Was Adam For Real, and Does It Matter?
00:00:00.000 | [Music]
00:00:04.640 | Pastor John, as you know there's an ongoing debate about the historicity of
00:00:07.800 | Adam. Did Adam really exist or not? And of course if Adam existed and if he was
00:00:12.880 | created from the dust, that creates all sorts of tensions in this world. Before
00:00:17.280 | we get into the theological implications for pastors and for missionaries, explain
00:00:20.840 | more about why there's so much debate over the historicity of Adam.
00:00:25.160 | Well first of all, it is in fact ironically what two days or three days
00:00:31.760 | before you called, I got a letter from a scholar who has been asked to write for
00:00:39.800 | a new book that's coming out on the four views of the historical Adam and he just
00:00:43.920 | wanted to get my take on the pastoral implications. So there's a just an
00:00:48.800 | off-the-front-burner example of how pressing it is. Before you called, just on
00:00:55.120 | a lark, I called up Wikipedia and typed in humanity or something like that and
00:01:01.400 | here's a sentence, "The splitting date between human and chimpanzee lineages is
00:01:07.640 | placed around 4.8 million years ago during the late Miocene epoch." Okay so
00:01:14.200 | this state is a pure fact right there in the article on Wikipedia that number one,
00:01:20.080 | human beings are the present, not the final, capstone on a millions or
00:01:27.800 | billions of year evolutionary process from inanimate raw matter to what we
00:01:35.080 | have as human beings today and the emergence of what we call human happened
00:01:41.880 | millions of years ago. So there's part of the origin for why it's a
00:01:47.000 | debate. When you go to the Bible, the picture you have is of an Adam and Eve
00:01:51.800 | created especially by God. I don't think from preceding forms of human or of
00:02:00.960 | animal life and created a good bit more recently than millions of years ago. You
00:02:07.400 | might stretch the genealogical tables out you know 10,000 years if there's
00:02:12.080 | some missing links but not much further than that. So there's this contrast
00:02:17.320 | between what the Bible presents as Adam and Eve created in a special way
00:02:22.640 | directly by God more recently and then there's the world's view of God
00:02:30.480 | either not or being involved in an evolutionary process that goes over
00:02:35.520 | millions of years. Pastor John, so what would you say to the pastor of a local
00:02:40.960 | church who says, "You know I really don't care about how humanity started, I'm just
00:02:45.480 | called to preach the gospel to the people in my church right now." What would
00:02:48.040 | you say to him? Well where would I start? I think I'd probably start by asking him
00:02:53.840 | how important the Bible is in his ministry. If you tend to minister with a
00:03:00.800 | kind of canon within a canon, like you pick out a center that you love and you
00:03:06.960 | just make that your Bible rather than the whole of the Bible, then I probably
00:03:11.960 | am going to have a hard time answering you. But if you care about the whole
00:03:16.400 | Bible as God's inspired word and believe that whatever center you believe is
00:03:21.360 | there is centered in the whole of Revelation because God thought it wise
00:03:26.880 | to give us the whole book in order to protect the center, then I think I
00:03:32.520 | would say you have to care about the way human beings are characterized and human
00:03:40.120 | beings are originating. And the Bible presents a view that if you deny the
00:03:51.200 | historical Adam, you're probably going to set your people on a trajectory of
00:03:56.880 | understanding the Bible or how to read the Bible that could undo things that
00:04:02.240 | you think are more central. So the first answer is going to be hermeneutical.
00:04:06.560 | What are you doing to the Bible when you neglect or when you disregard the
00:04:13.160 | teachings of the Bible that Jesus in Luke 3 is traced back as a descendant
00:04:20.560 | all the way back to Adam, not just to Abraham? What are you going to do when
00:04:25.400 | the prophets themselves refer, like Hosea, to the covenant with Adam? What are you
00:04:31.960 | going to do when Jude refers to Enoch as the seventh from Adam? What are you going
00:04:37.320 | to do with Genesis 2 and 3 where the foundational nature of our problem in
00:04:43.800 | sin is drawn from the disobedience of our original father? And then I
00:04:50.160 | think the most important thing I'd say to him is that when you get to Romans
00:04:56.080 | 5 verses 12 to 21, the way Paul sets up the whole problem with humanity and the
00:05:04.760 | whole resolution of the problem in Jesus is by saying that Adam disobeyed God and
00:05:13.920 | in him we all were counted as sinners and Jesus obeyed God perfectly and all
00:05:23.200 | who are in him are counted as righteous. So the whole structure of salvation,
00:05:29.240 | particularly justification, in Paul's mind is rooted in the way humanity
00:05:35.120 | relates to a single father, Adam, and the way the new humanity relates to a single
00:05:41.040 | father, Jesus. So I think hermeneutically it is going to be damaging for his
00:05:47.600 | people and they will not learn how to read their Bibles and they will start
00:05:51.480 | undermining teachings of the Bible, and then as far as salvation goes,
00:05:55.320 | justification goes, you're going to undo the Pauline structure of biblical
00:06:01.240 | theology if you do away with this historical Adam. Thank you, Pastor John,
00:06:07.120 | and thank you for listening to this podcast. If you have a question for
00:06:09.960 | Pastor John, please send it to us via email. Send those questions to
00:06:13.760 | askpastorjohn@desiringgod.org. Please include your first name and your
00:06:17.600 | hometown. You can find thousands of other resources from Pastor John online at
00:06:21.600 | desiringgod.org. I'm your host Tony Ranke, thanks for listening.
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