A Better Second Adam

"In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth."  Genesis 1:1

The Bible begins here at the beginning of the world and you probably know the story.  God created everything from stars to starfish and everything was good, all was perfect.  God created mankind and humans were perfect, too.  God created Adam and Eve and they were perfect.

"God blessed them and said to them, 'Be fruitful and increase in number; fill the earth and subdue it..." Genesis 1:28

The universe was perfect and its inhabitants were, too.  The creation stories in Genesis chapters one and two are full of perfection.  Chapter three is a different story.

Genesis one and two begins with perfection and by chapter three the story turns very sour.  The reader may wonder why there isn't more time spent talking about what was done in this perfect world.  What did Adam and Eve do?  What was it like for them to be with God during this time?  We don't really know the answers to these questions because chapter three comes in suddenly and everything is messed up.  Adam and Eve sinned and sin entered the once perfect world.

Flash forward to Noah.  The world's inhabitants are evil, so evil that God was grieved that He ever made humans.  But Noah found favor in God's eyes.

"Noah was a righteous man, blameless among the people of his time, and he walked with God."  Genesis 6:9

The reader of Genesis has to be thinking, "here's our chance to fix the story."  If the world got screwed up by Adam and Eve and their sin, then just start over with one family, but this time a family that won't screw up.

So, a big flood comes and destroys every human except for Noah and his family because they are on a huge ship called an ark.  This is the big restart and perfection has to be around the corner, right?

Noah and his family get off of the ark and life on earth gets a reboot.  In fact, God basically reissues His original blessing and command to the humans.

"Then God blessed Noah and his sons, saying to them, 'Be fruitful and increase in number and fill the earth."  Genesis 9:1

So, this righteous family has got to do well on their restart.  They won't screw it up, especially not one or two chapters later, right?  Wrong.  The very same chapter Noah and his sons blew it.

In Genesis chapter nine Noah plants a vineyard and makes some wine.  He then precedes to drink that wine and get hammered while he's naked.  Then Noah's son Ham did something.  Some scholars say he looked lustfully on his own dad and some say the euphemism in the chapter implies that Ham sodomized his own unconscious father before Sodom was even around.  Sin came quickly for this righteous family.

Noah and his family blew being the second Adam, they blew being God's great restart that would finally get the world back to its perfect ways.

Christ would not screw this up.  In Romans 5:12-21 the Apostle Paul explains that Jesus was the second Adam.  Adam screwed up and brought sin and death into God's perfect world.  Jesus came and was the Righteous One who lived perfectly and defeated sin and death.

Jesus is a better second Adam than Noah.

Am I slamming Adam and Noah here?  No, because I would fail miserably as a second or first Adam.  I would sin, guaranteed.  But this is the good news... where we fail, Christ succeeds for us.  We all would screw up, but Jesus fixed it all for us.

You aren't a second Adam.  You can't fix the sin of the world, you can't fix the problem of death, you can't even fix you; but Christ can.  If the story of Noah teaches us anything it's that without Christ we fail in major or minor ways every single time.  We needed Jesus to finally get things right for us and He did.  We needed not a second try for one of us, we needed someone to do it for us and then remake us.

Praise God for a better second Adam today.