Is it important to believe in Adam's existence in paradise? This article looks at the First Adam and the Second Adam according to Scripture, and what this means for the belief in evolution.

Source: The Outlook, 1986. 8 pages.

Adam and Evolution

The Bible knows of a First Adam and a Second Adam. Let's, with due respect for the Second Adam, call them A-I and A-II.

The First and Second Adam together form an axis about which both the Bible and the whole of human history, as interpreted by the Bible, revolve.

The Second Adam is, of course, our Lord Jesus Christ. He is a distinct and individual person.

The First Adam is, according to the Scripture, no less definite a person. He is so much an individual that St. Paul speaks of A-I as a "type" of A-II (Romans 5:14). Because this is so, what is revealed in the Scripture about the Christ sheds light upon A-I. There are, indeed, theologians who believe that the Genesis account of A-I can be rightly understood only as confirmed and illumined by the Gospel accounts of A-II. The unique individuality, then, of the Christ requires the unique individuality of the First Adam. Together, as we have said, A-I and A-II form the poles of human history.

The Bible, in a word, obliges us to acknowledge the unique and individual person-hood of both the First and the Second Adam.
It is serious business to deal disobediently with the First Adam.

Our Lord even warns that those who do not believe the writings of Moses are unable to believe His words, "for he wrote of me" (John 5:46). Where did Moses write of the Christ? St. Paul teaches us (or better, the Holy Spirit says through Paul) that when Moses wrote of A-I he was describing "a type of the one who was to come" (Romans 5:14). Moses could hardly write more specifically about the Christ than when he writes about His ante-type. "He wrote of me," Jesus says if you would hear Me, listen to Moses!

Could, then, the "type" (A-I) be ignored, or set aside, or blurred in a mist of evolutionary or cultural speculation without affecting our ability to hear the One typified?

"How can you believe," the Lord asks our generation no less than He asked the Jews, "who receive glory from one another and do not seek the glory that comes from the only God?" (John 5:44). That's a very exact description of how the evolutionary theorists of our times scratch each other's backs as they spin out their speculative webs. "But," the Lord goes on to say, regarding Moses, "if you do not believe his writings, how will you believe my words?" (John 5:47). And nowhere, as we have said, does Moses write more particularly about the Second Adam than in the Genesis account of the First Adam, as St. Paul makes clear not only as quoted from Romans but elsewhere – as we shall see.

Casting doubt on the Genesis account of the First Adam has, I repeat, momentous implications for the Church. These are, it seems, mostly ignored in the mad theological rush to board the latest evolutionary bandwagon to go riding wildly imagined ribbons of time into a dark and baffling past.
In our era, the emergence of the dogma of evolution has clouded the teaching of Genesis 1-3 in a haze of murky speculation. And the definite portrayal of A-I provided by Moses, and assumed by the Bible, vanishes in the mist. In its place have arisen a host of competing guesses. While some brazenly deny in the very face of Christ's warning – that Moses wrote the Pentateuch at all! This is to be expected, of course, of unbelief, but it can be heard among those who in the same breath claim undivided loyalty to the Christ and His Scripture.

It might be supposed that at least among ourselves in the CRC there would be stalwart refusal to bow the knee of Genesis to the Baals of evolutionary fancy. We would gladly, one might suppose, in order to hear the Lord, give ear to Moses. It may be that firm commitments to the literal authenticity of Genesis do indeed sound clearly from the academic ramparts – school, college and seminary – sustained by the CRC to confront the world. It may be so, but if such affirmations there be, they seem to be lost amidst a crowd of trendy evolutionary fashions – woven out of limitless strands of time on the looms of undisciplined imagination.

There seem to be those among us who want it both ways:

1. to join the "in" crowd uncritically committed to evolutionary dogma as to the origins of man, while

2. professing an undivided allegiance to the Scripture as God's inspired Word. It is obvious that anyone who thus tries to run in two directions at once will add little strength to the legions of the Lord.

What never comes quite clear in scenarios substituted for Genesis is precisely how A-I, and his correspondence to A-II, fit into an evolutionary scheme. Nor is this clarified when evolution is cautiously sprinkled with presumably holy water from a fount labelled "theistic!"

No doubt you too, reader, have wondered just how those who profess obedience to the Scripture do in fact bow in their theorizing to the Moses' account of Adam and the Biblical parallelism between A-I and A-II.

Moses' account is vivid, precise, clear – and grows the more instructive the more one subjects himself to it. Evolutionary hypotheses are breezy, belligerent, cocky and sterile – and hint of their hollow pretensions on first acquaintance. Moses for the childlike; evolutionism for the childish!

Yet, one may suspect, if one does not know, that among us, too, in practice it is often Genesis which is quietly being subordinated to evolution-ism rather than the other way around. Some theorists will blandly admit not knowing how to harmonize Genesis with their -ism while none-the-less giving their allegiance rather to the -ism than to Moses. Such indifference to the authority of Scripture is all the more distressing if one discovers that so it seems to be in his children's classrooms.
This essay is focused on the question: how do those who embrace evolutionary theories harmonize these with the biblical teaching regarding A-I and A-II? Or, if such harmony cannot be achieved, when will they openly choose between the -ism and the Word?

The issue is indeed momentous, but not complex. Adam and Eve had a clear choice: the Word of God or the word of the serpent. So do we: the Word of God or the word of the -ism.

Let's hear that choice made!
Some try to avoid making a decision, at least in public, by arguing that divine revelation appears in two "books," the Bible and Nature. We must, it is said, be equally attentive to both.

This has a pious ring to it, but it is a dead-end evasion! Books come to us in words – with a difference! The words of the Bible are divinely inspired. The words read out of, or into, the "book" of Nature are always fallible and human. Thus the two "books" are not on a par; they by no means enjoy equal authority. Therefore, one can't get away with talking of man's account of divine "revelation" in nature as of equal authority with the divinely inspired Scripture. Not at all! If the Christian is sure of anything, he is sure that nothing of human composition can speak with the certainty of the Holy Word.

The choice, as regards A-I and his relation to A-II, and their place in some evolutionary scheme, is always absolute: God's Word or man's?

When will those who entertain, in public or in private, on podium or in classroom, evolutionary hypotheses, make that choice openly before us all?

It requires no particular genius to mouth the latest evolutionary speculations, and to reel off millions or billions of years as if anyone knew what such words mean. The evolutionary theorist bedazzles himself with pompous sounds to which neither he nor anyone else can attach any content. He fills up his vacuums with zeroes, childishly supposing that adding nothing to nothing produces something! But what meaningful difference is there between, say, one million or one billion years? Adding zeroes tells us nothing – which is what zero stands for, after all.

The parent who recklessly wants his child victimized by such verbal bamboozlement has the whole range of secular schools to choose from – if only the time-bank numbers game were confined to these! California has just required its public schools to pour even more evolutionism down helpless throats, while efforts to add creation to schoolroom diets are viciously denounced as bigotry – by those who thus betray themselves as bigots!

What the believer expects, however, is that those to whom he entrusts the training of his children – and the future of his denomination - dare to hear Moses along with the Second Adam and thus, if need be, take up the cross of academic derision to rise above the crowd in solemn affirmation of the authority of the Genesis account of A-I. Not, indeed, as their own discovery, but as Truth breathed into the Scripture, and confirmed in the Scripture by the Holy Spirit.

The believer rightly expects those who teach and speak for him to take the Bible's rather than the evolutionist's view of the First Adam. And mindful of endless biblical warnings against cowardly disobedience, the believer anticipates no ultimate blessing upon the work of those who prefer the words of man over those of the Scripture.

What, then, is the Bible's view of the First Adam?
The Bible takes the First Adam very literally. Indeed, the Bible establishes a parallel relationship between A-I and A-II in which the literal Second Adam vindicates and confirms what is said of the First.

The Bible views the First Adam – and Eve – as historical, as individual and as brought into existence by immediate acts of God in very specific ways. Just as the Bible reveals very specifically how God brought the Second Adam into history.

Evolutionary theorists, on the other hand, seem to have only the fuzziest guesses as to how the biblical Adam and Eve can be fitted into their speculations. And many, of course, relegate the Genesis account to the realm of myth or saga or "teaching model" – linguistic tricks for concealing the fact that the Word's control of their speculations is minimal or non-existent.

While a discrepancy between the vivid teaching of Genesis and the hazy theorizing of the -ism does not seem to bother those evolutionary theorists whom I have encountered, the issue is, I repeat, exceedingly crucial and relevant. Not only because it forces a clear choice of momentous consequences between the Word of God and the words of man, but also because the whole history of man, and the divine economy of salvation, both take their point of departure from the intimate relationship biblically established between A-I and A-II. The approach of the Church to the reality of sin and evil, to salvation and the life of obedience, and to culture and the world at large moves within fields of force drawn between the twin poles of A-I and A-II. The disastrous effects upon society and upon persons and upon the Church, of ideologies which ignore the A-I - A-II tension is obvious.

Playing games with Adam is for far higher stakes than evolutionists seem aware of.

That is why the believer has every right to ask the evolutionary theorist – if he professes loyalty to the Scriptures – to explain in language no less clear and specific than that of the Word just how the events of Genesis 1-3 are accommodated in his theorizing. If ever you do, try to keep him from buying you off with checks drawn upon his fanciful and limitless bank of time. Such checks bounce. What you want is a simple explanation of how the events recorded in Genesis 1-3 harmonize with his evolutionary hypothesis, or, lacking that, his candid admission that for him the -ism comes first and Genesis had better make do. Then at least we all know where we are. But, alas, don't, as they say, hold your breath until you get a satisfying answer.
Let's sketchily observe how the Bible itself views Genesis 1-3. I say sketchily because the events related in Genesis 1-3, and what happened to man, to history, and to the world as consequence of those events, everywhere underlie the Word. Mystify the relationship between A-I and A-II by beclouding Genesis 1-3 in speculative vapors and for you the Bible goes adrift, anchors do not hold, and the bridge from time into eternity loses its footing in history.
Let it be said at once that to authenticate Genesis 1-3 for the believer it is enough to remind ourselves that, like the rest of the Bible, Genesis too is Spirit-breathed. What the Word says, God says.

Unhappily, the believer is sometimes beguiled by those who ask, with seeming innocence, "Yes, this is what Genesis says, but what does it mean?"

Much as the child tries to evade parental instructions through the same maneuver – "this is what you said, Mom, but I thought you meant..!"

Taking license from the same subterfuge, speculation pays lip service to Genesis and real service to whatever -ism flies high at the moment.

The Bible simply understands Genesis to mean what the Spirit through Moses says. This the Spirit re-emphasizes elsewhere in the Scripture. He not only inspired the Genesis account but has chosen to verify it beyond doubt elsewhere in the Word.
Having described in Genesis, for example, the creation of man, the Spirit chooses to confirm that account by writing to us through St. Paul: "For Adam was formed first, then Eve..." (1 Timothy 2:13). Two things here:

1. God's forming Adam (of the dust of the earth), and
2. God's forming Eve (from Adam's side) — confirmed as recounted in Genesis. First Adam; then Eve out of Adam.

This account of Eve's arrival on the scene is not likely to be a popular view these days, but is a God-breathed one none-the-less.

Let's invite the evolutionist to show how his theory accounts for this subtle distinction in the order of appearance of this first human pair on the stage of history: First the man, and then the woman from the man!
To the Corinthians the Spirit has Paul saying: "Thus it is written, 'The first man Adam became a living being'..." (1 Corinthians 15:45).

Some evolutionary theorists, who want it both ways, are fond of arguing that the term "Adam" simply means man-in-general. Grant this, and from there anything is possible.

But that obviously does not fit the Spirit's view of the matter. He who guides Paul's pen surely has in view a very specific person, "the first man..." Not one among others; surely not one after others. Rather, this very specific man, Adam, the first man. Just Adam and none other. That is what first man means, doesn't it?

A-I's unique reality is reinforced by Paul's (that is the Spirit's) further comparison: "Thus it is written, 'The first man Adam became a living being; the last Adam became a life-giving spirit"' (1 Corinthians15:45). That "last Adam" is of course the Christ. The Spirit points to a parallel which, in God's providence, exists between this unique historical person — the Christ! — and that other unique historical person — the first man! And one is inclined to ask, what God has joined together, who will put asunder?

No one denies — or almost no one — that the Christ was a unique, historical individual. The theorist who tries to dissolve that "first man Adam" into some abstraction cripples the parallel structure: on this side the Christ and on that side ... man-in-general? If the Christ be the unique, individual "second" of two persons, what can the "first" be but, in his own way, unique?

The reader will note that St. Paul is guided by the Spirit to quote Genesis 2:7, "Thus it is written..." We are obviously being told that the Spirit wants the Church to take Genesis at what it says.

Let's ask the evolutionary theorist if he believes that.

This is not the only indication, of course, that the inspiring Spirit, like the Christ Himself, intends us to take Moses' Genesis literally.

In the letter to Timothy already quoted, the Spirit is saying through Paul: "For Adam was formed first, then Eve; and Adam was not deceived, but the woman was deceived and became a transgressor" (1 Timothy 2:13-14). What a great deal of Genesis 1-3 is confirmed in this brief sentence — from the creation of A-I, and Eve, to their Fall! That's the way it was, by the Spirit's testimony!

Still more, the Spirit carefully confirms the Mosaic account of the Fall as given us in Genesis; He has Paul saying: "But I am afraid that as the serpent deceived Eve by his cunning, your thoughts will be led astray from a sincere and pure devotion to Christ" (2 Corinthians 11:3). How much farther astray, indeed, might thoughts be misled than down the devious paths of evolutionism?

But, observe how shocking, if not degrading, to "modern" ears! In what shreds would one's "scholarly" reputation be if he were even suspected of flirting with a deceiving serpent! And here God the Holy Spirit is affirming through St. Paul the Genesis account of that talking varmint! At this point the theorist who considers himself something of an adult thinker stands much as did Adam and Eve before the forbidden tree: to take God at His Word ... or ...?

At a talking serpent the arrogance of "science" draws the line. Call that part of Genesis myth, or legend, or saga, or adapted to the immaturity of the human race, or borrowed from pagan cosmologies by whoever compiled (as some theories go) Genesis — call it anything but what St. Paul is here inspired to call it with inescapable simplicity: a serpent, as recounted in Genesis, talked Eve into sin. What a painful option for an academic yuppie to take!

Scientists speak of the experimentum crucis, that is the crucial experiment on which a whole hypothetical construction hangs. Others speak of the "litmus test" to mean the same thing. That talking serpent serves the same purpose in Genesis 1-3, by presenting us with the options our first parents faced: take God at His Word, or fall!

So, reader, be sure that the evolutionary theorist — who wants you to keep believing his testimony of loyalty to the Bible — has a satisfactory account of that beguiling serpent. Some try the glib evasion, of course, of saying that Paul was, after all, imprisoned by the myths of his time. That is an easy and convenient (and cheap!) way to substitute man's ideas for the Bible's — until one sees in Paul the inspiring Spirit, who is by no means imprisoned by time. And while the Spirit no doubt employed Paul in terms of the language available to him, it is blasphemous to hold that God the Spirit misled Paul into assertion contrary to fact. Just as, of course, to brush aside or dilute the Genesis account is no less to flout the Spirit.
The Spirit, then, clearly confirms the Genesis account of A-I.

He does so, also, by explicitly paralleling A-II with A-I.

We have already heard His Word from Timothy. There are others:

"For as in Adam all die, so also in Christ shall all be made alive" (1 Corinthians 15:22). Not only a parallel which falls apart if A-I be made other than Genesis presents him, but also another puzzle for evolutionary theory: not only is A-I the first man, but his Fall first opens history to death.

Shall we inquire of the evolutionist when death first entered his theoretical universe — and why!

As to the real universe, St. Paul leaves us in no doubt: "Therefore as sin came into the world through one man and death through sin... "(Romans 5:12)

First the man, that very first man — then Eve — then the Fall — and only then death! So it really was.

Is that how it is for the -ism and its devotees?

Don't brush the question aside, friend. The first man was not made to die. And death gained access to human history only after A-I's sin. If your theory has death hanging around prior to the advent of man, how does it account for that? Or, if death is natural to evolutionism, as one suspects it is, how account for the role which the Bible accords to sin in bringing death about?

To touch on Romans 5 is, of course, to enter upon Paul's drawing out at large the underlying parallel between A-I and A-II.

And to drive that point home, the Spirit inspires Paul to declare, as we have already noticed, that A-I "was a type of the one who was to come" (Romans 5:14). Some theorists who want to hide their sabotage of A-I extol the importance of A-II. "Of the Christ," it is piously intoned, "I will never let go..." or some such bathos. To the childishness of unbelief it never occurs, apparently, that if A-I never existed, or was not a specific man, it would be untenable for God the Holy Spirit to be speaking of A-I as a "type" of A-II. That kind of faulty parallel would not even pass freshman rhetoric.

And Paul is inspired to say it again: "For as in Adam all die, so also in Christ shall all be made alive" (1 Corinthians 15:22). And again: "Thus it is written, 'The first man Adam became a living being;' the last Adam became a life-giving spirit" (1 Corinthians 15:45). And yet again: "The first man was from the earth, a man of dust; the second man is from heaven" (1 Corinthians 15:47).

Now, it is obvious that the believer does not really need more than the Spirit's assertion of Truth in Genesis — that is enough! Yet we are given the Spirit's confirmation, and re-confirmation, and re-reconfirmation of the same Truth, as we see. I say, for the believer that is, as the Spirit knows, superfluous. Why then the repetition?

For the unbeliever, of course! How often the prophets represent God as extending the hand of grace, repeating the Word of invitation, shedding abroad the light of revelation that unbelief may at last forsake its childish pride for childlike belief. We observe it here, focused upon evolutionism, in the repetition, over and again, of the ordained harmony between A-I and A-II.

Observe yet another confirmation of the Genesis account: "The first man was from the earth, a man of dust," Paul says. Exactly as Genesis has it. Moses said it first: "...then the Lord God formed man of dust from the ground" (Genesis 2:7). God repeats it Himself to a cowering pair: "...you are dust, and to dust you shall return" (Genesis 3:19). Nothing about, "You came from animal ancestry, so what could I expect? etc., etc." Nothing at all! How easy for God to have said, were it so, that man had simply not developed far enough. It's what the Carl Sagan types would be thinking. But not so the Creator!

God tells it like it was, and is. Those who cannot hear have introduced an evolutionism which so relativizes social and personal morality that a whole civilization totters over the abyss.

Dust! The Psalmist reminds us of the same: "For he knows our frame; he remembers that we are dust" (Psalm 103:14). And what, then, does "He" think of dust-formed theorists strutting on their platforms, posturing before the cameras, corrupting the minds of children with their "dusty" accounts of how it all began!

The theme echoes throughout the Bible: God remembers the Genesis account of our origin; do we? How fine a figure does dust-made man expect to cut?

Nothing in the Bible even suggests that instead of dust God used some other living forms to evolve into man. Nothing at all! Though there are those who advance the peculiarly gross hypothesis that God interrupted the animal evolutionary spiral at some point to adapt two specimens into what could be called Adam and Eve! If one can believe that in order to bend Genesis to evolutionary fantasy then, as they say, one can believe anything — and it seems that some evolutionists do. But in sober fact, a talking serpent is reasonable by comparison. Check it out with the next evolutionary theorist you meet.

The Lord once observed that unbelief strains at a gnat and gulps down a camel (Matthew 23:24). What more apt description (and condemnation), and from what more authoritative source, of the theorist who chokes on Genesis 1-3 and gulps down all, or even a part of, the panorama of evolutionary faddisms?
In the well-known description of marriage, Jesus Himself confirms the unique individuality of Adam and Eve: "Have you not read that he who made them from the beginning made them male and female, and said, 'For this reason a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and the two shall become one?'" (Matthew 19:4-6).

Note not only the dominical affirmation of Moses' account, but also our Lord's emphasis upon "from the beginning." If "from the beginning" means anything at all it means "nothing prior to." Before this "male and female" no others. Man began as Moses reports. Hear Moses to hear the Lord!
The biblical confirmation of Genesis 1-3 could, of course, be extended. Though the believer has, as we have observed, no claim upon the Lord for confirmation of the Word which he ought to accept at first hearing, it is graciously given, setting before us all the unmistakable choice: the Word of God, or the words of man?

The reader might, if he wishes to pursue the subject, study J. P. Verstees' Is Adam A 'Teaching Model' in The New Testament? And pursue in his Bible passages related to those cited above.

The Word will exercise, as we all well know, its own persuasion.
Ah, but what of all those fossils, all those drawings and models of prehistoric creatures, and the methods for dating bones, stones and stars?

Don't we live in a "new" era, one in which science makes the Genesis account untenable?

If you are musing in this way, what do you think of this from Jeremiah, suggesting that the Spirit (of course!) foresaw evolutionary theorizing long ago:

"As a thief is shamed when caught, so the house of Israel shall be shamed; they, their kings, and their prophets, who say to a tree, 'You are my father,' and to a stone, 'You gave me birth.' For they have turned their back to me, and not their face."

That's the way it was rather long ago, it seems. Nothing so "new" about evolutionism after all. Unbelief did not wait upon Darwin to hypothesize trees and rocks into our ancestry. And God did not wait upon Darwin-and-company to condemn that either. But when will our "advanced" theorizers be ashamed, "they, their kings, and their prophets?"

Jeremiah goes on: "But in the time of trouble they say, 'Arise and save us!"'

Sound familiar?

The prophet continues with a dire threat, which explains why our "new" era totters on the edge of disaster: "But where are the gods that you made for yourself? Let them arise, if they can save you, in your time of trouble; for as many as your cities are your gods, O Judah." Jeremiah 2:26-28

As apt to this moment as if written this morning, and as neat a description of the underlying assumptions, and terrible threat, of evolutionism as only the Spirit could reveal!

How long will it be before the Church at large declares that the prevailing -isms have no power to save?

But what, then, of all those fossils and specimens and brazenly touted tests for length of years out of which the evolutionists' imaginations fashion so much? What are we to do with those?

Dear me, friend. What are we to do with them?

Why, nothing, of course.

The childish will have their toys. What fun, filling imagined zoos with snarling, growling, ponderously weird creatures. Do you suppose that if the "in" folk prefer scraps of bone and rock to Jeremiah and Genesis and St. Paul that anyone can enlighten them? If the childish prefer their games, who is to deprive them of what may look as attractive as did the fruit of the forbidden tree to A-I and wife — and perhaps for the same reason!

Let those who believe the Word walk with Genesis in hand, having an obedient life to be living, leaving a diet of fossils to those who have a stomach for it.

One day all will be clear, and meanwhile Genesis will see us through — thanks be to Him who breathed it!

The forms of unbelief turn out to be monotonously the same, as do those who proclaim them. That's why Jeremiah fits today so neatly.

But be sure of this: The issue is one of destiny.

The burdens which evolutionary assumptions lay upon every aspect of our lives — moral, religious, pedagogical, social, political and economic — will bring down the Western world unless the Church once again preaches and teaches the reality and significance of the A-I — A-II axis upon which history moves into its future.

Looking ahead in the 1930s, the distinguished French Catholic thinker, Jacques Maritain, predicted that the combination of secular forces then gaining a strangle-hold on humanity would one day reduce mankind to the level of technical barbarism. He foresaw the time, of which Nazism was harbinger, when only those gifted with saintly perseverance could endure

He died, a decade or so ago, without having found any ground for altering that fearful premonition.

Between the childlike in faith and the childish in pride hangs, humanly speaking, the fate of the humane life and the well-being of generations just beginning their pilgrimage.

But how could it be otherwise when the battle is between belief and unbelief!