PARADISE REGAINED - I
The fall, or, in Blocher’s words, the breaking of the covenant, is an essential
part of orthodox evangelical theology. Every professedly born again Christian believes in
the fall. However, believing a doctrine and knowing a truth are two quite different
things. In the Bible truth must be done to be known. (John 1:6) Christ is the Truth, and
anything we call the truth is a created reflection of Him. All truth is revelatory of Him.
And since we bear His likeness as a mirror bears ours, all truth calls on us for a lived
out, responsive-to-God, handling of what we claim to know as true. Recognizing God in His
self-revelation and responding to Him in lives of loving service are the two rails on
which the train of Christian living moves.
What this means is that I must be quiet long enough to hear what God is saying on this
topic. I have to recognize that I am a covenant breaker. I did not produce myself. God
created me through my parents. He made me capable of a covenant relationship with Himself.
But my parents, like the rest of the human race, were covenant breakers, and I am their
true child. I am guilty of taking the ordering of my life into my own hands, of declaring
myself independent of the covenant of creation. While I am satisfied that my fallen
condition began at my conception (Psalm 51:5), I cannot therefore blame it on my parents
in order to excuse myself. I have, with the monotonous repetition, reaffirmed it ever
since. I have passed it on to the children I have fathered. It is no use blaming someone
else, as Eve did, or God, as Adam did. The best thing is simply to face the reality that I
am a covenant breaker and then see if God whose covenant I have despised has any remaining
interest in me, any solution to a problem which is, on my own, insoluble.
Before looking at that, however, it is of value to look more closely at the consequence of
my covenant breaking. They are important because they define dimensions of God’s
response. And they are primarily two. One is that I possess a bad kind of life. I may
appear to be an affable fellow on most occasions, especially when I want to get something
from you or to prevent your doing something unpleasant to me, but wait till there is a gas
crunch or someone cuts in front of me on the freeway. At bottom I find myself to be
primarily interested in justifying myself and promoting my own interests. That’s one
problem. The other is more difficult to realize because in an age of facts, God, who
doesn’t seem to be one, doesn’t appear to be real or worrisome. But, if once
again I can become quiet enough to hear what is really going on, and if I consider the
creative power of the God who formed me out of sperm and egg, the white hot holiness of
Him who is the just Judge of all earth, and the self-giving love which He shows in Jesus
Christ, then there is no escape from my second problem: I am guilty. It is wrong to treat
God the way I do! I belong to him because He made me; I can only find my true fulfillment
in Him because He is the only source of love. What am I thinking of, declaring myself
autonomous? And even if I could tell Him that I regret my rebellion, what assurance can I
give that I won’t do it again? None. I am indeed in two-fold trouble.
I read in the manuscript in which God has revealed Himself to mankind that none of this
took God by surprise. His response was specifically crafted to deal with both parts of my
problem. His answer was to take two further steps in making Himself known to the human
race. He created the world to reveal Himself, and to Adam and Eve before they broke the
covenant. He was transparently manifest in their surroundings and in their relations to
each other. But afterwards it all went sour, and all they could see was the flaming sword
that prevented their return to innocence. They concluded that God must be a pretty bad
being. To show them that He wasn’t, He revealed Himself. In dreams, through prophets,
through inspired leaders - in many ways He kept knocking at mankind’s door to
identify Himself. He inspired the Old Testament writers to give and account of His
redemptive words and deeds. But the race that had lost the ability to see God revealed in
the creation didn’t read the Book well, either. So God took the final, decisive step.
He came Himself, in the Person of His Son, into our manhood. He took our condition upon
himself, except for our sinfulness. And in Christ’s life and death He met our two
great problems.
CHRIST’S LIFE DEALS WITH OUR BAD KIND OF LIFE
We open the windows and a stuffy room to let the clean outside air sweep through and
freshen things. Sometimes a person’s tainted bloodstream can be completely changed
with a healthy supply of clean blood provided by transfusion. Something like this happened
through the life of Jesus Christ. He lived the life we ought to live and don’t. In
Him the Holy Spirit produced a kind of human life totally satisfactory to God the Father.
He lived this life with one objective, to be able to pass it along to us.
To understand this concept one needs to remember the Biblical doctrine of representation.
That doctrine states that someone can do something for someone else and pass along to that
someone else the consequences of his actions. Adam and Eve represented us, because they
were the entire human race. What they did was what the race did, and so what we did. We
may say that’s unfair, but that would be about as useful as complaining because we
think we should have been given three arms instead of two. This is the way things are. And
it’s a very good thing they are. It is the only way in which we can hope for a
solution to our two-fold problem. If Someone Else doesn’t help us, then there is no
help. We are powerless to help ourselves. Furthermore, if we object to Adam’s
representing us, we cannot with good face ask for a share in what Christ has done for us,
because that involves representation also. So we need to look at Christ as our
Representative, living for us the kind of life we ought to live and don’t.
As an illustration, think of Christ’s baptism. John the Baptist, awesome preacher
from the desert who could sway crowds as the wind bends a wheat field, was baptizing
people unto repentance in the Jordan River. One day he encountered a young Galilean whom
he had never met before but whom he instantly recognized as his cousin, Jesus of Nazareth.
When they had met, Jesus asked john to baptize him.
"Oh, no," John protested, "I can’t baptize you; you should baptize
me."
"No," Jesus replied. "This is the way it is meant to be. You are to
baptize me."
"Well," John said, "if you say so . . ." And he proceeded to
baptize Jesus.
Parenthetically, think what happened to John. This was the crowning day of his life,
and all because he did what Jesus told him to do. He saw the heavens opened and the Holy
Spirit descending like a dove on Jesus. He hear the Father’s voice, "This is my
beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased." (Matthew 3:17)
But the question arises, why should Jesus be baptized unto repentance. He had not sinned.
He needed no forgiveness. But we had, and did. He was doing it for us! He was our
representative. So Peter can say in one of his sermons that God exalted Jesus to give
repentance (Acts 5:31). Jesus did it in order to be able to give it to us.
From the Jordan River Jesus was driven by the Holy Spirit into the wilderness to be
tempted by the devil. Here again we see Him standing in our place. Here is the awesome
contest to which the fight between David and Goliath pointed. And, like Israel’s army
standing apprehensive on the sidelines while the shepherd boy took his sling and stones to
counter the frightful giant, we stand on the sidelines to watch as our Champion meets the
great Tempter. Jesus conquers, but not merely for Himself. He does it for us. Thus the
Bible can promise, "There hath no temptation taken but such as man can bear: but God
is faithful, who will not suffer you to be tempted above that ye are able; but will with
the temptation make also the way of escape, that ye may be able to endure it" (1
Corinthians 10:13). He made that way when Jesus, as our representative, overcame the
tempter in the desert.
So it goes with all of our Lord’s earthly life. He was living the life we ought to
live, but don’t. It would be a different world, and a different church, wouldn’t
it, if we knew this truth in the Biblical sense of doing it, day in and day out, in the
ordinary activities of our ordinary lives?
CHRIST’S DEATH DEALS WITH OUR GUILT
Modern psychology notwithstanding, guilt is a very real problem for us humans. It is
our most pressing and distressing problem. And Christ, in His death on the cross, dealt
with that problem.
How did He do it? We do not get very far into answering that question before we are
involved in impenetrable mystery. Theologians have proposed numerous theories about what
happened. This is not the place to list or discuss them. What is perfectly clear is that
in the deepest possible sense Christ represented us on the cross and took away the guilt
that is our greatest problem.
One insight that may be helpful comes from Schilder’s three-volume set, The Trial,
Sufferings, and Death of Jesus Christ our Lord. Schilder points out that, all through
His life, the thing that sustained Jesus was His sense of His Father’s approval. He
could do without anything else, but not without that. Food, friends, popularity,
"success," all meant nothing when compared with that. At the baptism and the
transfiguration He heard the Father clearly affirm His approval.
But as He neared the end of His ministry and His life, a dark shadow fell over Him. He
realized more and more keenly that He was to be deprived of that consciousness. That was
what preoccupied His mind on the walk back to Capernaum when the disciples mistook His
withdrawal from them as a sign of the coming of the kingdom and got into a squabble over
their places in it (Matthew 18). On the night before the crucifixion, he went through the
dress rehearsal in the Garden of Gethsemane, and He sweat drops of blood as he anguished.
The next day He endured the real thing. Awful as crucifixion is as a mode of execution,
its frightful characteristics pale in comparison to the basic suffering of our Lord. The
terrible pain, the thirst, the psychological depression of the unnatural darkness, the
shame of exposure, the mockery of His enemies, the desertion by His disciples - these were
all dreadful in the extreme, but they did not begin to equal the loss of His sense of the
Father’s approval. It wrenched and pummeled and stabbed His soul until He cried out,
not my Father, but "My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?" He was, says
Schilder, walking the very floor of hell, for hell is forsakenness by God.
At this point the remarkable and saving quality of His suffering appears. It is, again
following Schilder, as if a hand comes up out of hell and rests upon the steps to the
throne of God, and a voice says, "I am your Son, no matter what I feel. I will not
let you go. I will not deny you." Adam, in the best of circumstances, turned away
from God. Christ, in the worst, turns towards Him in unquenchable faith and love. He hangs
tough. And his faithfulness is the key to our forgiveness. He dies the death we deserve to
die but cannot without dying forever.
Then the Father responds. We need to be careful to avoid the assumption that this whole
crucifixion experience left the Father and the Spirit untouched. No action of the Trinity
is, in the deepest sense, unshared by all the members. Hebrews 9:14 corroborates this when
it says that Christ "through the eternal Spirit offered Himself without spot to
God." Unquestionably the Father and the Holy Spirit suffered with our Lord in that
mysterious tearing at the heart of the triune God when Christ took our guilt upon Himself.
But, when the dread darkness was over and the redeeming deed was done, the Father
responded. The veil of the temple was torn in two from top to bottom. There were other
special signs, and, after the body had been laid in the tomb and made as secure as
government and religion together could make it, there was an earthquake, the angels came,
and Christ was physically raised from the dead to reign forever over all things.
Redemption was complete. His representative work was done. Our two great needs had been
met.
What remains is to consider how we can participate in what Christ did to provide for us.
That must wait for another issue.
Editor: Al Greene
Alta Vista College
