 |  |
The first and last Adam.
It is the fashion nowadays to deny the historicity of Gen. 1:-5: In many schools the
pupils are taught that these chapters are no more than myth. There was never a real man
called Adam. The whole story was just a fairy tale or legend, a convenient way of
making a beginning in the Bible. Not only in schools, but in many pulpits these ideas are
promulgated and anyone who believes that these chapters are literal history is looked on
with pity or amazement.
But let us face the consequences of denying the historicity of the first five chapters of
Genesis. First of all, the whole validity of the O.T. is involved, for the closing books of
the Hebrew canon, as we have already pointed out, are the books of Chronicles. The
first nine chapters of I Chronicles are devoted to a genealogy starting with Adam
(I.Chron.i.1) and adopt without question the genealogies set out in the book of Genesis, in
which there are eleven. It then goes through unbroken succession to David and his sons,
the ninth chapter opening with the comment:
"So all Israel were reckoned by genealogies."
These governed the right of succession, inheritance, marriage, priesthood and were
never questioned, but always accepted as valid. So, to be reasonable, the critic must set
aside the complete O.T., for it is an organic whole. When we come to the N.T., the
seriousness of this repudiation becomes evident. Not only did the Lord Jesus Christ
endorse and accept the O.T. as the Word of God of which not one jot or tittle should pass
unfulfilled, nor can it ever be broken (John 10: 35), but in resurrection, and not under the
so-called limitation of the kenosis theory ("He emptied Himself", Phil. 2: 7 literally), as
the conqueror of sin and death. When He was about to ascend and take His place at the
right hand of the majesty on high, the Lord Jesus said "These are the words which I spake
unto you, while I was yet with you" (Luke 24: 44) and so endorsed all that He had said
concerning the O.T. Scriptures during the days of His flesh. He continued:
"That all things must be fulfilled, which were written in the law of Moses, and in the
prophets, and in the Psalms, (i.e. the whole of the O.T.) concerning Me."
Coming to the specific question concerning Adam, we note that if Gen. 1:-5: is
unhistorical, the genealogy of Christ is validated. Luke 3: 23-28 ends with ". . . which
was the son of Enos, which was the son of Seth, which was the son of Adam, which was
the son of God".
If we refer to the genealogy given in Matt. 1: which commences with Abraham, we
read "Abraham begat Isaac . . . . . begat Joseph the husband of Mary" (Matt. 1: 1-16).
How can fictitious characters beget children? There is only one logical thing to do if we
deny the record of Gen. 1:-5:, and that is to repudiate the genealogies of the Saviour and
in so doing we shall be forced to lose all the blessed and wonderful consequences
resident in the prophecy and the name "Emmanuel", "God with us", which is one of the
links in this chain. Further than this, in Mark 10: 1-12 we have the account of the
Pharisees' questioning of the Lord regarding divorce. In His reply (6, 7) Christ said: