Christ the Greater Adam

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We are going to be in Mark chapter 1 and we're going to read verses 12 and 13.
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The Spirit immediately drove him out into the wilderness.
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And he was in the wilderness 40 days, being tempted by Satan.
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And he was with the wild animals, and the angels were ministering to him.
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Father, as we seek to understand your word, even now I pray that you would keep me from error.
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Lord, make this study one that would encourage your saints and draw people unto yourself.
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In Christ's name, Amen.
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The title of tonight's lesson is Christ the Greater Adam.
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When we come to the passage that we are looking at tonight, a passage which has been preached so many times, there is a tendency among preachers to moralize this passage and make it about what it's really not about.
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And that is not to say or to call into question any man's integrity who has ever preached this passage.
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I, myself, have gone through this passage before and looked at it from a more moralistic perspective.
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So, you know, I'm not casting stones in a glass house.
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However, I do think that moralizing this passage and making it about ways to battle temptation, that's typically how people will use this passage.
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And they'll preach this passage as a methodology for battling temptation.
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I think when we do that, when we look at the temptation of Christ in the wilderness and we make it about us, we immediately take the focus off of what the real intention of the passage is.
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The real focus of this passage is not about how you can overcome the temptations of Satan in your life.
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Even though, certainly on the application side, we could eventually get to that.
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We could eventually move into an application phase, but just as Jackie and Daisy and some others who have been in my hermeneutics class know, you don't ever begin with application.
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Where do we always begin? We always begin with investigation, observation, and then interpretation well before we get to the application.
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We need to know what the text is about before we begin to make it about ourselves.
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And that's the worst thing that people do, is they read the...
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You've heard of exegesis and eisegesis, right? Exegesis means to draw out of the text what's there, eisegesis is to read into the text something that's not there.
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Well there's also a third one, it's called narsegesis, and that's every time you read a text, you read it about yourself.
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Like narcissism, it's narsegesis, it's always about me.
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And there is a danger in that, that every time I read the text, it's always about me, it's always about my situation or how I might deal with a certain issue or how I might face a certain temptation.
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And again, I think that by doing so, we miss the point.
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Because the temptation of Jesus in the garden, I'm sorry, in the wilderness, is not about how we face down the devil in our own life, but rather it is about demonstrating to us who Christ was in his absolute perfection, and demonstrating what he came to be as the second Adam, or what the Bible calls the last Adam.
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And so that's what we're going to talk about tonight.
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We're going to talk about why this particular passage, and this passage by the way is paralleled in Matthew chapter 4, we're going to look there, it's also paralleled in Luke chapter 4, we're going to look there, and we're going to see that this passage tells us more about Christ than it does ourselves.
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It tells us more about what he came to do than about what we are able to do.
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We noted in our lesson last week when we talked about baptism, some of you weren't here so I just want to remind, we noted last week that Jesus was baptized, but he was not baptized because he was a sinner.
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In fact the first thing we did last week Caleb was you and Steve and a couple of the other guys read passages from the scriptures.
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We read 2 Corinthians 5.21 which says God made him who knew no sin to become sin for us.
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That tells us Christ is without sin.
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We read from 1 Peter 2 and 22 that says in him there is no sin, you know no deceit found in him.
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We read from Hebrews chapter 4 which says that he was tempted in all ways as we are but yet was without sin.
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And so the Bible is very, very clear that Jesus Christ was sinless in his time on the earth.
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And so when we come to this moment of temptation, we have to understand that this has a purpose in the life of Christ in much the same way that when gold is placed into a furnace and it is allowed to be tested for impurities, often times when it is placed into the furnace those impurities will come out because of the massive amount of heat that is introduced into the gold.
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It's called slag as that impurities come to the top and they scrape those impurities off to the top to further purify the gold.
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But Jesus goes into the wilderness as it were, pure gold, and demonstrates that there's not one ounce of slag in him that needs to be purged out.
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There's not one error in him, there's not one sin in him that is able to be eked out even under the highest pressure and most intense temptation that Satan could place him under.
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And so again I say it's about him, it's about showing who he is in this moment.
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Now I do want to bring up a theological controversy in this conversation only because I love it so.
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And that is the question which is referred to as the question of peccability.
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Peccability is the idea of something being able to fail.
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You've heard of a peccadillo, something that is a failure or a kink in the rope or a hole in the dike, it's an area of failure.
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We often try to reduce our sins by calling them little, we'll say that we have a peccadillo, we have something about us that when in real life if we consider what it is, it's a sin.
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But we try to reduce it, it's just one of those little peccadillos of our life.
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Well this idea of peccability is juxtaposed by the opposite which would be impeccability.
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And the way that this particular theological controversy goes is something like this.
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And maybe you've had this conversation with someone, maybe even you have at some point in your life debated this in your own mind.
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And that is not whether or not Christ sinned because any Christian worth his salt better say he never did because if Christ had sinned then he didn't die for your sin, he died for his own.
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So no one who believes the Bible believes Christ sinned.
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But the question is could he sin? And that is the debate of peccability versus impeccability.
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Peccability gives the idea that he could sin and impeccability would say that he couldn't sin.
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Now I'm not going to go around the room and ask for, you know, I'm not going to count noses to see where you stand on this particular theological debate because it would not do good to do so but also because I'm going to give you the right answer and I'd hate for you to feel bad for being wrong.
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No it's a real issue, it's a real debate because this is how most people frame the conversation.
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They say if Jesus could not sin then he was not truly tempted.
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That's the argument for people who hold to this side.
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They say if he could not sin then he was not truly tempted.
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And maybe some of you have had that thought before.
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That is a reasonable thought and I'm not saying that if you've had that thought that you are an unreasonable person.
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That is a very reasonable way to approach this subject.
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However I will hopefully throughout this conversation show you why I think there is a fault in that logic.
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However, let me just be clear, I do fall squarely on the side of impeccability.
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I'm the worst poker player in the world because I show my cards in the very beginning.
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I don't make people wonder where I stand.
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I just, you know, this is me.
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I am on this side.
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The late Dr.
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R.C.
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Sproul took a very interesting approach to this.
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The late Dr.
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R.C.
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Sproul who I respect greatly was asked this question publicly and he gave a public answer and therefore I think I can speak at least fairly to say that this was not something that he told me in private or that he, you know, it was in an obscure conversation.
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This was publicly in one of his conferences.
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He was asked could Jesus sin.
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And Dr.
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Sproul decided to divide Christ between his humanity and his divinity.
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And in that he said touching his divinity he could not sin, but touching his humanity he could.
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And again, as reasonable as I think that is, I don't think that's the answer.
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But I want to tell you if that's where you land, at least you're in good company.
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You can be wrong.
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I mean he's baptized babies.
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He was wrong about a lot of stuff.
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But at this point in the conversation I'm just saying we're not going to leave this conversation as enemies if we disagree.
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But I do firmly hold on the side of impeccability and my reasoning is fairly simple.
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It's based on three ideas.
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One, the purpose of a test or a temptation is not to demonstrate that something has the capacity to fail, but it is to see whether or not it has the capacity to fail.
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When you put gold in, if no slag comes to the surface, that doesn't mean that the gold did anything wrong or that the gold somehow failed to be gold.
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By passing the tests it doesn't mean that he wasn't truly tested.
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And so the idea that the test is not valid because he couldn't fail, that doesn't hold water.
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Because he can't fail demonstrates that's what the test was for, to demonstrate who he was.
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So it doesn't violate the purpose of the test because the test shows us who he is.
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The test demonstrates who he is to us.
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He is the gold without slag.
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He is without fail.
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Number two, and I think a little bit more philosophical, is the question of could Jesus stop being God? Because we do all affirm if we are Christians who hold to the Nicene Creed, which I think we all would, we hold to the scriptures and the scriptures are affirmed in the Nicene Creed that Christ is very God of very God, right? That he is the God-man, vera homo vera deus, truly God, truly man, right? So we believe he is fully God.
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Had Christ sinned would he have ceased to be God? And then you have to take the next step and ask is that possible? Is it possible that God could cease to be God? This is the issue I take with Dr.
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Sproul's argument because Dr.
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Sproul's argument, as erudite and thoughtful as it is, even though Christ was the God-man we cannot ever separate the hypostatic union because it is a union.
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This was the problem with the Nestorian controversy.
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The Nestorian controversy is an ancient heresy where there was an attempt to try to divide the union of Christ to the point where you had a divine nature and a human nature that was able to be separated.
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We can't separate the union, even though we say the union of God and man is not mixed in Christ, we also say that that union is not divided either, that he is the God-man.
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And so had he the capacity for sin he would cease to be God.
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Thirdly, and again I'm making an argument, this may be unnecessary because you may already be on my side, but I always like to make my arguments as if someone was challenging me.
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I want you to think this way, I want you to think why do I believe what I believe? And by the way, I did have this conversation recently in an automobile, I had to go pick someone up and take them somewhere and the person I picked up, it just so happened they wanted to have a theological conversation, often happens with me.
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People want to go for, in fact, got to help somebody do something or whatever, they get in the car, what do you think about this passage? It's usually a passage I haven't thought about much, they'll throw something at me that's totally off, but this guy just happened to ask, well what do you think about impeccability? Do you think Christ is impeccable? And I said of course I do, and well I don't, I think he could have sinned.
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So I began to challenge, my first challenge was could he cease to be God? My second challenge was does his, well actually, I went in a backwards, from what I'm giving you guys I did a little different order for him, my first question was could he cease to be God? My second question, which is the third one I'll give you guys, is not only could he cease to be God, but could God's decree be broken? Because God decreed that the Savior would come and be a sinless Savior, that's clear right? God has decreed from eternity that Christ would be the sinless sin bearer.
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And so when we begin to discuss this, we have to understand we're talking about potentiality.
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Could he have, that's a potential, like any one of us, if I said could you on your way home tonight have a flat tire, well of course it's potential, you're riding on four pneumatic tires there's a chance that one of those tires may go flat, certainly all of us have the potential of having a flat tire, however if God had decreed that you make it home tonight without a flat tire, guess what, ain't one of them tires gonna flatten because God has determined from eternity past that you're gonna make it home tonight, praise the Lord.