Will you please open your New Testament at the First Letter to the Corinthians, Chapter 15?
Now I make known unto you, brethren, the gospel which I preached unto you, which also ye received, wherein also ye stand,
by which also ye are saved.
I make known, I say, in other words, I preached it unto you.
These words—the greatest apostle that Jesus Christ ever had—draws his mantle together over his shoulders and sets himself to gather up everything that he has been saying into a climax and a consummation.
We can almost hear him breathe a sigh of relief that he has got through all the unpleasant business that was imposed upon him in the writing of this letter. Having got through it, he says, “Now I make known unto you, brethren, the gospel which I preached unto you.”
He had been compelled to write about a whole lot of unpleasant and difficult matters. He was, at the time, in Ephesus, about to conclude a very wonderful time of ministry there.
And his fellow labourer, Apollos, had arrived and told him the state of things in Corinth. Three other people, probably slaves of the household of Chloe in Corinth, had also arrived. They had poured out a very deplorable story of things in the church in Corinth.
It was a sad story of divisions, schisms, quarrels, disorders, moral evil, social wrongs, spiritual immaturity, Christian unkindness one to another, and so on. It is all here.
By either Apollos or these others, they had sent a letter to Paul asking him to answer a number of questions on matters about which they were troubled. And, as you know, this letter is his answer to that whole situation and all those aspects of it.
It is a laborious thing. You cannot read it without feeling how the apostle laboured with this situation. Well might he be troubled, heartbroken, deeply moved.
He passed on from point to point, covering the whole. Then, when we come to the end of Chapter 14—in the dividing up of this long letter into sixteen pieces—he finishes that. And I think, as I have said, gladly finishes that. You might very gladly finish that, as far as the job is concerned.
And he, in effect, says, “Having dealt with all that, I am not prepared just to leave it there. Let me take you back, brethren, right to the beginning of your life and history as a company of the people of God, and remind you of the basis upon which you came to be a church and a company of God’s people: what I preached unto you, which you received, wherein you stand—that is, you have your very existence—and by which you are saved.”
Having written all the rest with a sick heart, he concludes that he must restate the gospel, he calls it, which he had preached and which was the ground of their existence as a church.
Now, while all the conditions in Corinth may not obtain today in many churches, thank God, there are some things that persist and are at least a lurking peril to companies of God’s people. In any case, there is something that comes out of this final resolve of the apostle which is of inestimable value to the church and the ages.
We are not glad that the Corinthians were like that, but they were like that. Yet here is the wonderful sovereignty of God: He takes hold of the most deplorable situation and makes it the means of drawing out some of the most sublime things and divine revelations.
And who would be without what we call the fifteenth chapter of the First Letter to the Corinthians? Thank God for His power to use the darkest black background to bring forward the most glorious revelation.
Well, you notice that this chapter, or this section, is a summary. There is a consummate restatement and a climax.
Paul uses this word preach several times: Verse 1, Verse 11, Verse 12, Verse 14. “The thing preached.” “I preached.”
So you look to see what was the heart and the essence of that preaching. Well, you have only got to underline one word: Christ. You find, right at the beginning, the presence of a mention of Christ no fewer than thirteen times. I say, at the beginning, showing how the foundation of the preaching really is Christ.
Now, into this consummate restatement the apostle gathers a revelation which is well-nigh unparalleled.
Or, I may make this parenthesis: you read through this long chapter, and you are amazed. You hold your breath and say, “Where did the apostle get that? Where did he get that? How did he come by that?”
He is telling you here about glory, the differences in glory, the resurrection body, and what it will be like, and so on. This is something no man ever concocted. It just never arose in a man’s brain. There is something here of unparalleled revelation.
It is summed up by him in a title—a double title.
The first man Adam became a living soul.
The last Adam became a life-giving spirit.
The first man is of the earth, earthy:
the second man is of heaven.
There is your title, or designation: the Second Man, the Last Adam.
And in its heart, dear friends, that double title of the Lord Jesus is a summary of human history from the beginning.
In the immediate context, it is a summary of human history on both sides: that of the first Adam, the human history of tragedy; and that of the last Adam, the story of human history in recovery and glory.
Christ Jesus: the Second Man, the Last Adam. Always be correct in how you put that. Even such a saintly scholar as John Henry Newman has slipped up on it, as we just sang when you sang it so glibly.
No, He is not a second Adam. He is the last Adam. He may be the second Man, but He is the last Adam. Finality is reached in Christ in human history.
Now, in the first place, that is an explanation of Jesus. Jesus.
And it is quite right to say, dear friends, that the whole of the New Testament is a combined operation to declare and explain Jesus Christ. You get hold of that.
The whole of the New Testament is a combined operation to declare and explain Jesus Christ. And it should never be used, in part or as a whole, for any other purpose.
Because it has been used for all sorts of things. Everybody who has some particular bee in their bonnet will put something in the New Testament to support their view. Because it has been used for so many things, it has lost its mighty authority.
The New Testament may be used for one thing and one thing alone, and that is to explain Jesus Christ: explain why there was a Jesus Christ, why Jesus Christ came into this world, why He lived, why He died, why He rose again, and why He is in heaven.
The New Testament, I say, is all gathered into the business of explaining Jesus Christ. One question should always govern our reading, in part or in whole, wherever we read in this book: What has this to say about Jesus Christ?
What light does this throw upon Him, either by direct statement or by right and true implication or inference? What does it say about Him?
Now, these words in 1 Corinthians 15:45 and 1 Corinthians 15:47 are a very important instance of this very thing: the explanation of Jesus Christ. How is He explained by these words? The Second Man, the Last Adam.
Friends, it does not require profound scholarship or great intellectual ability to see that such a title, such a double designation, puts the One who bears it into a precise and unique relationship to the whole human race.
A second implies a first. A last implies an original. And by the two, everything in human life and history is compassed. You cannot get before the first. There is no such thing as before the first, in anything, anywhere. And you certainly cannot get beyond the last. Nothing is beyond the last.
So here we have human history—that is the subject—compassed by this title. But what does it imply?
Clearly, the conclusion is that two different humanities stem from two different racial heads. One humanity stems from the first man, and another—and quite another, and that is the thing in the New Testament—stems from the Second Man, the Last Adam.
Two distinct lines, two distinct kinds. But mark again: in this very connection, the teaching of Scripture is that the Second Man, the Last Adam, stepped into humanity in order to supplant and displace the first and the original.
He came to set aside all the damage which the first had brought into humanity by his sin, by his wrongdoing. The Second and the Last was a necessity because of the utter breakdown of the first and the original.
Paul has, you know, a corresponding paragraph on this very thing in Romans 5:12-21. He dwells upon this: as by one man sin entered, and death, ruin; so by one Man’s righteousness. It is a good, strong section on the functions of the two racial heads. You can read it.
But then, in that chapter, Paul, in speaking of the first Adam, says, “Adam was a type of Him that was to come.”
Now, all too briefly, Adam’s typological position was, with justice, in his being first and the progenitor of a kind. And I think that is where it ended before his fall.
He was the first of the race. He was the progenitor of the race. In that sense he is a type of Christ. There may be other features of the type, but that is the significance of Adam being assigned as a type.
There was a gap, you see, in his history: the gap of probation and test. He was placed, and then there was to be, in the intention of God, all that he was meant for and made for.
But between the placing and the fulfilment, there was this gap of probation, when he was put on test. All the immense potentialities were crammed into that probation.
That is what we are going to see, I trust, today: the immense potentialities that were there in the balances of that gap, that probation. What tremendous things hung upon one thing—one thing!
And that one thing was how he would use the great trust of free will. The great trust of free will.
On the one side, all that God intended and hoped for in the creation of man demanded that man should be a free agent—not compelled, not forced, not just a piece of machinery going without its own volition, desire, or thought.
You would never be satisfied with anybody giving you anything on those terms, so that they could not help themselves; they had to do it. You got it because they had no alternative.
You would only be satisfied if, by choice of their own heart and reason and design, they gave it to you. So God made this great trust in man—gave him, at the same time, the trust and responsibility of free will.
Everything was in the balances of how he would use that trust.
There was a law governing—not the law of compulsion at all—but it was the law of dependence upon God, just dependence upon God. Whether he would use that trust of free will in dependence upon God, or whether he would use it in independence of God.
What delights, these unspeakably great things, were bound up with that probation, that test, that question. All heaven might have been holding its breath at that time.
We know. We know. We know all too well what happened.
I say, we know all too well. Before I am through, God helping me, you will see what is involved for us.
Well, we know the story: how he used that trust; how he broke that line of dependence upon God. He severed that and took his trust into his own hands to realise all his potentiality out of relation to God, in independence of God.
And because of that, and all that it entailed—the terrible, terrible entail—the Second Man, the Last Adam, became necessary if the world was to be saved and humanity was to be saved.
Now look at some of the essential facts of this Last, this final Adam, the Second Man.
In order really to undo all that—but we will not get touched upon it—in order to undo all that it entailed, He Himself must be the negation of the violated law.
If the law was that everything depended upon God, and that law was broken in Adam’s saying, in effect, “Everything without dependence upon God,” for that was the issue and the upshot—if that law was broken, the Redeemer must Himself be the embodiment of that law: absolute dependence upon God, and nothing else.
Nothing else to it. Nothing to help in Himself, in any human way, in the world, anywhere, of any kind. Nothing but God. God to the very last breath of man. God.
The first Adam was a new type? You tell me that is the Adam race? Not a bit of it. Not a bit of it—not as you know yourself, but I know myself. Not like that, is it?
This is another order of being, that is like that and will go that way even unto death, and the most ignominious death, whereby, by deliberate choice, He refuses any kind of deliverance that could come to Him because He is a committed Man to the will of God.
He then, as such, as the Last One, as the Second Man, is the progenitor of another race which is to be like Himself in this very respect: a race of people who, on this very principle of His, will be constituted—the principle of everything to the last fraction by dependence upon God.
Oh, brethren, does not that in itself open up the First Letter to the Corinthians? Read from the beginning again. Read this Corinthian letter.
Oh, their self-sufficiency, self-glory, glorying in worldly wisdom! But that is an aspect of the whole which we must leave for the moment. I just mention it to let in light on this.
“I preach Christ,” and said, “When I came to you, I determined to know nothing among you save Jesus Christ, and Him crucified.” What does that mean? What does that mean?
It does not mean crucifixion merely. It means crucifixion to all that independence of God which came in through the first Adam: all that taking into his own hands, all that seeking for himself, drawing to himself; that acquisitiveness, that possessiveness, that assertiveness, that pride.
It is characteristic of all who have come from that first man, but none of it in Him.
The first—the Second—in this new movement of God, He must reproduce, must reproduce after His own kind, must reproduce after His own kind.
Now that, dear friends, after all, is only introductory. I hope I am not wearying you. That is very important, that we get the foundation well. It brings us right to the present point.
There are some things that every serious-minded person will be concerned with. Sooner or later, everybody will be seriously minded about life in general. But Christians are particularly supposed to be serious-minded people who are really concerned about this matter of life.
And there are four things that comprise that concern:
Have you ever really sat down with your Bible to find from it the explanation of human history?
The meaning of all those four things is gathered into one Person, Jesus Christ. And He, as the Second Man, the Last Adam, explains human history; as such, He explains spiritual experience; as such, He explains Christianity; and as such, He explains the church.
I do not propose to try and cover all that ground, so fear not. But I am tremendously concerned, dear friends. I am burdened. This is no mere subject in which I am interested or occupied.
If you are a serious-minded person, this really does concern you. And are you not? Are we not being forced in our time to have a serious question about human history? What is the meaning? What is the meaning of it all—the human race, mankind, and all history of mankind? What does it all mean?
You know, we are being headed right up to that question today. Leave that for the moment.
And Christian, are you not increasingly confronted with the question as to the meaning—the meaning—of Christianity? The meaning of Christianity. After all, what is this thing? What does it mean? How do we define it in general, or in particular? What does it mean?
Further, if those are two objectives, are we not being forced more and more to face the question of the meaning of spiritual experience? Is there not in our hearts a recurrent question: Why? Why are we going the way we are going? Why is God taking us this way and through this? Why is this being allowed? Why, to the children of God, is all this?
If that is not a really pressing question in your heart, I am not giving very much for your spiritual life, dear friends. Anybody who is really alive to ultimate things is very concerned about this. What does our spiritual experience in the hands of God really mean? What does it mean? What is He after? What is God explaining? What is He doing?
Now, on the one side—human history—we must see that God has taken all time. No, I am not going to say how long that is.
Human history at least embraces ten thousand years. Well, let us leave it there. That will be good, then, if that is all. That is only enough.
God has taken all time to demonstrate—to demonstrate—the meaning and the results of the wrong use that man made of his trust of free will, when he took that into his own hands and it became self-will instead of God’s will.
Can I repeat? God has taken all time to demonstrate the meaning and the results of that act.
It is here that we come to a point which is full of the most important instruction. What was God left to do?
You say, “Why, when man did that—when man broke that law of dependence, took his will into his own hands out of God’s hands, and violated his trust—why did not God just say, ‘Right, enough. Finish that right away. Start again’?”
Suppose that is easy, is it not, to talk like that? Perhaps that is what you would do. Perhaps that is what you think He ought to have done, in view of all we know.
Do you not see that for God to have done that would have been simply to say that He never did give man free will? To annul the whole principle of choice, He would have destroyed at once the primary thing: free will.
It is never free will if, when you use it, you are at once destroyed. That is not free will.
No, but what did God do? What did God do? That is history.
The Lord’s way has been, and still is, like it or not, to let the choice have full course and destroy itself—bring its own judgment upon itself. That is history. That is it. It is a long-term business, a long-drawn-out business.
And just into that, let me say a very intimate thing to you, into my own heart. There are some prayers that God answers which—oh, God, He never answered! Would to God He had never answered, because men would not take a no or an alternative.
The little fragment about Israel’s long stiff-neckedness and hardness is this: “He gave them their request, but sent leanness into their soul.”
Have you ever prayed and insisted and refused to take a no or an alternative, and wished God had never answered your prayer? It is possible. Where your will is—is it on your own side or on His side? There is a lot of spiritual history bound up with that, is there not?
But here we are saying the Lord has taken all time to demonstrate the folly, the madness, the iniquity of this wrong use of a sacred trust.
Note, then, the development of this. All the immense potentialities that were in man have been allowed to express themselves, have been drawn out. And today we marvel at the potentialities in man.
Why, in the last fifty years, what a story of the uncovering, unveiling, and exploiting of the potentialities in man! Make no mistake about it: in five hundred years we have moved from the making of iron cannonballs to the atomic bomb. That is progress, do you say?
But look what man can do. What is in man to do? We are all wondering, are we not, what are they going to do next? If things go on for another fifty years as they have gone on in the last fifty years, where shall we be? Where shall we be?
This is no dreamed-up imagination, is it? These things are reality—reality. It is going apace.
All this is in the man that God made. But do you recognise, and recognise with the acceleration and intensification of this process, that man has never yet made either a discovery or an invention without there coming along a parallel curse with it—a new problem?
Almost all men do not altogether despair of discovery. Anywhere else you like, anywhere you like. Oh, if we were here long enough to survey the ground adequately, that is all we could do.
These potentialities which were in the man that God created have been given full play by God through all time to express themselves—always with a curse.
What is a curse? What is it? I could put the curse into one word: fear. Fear. The further man goes, the more fearful he becomes.
It is fear that is allied to the greatest discoveries and inventions of men. It is fear, dear friends, that is ruling men’s hearts today. They are conscious of insecurity—insecurity. They are striving for some kind of security in order to overcome this fear.
The Bible is right, you know. It always is. There is a mark of the end time: men’s hearts failing them for fear.
Oh, you would only have to read some of the books that have been produced by the discoverers of the nuclear age, and they will tell you—in unvarnished language—that it is only one touch of a finger to end the whole human race by this very thing they have discovered and are now exploiting.
The end of the human race—and an awful end. If you have read the story of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, how is that over the whole human race? No, I do not want to be sensationalist. These are facts.
There is fear in their hearts, and all this effort to find some way of security. Security—is that not a word today? Because of this fear, and the further men go in their inventions and discoveries and in the development of the potentialities in their own being, that fear is accentuated and intensified.
That is the end. I mean, there is here—I repeat—God has taken all history, and what a lot that word history covers: past, present, and future. It is not a contradiction to speak of the future as history. There is history being made for the future.
History is, on the one side, demonstrating beyond any question that man has made a mistake somewhere, has gone wrong somewhere, has defaulted somewhere. No, worse than that: he has done something infinitely evil, and it has come out on himself by the wrong use of his own will—his own will.
Do you not see? Are we blind? Are we not taking account of this? I said serious-minded people are concerned about history. Are you not taking account of this: that where these things in development, in uncovering, in intensification, in application, in discovery, in invention—where everything is most pronounced—you have the most awful strength of human will against God, against God?
That is not an argument. It is a soul strength, a strength of the human soul, I think.
And how we fail to see that the one thing history has revealed is this contradiction, this strange and patent paradox: the greatness of man and, at the same time, his smallness.
The greater he seems to be, the less he seems to be able to cope with his own greatness. Is that true? He has brought it out, but now he is a mere pawn. I mean, amazing greatness—and how little he is at his greatest. Is that not true?
Well, look, that is the way of history, and that is what is happening, dear friends. The greatness of man—the greatness of man, yes, as God made him.
But now, because of this one thing, a greatness that is cancerous. There is no other word to explain and define it. It is a cancerous greatness.
What is cancer? What is cancer? Well, I cannot answer all the research on that matter, but I will tell you what is known: cancer exists because of the loss of one central governing and regulating authority. Got it?
It is something that has broken away from the acknowledged controlling and regulating authority in the organism and becomes an authority in itself. It becomes something in itself. It has absolutely refused that central authority regulating and governing within the organism, taking things into its own hands. That is cancer.
The scourge—this greatness of man is like that. Look at it. It has broken right away from the great controlling authority of God and God’s will.
The authority of God—the answer. What a scourge on humanity!
Now, at that point, it is impossible for me to put in a tremendous section by way of illustration. I only have to mention things without any additional words.
What about international relationships? What are they going to do with it? What are you going to do?
Oh, the tentacles of this cancerous thing in human life, in humanity! You cut one off, and then half a dozen more spring up. Is it not like that? International relationships: you think that you have just got the thing nicely settled, and it breaks out in more than one other place.
You cannot cope with this. It cannot be dealt with.
International relationships: we have got all the existing potential for a prosperous and happy world. Yet there is a Pandora’s box, a curse, destruction instead.
All the instruments and institutions for peace—and there was never so much loss of peace in human history, so to say.
Oh, the amenities and facilities for rest, progress—for rest! Think of all your gadgets to save work. Think of all the inventions to make life easier.
Never so many amenities and facilities for rest and leisure, and never in history so much discontent. Is that true? Something is wrong with this humanity, this world.
And we might look at industry, and we might look at science, and we might even look at religion. If you want me to stop somewhere, I must leave it there for the moment.
That is one side. One side. But, dear friends, we are not talking just objectively—that is, you, that is me, I mean.
The deepest, truest thing about you and about me naturally is self-will, is pride, is possessiveness, is the desire for power. Can I agree with you? All right, all right.
If you allow the Holy Spirit to take you any way at all, you will discover that is true. That is the first man. That is the old Adam.
And you will see at once how that opens the door for the Second Man and the Last Adam to start things all over again on another basis: to be the race’s firstborn, head, progenitor, of another kind.
You will see a lot more once you have seen that. But I am very well aware that all that I have said may be oppressive, may be the heavy side. But, friends, you and I have got to understand history, and present history—what it means.
What does it mean? What are the forces and what are the things that are producing this marvellous, wonderful, amazing, startling, terrible world?
Well, you see, God has been saying, “All right. All right. All right. You have made your choice. You have decided this, and you would not have it otherwise. Very well, very well.”
The history of our kind, persisting always like that, will lead on and on until the final verdict of sin. Sin is wrought up. It is sin.
I wonder if you will still bear with me just this moment. Something that you will do well just to store up.
You know, dear friends, one of the things that is going to amaze us, perhaps more than most other things—there will be a few things that are amazing when we get to heaven—will be this: our discovering how much more, infinitely more, there was in any one statement of God than ever we imagined.
Oh, when God speaks, He does not speak just casually. He does not speak just observations and remarks casually. In anything that God says, there is the infinitude of His knowledge and His wisdom.
And if any light comes into the hands of the Holy Spirit, that is one thing you discover: there is an unfathomable depth of meaning in anything that God has said, and you will never exhaust it.
Preach, preach, preach on the same thing all your long life—you have not exhausted that same thing that has come from God. There is something more.
And I say, we are going to be amazed when we get to heaven to see the infinity that was in some things which were almost commonplace things with us.
Oh, if God uses the word sin, disobedience, rebellion, there is all time gathered into that in tragedy.
Never, never will happen that the Last Adam did not go to the bottom of it, drained it in His cross. But that is where the other side opens up. We will go on later.