This morning I asked a question on Twitter:

Here is a response & re-response:

So let me now unpack what exactly I was getting at with this question, some of the implications, and what is a possible solution.

First the question

The original question was essentially this: what will the nature of our redeemed bodies be. While this question could go into many directions, my thought was how our redeemed bodies will compare to Adam’s (& Eve’s) pre-Fall bodies. The underlying question is this, is the redemption through Christ simply about making things right again, or about something more.

Hopefully your gut is telling you that there has to be more happening than simply pushing rewind on the destructive force of sin in the world.

Possible Responses & Avenues of Thought

Let us first go with the answer that I think is wrong. It seems that a lot times we talk and think about Christ’s work in this way, I’m a bad person so Christ has come to make me clean. But this would simply put us back in the garden with Adam. He was pure when he was created and it was later that he sinned and fell from that place of purity.

It seems that this leaves something to be desired for a couple of reasons.

What do we make of the centrality of the New Jerusalem both within the Old Testament with the prophets and also in the New Testament most prominently in Revelation? If Jesus Christ’s work was simply to put us back in the garden, then the great plan of God isn’t very great after all. If we are simply trying to get back to the point of departure then we have really gone forward at all.

That’s like getting lost in the wilderness and finding yourself back at the campsite where you started—yeah it’s good that you are back to a known place but if you’re intending to get somewhere else then you still have try going through the woods again.

So it’s like this with God’s plan, which we get a glimpse of with the story which goes through the whole of the Bible. God created a world, putting man in a garden. When you skip to the end, you see man not in a garden but in a city. Can you see the movement? It can’t be just about sin; there is something happening in the Bible beyond simply fixing our screw ups.

The problem that I had with the second response that I couldn’t figure out was how God could call creation very good, if Adam was missing something that Jesus would have to later add to him.

The Resolution

The key figures within this question are Adam and Christ. It is about what Christ did and how that act retro-actively affects Adam, and subsequently the rest of mankind. The resolution that I came across today, explains it this way.

We are missing part of the story with Adam and also therefore with Christ. It is clear that Adam sinned and this was an act of disobedience. God had told him not to eat the fruit of the tree of knowledge. He did this, therefore he sinned. This only half the story though.

The other half of the story is God giving certain duties to man. He asks Adam to cultivate and subdue the land. Adam is given authority over all of creation, to be a steward of God’s creation. This a tall order, and Adam, through his sin, is not able to achieve success or completion of it.

Looking at our second character, who Paul calls the second Adam, he is first of all shown to be perfect sinless, without spot or blemish. But furthermore he is also shown to be complete in righteousness before God. Where Adam failed to achieve God’s calling for his life completely; Christ is able to fulfill his purpose completely and perfectly.

It is because of this fulfillment of his divinely given purpose that he is given complete authority over heaven and earth—He is the only one who rightly deserves to rule over it all because he has been the only person to live sinlessly & righteously.

So there are a couple things going on here. Adam was created free of sin. While living in the garden his mission wasn’t simply to live without sin. No, God gave him a job to do which he couldn’t do. In that act of sin, he failed in the project of personal righteousness.

So let me tie all these thoughts together now.

God has programmed into creation that it go somewhere. He wanted to watch it progress, though we failed in that, in two related ways. Through Christ, he has fixed all our screw ups before God, but that only gets us back to square one. We still aren’t impressive, we haven’t done anything of worth. We still haven’t obeyed God in our life’s work, doing what he has divinely ordained for us to do. That is where Christ’s righteousness covers our inabilities to do good. He did do what he was supposed to do, he followed God’s plan all the way to and through the cross.

So our redeemed bodies have been purified of the impurities of sin, but it also is as if we have a jacket full of the medals of a five-star general—when we never got past private (before we went AWOL) on our own.