For as in Adam all die, so in Christ shall all be made alive (1 Corinthians 15:22).

“In Adam, all die.”  

Welcome to Week 2 of our Hungry for a Savior series: What a way to start a Monday, a new week!  But maybe a good and needed way? 

Paul does not simply mean that our bodies eventually run out of gas and down we go.  If only that were the worst of it!  In fact, our physical death is merely the end of a long trail of death, and the beginning of a death that never ends.  All die “in Adam” because all of us are determined, like Adam, to find ways to live apart from God.  Sin is the refusal, the violation, of relationship, with God, with our neighbors, with Creation, with ourselves.  

So “Adam’s way” is the attempt to build lives apart from God, to live as if God doesn’t matter.  

But what if there is another way?  If “in Adam, all die,” is it possible for us to be “in” something different, to be traveling in a different way, in the way of life instead of the way of death?

Welcome to the glorious Good News of Jesus!  “You know,” Paul might say if we were having a conversation with him in a coffee shop, “think of the way your life got started.  You actually didn’t make yourself ‘alive,’ and that should be a clue.  Life has always been a gift, not an accomplishment.  

“That’s the way of the Gospel,” Paul might continue, “to gratefully receive what God so gladly gives.  Just as your physical life has always been a gift you did not earn or deserve, so also with real, true, abundant and everlasting life.  You can’t make it, earn it or ‘accomplish’ it.  As long as you keep viewing life as either an accident, or something you are owed, or something you have achieved, you will remain stuck in Adam’s way, never truly alive, not the way God intended.  As long as you keep trying to do it that way, the Adam Way, you remain ‘in sin’ and therefore ‘in death.’ 

“But in Christ,” Paul, now warming to his subject, goes on, “all shall be made alive!  God raised Jesus from the dead, and that’s exactly what God will do for all of Creation and for all who trust Jesus.

“Do you see,” Paul might say, really excited now, “Christ is Second Adam.  Christ is the Way into being human the way God always designed and intended us to be.  Christ is the way of the recovery, the restoration and the restart of the human project that was God’s purpose from before the Beginning.  If you will welcome the free gift of God ‘relocating’ you from ‘Adam’s way’ to ‘in Christ,’ your life, your real and true life, can finally get started.

“Even better: that life does not end.  And I say this with such conviction and confidence because God raised Jesus from the dead – and therefore in Christ, all shall be made alive!”

Lord Jesus, you are the Way: the truth about life is in you!  Deliver us from all our “Adam ways,” and lead us in your Way everlasting!  Amen.