Genesis 1:28 & 2:15

The task of the first Adam

Point number one, the task of the first Adam. The task of the first Adam. Point number two, the task of the last Adam. the task of the last Adam, and point number three, the task of the new humanity. So let's go ahead and dive into point one, the task of the first Adam. And what we're going to see here is that Adam's task consisted of two things. Really, if you were to summarize what Adam was created to do, what God commissioned him to do, it would boil down to two things, expanding and maintaining. Expanding and maintaining, and one thing we're also going to see is that those correlate to the role, the office that Adam had as king and as priest. So let's look firstly at Adam's role in expanding.

Look with me in Genesis chapter one, verse 28. It says,

and God blessed them and God said to them, be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over every living thing that moves on the earth.

So as mentioned before, last week Caleb touched on what it means to be made in the image of God. And it was mentioned that back in the ancient Near East, this phrase, the image of God, was often used to refer to kings who were to rule on behalf of their God, to rule whatever domain they were in, to rule it for the glory of their God and representing their God. And so for Adam to be made in the image of God, he's given a kingly role. And that kingly role consisted of expanding the borders of Eden for God's glory.

A good way to think about this is if you think about the idea of a beachhead. Some of you know what a beachhead is. A beachhead is when militaries go to invade a land, What they'll do is they'll work really hard to get a little bit of land right there on the shore.

And they'll fight super hard for that little bit of land. And once they get that land settled, they'll make a fortress. They'll settle down there. They'll put roots down there in that little piece of land so that they can then continue the invasion further in.

And that, as we'll see, is sort of a picture of what the Garden of Eden was for Adam. This Eden was a beachhead where God would commission him out to expand God's glory to the entire earth. So where do we see this from the text, this idea that Eden was a beachhead?

Well, we don't have enough time to go in detail of it, but if you flip over to chapter two, verses five through nine, if you read through that, one thing we'll see is it's clarifying for us the situation going on on these creation days. And what we see is that we know from day three that God created the vegetation, he created the plants, seed bearing fruit. God created all that on day three, but we learned that on day six, three days later, nothing had yet sprouted. So we sort of need to picture this as, yes, there's vegetation, there's all of this, but it's still in seed form all across the earth. And that's the situation we find ourselves in day six when God creates man.

And so what is God going to do with this man who needs food? He needs sustenance. He needs plants fully grown to survive. Well, God's solution we see in that section in chapter two is to plant the Garden of Eden for him. So as the earth is all still in seed form, it says that God himself planted a garden. In a sense, he sanctified, he set apart this piece of land. And it says that God himself planted the vegetation and made it immediately spring up. There is the beachhead of God's mission for the world. That is where God is going to commission Adam for his mission to then expand the Garden of Eden, expand this little place that God himself sanctified and planted with his own hands. He's going to commission Adam to expand the borders of it to the ends of the earth.

So now looking back at chapter one, verse 28, we see five commands given to Adam in this situation, in this beachhead. The first three, it says, is to be fruitful and to multiply and to fill the earth. These all carry the idea, obviously, procreation, but it's interesting because the sea creatures and the birds, back in verse 22, were given the same exact command. So what's unique? What differentiates us from the sea creatures, from the birds? Well, it's the commands given at the very end of verse 28.

As they are to go and multiply, they are also, it says, to

subdue the earth and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over every living thing that moves on the earth.

So as humanity is called to multiply, to procreate, to fill the earth, the thing that's unique about them is they are called to then have dominion over the rest of creation, have dominion over all the other creatures, They are to take what God did in Eden, and as God's representative, as his image, they're to sort of mimic that. They're sort of to remake that. What God did in Eden, they're to do that across the entire earth. That's the task he's giving humanity. And it's a kingly role that Adam is given to do this.

And this really relates to the end goal of all of scripture, doesn't it? What's the end goal of all of scripture? It's to have God's glory fill the entire globe. And we see it right here at the beginning. The goal from the very beginning was to have image bearers of God representing him, glorifying him, to be all across the earth. So that's, firstly, Adam's task in expanding. Secondly, we see Adam has a task in maintaining as a priest. So if you flip with me to chapter two, verse 15, it says,

the Lord God took the man and put him in the Garden of Eden to work it and keep it.

Last week, Caleb wonderfully showed us how Eden was a temple.

We walked through that last week. There are so many scriptures to prove this to you, but I'll just recap just a few very quickly. The terms work and keep here. The only other time those words are put together in the rest of the first five books of scripture are when it talks about the priests and the tabernacle. So that clues us in.

The lampstand in the midst of the temple mimics the tree of life in the midst of the garden. In both the temple and the garden, you have cherubim guarding the entrance to God's presence. There's so many more. It's just so clear. Genesis 2.15 is shouting to us this reality that the Garden of Eden is a cosmic temple and Adam was meant to be its priest. And so as Eden is expanding, as Adam is expanding the borders as a king, he is meant to maintain that communion with God, maintain that true worship of God in that space as it expands.

And yet we know that Adam did not succeed. The priests in the Old Testament, it was their job to keep out whatever was unclean from God's presence. And when this unclean serpent comes in, Adam fails to drive it away. And so he fails in his task as a king and as a priest, and the fellowship with God there is broken. And so now they had to wait for the seed of the woman to come and to crush the head of the serpent and to undo all of the curse.

The task of the last Adam

So that leads us into point two, the task of the last Adam. We find throughout scripture that Adam is a picture of the Christ to come. Maybe that strikes you as strange at first. Adam is seen as a picture of Christ to come. What that means is not that Christ is just like Adam, but what it means is Christ sort of fulfills what Adam was supposed to do. This is why Paul calls Jesus in 1 Corinthians the last Adam. And one of the ways that Jesus will be like Adam is he will take on the role as a king and as a priest to continue this original plan that God had. But one way he will be unlike Adam is where Adam failed, Christ will be victorious.

So as a better king and a better priest, we're going to see that Christ will expand and maintain the kingdom of God. How does he expand it? Well, in the Old Covenant, we see the borders of God's kingdom are sort of limited, most of the time, to the nation of Israel.

And the purpose of that was to preserve this messianic line, to preserve the lineage of this seed of the woman that was promised to come. But when he came, he was bringing salvation to the entire earth. He was bringing the way to fulfill That plan that God had from the beginning to bring glorifiers of Him all over the earth. God was bringing that to fruition in His Son and through the person and work of Christ.

Through that person and work, what do we have now? We have restored image bearers from every tribe and tongue and nation. We have churches all across the globe that are imaging the gospel to the world. and that are being God's dwelling place all across the earth. And so we see Jesus expanding his kingdom successfully even today.

While Christ is the last Adam, he also needed to fulfill the priestly task of maintaining And so how does Jesus do this? We see this in so many places throughout the New Testament. When Jesus rebukes the Pharisees, the false teachers, he's trying to maintain true worship of God over the hypocritical worship of the Pharisees. One of the very clear ways we see this is when Jesus drives out the sellers from the temple. This is a picture of Jesus as a priest cleansing what is unclean out of God's presence, maintaining the temple.

Just as Adam failed to drive away what was unclean, Christ is succeeding in keeping God's place of worship pure and holy. We see this as well In the church discipline passages in the New Testament, Jesus promises that his spirit will be there. When the church commits itself to maintain its purity, Jesus is there blessing that work. And he's washing his bride, making his temple pure for the day of his coming.

So the second Adam has accomplished as a king and as a priest what the first Adam failed to do. I want to speak for a moment to those of you who are not following the Lord Jesus. This last Adam, the Lord Jesus, he has all authority over your life, over heaven and earth, and over your life, and you must reckon with these two roles that Christ has as king and as priest. You know what a king does. He judges. A king brings judgment. And friend, if you are not bowing to the Lord Jesus, you will face that judgment. That is a frightening thing.

And Jesus is a priest who is zealous to maintain purity. And yet you have corrupted the world that he gave you, the life that he gave you. And you're going to give account for that. But friend, the good news is, is do you know what else a priest does? A priest makes atonement. A priest makes atonement and we learn that the Lord Jesus has himself entered into the holy place with his own blood. And that own blood can cover the worst of sinners. His own blood can cover you. The priest that you have come in and defiled the life he gave you, the king that you have rebelled against, with his own blood, you can be forgiven. So turn to him.

The task of the new humanity

That leads us to the final point, the task of the new humanity. We've seen what the first and the last Adam were supposed to do. Now we must ask as Christians, as redeemed humanity, what is our task? What are we to do? And because we are united to Christ, we are united to this last Adam, we, in a sense, carry on the work that he inaugurated, and we carry on the work that he will make successful. We ourselves, in a sense, are given that expanding and that maintaining task that he had. How do we expand? How do we carry on that kingly role of expanding God's kingdom? Well, I want us to think for a second.

In Genesis 128, where it says,

be fruitful and multiply, fill the earth

, do you hear an echo of something coming from the New Testament? Do you hear something from the New Testament ringing in your ears when you hear that? What about when Jesus says,

go and make disciples of all nations

?

You could really say, go and make restored image bearers of all nations. Go be fruitful and multiply with my restored image bearers. The Great Commission itself, that is how we expand. That is how we carry on this original task that Adam had. We are foot soldiers of the king. We carry on his task. What a privilege. He doesn't need us. What a privilege that he has commissioned us. He has enlisted us to be part of this glorious mission.

And I do want to say that this whole idea of taking dominion, subduing, this has often been misinterpreted in the past, in our own day, as sort of this call to take arms, take over in a somehow Christian way, with force of arms, or just to entirely take control, government, institutions, whatever it is, in just an unchristian way, in a violent way, in a forceful way. That is a complete failure to understand the storyline of Scripture. No, the way that we expand the kingdom is just how Adam did. Adam did not need force of arms. He was a proclaimer. If he would have been successful, he would have been proclaiming to the next generations what God said to them and calling those people to continue that legacy of believing what God said.

We continue this mission, not by force of arms, but by evangelism. By being faithful church members here, where this is the headquarters of God's mission. All of these local churches around the world, we need to be faithful members here. This is where God's mission is happening. And through faithful families who are raising their children in the nurture and admonition of the Lord.

As I heard one preacher said,

the most powerful and effective evangelistic force on the planet is called mom and dad.

And that's so true. You listen to testimony after testimony after testimony, the most common thing you'll hear, my mom and dad were Christians. They taught me the gospel from a young age.

That is how you expand the kingdom of God. Finally, how do we maintain? Peter says that we as a church are kingdom of priests. So how do we maintain the true worship of God in this church? Firstly, know your Bible deeply. If you're to know what true worship consists of, you need to know your Bible deeply and to be able to stand for what it says.

You need to feel a certain level of responsibility for your brothers and sisters here. Adam failed to feel responsible for what was going on when the serpent came into the garden. We need to feel responsible to help our brothers and sisters spiritually in this place.

Well, as we conclude, we should just take a step back from all of this and realize what a glorious saga God has called us to, us normal Christians. What a glorious task God has called us to, to carry on the task of the last Adam, to be co-laborers with him. That is a glorious thing and all the more reason to take these tasks seriously in our own lives. Let's pray together.

Lord, we know that the task you've given us will not be successful without your spirit. We pray you would empower us to carry on the task you've given us. And Lord, we thank you that ultimately the task is accomplished through the work of Christ. We thank you for that. We pray you give us strength in Jesus name. Amen.