Adam our Representative

One of the keys to understanding the Bible is the concept of a representative acting on behalf of his constituents. We in the United States have some concept of that when we elect representatives to our legislatures. There they make decisions on our behalf but not always the decisions we would make but those decisions impact our lives. We may have to pay more taxes or be at war with another country and yet we didn’t make those decisions ourselves.

The same thing happens in the Bible. For example, we are taught that Adam represents those who are his constituents. Jesus Christ also represents His constituents. This relates to our study in the book of Joshua because God promises Joshua that every place he sets his feet in the Promised Land is his. Now obviously God isn’t giving Joshua personally all the land. He is giving it to Joshua as the representative of all the people.

We need to take some time and work through this because it is central to our understanding of some important Scriptures.

Let’s start with Adam. Look carefully at Romans 5:12-16. First we learn that sin entered the world through one man, Adam. Christians generally believe that Adam’s fall is what brought sin into the world. Sin brought death with it and as a result death passed to all men because all sinned. Now the problem is that most people think that this passage is saying that since Adam sinned, other people have a sin nature that they follow and so they also sin and bring death upon themselves. But this is not what the passage is saying. What the passage is saying is that when Adam sinned we all sinned in him. He sinned as our representative and this brought guilt on all of us before we even had a chance to show our own sinfulness by committing sins ourselves.

We know this is true because it is explained in verses 13 and 14. Verse 13 says that there was sin in the world before the law came, but when there is no law, sin is not charged to anyone. However, verse 14 says that in spite of this fact, people died before the law came even though they did not sin like Adam did by disobeying a specific commandment. What that means is that their death was a result of the sin of Adam which was imputed to them.

In writing this, Paul says that Adam is a type of Christ who was to come. We’ll pick up on this more next time, but where he is going with this is that Christ also is a representative and what He did in that capacity is greater positively than the negative of Adam’s transgression.