COLLEEN TINKER | Editor, Proclamation! Magazine
I’ve always loved Christmas—but for many years I felt let down by the holiday. It never quite seemed to yield the magic and peace that it seemed to promise, and I couldn’t understand why Christmas joy eluded me. In fact, sometimes I heard Christians talking about the fact that the baby we celebrate every year actually came to die on a cross. I distinctly remember attending a Christian pageant at a large evangelical church in Orange County, California, right about the time Richard and I were discovering that Adventism was only posing as Christian.
That pageant ended with a portrayal of Jesus being crucified and then resurrected, and I was offended. Why were they messing with my nostalgic Christmas “feels” by reminding me of that bloody death?
I finally came to understand that Jesus’ death really IS the heart of the Christmas story—that the Lord Jesus had to come, God incarnate, in order to propitiate for our human sin by shedding human blood. And it wasn’t just any human blood: it was sinless blood—the life of the only human ever born who didn’t need to be born again. Jesus was conceived by the Holy Spirit, and unlike all the rest of humanity, He wasn’t born dead in sin!
What About Mary’s Genes?
Last Sunday a person I love asked me after church why Jesus’ being born to Mary didn’t make Him a sinner. After all, He had her human genes in Himself. How could he be literally related to and descended from a human sinner without being a sinner Himself?
Her question reminded me again of the way the Lord is still redeeming my Adventism. If I hadn’t had to rethink every nuance of my theology, my view of reality, and my dependence upon Scripture, I might never have seen so clearly how Jesus really is different from the rest of us humans—and I might never have understood why my Adventist worldview that focussed on physicalism was wrong.
Let me share what I have learned as I’ve studied the New Testament. There is a good answer to my friend’s question!
We have to start in Eden, though. When Eve and then Adam sinned and ate the forbidden fruit, God judged them and the serpent and declared the consequences for the entire human race—consequences that would forever define natural man.
God cursed the serpent and sentenced it and all its descendants to crawl on the ground, and He declared that He would put enmity between the serpent and the woman. The woman’s “seed” (women do not have “seed” biologically) would bruise the head of the serpent, and the serpent would bruise the woman’s seed on the heel.
In other words, the serpent would attempt to destroy Eve’s seed, but He would destroy the serpent.
It’s important to notice that in Genesis 2:17 God had told Adam that if he ate of the tree, he would die that day. Significantly, when Eve ate the fruit, nothing discernible happened, but when Adam ate the fruit Eve gave him, immediately they both knew shame. They both realized they were naked and hid, cobbling fig leaves together to hide their shame. When God came looking for them, neither Adam nor Eve would “own” their own sin but blamed: Eve blamed the serpent, and Adam blamed Eve and even God who gave her to him.
What do these details mean?
One essential sin
A sermon I listened to recently by the late S. Lewis Johnson made an interesting point: there is only one death: spiritual death. When Adam ate the fruit, he died spiritually at that moment—and so did Eve. Adam was the one to whom God had given the command and the death-warning. In fact, God had instructed Adam about the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil before Eve was created. Adam, as the federal head of the human race, was the one responsible for instructing and protecting Eve as well as the earth as God’s agent on earth.
Both Adam and Eve, therefore, died spiritually the moment Adam ate the fruit because Adam had been entrusted with the responsibility to teach and protect the earth.
Their spiritual death eventually resulted in their physical deaths, and eventually eternal death—when God judges the earth at the Great White Throne judgment—will be the final result of that first spiritual death.
Since, as Paul explains in 1 Corinthians 15:22, “…as in Adam all die, so also in Christ all will be made alive” Adam’s transgression against God’s clear command plunged the entire human race into spiritual death.
Ephesians 2:1–3 confirms this fact:
And you were dead in your transgressions and sins, in which you formerly walked according to the course of this world, according to the ruler of the power of the air, the spirit that is now working in the sons of disobedience, among whom we all also formerly conducted ourselves in the lusts of our flesh, doing the desires of the flesh and of the mind, and were by nature children of wrath, even as the rest.—Ephesians 2:1–3 LSB
It was God’s design that determined that Adam was the head of the human race. His disobedience resulted in spiritual death, and that spiritual death—that essential guilt before God—was his legacy to the entire human race.
But what about Eve’s spiritual death? Didn’t her sinful nature get passed on to her descendants including the Lord Jesus?
Yet Scripture tells us that Jesus had no sin in Him:
He made Him who knew no sin [to be] sin on our behalf, so that we might become the righteousness of God in Him.—2 Corinthians 5:21 LSB
And you know that He was manifested in order to take away sins, and in Him there is no sin.—1 John 3:5 LSB
This fact means that Jesus did not inherit a sinful nature through Mary. Oh, yes—He was a human in the line of Judah by physical inheritance, as we learn in Luke’s genealogy. Yet His physical, genetic inheritance did not give Jesus a sinful nature.
The mystery and the miracle of the Lord Jesus’s nature hangs on the fact that He was not born IN ADAM. Jesus did not have a human father; God Himself is Jesus’ Father.
Mary’s pregnancy was a miracle that we cannot explain. God did not tell us HOW He accomplished the incarnation, but He tells us that it occurred.
What we learn
This mystery reveals something very important: sin is not primarily a physical problem. It is neither inherited nor passed on by physical means.
Mary was a sinful human who needed a Savior—and she was chosen by God to bear her own Lord and Savior into the world. Yet Mary’s gene pool did not make Jesus a sinner nor a human with a sinful nature.
Further, Jesus’s Father, God, gave Mary’s baby a spiritually living spirit from the moment of her conception. Jesus was the only baby ever born who did not have to be born again. He was alive from the moment of His conception!
This fact emphasizes that Jesus was not born “in Adam”; He was born of God.
It is this spiritual life that God smuggled into the world in the person of His Son incarnated in a human body born of Mary.
This spiritual life in Jesus is the only thing that could bring about our salvation, because His sinlessness meant that He had no sin and therefore fully completed and fulfilled all the terms of the law. He filled every shadow of the law full of its intended meaning.
Even more, Jesus took the law’s death sentence. He took our imputed sin into Himself to reconcile the world to God!
Because Jesus fulfilled every shadow of the law, we are not asked to keep the law to qualify for eternal life. Rather, we are asked to BELIEVE.
This belief requires that we recognize and repent of our sin; we can’t blame Satan for our sin and believe that God will punish him for it because we ourselves are declared dead in sin by nature. This innate state of spiritual death is the THING that causes us to commit sins, and it is this spiritual death that is reversed when we place our trust and faith in the Lord Jesus and His perfect, completed work of atonement and propitiation.
When we trust Jesus with our sin and believe that He has completed everything necessary to redeem us and to save us, we receive His own resurrection life. Our dead spirits are brought to life on the basis of Jesus’ blood opening a way for us to approach God directly, without fear.
Saved by Grace
We cannot be saved by our works, no matter how altruistic or pious. Our best efforts flow from hearts that are dead in sin. Only admitting our sin and entrusting it and ourselves to our Lord Jesus and His death, burial, and resurrection can rescue us from the death sentence into which we are born.
Conversely, just as we cannot be saved by our works, neither can our works cause us to be lost. Our essential sin—our spiritual death—is not physical. The degraded gene pools we inherit from our forebears is not what makes us sinners.
We are sinners because we are born in Adam. We are imputed with his spiritual death because he is the federal head of the human race. We are born spiritually dead as our spiritual—not our genetic or physical—legacy from Adam.
In the same way Mary’s genetics did not give Jesus a sinful nature. They gave Him human flesh with its troubles and weaknesses, but he did not have a sinful nature because His Father was not a man but was God.
Our Lord Jesus was born spiritually alive, and when we trust Him, we are born of God (Jn. 1:12), born again of the Spirit (Jn. 3:6). We pass out of Adam and the domain of darkness and are transferred by our Father into the kingdom of the Beloved Son (Col 1:13).
We Celebrate Immanuel!
This miraculous provision of God is the reason we celebrate the birth of the Lord Jesus this Christmas. God the Son, wrapped in human flesh, came into this dark and sinful world bearing unquenchable Life—the life of God. He came to be the new federal head of a new “race” of people: those who are born of God through faith and trust in Jesus’ completed atonement for sin!
When we see our sin and trust Jesus’ death and resurrection as the full provision for our sin, we are born again and permanently indwelled by the Holy Spirit. We are placed in Christ and are no longer considered to be in the image of Adam.
We celebrate the baby who was born to give us His life, and we praise our Father who adopts us when we trust His Son. We praise the Holy Spirit who guides and guards us, teaching us to discern and to learn and to understand the truth of His word. We thank our triune God for saving us and for making us eternally alive.
We worship the Baby who was the Lamb of God, and we thank Him for giving us His life and forever being our Immanuel: God with us! †
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