Sugar Land Bible Church

Dr. Andy Woods: All right, I thought I'd get up here about a minute early just so... Well, that's very nice of you guys. You guys, I missed you too. Our sabbatical policy requires me to do kind of a summary of what I did. Kind of like a book report when you come back from summer, you've got to give a book report or a summary report. So, I was going to spend about five minutes doing that in the next hour. Is that okay with you guys? Because I figured we'd have more people here in the next hour.

In this hour, you guys may remember that we were studying the book of Hebrews. Does anybody remember that? All right, so let's go to the book of Hebrews, chapter 2 and verse 4. And I'm going to open up with a word of prayer. Father, we're grateful for Your church, and You care deeply for Your church, Your blood-bought church. We're thankful, Lord, for the Lord's table that we're going to gather around in the second hour. We're thankful for Your Word that we're going to study.

Thankful for the love of this church towards me and my family, and we're just looking forward to what You're going to accomplish today in Your church. In preparation for that, we're going to just take a few moments of silence to do personal business before You, if need be, so we can be prepared to receive Your Word this morning. We're thankful, Lord, for the promise of First John chapter 1, verse 9, and the comprehensiveness of Your provision for us. Help us to grow in these things today. We ask these things in Jesus' name. And God's people said, amen.

Well, let's take our Bibles this morning and open them to Hebrews, chapter 2, and verse 4. Going back three months, what is the book of Hebrews about? You've got a bunch of people that are saved Jews. That's why it's called Hebrews, right? Saved Jews, and they are second-generation Christians, so they came along after the apostolic age ended. And they are contemplating, as they're living in and around the temple area in Jerusalem, leaving the full revelation of Christ, which they had received from the apostles, and shrinking back into the sacrificial system, the temple system.

The temple was still functioning at this time; it hadn't been destroyed until the Romans would destroy it a few years later in the events of AD 70. And they just want to slip back into temple life because they're just tired of being persecuted. Unbelieving Jews are pressuring them to go back and renounce their confession, their public confession of Christ, which is their baptism. And they think that if they just slip back into temple life a little bit, then these unbelieving Jews will get off their back.

The author of the book of Hebrews—and we don't know who the author was—writes a book telling them not to do that. And the author explains you shouldn't do that because what you have now in Jesus is the final, total, complete picture. So why would you renounce that and drift backwards? And as I'll show you, the author gets across the point that if you slip backwards, something really bad is going to happen to you. Those are called the warning passages. More on that in just a second.

How does the author start his masterful treatise on this whole subject? Verses 1 through 3 lay out the attributes of Christ. Verse 1 and the first part of verse 2, he says Old Testament revelation was indirect, but Christ is direct revelation. Old Testament revelation was incomplete, but with Christ, you now have the completed picture. Old Testament revelation was temporary; it was like a shadow pointing to a coming reality, and now the ultimate reality in Jesus Christ has been brought forth. So why would you ever logically think about renouncing what you have and going back to an inferior system?

You can look at the Bible as all revolving around Jesus. The Old Testament is the preparation for Jesus. The Gospels—Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John—are the manifestation of Jesus. The book of Acts is the propagation of Jesus. The Epistles, which are the letters, are the explanation of Jesus. And then the book of Revelation is the consummation of Jesus. So that's pretty cool, huh? Old Testament preparation, Gospels manifestation, book of Acts propagation, Epistles explanation, book of Revelation consummation.

But it all revolves around Jesus. So if you leave what you have and go back strictly to an Old Testament system, you may have the preparation for Jesus there written out, and praise God for that, that was inspired, but you don't have the manifestation of Jesus, you don't have the propagation of Jesus, you don't have the explanation of Jesus, and you don't have the consummation of Jesus. It's like a jigsaw puzzle. You've only got a few pieces, big pieces, but there's nothing more frustrating when you do a jigsaw puzzle and there's a piece missing.

What you have in Scripture is a completed picture, but if you renounce the completed picture and go back to a partial picture, then you've got a jigsaw puzzle with some very important pieces in it but not the whole picture. He leaves that subject and then, in the second part of verse 2 into verse 3, he lays out the attributes of Jesus. Who is Jesus that you're thinking of renouncing? He's the heir of all things, the maker of all things. Can you get a higher resume than this? He's the brightness of the Father's coming, He's the express image of the Father, He upholds all things, He has made complete purification for sins, and He's now in a seated position at the Father's right hand because His work is completed in terms of redemption.

There's nothing more that can be done to add to what we need to be saved than what Jesus has already done. So if He was standing, He'd still be working at it, but He's in the seated position. So we talked a lot about that. And then we left that introductory part and we moved into the first major section of his argument. That was just introduction. Here's the first major point that the author gets to: Jesus is higher than the angels. And he starts that in chapter 1, verse 4, and that goes all the way through the end of chapter 2.

And you look at that and you say, "Well, that's weird. Why would we have to know that Jesus is higher than the angels?" The answer is, in Old Testament Judaism, angels are revered because angels were the messengers of God. So it was through the angels that the law of Moses came to the nation of Israel at Mount Sinai. You'll see that in the book of Galatians. It was through the angel Gabriel that we have many of the prophecies that we find in the book of Daniel, like the 70 weeks prophecy. That came from God ultimately to Daniel through an angel named Gabriel.

So in the Jewish mind, angels are synonymous with messengers. The Greek there is *aggelos*. So if the author can show that Jesus is higher than the angels, he can show that Jesus has brought in a higher message than Old Testament Judaism, which was given through angels. So that's why that's a major part of his argument. So he starts in verse 4 of chapter 1 and goes all the way through verse 14, and he weaves together seven Old Testament scriptures explaining the supremacy of Jesus in comparison to the angels.

And then, as we have covered, you get your first warning. It's a warning against drifting. It's in chapter 2, verses 1 through 4. Now, these are five times where the author will stop his logical flow of thought and almost like a parenthesis or an interruption in his presentation, he gives us really strong warning. And he'll do this five times in the book. We have the warning against drifting (chapter 2), the warning against disobedience, warning against immaturity, warning against despising the truth, warning against denying the truth.

And this is where the battle is fought in the book of Hebrews because most theological systems make these warnings about hell. It's a warning about hellfire and damnation. The Arminians, people that say you can lose your salvation, will say this is what's going to happen to you if you drift backward: you're going to lose your salvation and go to hell. That's how they interpret over and over again these warnings. The Calvinistic system says the author is addressing a mixed audience.

In his audience are saved people and unsaved people. And the warning is addressed to the unsaved people because there's no way a believing person would ever act this way because, in Calvinism, you have the doctrine of the perseverance of the saints—that if you're really saved, then your life should show it. And it should, generally, but there's some exceptions to that. You have examples in the Bible of disobedient Christians, wayward Christians. So I don't think the Calvinistic system is right on these. I don't think the Arminian system is right on these.

I don't think you can lose your salvation and I don't think, as I tried to establish in our introduction to the book early on, that the author is addressing an unsaved audience. For example, if you just look at chapter 2, verse 1, it says, "For this reason," see the next pronoun there? "we." Was the author saved? Sure. So was his audience. By using the pronoun "we," he's identifying with his audience. "For this reason we must pay closer attention to what we have heard so that we do not drift away," meaning a Christian can drift.

Verse 2 it says, "For if the word spoken through angels proved unalterable and every transgression and disobedience received a just penalty, how shall we escape if we neglect"—what's the next word there?—"so great a salvation?" So notice that word "neglect." You can't neglect something that you already have, right? So the implication is they already had salvation. They were saved, which can never be forfeited. When Paul writes to Timothy in First Timothy 4:14, he says, "Do not neglect," same word, "the spiritual gift within you, which was bestowed on you through prophetic utterance with the laying on of hands by the elders."

So when he says, "Do not neglect your gift," it's kind of clear that Timothy had a gift to neglect. "Hey, you're neglecting your wife." Well, that means I have a wife to neglect. You can't neglect your wife unless you have a wife. So the language here is they had salvation. These people didn't need the gospel explained to them. They had it, they believed it, but they were neglecting what they had. So it's not dealing with people that maybe are saved, maybe you're not. It's not dealing with people that might lose salvation.

What this is dealing with is temporal blessings that we forfeit when we neglect the full revelation of Jesus and drift back into something inferior. So things like what? Divine discipline comes your direction, which could have been avoided. "Whom the Lord loves, the Lord chastens." Hebrews 12:5-13 talks about divine discipline. You neglect rest. Suddenly you're living the Christian life on your own power. Hebrews 4:1 talks about that. Loss of being fully rewarded at the Bema Seat judgment of Christ. First Corinthians chapter 3, verse 15 talks about that.

Loss of authority in the millennial kingdom. You're ruling over five cities when you could have been ruling over ten. You're still in the kingdom; it's just that your sphere of influence shrunk. What else do we have here? Loss of fellowship. That's why we opened up in prayer, asking the Lord to restore broken fellowship so that we might receive from Him everything that He has for us today. So loss of fellowship, and by the way, every moment you spend away from the full revelation of Jesus is a moment you could have been growing and maturing.

So that window of opportunity is lost during that season of your life. That's Hebrews 5:11-14. So that's how I'm understanding these warning passages. This is not hell that's being addressed here. What is being addressed is if you drift back, you start losing. Is your name erased from the Book of Life? No. But there's a lot of other things that are in play that get forfeited: discipline, lack of rest, loss of reward, loss of millennial kingdom authority, loss of maturity, loss of fellowship.

Think of yourself in a situation where you come out of a religion. You come out of Mormonism and get saved. You come out of Roman Catholicism and get saved. You come out of strictly Judaism and get saved. And you think the world and your family and everybody else is going to be happy with your new relationship with Jesus, but they hate it. And they keep pressuring you to go back, to come back into their system. And you have a moment of thought where you just say to yourself, "You know what? I'm just so tired of everybody being on my case. I'm being tired of awkwardness at family functions. I'm so tired of being cut off from my grandkids or relationships. You know what? I'll just slip back. I'll go back to the system. I mean, I know I believe in Jesus, but I'm just going to go back to the system just to shut everybody up and make things right."

Well, the book of Hebrews is for you. It's dealing with that kind of situation. And it's saying why would you leave what you have to go back to something that's just a shadow, if that? And every moment you spend back there is a moment you could have been gaining things eternally that you're now forfeiting. So nothing to do with heaven or hell, but loss of a lot of temporal issues that are very significant. So that's the warning passage, the first one, which we've already covered, believe it or not.

And now, as the author does, once he interjects his warning, he gets right back on the beaten path with his central argument that he's making about how Jesus is higher than the angel. You'll notice there, chapter 2, verse 5: "For He did not subject to angels the world to come." Wasn't he just talking about angels at the end of chapter 1? Speaking of angels, he says in chapter 1, verse 14, "Are they not all ministering spirits sent to render service for the sake of those who will inherit salvation?" Jesus is higher than the angels, Jesus is higher than the angels, Jesus is higher than the angels. Pause. Strong warning. End of warning, end of pause. Let's go back to our central point and start talking about how Jesus is higher than the angels. So that's how this book works.

So what he does here, beginning in chapter 2, verse 5, all the way through the end of the chapter, is he says Jesus did something that no angel ever did: He, as God, became man. Now top that one, angels. No angel ever did that for you. And in the process of making this argument, he gives us eight reasons why Jesus became man. It's called the Incarnation. Who is Jesus? Jesus is the eternally existing second member of the Godhead.

He has always been throughout eternity fully God. He shares full deity with the Father and with the Spirit, and yet Jesus is unique in His sonship. It's the mystery of the Trinity. There never was a time in which Jesus did not exist. But Jesus, at a certain point in history, at the point of the virgin conception, what was added to Jesus, eternally existing deity, was humanity. And at that point He became the God-man.

He didn't suddenly exist at the point of the virgin conception. He didn't become God at the point of the virgin conception, but He became the God-man. What was wedded to eternally existing deity was humanity through the miracle of the virgin conception leading to the virgin birth. And that's who Jesus is. And the author's going to start to develop this and say, "You think an angel could pull this off? I mean, do you think an angel came close to doing anything like this?"

So this is something that we call the Incarnation. You recognize the word *carne* as in meat or flesh, carnivorous. You may eat some chili con carne, as I like to do, chili with meat. It's the in-meating or it's the enfleshing of God. If you want a fancy name for this, it's called the hypostatic union. It's dealing with the point in time in which Jesus became 100 percent God and 100 percent man. He became the unique God-man.

And this is why Jesus is called the only begotten. Begotten is a translation of the Greek word *monogenes*. *Mono* as in alone, monopoly. *Genes* as in species or kind. If you're working in biology, you know you study different species that have that same name. I think it's called a genus or something like that. It's kind. Jesus is only begotten, one of a kind. Only begotten doesn't mean His life started.

He's always been. There never was a time in which He was not. But at a specific point in time, at the point of the virgin conception, He became the God-man. So that's what John is writing his gospel about. John is saying, "I saw it. I saw Him. I saw the God-man." It says, John 1:14, "The Word became flesh and dwelt among us, and we saw His glory, glory as of the only begotten," which is a translation from the Greek *monogenes*, "from the Father, full of grace and truth."

John a little later in the same chapter says, "No one has seen God at any time, but the only begotten," translation from *monogenes*, "the only begotten God who is in the bosom of the Father, He has explained Him." There you see, I don't have it underlined, but it's the Greek word for explained, *exēgeomai*, where we get the word "exegete." An exegete is an explainer of the Bible, a Bible commentator. So Jesus, when He became the God-man, explained God, explained the Father to us because He became one of us.

It's like my two cats. They do a lot of naughty stuff. One of the things they do is they fight with each other, they're like boxers. And I watch this whole show go on and I say, "You know, if I could just become a cat, I could explain to them the stupidity of this." But I can't. You can try to use logic, you can put up a PowerPoint presentation; they're not going to get it because they're a totally different kind than we are.

So how can man understand God? God is God and man is man. He's infinite and we're finite. Well, we can understand Him if He becomes one of us. Now we get it. That's why the gospels are such a big deal because they're a record of eyewitness testimony of the God-man who dwelt among us. And He became not God—not created, He's always been God, always existed—but He became God-man at the point of the virgin conception.

The Holy Spirit did a work in Mary's womb pulling this off where Jesus' humanity was added to Jesus without any help from Joseph. And thank God for that because if Jesus was just the product of Joseph's sperm, then Jesus would have inherited a sin nature, which we all inherit. But this had to be different. Hence the importance of the virgin conception. A lot of people talk about the virgin birth. I'm for that, but I like "virgin conception" better because at the point of the miraculous conception in Mary's womb, He became the *monogenes*, the God-man.

This is called the Incarnation, the enfleshing of God. This is called the hypostatic union. And Dr. John Walvoord explains this so well in his book, *Jesus Christ Our Lord*. And he's talking here about Philippians 2, verses 5 through 8, and I believe it's in verse 7 where Paul says Jesus emptied Himself. The Greek word for emptying is *kenōsis*. And so that's what Walvoord means by the *kenōsis* of Christ, the emptying of Christ.

In other words, when this happened, Jesus humbled Himself and became one of us, lived among us with all kinds of limitations, but without sin because He had no sin nature. Walvoord writes here, kind of explaining Philippians 2:5-8, he says, "The act of kenosis, emptying, as stated in Philippians 2:5-8, may therefore be properly understood to mean that Christ surrendered no attribute of deity." If you think He took off the God coat and put on the man coat, you don't understand the doctrine. He was God before, He was God during, He was God after, He is God today as the God-man.

He didn't become God at that point, and He certainly didn't stop being God at that point. "The act of kenosis as stated in Philippians 2:5-8 may therefore be properly understood to mean that Christ surrendered no attribute of deity, but He did voluntarily restrict their independent use in keeping with His purpose of living among men and their limitations." He had divine prerogatives when He walked the earth, but He submitted those to the will of God the Father as the God-man.

So Paul in Philippians 2 uses this as an example of service. Should I be the kind of Christian that goes around demanding my own way, wanting to exercise authority over people, tell people what to do? No, Paul says we shouldn't be that way because look at what Jesus did. Look at how He emptied Himself—not of deity, but of the privileges of deity. Not of His attributes, but of His right as God to exercise those attributes according to His will. He gave that up.

That's why He keeps saying over and over again in the gospels, "Not my will be done, but Thy will be done." He didn't want to go through the ordeal of the cross—who would? But He said, "Not my will be done, but Thy will be done." So He kept His independent use of His abilities, powers as deity, but He surrendered that to the will of the Father. And so since He's our role model, that's how we should be, right? We should be the kind of people about giving ourselves away to others in service, not trying to subjugate people.

So just a couple of things on this *kenōsis* that I think are important. This *kenōsis*, emptying of Christ, Incarnation of Christ, hypostatic union—whatever terminology you want to use—was not an exchange but a substitution. He didn't pull off the God coat and put on the man coat. There's no exchange going on at all like that. What it was was not an exchange and it was not a substitution. Also, when this happened at the point of the virgin conception, it was not a subtraction. Nothing was subtracted from Jesus.

So you're not dealing with an exchange, man for God; you're not dealing with a subtraction, "I'm man now but no longer God," but it's an addition. Something was added to Him. And at that point He moved from being God to the God-man. So now the question is, why would He ever do that? Well, the author of the book of Hebrews says, "I'm so glad you asked. Here's eight reasons." And this fits his argument about angels because he's saying no angel ever did this for you, but the God-man did it.

So since you know these things, why would you leave this and go back to that, something inferior? So why did God become man? Eight reasons. These come from Dwight Pentecost's commentary on the book of Hebrews called *A Faith That Endures*. The first reason God became man is to restore God's original purpose for man. So we pick it up here in Hebrews chapter 2 and notice if you will verses 5 through 8: "For He did not subject to angels the world to come, concerning which we are speaking. But one has testified somewhere saying"—this kind of cracks me up because he's quoting the Old Testament and he says it's in there somewhere.

I think he knows where it is, and they know where it is, and he doesn't want to insult their intelligence by telling them where it is. I tried to use that once on an exam; they asked me where this passage was and I said, "Well, someone has said somewhere," and they didn't accept my answer. And then he starts quoting Psalm 8, verses 4 through 6. "But one has testified somewhere saying, 'What is man that You remember him, or the son of man that You are concerned about him? You have made him a little lower than the angels,'" see, it's part of his angels argument.

"'You have crowned him with glory and honor, and You have appointed him over the works of Your hands; You have put all things in subjection under his feet.' For in subjecting all things to him, He left nothing that is not subject to him. But now we do not see all things subjected to him." So what he's explaining here is why in the world did God create humanity to begin with? Have you ever wondered that? I mean, why are we even here? Why does the human race ever even exist?

And when God created us on the sixth day of creation, what was His purpose? Well, you would never know the answer to that question unless you consulted the first chapter of the Bible. Genesis 1, verses 26 through 28 tells you why we're here. It says, "Then God said, 'Let Us,'" kind of sounds Trinitarian, doesn't it? "'make man in Our image, according to Our likeness; and let them rule,'" so we have authority, "'let them rule over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the sky and over the cattle and over all the earth and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth.'"

Genesis 1:27: "God created man in His own image, in the image of God He created him; male and female... God blessed them and said to them, 'Be fruitful and multiply, fill the earth, subdue it; rule over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the sky and over every living thing that moves on the earth.'" So now we have an explanation for the creation of humanity, man and woman. We were created to govern this creation for God. Rule over the fish of the sea, it says. Subdue it. Rule over it.

And that's what Psalm 8, verses 4 through 6 that he just finished quoting says also. So if you want to know why we're here or why we exist, your two scriptures you'd go to would be Genesis 1:26-28 and Psalm 8:4-6. So originally the design of God in Eden—this is pre-fall—is the office of theocratic administrator, which is someone who governs for God. So God's original purpose was to govern man and woman, Adam and Eve, and they were to govern creation for God.

That's our purpose. That's why we exist. The problem is—and you know the story, Genesis 3—our forebears stopped governing creation for God and started to listen to creation and rebel against God. And one of the entities that they were listening to was a talking snake, who is Satan. And so what Satan tried to do at the very beginning is he tried to unseat this arrangement. And he succeeded for a season. Adam and Eve stopped governing creation for God; they started to listen to creation and they rebelled against God through the forbidden tree of knowledge, as you know.

And that is why Satan became the unlawful usurper over planet earth. The moment that happened, what did Satan say to Jesus in Matthew 4 and Luke 4 when he was testing Jesus in the wilderness? He said, "If You bow down and worship me, I will give You all the kingdoms of this world." Why is that? "Because they have been given to me," Satan says, "and I can give them to whoever I want." And Jesus didn't sit there and say, "Well, that's not true," because it was true.

And how did Satan—who in the world gave Satan authority over this world? Adam did. When they listened to creation and rebelled against God instead of doing what they were supposed to be doing, governing creation on God's behalf, and so we lost our authority over planet earth at that point. Satan became for a season the illegitimate ruler over planet earth. This is why the Bible calls Satan the titles that it does. He's the prince of this world (you see the scripture verses in parentheses you could look all these up), he's the god of this world, he's the prince and power of the air, he's the one that the believer wrestles with, he's the one that roams about like a roaring lion seeking someone to devour, and he is the one that the whole world lies within his lap, we're told.

So this is a very important thing to understand because people are going to come to you as a Christian and they're going to know you're a Christian and they're going to say, "Well, how can you be a Christian and serve God? Look at how bad the world is. Don't you realize that so-and-so just died of cancer and somebody's grandchild just got hit in the crosswalk and you're going to talk to me about a loving God? There's no loving God out there."

Well, you actually have an answer for that. The answer is don't blame God. When we did things God's way, everything was picture perfect. The problem is we gave the authority away to somebody else. And Satan became the prince and power of the earth. Don't blame God for things Satan does. And these insurance companies call these hurricanes and tornadoes acts of God. I can't stand it when I see that. Can't we give the devil a little bit of credit? Why don't we call them acts of Satan?

So what the author is saying is here is the design of God and here's where it went wrong. Now Jesus came into the picture to fix what got broken. And how do you restore God's purpose for man unless God becomes man? See that? The Incarnation. The Incarnation happened to reverse the mess that the first Adam put us in, a mess that can't be reversed unless God becomes man himself in the Incarnation.

So Adam's disobedience affected all; Christ's obedience blessed all. Therefore in Scripture, Christ is called the what Adam? The last Adam. And there's a lot of people out there saying, "Well, he's the second Adam." No, no, he's not the second Adam. If he's the second Adam, there could be a third one and a fourth one. You can't get a better deal than what He did. So we don't refer to Jesus as the second Adam; we refer to him the way the Bible refers to him, as the last Adam.

Something that he couldn't do unless he became man and lived amongst us. I mean, he came to put Genesis 1:26-28 back together again. He came to take Psalm 8:4-6, which is quoted right here, and put it back together again. First Corinthians 15:45 says, "So it is written, the first man Adam became a living soul; the last Adam," not the second one, "became a life-giving spirit." And then over in Romans 5:18 and 19, it says, "So then as through one transgression there resulted condemnation to all men, even so through one act of righteousness there resulted justification of life to all men. For as through one man's disobedience the many were made sinners, even through the obedience of the one the many were made righteous."

And here's something else that the devil is really working hard to accomplish: he's trying to convince people that Adam and Eve never existed. Oh, they're just metaphors or whatever. I used to get angry about stuff like this; now it's just heartbreaking that today as we speak in the Evangelical Theological Society, which is supposedly the best and the brightest of evangelical scholars all over the world, their number one thing that they're talking about today—not number two, not number three, this is like the number one thing they want to talk about—is they're debating the historicity of Adam.

In other words, they've caved to the evolutionists and so forth that says there was no Adam and Eve, we all came from the monkeys. Well, here's the deal folks: you start tinkering around with the historicity of the first Adam, it's not going to be long till you start tinkering around with the historicity of the last Adam. Because the two are connected in a chain. What this one messed up, this one came into the world to fix. And if you start to give ground on the historicity of Adam, then you really don't have Christianity anymore.

So maybe this chart will help you. Adam, through a single action of disobedience involving a tree, the tree of knowledge, brought in a universal curse. And every single human being born from his lineage physically is under that curse. So we're born into this world dying and cursed because of the sin of the first Adam. And that's why Adam is referred to as the first Adam.

And don't get the idea that you're going to go to Adam and you're going to say in heaven when you see him—I think he is in heaven because of Genesis 3:21, which we'll talk about in the second hour—"Boy, I'm going to give him a piece of my mind. He really messed it up for everybody." When the truth of the matter is—and I'll show you this when we get to Hebrews 7 if we get there before the Rapture—that God could have put every single one of us in Eden and we all would have done the same thing. His sin was our sin, our sin was his sin. Don't get high and mighty; we would have done the exact same thing.

So Adam, one act of disobedience involving a tree, the tree of knowledge, brought in a universal curse. We're all physically born under it. That's why we're all dying. And if you don't believe you're dying, just take out your high school yearbook and look at your modern-day driver's license picture, and you'll see you're dying. We put up in our podcasts these thumbnails, and it'll put up a picture of me, and people write on there and they say, "You know, you don't really look like you look in that picture." And I'm like, "You're right, because I'm dying. And let me see your pictures; I'll show you you're dying, too."

So Adam, through his one act of disobedience involving a tree of knowledge, brought in a universal curse. We're all physically born under it. That's the damage that the first Adam did. He had a worldwide impact. And who I'm introducing you to is the two most influential people in history. And one of them is not Donald Trump or whoever, okay? I'm talking about the two people in history that have had the greatest impact. Who are they? First Adam, bad impact. Last Adam, good impact.

So Jesus became the last Adam to reverse what the first Adam had done. So through his single act of obedience involving a tree—did you know the cross is called a tree? Galatians 3:13: "Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law, having become a curse for us, for it is written, 'Cursed is everyone who hangs on a tree.'" We've got two trees here: tree of knowledge and the cross. Through what Jesus did with his tree, which was obedience rather than disobedience, he brought in universal blessing.

Now to get under his blessing—under Adam's curse you just have to be born. You're under the curse the moment you're conceived. But under Christ's tree, you have to be born again. See that? It's a spiritual tree. So if you've never been born again, the only thing you're left with is the rottage and curse of the first tree and the first Adam. But once you're born again, it changes everything. Your whole identity shifts. Positionally you move from the first Adam to the last Adam just like that.

And so Jesus then is called the last Adam. See the parallel? And how could Jesus do that unless He became one of us? Couldn't happen. Psalm 8, verses 4 through 6 could never get fixed. So right now all of creation groans. Our bodies are groaning. Romans 8, beginning in verse 19 says, "For the anxious longing of creation awaits eagerly for the revealing of the sons of God. For the creation was subjected to futility, not willingly, but because of Him who subjected it in hope that the creation itself would also be set free from its slavery to corruption into the freedom of the glory of the children of God. For we know that the whole creation groans."

You guys do any groaning this morning? I made it over to the Lifetime Fitness yesterday, did my weight workout, legs workout, bicycle. I hadn't done that for a while, and I woke up this morning groaning. I wasn't groaning like that in my 20s. The whole creation groans and suffers pains of childbirth until now. And not only this, we ourselves having the first fruits of the Spirit, we ourselves groan within ourselves, waiting eagerly our adoption as sons, the redemption of our body.

So as everything is falling apart, how in the world does a Christian go through life so optimistic? Because we know that Jesus fixed everything. The promise of the fix is coming, but it just hasn't arrived yet. And that's how you can live with hope in a world that's hopeless under Adam's lineage. So this situation here, the world in a state of bondage, is just a matter of time before that is reversed because of what Jesus did.

So I can live with hope in a world that's falling apart. I know that the last Adam came into history and fixed what got broken. It's just the full phase of the plan hasn't arrived yet, but it's already in motion. And there's coming upon the earth a kingdom. Are you looking forward to that? We're supposed to pray for it. Do you guys pray for that? "Thy kingdom come," that's what we're supposed to do. Revelation 11:18 reveals the future arrival of that kingdom, which is not an "I hope so" thing, it's an "I know so" thing.

The kingdom of this world has become the kingdom of our Lord and of His Christ. And by the time we get to the end of our eschatological chart, you see there "Kingdom," Revelation 20. What are you going to have? You're going to have God the Father ruling over God the Son, who is the what Adam? Last Adam. Does this sound familiar? This is exactly what God set up in Eden. But wait a minute, it says Adam and Eve together were ruling. That's right. Jesus is going to be there ruling with His wife.

You know who His wife is? You. That's Revelation 5:10. He has made us a kingdom of priests and we will rule upon the earth. This, you know the Corinthians, they're crazy. I call them the Californians. I mean, they're suing each other and all of this kind of stuff, and Paul says, "What is wrong with you people? Don't you know"—it's all in First Corinthians 6, you can read it for yourself around verse 3—"Don't you know that we will rule the angels?"

So if we're going to have authority over the angels, do you think you have enough wisdom to merit out the minor differences between you? And so by the time you get to the end, Revelation 20, and this has to—this is why you have to have this in existence for a thousand years before this world is dissolved by fire. You have to have the arrangement established in Eden brought back where God the Father rules over the last Adam and His wife, the church, Adam and Eve, and we're governing this earth on God's behalf.

And there ain't going to be a talking snake to listen to because he's going to be in the abyss. Revelation 20, verses 2 through 3. And the point that the author is making is none of this is going to happen unless God the Son becomes man. The only way you can reverse what the first Adam messed up is for God to become man Himself, for humanity to be added to eternally existing deity. And His point is, what angel ever did that for you?

No angel comes close. So obviously the message of Christ is way higher than anything Hebrew Bible Old Testament has to offer. So why would you drift backward is his point. So some of these—these verses, verses 5 through 8, are some of the richest theology you'll ever run into. So I think I'll stop here and we'll pick it up with verse 9 next week. Father, we're grateful for Your truth, Your Word. Help us to understand these things. Thank You for what Jesus did for us as we celebrate Him today at the Lord's table. We'll be careful to give You all the praise and the glory. We ask these things in Jesus' name. And God's people said, amen.