Was Adam for Real?

July, 1925 - Dayton, Tennessee - John T. Scopes, science teacher indicted for teaching that man has evolved from the lower animals. Prosecution led by William Jennings Bryan and religious fundamentalists. Scopes’ lawyer was Clarence Darrow and the ACLU lent their support. Scopes convicted but verdict overturned on a technicality by a higher court. Bryan died a few days after the trial. The famous Scopes Monkey Trial, one of the most famous trials ever, was one of the first “media events” in American history. Journalists packed the courtroom, and writers like H.L. Mencken succeeded in portraying fundamentalists as ignorant rural hillbillies. The implication was that if you believed in the Bible’s account of Creation, you were the same. This was a real turning point in the way the American public thought about the first few chapters of Genesis.

Sixty-five years ago, you weren’t allowed to teach evolution in the public schools. Now you aren’t allowed to teach creation. Things have changed! The view that Adam and Eve were real people, the parents of the human race, created by God to be the first man and woman, is now forbidden by law to be taught in the public schools.

In its place, is the view that man has evolved upward from lower life forms over a period of millions of years. Man traces his family tree back through the monkeys and the mammals and the reptiles and the fish to the simple one-celled amoebas, which themselves sprang to life from inanimate matter. The idea is that man is still evolving, still getting better, and smarter, and more noble, and that in the future, he will be a much higher and more sophisticated being than he is today.

If you believe that, you are considered to be one of the intelligentsia today. But God help you if you believe in Creation! You’ll be laughed at and ridiculed, or even worse, you’ll be ignored as a superstitious fool who still believes in religious myths.

What about it? Is there any credibility to the idea that God created a single man and woman as the parents of the human race? I believe that there are a number of lines of evidence that indicate that this is in fact a more credible alternative than the view that man evolved from the lower animals. There are three reasons which I would like you to consider this morning.

1. A reason based on the character of the Bible

2. A reason based on the make-up of man

3. A reason based on the person of Jesus Christ

1. A reason based on the character of the Bible

If you are going to reject the existence of Adam as a real person, but still accept the Bible, you are left with the problem of how to explain Genesis 1-3. The most popular explanation is that Gen. ch.1-3 are actually a collection of myths. Something like Aesop’s Fables. The idea is that God wanted to convey to us some important spiritual truths. For example, He wanted us to be aware of the fact that He gives every one of us the opportunity to choose between good and evil and that our choice will have consequences. But as far as a literal first man and woman and a Garden of Eden, these things are just window-dressing to add color to the story. They didn’t really exist any more than the characters in Aesop’s Fables really existed. The important point is the moral of the story. That’s what is real about Gen. 1-3.

Now this is a very attractive explanation, and many people who regard themselves as Christians have bought into it. But it has a fatal flaw. If the story of Adam and Eve is a myth, then where does history actually begin in Genesis? Does it begin in ch. 4 with Cain and Abel, or is that also a myth? Does it begin in ch. 6 with Noah, or is that also a myth? Does it begin in ch.12 with Abram, the father of the Jewish people, or is that also a myth? Does it begin in ch. 37 with Joseph in Egypt, or is that also a myth? Perhaps the whole book of Genesis is a myth? But it seems to have a lot of actual history in it.

Archaeologists have dug up a lot of things that corroborate the details of the stories told in the book of Genesis. Do you see the point? The book of Genesis has all the characteristics of being a book about things which actually happened. It doesn’t tell us that the first three chapters are mythology, and then everything after is history. It just flows from one story into the next. It is a narrative which is an integrated whole. If you are going to draw an arbitrary line and say everything on one side of that line is myth, and everything on the other side of that line is history, I suppose it’s your privilege to do so. But that will tell us more about you and your preconceived ideas than it will about the book of Genesis.

Then you’ve got the problem of what to do with the rest of the Bible. Because the rest of the Bible refers back to the events in the first three chapters of Genesis as actual historical events. In the books of Job and Isaiah and the Psalms, you have a celebration of God’s creation. In the book of 1 Chronicles, you have genealogies which trace the line of Israel’s kings all the way back to Adam. Genealogies are not much use if they start with mythical creatures, are they? That would make about as much sense as if you traced your lineage back to the Wizard of Oz.

When you get to the NT, you find the same thing. Luke traces Jesus line back to Adam. Paul, in Romans talks about the parallel between what Adam did in disobedience to God, and what Jesus did in obedience to God. The whole comparison makes no sense unless both men were historical figures. Again, in 1 Timothy 2, Paul addresses a church problem in Ephesus, and he cites what happened in the Garden of Eden when Eve was deceived by the serpent. Makes no sense for him to do so unless he believed that it really happened that way. Again, in the book of Jude, you have Jude who was a half-brother of the Lord Jesus Christ himself, talking about a man named Enoch, who was the seventh from Adam.

So if you’re going to say that Gen. 1-3 was a myth, you’ve got problems with the rest of the Bible, because the rest of the Bible treats Gen. 1-3 as history. You’re going to have to decide what you think about Jesus Christ, because the Bible tells us that he descended from Adam. If Adam was a myth, does that also mean that Jesus is a myth?

The point I am making is that you cannot respect the rest of the Bible as history if you don’t respect Genesis 1-3 as history.

2. A reason based on the make-up of man

Some time ago, I read a book by a popular psychiatrist named M. Scott Peck. The book was titled People of the Lie, and it was published in 1983. In this book, Peck comes to the conclusion that there is a personal force for evil in the world, and that it is very much possible for people to come under its influence. These “people of the lie” create havoc, and pain for everybody around them.

Peck’s book was hailed by the secular press as being “a daring study of evil” “compelling in its explanation of the human psyche” “a strikingly original approach to the age-old problem of human evil.” Yet Peck was simply building his theory of human evil on foundations which were laid a long time ago in Genesis 1-3.

Genesis tells us that man was created in the image of God, but that he sinned and the image of God was marred and spoiled. It tells us that there is now in man a positive inclination to evil, which try as he might, he can never overcome. In other words, man had a high beginning and fell.

Evolution tells us that man has risen from lower life forms, evolving the capacity to think and reason and feel. Somewhere along the way he developed an ethical consciousness - an awareness of right and wrong. And evolution tells us that man will continue to develop, continue to get better, and that it is only a matter of time before he finally arrives at ethical perfection. In other words, man had a low beginning and rose.

Now, I ask you, which of these descriptions of the make-up of man more readily fits the facts? Does history seem to bear out the idea that man is slowly getting better, that he is becoming more moral? If that is so, why is it that in the 20th Century - supposedly the century of man’s highest development - more people have been killed in wars than in all of man’s previous history combined? Why is that in the 20th Century we have had two world wars? Why is that in the 20th Century we have had genocide in Armenia, the forced collectivization of the peasants in the Soviet Union, the Holocaust in Eastern Europe, the killing fields in Cambodia? Does this indicate that man is getting better?

If man has arisen from the animals, why is it that there is a qualitative difference in the savagery of man and the savagery of even the most ferocious animals? Evil and man’s capacity for evil is, to me, the thing which indicates that man is a qualitatively different sort of being from the animals.

Sometimes you hear the question, “Well, if God made man, why did He make him with the capacity to be so bad? Why didn’t God make man in such a way as that he would always be good?” C.S. Lewis has well addressed this question:

“Why did God make a creature of such rotten stuff that it went wrong? The better stuff a creature is made of - the cleverer and stronger and freer it is - then the better it will be if it goes right, but also the worse it will be if it goes wrong. A cow cannot be very good or very bad; a dog can be both better and worse; a child better and worse still; an ordinary man, still more so; a man of genius, still more so; a superhuman spirit best - or worst - of all.”

Man’s make-up and his struggle with evil within himself makes more sense in the context of his having been created in the image of God and fallen. He struggles to get back to his original estate - to recover paradise lost, but he always falls short. This is the story of human history - this is the story of civilization.

3. A reason based on the person of Jesus Christ

In the book of 1 Corinthians, the Lord Jesus Christ is given a very strange title. He is called in 15:45 the “last Adam”. When we sing Charles Wesley’s Christmas carol “Hark the Herald Angels Sing”, we sing in the last stanza “Adam’s likeness now efface, stamp thine image in its place. Second Adam from above, reinstate us in thy love.”

Why is Jesus called the last Adam? Why, in Romans 5 is his work of redemption compared with Adam’s disobedient act in the Garden of Eden? Because when Jesus Christ died on the cross for our sins, He represented us just as Adam represented us when he ate the forbidden fruit in the Garden.

Adam and Eve had been created as perfect beings. I believe that this means that they were immortal. They were not subject to death. God warned them what would happen if they ate the forbidden fruit:

Genesis 2:16-17 And the Lord God commanded the man, “You are free to eat from any tree in the garden; but you must not eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, for when you eat of it you will surely die.”

The Hebrew construction of this phrase is “dying you will die”. In other words, God wasn’t talking about instantaneous death. He was saying that they would begin to die. When they ate the forbidden fruit, they began to die. They introduced into the human race an element that wasn’t meant to be - death.

Now you may say “How was Adam my representative when he did this?” Simply in the fact that you are subject to death. His act of disobedience had consequences not only for himself, but for everyone else who came after him as well. He introduced death into the human race. This is what Romans 5 means when it says…

Romans 5:12-14 Therefore, just as sin entered the world through one man, and death through sin, and in this way death came to all men, because all sinned..

When it says “all sinned”, it doesn’t mean that everyone turns out to be a sinner, because sooner or later all sin, though that is true. It means that when Adam sinned, all of us sinned. The result of Adam’s sin had implications for all of us. His act was a representative act with universal consequences for the whole human race. When Adam sinned, everyone of us sinned because everyone of us is now subject to death.

You and I are sinners because Adam sinned, not because of our own “track record”. The fact that we do have a sinful track record simply proves that we are sinners, it doesn’t make us sinners. We are sinners from the very moment we are born - before we even have a chance to actively sin. You and I don’t die because we commit sins once we have reached the age of accountability, we die because Adam sinned. This is what we mean when we talk about “original sin”. This is why babies die. Babies don’t sin, but they die anyway, because Adam made sin and death a part of human existence. We can’t get away from it.

But the Bible says there is another Adam who did something to undo what the first Adam did. He came to be our representative, just as Adam was our representative. He was immortal, just as Adam was originally immortal. This is an important thing to realize. Jesus was a sinless man. Though fully man, he didn’t inherit original sin from Adam, because he was born of a virgin. In a sense, you could say that Jesus was just like Adam was before the Fall. He didn’t have to die. Though Jesus died on the cross, it wasn’t the cross that killed him. The Bible says that he laid down his life voluntarily. That is what makes his sacrifice so unique.

When a soldier dies heroically to save his buddies, he is not choosing whether or not to die, he is simply choosing when to die. A person who commits suicide is not choosing whether or not to die, he is simply choosing the time and manner of his death. Every human being has to die sooner or later. Nobody can choose not to. But Jesus didn’t have to die, but He chose to die to pay for our sin. That is what makes his death so unique - because it was a death that didn’t have to be. It was a death since Adam that wasn’t inevitable.

Adam chose to die by disobeying God. In so doing, he became the agent of death for the whole human race. Jesus Christ chose to die in obedience to God, to pay for man’s sin. In so doing, he became the agent of life for the whole human race.

As a child of Adam your inheritance is death - physically and spiritually. As a child of God through faith in Jesus Christ, your inheritance is eternal life - physically and spiritually. Jesus is the last Adam because he came to undo what the first Adam did.

If you want to believe that Jesus is real, you’re going to have to believe that Adam was real, too. The Bible and the truth of the Gospel won’t let you do otherwise.