The path of the last Adam was a path that took Him from Heaven to earth, from the earth to the grave and from the grave to resurrection power on display as our Lord, Savior and King. But a study in contrast with the first Adam shows us the stark contrast to the faithfulness that the last Adam offers us in the place of the failure that we have experienced with our first earthly father.
1. Sinner vs Sinless …
Wade Burleson has blogged on the Trinity and the unorthodox trend that has come into the church that teaches an eternally subordinated Son of God in the Trinity.
Wade writes:
The Council on Biblical Manhood and Womanhood is composed of many Southern Baptists who are introducing to evangelicalism a novel, if not peculiar, view of Christ which has more in common with Arianism than the historic, orthodox view of Christ’s person. The theologians and teachers who write for the CBMW are teaching what they call “the eternal subordination of the Son to the Father” as a basis for their hierarchal view that the female is to be subordinate to the male. Women’s subordination to man, according to the teachings of CBMW, is not a consequence of sin or a reflection of cultural values, but is built upon the heirachical order God established before the fall as a reflection of the Trinity.
This view of the Trinity has been used by some complementarians who have a lot of sway in Southern Baptist circles to support the functional subordination of women. I would recommend that you read what Wade has written and then have a read through the comments on his blog as well. It is a frightening thing to me to see the spread of this unorthodox doctrine and how many have accepted it as gospel truth.
It also comes at a very timely place for us as we are just getting ready to release our new 2 DVD set called “The Trinity: Eternity Past to Eternity Future, Explaining Truth & Exposing Error”
The DVD will be availabe by mid October at http://mmoutreach.org/ or from Amazon.com.
(October 2008 update: The DVD is now available and a preview is available on Youtube at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JLe-qF2nptA.)
In dealing with women in ministry, the question has been asked of me, isn’t circumcision a proof that God only wants men to minister through leading and teaching since God gave the sign of circumcision for males only to his people in the Old Testament? Did God give preferential treatment to males when he brought them into the Abrahamic covenant in the Old Testament through circumcision?
While some believe that the entrance into the Abrahamic covenant of blessing through circumcision gave preferential treatment for males, the fact is that only the males had a necessary ritual of entrance into the covenant and without this ritual, they were rejected as part of the covenant. Females entered the covenant without restriction and without rejection. To understand the reasons why, we need to look at the biblical requirement for circumcision.
Circumcision was performed on babies when they were 8 days old and if the parents did not circumcise their baby boy, the baby was rejected.
Gen 17:14 “But an uncircumcised male who is not circumcised in the flesh of his foreskin, that person shall be cut off from his people; he has broken My covenant.”
Since God is neither male nor female, some have suggested that the Messiah could have been born a female. I would respectfully like to differ with that view. In this post I want to show from scripture why the Messiah had to be a male.
The scriptures definitively say that sin came through one man.
Romans 5:12 NASB: “Therefore, just as through one man sin entered into the world, and death through sin, and so death spread to all men, because all sinned”
Paul carries the thought further by saying:
Romans 5:19 “For as through the one man’s disobedience the many were made sinners, even so through the obedience of the One the many will be made righteous.”
Although Adam and Eve both sinned, the willful disobedience of the man was what brought sin into the world. …
It is common for hierarchists to say that Adam was Eve’s head not because he was her source, but because he had authority over her. While the teaching that Adam was Eve’s ruler before the fall of man is unsubstantiated, the fact that Adam was the source of Eve is foundational to the doctrine of the kinsman redeemer.
Let’s see if we can draw out the important connection regarding Adam’s headship and the new head of the church, the Lord Jesus Christ. Adam was the first human creation and from his body, Eve was created.
The fact that Eve was created from Adam’s body and that he was the source of her flesh-and-bone-body is highly important because of what happened next. Although Eve was deceived and she sinned because of her deception, Adam sinned willfully without being deceived. Adam sinned with full knowledge of what he was doing. Adam was charged with bringing sin into the world. The following diagram shows how Adam’s blood line was tainted with sin.
God, however, prophesied that the Redeemer, the Messiah, would come from the woman. It is vital that the seed of the woman alone would produce the Messiah because of the inherited sin nature that comes through the man. The diagram below shows that the Messiah is produced from a virgin woman.
