Sermon Tone Analysis

Big idea:

The first human (adam) represented the human race and chose sin and death for us.

The second adam, Christ Jesus, represented the human race and gave us life.

Introduction to The Story

This year we’re going to be focusing a lot of attention on discipleship.

The basic requirement of a disciple of Jesus is to follow Him.

Revelation 14:1-6 describes a group of people who follow Jesus wherever He goes.

They are His disciples, and you can be one of those people.

Our goal this year is to cultivate a culture of nurturing disciples of Jesus.

Check out the newsletter for a few ideas on how we’re going to pursue that.

One of the key parts of this discipleship journey is to spend time in God’s Word.

That’s why I’ve designed a year-long series of sermons that take us through the bible.

I’m calling it, “The Story.”

Each sermon will explore the story of one of Jesus’ ancestors, until we get to Jesus himself.

You can trace the line from Adam to Jesus in the last part of Luke 3.

Along with this sermon series, I’d like you to read through the Bible with me.

If you’ve got another devotional journey you’re on, that’s fine, but if you’re not regularly spending time in the Bible or you’re nearing the end of your last devotional plan, then why not join me as we read through the Bible this year?

There are three different Bible reading plans at the welcome desk in the lobby.

One is a book-by-book plan that goes from Genesis to Revelation.

The other is a Chronological plan that tells the stories in the order they happened rather than the order they were collected in the Bible.

The third plan is a simplified plan that focuses on the major stories of the Bible with only 160 or so readings.

Choose the last plan if reading the whole Bible feels overwhelming, or if you’d like to read through the Bible with your kids but want to skip some of the tedious details.

As you read through the Bible you’re likely to have questions; maybe even a few doubts.

You may run across something that seems contradictory to something you already read.

Keep a notebook nearby and write down your questions, then join me on Wednesday evenings at 6 pm for a Bible Q&A.

You’ll be able to ask any question you have about the Bible, the church, or Christian life.

You don’t even have to be reading the same section of the Bible as everyone else, just bring your questions and we’ll explore the Bible’s answers together.

Now lets dive into our first story.

We’ll begin at the very beginning of Jesus’ family tree with Adam, the son of God.

Illustration: Representative Government

Governments have long had representatives of the people who stand before a king, or a body of government to express the needs, desires, and troubles of the people.

Not all governments have cared very much about that representation.

One of the issues that led to the political separation of the United States from British rule was that our people were seeing trade laws passed and taxes levied on them with no representation in the halls of power.

Taxation without representation was one of influences that led to the structure of our representative government.

Theoretically, there is no part of our country that is left without representation in our government — except for the District of Columbia and a few islands, but that’s another story for another time.

The United States government has two legislative bodies that work together to make laws for our country: the Senate and the House of Representatives.

More than any other body in government, the House of Representatives is designed to represent the people of the nation.

The entire country is divided into hundreds of congressional districts.

Each district gets to vote for their own representative.

While the process is flawed, the goal is that through your representative your voice is heard in the highest seats of power in our nation, and your vote is cast for every law that our country considers.

Some would suggest that the ideal government would be where we each represent ourselves—a total democracy; one in which each person would get an equal vote on every issue and law, and no law would pass without unanimous agreement.

But even a child can recognize that you’ll never get everyone to agree on everything.

And the logistical nightmare of getting everyone in the nation vote on every single issue that comes us would make a total democracy a completely impossible.

So, instead, we find people who share much of our philosophy on life, and who hopefully have integrity and the skills of diplomacy, and we ask them to represent us.

You tell your representative what you want, and they do their best to try to make your voice heard in their proposals and their votes.

You are in the legislature through your representative.

You are making laws and sharing your philosophy of government through your representative.

The First Man

Let’s turn to the first words of the Bible in Genesis 1 and discover that the Bible begins with a representative government of sorts.

God is the authority—the governmental head of our world.

He is the Creator.

The next verses describe what must have been an incredible scene as day after day God spoke and stuff that had never existed before came into being.

“Let there be...” was all God needed to say and suddenly stars and light and planets and dirt and air and plants and animals appeared.

And then, on the 6th day, God knelt down on the dirt he had created, gathered it together and designed the form of a human and then breathed into it His own breath of life.

Genesis 2:7 (NIV)

and the man became a living being.

That word, “Man” is important for us to stop and consider.

The Hebrew word for man is adam (אָדָם), which is another way of saying, “human.”

While this word can mean “male human,” in many places, and especially in this original context it just means “human.”

At the time God created the first human there weren’t any females to compare with; there was just the one.

We call him “Adam” but if the original human had the name Adam it was just because he was the first of us all.

Every person in this world could technically be called “adam” in Hebrew, because we’re all human.

The Hebrew word for “man” or “mankind” is used 585 times in the Old Testament, but only 10 times is it used to name a person.

Every other time it’s just talking about humans in general.

What I’m telling you is extremely important.

Adam is the first adam, the first human.

And as the first human he had the dignified responsibility of standing before God as the representative for all humanity.

There was no other human on earth, and yet all humanity existed in Adam at the moment he took his first breath.

If the first human had continued to live without rebellion, then he would have continued to represent all of humanity even to this day.

Son of God

The first man was not born from a woman, he was fashioned by the creator’s own hands.

And because of that he was the son of God.

Not the son of a woman—the son of God.

You may be most familiar with this phrase, “son of God,” in reference to Jesus.

We’re going to get there soon, but I want to make sure you understand why we call Jesus the “son of God,” and it starts with the story of the first human, Adam.

Turn to Luke chapter 3 and we’re going to read verse 38.

The last part of this chapter tells the family tree of Jesus and it ends with Adam.

Let’s read it:

“The son of God” is a special phrase.

Notice what God said when He created Adam:

In creating the first man God made a representative that went both directions.

Adam was a representative of humanity before God, and a representative of God before humanity.

There are two examples in the Old Testament of this intermediary role of a son of God:

In Genesis 6 the Bible says that the “sons of God” saw the “daughters of men” and thought they were beautiful, so they married them.

In this situation the phrase, “sons of God,” is used to describe the children of godly humans who ended up marrying ungodly people.

Eventually these unions led to the terrible human condition that led to the flood—the thoughts of humanity’s hearts were only evil continually.

No one followed God except Moses and his family.

The sons of God had failed to honor God, and instead abandoned God for idolatry and the worship of self.

In this case the “sons of God” didn’t fulfill their role as representatives of the Creator.

In Job 1:6 we’re told about a council meeting where the “sons of God” came to present themselves to the Lord, and Satan also came.

Like Adam who represented the human race there seems to have been a council of representatives from all the created beings.

Because Adam surrendered his will to Satan, Satan thought of himself as the new representative of the human race and so he showed up at this meeting of the representative sons of God.

Unfortunately, the first man failed in his role as the representative of God, and he failed in his role as the representative of humanity.

Notice that in 1 Timothy Paul hints that Adam’s choice to eat from the tree was not out of ignorance or deception:

Eve might have been tricked by Satan, but Adam wasn’t.

Adam knew exactly what Hew as doing.

He CHOSE to disobey and turn the whole course of humanity towards submission to Satan instead of God.

If only you and I could have called out to Adam from the future, “DON’T DO IT, ADAM! You’re representing us and we don’t want you to vote that way.”

But that’s not how time works.

Our choices impact our children and our grandchildren long before they have a choice in the matter and long after we are gone.