So it is written: “The first man Adam became a living being;” the last Adam, a life-giving spirit. (1 Corinthians 15:45).

Welcome to this new week in our Hungry for a Savior series.  This series is “parking” in just one chapter of the Bible, 1 Corinthians 15, settling into a different section week by week.  This week we’re focusing on verses 35 - 45.

One of the goals of this series is to help expand our understanding of what Scripture means by the word Gospel, Good News.  As Paul is finishing up this second-longest of his letters, he wants the confused Christians of Corinth to be grounded and established, settled and secured, in the Good News of Jesus.

We’ll notice two things (at least!) as Paul goes about his work in our chapter.  First, we may notice what he doesn’t say when writing here about “the Gospel.”  Second, we’ll notice what he does write, and take some time to unwrap that.

Here are two examples of things Paul does not say in this chapter: He does not talk about going to Heaven or about forgiveness. (The fact that he doesn’t say them here does not mean they are wrong or that Paul didn’t think them important.)  

What Paul writes about is the resurrection of Jesus.  And about the ways in which the reality of that resurrection is to reshape the way Christ’s people live, here and now.

In this week’s passage, he goes about his work in an unexpected way.  He talks about Adam: “For as in Adam all die, in Christ all will be made alive … So it is written: ‘The first man Adam became a living being’; the last Adam, a life-giving spirit” (1 Corinthians 15: 21-22, 45).  Anyone see that coming?  Well, no, not until Paul wrote this chapter!

First Adam – the Adam and Eve of Genesis 1-3 -- had a God-given identity (“Made in the image and likeness of God”) and a God-given commission or mandate (“Be fruitful, fill the earth, steward Creation into fruitfulness”).  First Adam (i.e., Adam and Eve, representing the human race) rejected this identity and commission, imagining they knew a better way.  The result was death, across all the levels of life, for them and for all their descendants, including (your name here).  “Death came through a man … in Adam, all die” is how Paul puts it.

There’s a “but” hiding in here.  First Adam rebelled, died, and remanded all his descendants into the grip of Death.  BUT God did not abandon his original mandate for humanity, nor did God cancel the image-bearing identity of the human race.  Jesus, Paul writes, is Second Adam, the one-man truly human life lived the way God intended, for the purposes God intended.  

A human (First Adam) brought death into the world, and a human (Second Adam, Jesus) brought the resurrection from the dead.  Second Adam (Jesus and the life-giving Spirit that raised him from the dead) recovers and restarts the Genesis Project that God has always intended and never abandoned.  First Adam rejected the Genesis mandate and defaced and deformed our Genesis identity.  Second Adam has restarted God’s Genesis Project, and you know how we know this?

God raised Jesus from the dead.  This resurrection is the first step and the first sign of God making all things new.  And that changes everything.

Lord Jesus, please lead us into more of the fullness of all that we celebrate on Palm Sunday, Good Friday and Easter Sunday.  Open our eyes, expand our minds and hearts, capture more of us, that we might receive more of you.  Amen.