In some cases, yes. But not always. Sometimes they did know, and they were not deterred by fear because they were abroad and safe. Then why did they, or we, not protest? The answer seems to be because they, and we, simply did not believe that it was possible for human beings to be so inhuman. And as for the people themselves, the victims, in prospect they too shared some of this unbelief and went, as it were, "like sheep to the slaughter," unprotesting until it was too late.
     As Herbert Butterfield, the Oxford historian, observed:
"We create tragedy after tragedy for ourselves by a lazy unexamined doctrine of man which is current amongst us and which history does not support. . . .  Those who do not believe the doctrine of the Fall can hardly deny that human history has always been history under the terms and conditions of the Fall." (104)
     We suffer from a unique form of sickness which is not to be observed in nature apart from man. This sickness does two things: it makes us capable of truly incredible wickedness totally foreign to the animal world; and it puts blinkers on us which make us believe we are suffering from no such disease.
     This disease is universal in man, and we all grow up to display it unfailingly. If one asks, "How soon is the delightful illusion of childhood innocence lost," one can only say that man sins just as soon as he can! Thousands of years of increasingly complex civilization have not really changed the picture. We are still as sick as our first ancestors were — Cain was a murderer. All we have done is to arm our wickedness with superior weapons of destruction. The disease lives on in the earth because man himself is the disease.

      An individual, acting in defiance of society is bad enough. But there is probably nothing so wicked as a crowd acting in unison under the dictates of their lower

104. Butterfield, Herbert, Christianity and History, London, Bell, 1950, p.46.

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nature. A culture may be so disrupted that a whole society goes bad. Authority is everywhere undermined to such an extent that lawlessness, destruction, violence, rape, murder, theft, and cruelty know no effective curbs and chaos results. This may happen in any social grouping such as a crowd. When a crowd throws off all recognition of established authority its mood changes rapidly from bad to worse, no longer constrained towards any good, but self-reinforced and self-reinforcing towards wickedness. Human behaviour becomes "liberated" and equated with sin. People are swept by the compulsive mood of the crowd, and individuals find themselves suddenly free to express the very worst side of their nature — often to their own genuine amazement in retrospect.
     The roar of unified voices bent on evil is terrifying. There is something demonic about it. Crowds become vicious in ways totally foreign to the behaviour of the individuals who make up the crowd. Men in groups will become vicious murderers and violent in the extreme, even the gentlest of them. And history shows, sadly, that in times of great violence (as in the French Revolution) women are equally capable of cruelty. Even in watching violent sports, this unexpected side of woman's nature may be suddenly revealed. Afterwards, the individual may sort himself or herself out and ask in amazement, "What got into me?" Nothing got in. It is not what gets in at all but what comes out that reveals the truth of human nature, even as Christ said it would (Matthew 15:18,19).

      Man's dominion and government over the world has been a disaster. We do indeed seem to be very near to the end of the human experiment. Only a divine intervention can salvage what is left. The whole of human society is close to moral bankruptcy and technologically the resources of the world (air, water, minerals) are either almost exhausted or so hopelessly contaminated as to be no longer able to support life. Even outer space has become a junkyard.

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      What has happened is that man has become the arch-destroyer of his own appointed kingdom, turning a Garden of Eden which was filled to overflowing with everything good into a wilderness filled with the debris of our own folly and greed.
     Some have even gone so far as to say that every desert area in the world is due to man's abuse of the land, and they base their arguments, as W. C. Lowdermilk has done, on the fact that most deserts are dotted with the remains of cities now buried under drifting sand.
(105) Other deserts are being attributed to a spin-off of man's unwise use of water resources which once formed part of a smoothly working ecology. In one area, Sir Samuel Hall refers to a desert of over 40,000 acres in Africa which began with water running off a barn roof that was just allowed to carve a small channel which grew and grew because the farmer was too lazy to do anything about it. One native observer remarked, "Just one damn trickle forty years ago. . . and now a third of the country gone." (106)
     Oliver Pearson says that man's impact on the environment has become so great that it is "probably greater than that of all other mammals combined. For many years man has been drawing on the earth's capital to support his high living; most other animals live frugally within the earth's income."
(107)
     Andrew Ivy recently pointed out that "soil erosion and depletion caused the transformation of garden spots into deserts in Greece, Syria, Northern Italy, Mesopotamia, and the Uplands of China. We hear of dust storms in the Volga Valley, in South Africa, Australia, and the United States, the breadbaskets of the world."
(108) He might have added Canada to this.
     Laura Thompson observed, "Man is not only a major factor in the web of life; he is the only agent whereby a conservation program for a local area may be actively implemented."
(109) He alone is responsible for the upset; he alone can correct it. The trouble is man is literally too

105. Lowdermilk, W. C., "Man-Made Deserts" in Pacific Affair, VIII, Institute of Pacific Relations, 1935.
106. Hall, Sir Samuel, Smithsonian Report for 1938, p.309.  
107. Pearson, Oliver, "Metabolism and Bioenergetics", Scientific Monthly, Feb., 1948, p.133.
108. Ivy, Andrew, "Medical Research: Operation Humanity," Scientific Monthly, Feb., 1949, p.120.
109. Thompson, Laura, "The Basic Conservation Problem," Scientific Monthly, Feb., 1949, p.130.

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wicked to engage himself in any corrective process which requires any significant personal sacrifice. A. J. Carlson, with grave humor, wrote, "In the face of this can we claim the name Homo Sapiens," (110) — man, the wise one? The one creature who is pleased to call himself such must seem pretty foolish to all other creatures, if they are able to judge him.
     Man is not merely a disturber of nature because of ignorance. He is deliberately destructive because of some strange preference for destructiveness — even in childhood. Something is wrong with his nature. The beastliness of man is not of the beast. It was Alfred Lord Tennyson who in his poem In Memoriam (published ten years before Darwin's Origin of Species), coined the famous phrase "nature red in tooth and claw." In recent years a substantial number of books have been written which show clearly that nature is not red in tooth and claw, that animals are not aggressive towards each other in the sense that man is towards his own kind, that there is no vindictiveness or vandalism * in animal society, but that — as Prince Petr Kropotkin, after years of active research in the wild, put it — nature is characterized by a spirit of "mutual aid!" It is clear that the wickedness of man is not because there is something animal in his nature but because his nature is fallen.
     When famous men like Professor George Gaylord Simpson
(111) and Will Durant (112) persist in their defense of human evolution by arguing that the evidence shows that "man has risen — not fallen," they are talking unbelievable nonsense. History screams a negative.

110. Carlson, A. J. "The Science of Biology and the Future of Man," Scientific Monthly, 1947, p.500.
* Some would argue that foxes are vandals when they kill hens indiscriminately, and so likewise when wolves kill sheep. The answer to this probably lies in the fact that the domestication of hens and sheep has destroyed their natural behaviour pattern under attack so that the predator has his natural instincts confused. Foxes do not do to wild fowl what they do to hens; nor wolves to wild sheep or goats what they do to domestic ones. The behaviour of the predator and the behaviour of the prey were balanced in nature, and man has upset the balance. If man had domesticated both predators as completely as he has domesticated both prey, perhaps this disruption would not be exhibited.
111. Simpson, G. G., Biology and Man, New York, Harcourt, Brace, & World, 1969, p.148.
112. Durant, Will and Ariel, The Lessons of History, New York, Simon & Schuster, 1968, p.38.

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          2. UNFALLEN MAN

     As evolution cannot account for fallen man, it cannot account for unfallen Man either. But where are we to observe unfallen Man that we can speak so confidently of what evolution cannot thus do? We find unfallen Man in the person of Jesus Christ.
     Here was true Man, with a magnificent beauty of bodily form that made even those hired to arrest Him fall back when He stepped forward to identify himself (John 18:6), and an unutterable beauty of personality that was flawless though under constant provocation by his enemies.
     Lord Acton, in a letter to Bishop Mandell Creighton in 1887, wrote, "Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely." If you wish to prove the corruption of human nature, give a man power over his fellowmen and the means to exercise it. The more the power, the more certain will be the display of corruption. But here was One who, although He had been given all power in heaven and earth and who although He could do whatsoever He wished consonant with the purity of his nature, nevertheless remained throughout a life of continuous challenge utterly uncorrupted.
     The evidence of his power is everywhere to be found in the Gospels, but in no sense do they appear to the reader as examples of what we would view today as showmanship. In some strange way we expect them, for they are completely in keeping with everything else He was and did. Probably never before or since has a nation been so nearly rid of human sickness by the power of one man to command the source of it — whether the source was sin or demonic.
     When we observe closely how He dealt with his challengers we can only stand back in amazement at his calm wisdom. One day the scribes and Pharisees, hoping to trap Him into making a statement publicly with which they could accuse Him of treason, asked Him whether it was proper to pay tribute to Caesar or not (Mark 12:13,14). If

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He replied, "No, it is not proper," the people would have cheered Him but his statement would have at once been reported to the authorities. If He had replied, "Yes, it is proper," the people would have turned against Him immediately, and the scribes and Pharisees would again have been the winners.
     What did He do? He asked them to show Him a coin. The question arises why did He not have a coin of his own, since his little group had a treasurer. Perhaps He had a purpose in not appealling to the treasurer, who was Judas Iscariot. But the fact is that there were at least two kinds of coinage circulating in Palestine. The Romans allowed the Jews to mint coins of their own because they did not want to use the Emperor's coinage in their temple services — hence the existence of money changers right in the temple precincts.
     However, the scribes and Pharisees, bowing to their authority, preferred to use Roman coins for all commercial intercourse: and so the Lord turned to them and said, "Show Me a coin." It seems highly unlikely that they were aware of what He was doing, but when they showed Him one of their Roman coins, He held it up for everyone to see plainly and said, "Whose image and whose superscription does it bear?" To their shame the scribes and Pharisees had to say, "Caesar's." And they were trapped themselves, for by their very possession of these coins they were really strengthening the hold of the Romans on Palestine. Then He said, "Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar's, and to God the things that are God's." In other words, if you are going to use Caesar's coins, you must serve Caesar.
     On this occasion several other challenging questions were presented to Him and He answered them all with equal ease and effectiveness. So much so, in fact, that some of the scribes themselves admitted defeat, saying, "Master, you have well said" (Luke 20:39), and after that they dared not ask Him any more questions.
     Perhaps no one incident in the Lord's life displays his

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extraordinary wisdom and gentleness than upon the occasion of his dealing with the woman taken in adultery. The story is given in John 8:1—11. This is a passage which many scholars today believe may not have belonged to John's Gospel in the original, because some of their favourite manuscripts from ancient times have omitted it. It should be noted, however, that the omission may have resulted from the fears of some copyists that in the story the Lord was really condoning adultery, and so they quietly deleted it. To my mind, the Lord was not condoning adultery but He was judging one who was no greater a sinner than the man with whom she was caught "in the act" (verse 4) who had not, be it noted, been brought to judgment with her. One wonders why. . . Perhaps the woman was more sinned against than sinning.
     The law required that an adulteress be stoned, so the Pharisees brought this woman and flung her down in front of the Lord while all the people stood around. They brought the charge against the woman, pointed to what the law said must be done, and then posed their question, "But what do you say?" Notice the "But"!
If the Lord should say, "She must be set free" — as an act of mercy, the Pharisees could repudiate Him publicly for disregarding the Law of Moses. If He had said, "She must be stoned," it could only seem to the crowd around that He was merciless — righteous perhaps, but merciless.
     So Jesus stooped down and wrote something with his finger in the dust which collected in the broad expanse of Solomon's Porch where these events evidently took place. He seemed to be ignoring them. Not unnaturally they were annoyed and persisted in asking the same question.
     Jesus straightened up just long enough to say, "He that is without sin among you, let him first cast a stone at her."
     It is rather widely agreed that the chief accuser had the responsibility of casting the first stone. This is a tribute in a sense to Jewish wisdom, for many who make accusations would not have the courage to do so — or perhaps the gall —

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if they knew they were personally responsible for initiating the actual punishment itself.
     Clearly the result of this simple invitation set them all thinking deeply, reconsidering their position. They started to leave one by one, as unobtrusively as possible, from the oldest of them down to the youngest, until they had all gone. And then Jesus straightened up and seeing that none were left, said to the woman, "Where are your accusers? Has no man condemned you?" And she replied, "No man, Lord."
     Whatever we may think about the Lord's personal judgment, there is no doubt that she was, before the law, without any accusers, and could not legally be condemned. It would seem that the circumstances of her being taken were rather special, and perhaps Jesus knew what those circumstances were. At any rate He said to her, "Neither do I condemnyou: go and sin no more."
     The story has a ring of truth about it, and it once more displays the extraordinary skill and wisdom of this Man. A wiser than Solomon was here.
     In all his relationships with friend or foe, He preserved the perfection of his own manhood. This perfection was also reflected in his relationships with his mother. He knew how to respond to her claims when she sought them appropriately (Luke 2:51); to resist them when they were sought inappropriately (Luke 8:20, 21); and to recognize them when they were appropriate but unsought (John 19:27).
     Such a figure as appears before us in the Gospels is truly uninventable. The literary creation of a character so perfect as this would require even greater faith than simply to believe the record as it stands. He is altogether and absolutely unlike ourselves, and the fact is scarcely denied even by his worst enemies throughout history.
     When He was brought to trial by those who could not endure the white light of his purity, all kinds of people were presented as witnesses against Him but their witness was uniformly contradictory until it became clear to

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everyone that these witnesses were false. But there were many whose witness to his total innocence was almost involuntary, sometimes taking only the form of silence. John 8:46 records that the Lord once asked his accusers, "Which of you convicts me of sin?" And quite frankly not one of them could think of a word to say.
     When Jesus had been arrested and brought before Pilate, Pilate's wife warned her husband, saying, "Have nothing to do with that just man" (Matthew 27:19). Pilate himself three times officially declared that he could find no fault in Him (John l8:38; 19:4, 6). On the third occasion he tried to be even more emphatic and exclaimed, "I am innocent of the blood of this just person" (Matthew. 27:24).
     Even Judas Iscariot who had betrayed Him, went back to the chief priests and elders and offered to return the money he had received for his betrayal saying, "I have sinned in that I have betrayed innocent blood" (Matthew 27:4).
     One of the crucified men sharing some of his physical torture, rebuked his fellow in crime for speaking abusively to the Lord who was crucified between them, saying, "Do you not fear God, seeing you are in the same condemnation? And we indeed justly; for we receive the due reward of our deeds: but this man hash done nothing amiss." How did he know this? He knew because everyone knew.
     The Roman centurion in charge of the crucifixion detail of troops, after observing the behaviour of the Lord on the cross for a while, and no doubt having been responsible for many such events, said when Jesus died, "Certainly this was a righteous man: truly this was the Son of God" (Matthew 27:54 and Luke 23:47).
     Paul, the intellectual among the apostles, said, "He knew no sin" (2 Corinthians 5:21); Peter, the activist, said, "He did no sin"(1 Peter 2:22); and John, who loved Him most tenderly, said, "In Him was no sin" (l John 3:5).
    Never was there such a testimony to the total innocence of a man. So overwhelming was this witness that in the end the Jewish authorities themselves admitted they had made

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a mistake. They assembled to discuss the situation after the crucifixion and said among themselves, "Command that the sepulchre be made sure until the third day, lest his disciples come by night and steal him away and say unto the people, He is risen from the dead: and so the last error shall be worse than the first." (Matthew 27:64).

     The Lord Jesus came to reveal God to man, and He came to reveal man to God. But He also came to reveal Man to man, and this He did in two distinctively different ways. In the first place, He showed what true Man could be, and should be. He came a light to light every man that is born into the world (John 1:9). He came as a standard of reference, a plumb line, as Amos (7:7,8) says.
     If we want to know what we ought to be, here is our image restored. If, on the other hand, we want to know what we are capable of, given opportunity — whether man is essentially good, whether man loves truth, whether man really wants righteousness and purity and unselfishness and absolute integrity of person — then here again we have the answer. The only perfect Man who ever lived was condemned to crucifixion, and He was condemned not for some crime or evil deed or even falsehood, but for simply telling the truth about Himself, namely, that He was God and man — both (Matthew 26:63—66).
     It has been universally admitted by advocates of man's evolutionary origin that he is nonetheless "the crown" of creation. It is a strange thing that the most wonderful representative of this creation was by man himself crowned not with gold but with thorns. Is not this man's judgment of himself? How has such an anomaly come about?
     A native from the Yana tribe once located in California who came to be known as Ishi (his own word for man) and who was the last lone survivor of his people, was shown a Passion Play film. He was deeply moved by the story of the crucifixion and remarked that Jesus Christ must have been a very "bad man" to suffer such a fate.
(113)

113. Kroeber, Theodora, Ishi in Two Worlds, Berkeley, University of California Press, 1971, p.225.

     pg.17 of 19    

     The truth is precisely the opposite. In the first place, had He been a bad man, God would not and could not have laid upon Him our sins: He would never have been acceptable to God as the sacrificial Lamb. In the second place, He would, on the contrary, have been acceptable to the world. But the world rejected Him and crucified Him not because He was a bad man but because He was a perfect Man! So it was only his perfection that made Him an acceptable sacrifice from God's point of view and an unacceptable person from the world's point of view. His very goodness, not his badness, was the reason He was condemned to death by us men. We were all involved in that trial.
     
Thus in reality the trial of Jesus Christ was not the trial of Jesus Christ at all, but the trial of fallen man. It was not He who was on trial, but man. And the outcome was not his condemnation but ours.

     If it is not possible to build a bridge between animals and fallen man, what bridge shall be built between fallen man and the Lord Jesus Christ? If both are truly human, which they certainly are, how do we make a bridge between such purity and such utter wickedness? Is such a bridge possible?
     The answer is, Yes! And to build this bridge we go back to the First Adam as created, and from there to the same First Adam as fallen. The Fall is the arch of this bridge. In that one act the First Adam (who is truly represented by the Last Adam) became also the fallen "Adam" who is represented by the human race as exhibited in the whole of human history. The potential, locked up in the newly created being called the First Adam was capable of giving rise to man as we see him displayed in the tragedy of history, and to the glory of God as seen in the face of Christ Jesus. What a creature this was who carried the potential for both the corruption of our nature and the perfection of His! Evolution is quite incapable of accounting for Him.

     pg.18 of 19    

     Both men called Adam were immortals. Both men called Adam came into the world by a miracle: the one by creation, the other by virgin birth. Both men died — but neither need have done so, ever. Evolution cannot account for either of them.
     However, the Lord's people are not being shown why it is so damaging to the Christian Faith to allow the evolution of man's body. The truth is that to do so is to divorce the Incarnation from its redemptive purpose and to reduce the life and death of Jesus Christ to one of tragedy rather than triumph. His virgin birth and his bodily resurrection become meaningless, since there is no rational necessity for either of them.
     The suicidal wickedness of fallen man and the sacrificial splendour of Jesus Christ can only be accounted for by assuming a strictly historical basis for the appearance on earth of the First and the Last Adam precisely as they are set forth in the Bible. Neither their origins nor their deaths can be accounted for in ordinary biological terms, for neither were "natural."

 

     May I conclude this chapter by saying that it was one of the most difficult to write in the whole book. It was completely rewritten so many times that I despaired of ever getting it written at all, and at one point decided to omit it altogether. But it had to be done. Why, then, was it so difficult?
     Because the immensity of fallen man's wickedness is beyond comprehension and because the beauty of unfallen Man's character is beyond description. That's why. Who can possibly be sufficient for either task.

 

     pg.19 of 19    

Copyright © 1988 Evelyn White. All rights reserved

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