Wise human beings will be those who, in their weakness, learn to live dependently upon God. Appropriately, “O God our help” was sung at the funeral of Sir Winston Churchill in St Paul’s Cathedral. God certainly helped the nations of the World when He prepared and used that man to lead the resistance against the tyranny of Nazism threatening to engulf civilization at that time. Not that we could say that Churchill was a Christian in any evangelical sense, but God was at work through him nevertheless. God was conducting the nations through a time of great peril and this wartime leader among others was one of His key instruments in so doing. This truth helps illustrate an extremely important matter. Not only does God help His creation throughout its history; He uses incredibly varied ways to accomplish His purpose. He is at work, always. There is no cessation to His activity. He works on so many levels, things hidden and things seen, in government of nations and in the minute details of human lives. It is quite beyond our ability to catalogue all His gracious activity, only slowly shall the humble come to comprehend the truth that just as “without Him (that is Jesus) was not anything made that was made” (John 1:3); even so, “through Him all things hold together” (Colossians 1:17).
In Old Testament days God adopted one nation to be His special people. He brought them forth from father Abraham and became the objects of His care, privileged above all the other nations of the earth. He chose them because they were mean and of no account and He enriched them with the abundance of His grace. God began with Abraham not because of any attractiveness on his part. He was already old in years, a pagan idolater, ignorant of God and yet God, the God of glory appeared to him and the course of his life was forever changed (Acts 7:2 & Hebrews 11:8). What help God gave to His friend and the offspring that came from him. God blessed them with fruitfulness and they became a mighty nation saved by the Lord when He delivered them from the oppressive Egyptian slavery into which they had fallen. By His might and power God brought them to birth and bestowed wealth upon them overnight. He gave them the laws of His own Being written on tablets of stone and by this holy code they were to regulate their life together and if they did so they would become the head and not the tail. Promises were showered on them from God, the Lord Jehovah; who was in no way to be likened to the other gods worshipped by the nations around them. God was their glory and His presence was at the heart of their national existence and made them utterly distinct as a people. They were separated unto Him and uniquely blessed with His bountiful care. What help He gave them, dietary laws to keep them healthy, family honor to save them from sacrificing children to their gods as some other nations did. Moses sang of these multiplied gifts, promises and privileges in these poetic words, “There is none like God, O Jeshurun, who rises through the heavens to your help, through the skies in His majesty. The Eternal God is your dwelling place, and underneath are the everlasting arms. And He thrust out the enemy before you and said, Destroy. So Israel lived in safety, Jacob lived alone, in a land of grain and wine, whose heavens drop down dew. Happy are you, O Israel! Who is like you, a people saved by the Lord, the shield of your help, and the sword of your triumph! Your enemies shall come fawning to you and you shall tread upon their backs” (Deuteronomy 33:26-29).
God helped His chosen people in these multiplied ways but the help He gave did not reach their deep need at all. From Him they fell away and turned to worship the filthy gods of the nations. They committed spiritual adultery in their hearts and the center of their national life became defiled and foul. The laws of those gods became the law of their life together; a terrible fall from the gracious law and many other gifts God had bestowed upon them. The national degradation was appalling and the judgment that came from God grave in the extreme. As a people they simply replicated the fall begun in the garden by Adam and Eve. God gave and they rebelled and squandered the bounty He had given, throwing it back in His face. It is true that there was always a few of their number who believed God and looked to Him to provide that great help that would answer their deepest need. When would God come down and get to the root of it all and give them a new heart and a new spirit? These faithful ones understood that God their Helper had to do more, they had no resources to accomplish it their own self. If the knowledge of God was quickened among them for a season it proved to be short-lived, soon decline set in, it was as though the Adam way of life did not die, it simply declined only to revive again and reassert itself in an increased way at a later date.
Let us simply consider one aspect of the Adam way of life when he took of the fruit of the tree and ate. Along with his wife he acted in disobedience to God and the consequences were dire. Guilt and shame made the two, manufacturers of their own fig-leaf coverings, and they hid among the trees of the garden. As soon as God addressed them the blame shifting began and the notion of “I am a victim” surfaced. It has been around ever since. Adam blamed his wife and, in a backhand way blamed God Who had given her to him. His wife later blamed the serpent; no one took responsibility, save God Himself, in Christ. We must understand that the Adam life remained and was being perpetuated in and through his offspring. Blame shifting, excuse making and the culture of victim-hood remain with us today. Attempts to fabricate fig leaf aprons to cover our nakedness (although they have usually been more sophisticated since) are legion. Every effort is made to cover the sense of shame and guilt we feel in the sight of a God we know we are accountable to and yet search after and fear. It is true that Adam who had been made in the likeness of God in the beginning eventually died but not before fathering many children and they were all as his first born Seth who was brought forth after his own likeness and after his own image (Genesis 5:1-5). What sadness these words should provoke in our hearts. Man is a shadow of God’s original, a corrupted being with the image and the glory he enjoyed at the beginning now degraded and faded, replaced by a marred, sometimes pretentious, naked ruin, dead, but living on through the generations. Though dead Adam yet lived, passing on his characteristics to all his offspring and this is true in every family and nation; the image is undeniable, no one is exempt from Adam’s likeness.
All this was true until God came bringing mankind His greatest and most costly help. “God came down, He bowed the sky and made Himself our friend!” These are the words of one of the Wesley brothers. With joy they announce the coming of Jesus. Another Adam, He would initiate a line of new creatures, not like the old. This Adam came from heaven and there shall be no others for He is called “the Last Adam,” no other Adam’s are required. He accomplished the demise of the old and the beginning of the New. He is a life giving spirit whilst the first Adam was of the earth, earthly and a living soul alone (1 Corinthians 15:45-47). Both these Adams were garden men. They were men of the trees. The first hid away behind them, ashamed to bear the fearsome gaze of God, the other hung on a tree an object of shame and derision, naked and alone, rejected of men He (Jesus) bore the sin of the world away and in so doing brought the greatest help God has given to mankind. In Jesus God has given us a death to die, in Him Adam perished. Jesus became sin for us, He, the sinless One became the wretched man and bore that fallen race to death that it should be raised to newness of life in His resurrection. That species of man, the one that is forever passing the buck, blaming someone else for his problems, excusing himself and saying ‘poor me, poor me, it is not my fault, it is my heredity, I have been hurt and sinned against by others, all my problems are their fault” has been carried to his death in the cross of Christ. The man that refused to bear the blame died, Jesus became that man and took him to his death and burial. The old man who refused to accept responsibility for his own sin is dead, and not only dead, but buried. Jesus did it, and in Him we all died. God has given us a cross to die upon; He has accomplished it in His Son and this is the greatest help He has given us. Henceforth ‘I’ can die, it no longer needs to live on and on repeating Satan and Adam’s sin because ‘I’ has died in Christ and not only so, but ‘I’ has been given new life through Him alone. Jesus died on a tree; the cross sank into its socket in “the place of a skull” (Luke 23:33). No doubt this referred to its shape, reminding people of a skull, but nothing is by chance and we can rejoice that spiritually Jesus has given us His cross and the way of the cross can sink right down into our mind and ways of thinking so that the crucified life becomes natural to us even as it was and is to Him. The excuse making can end; the blame shifting can finish, we are able to repent and accept responsibility for ourselves receiving the sentence of death that leads to that newness of life that is in Jesus because we share in His death. We must not let the Adam attitude remain our way of living; a cross is given to us in Christ, a tree to hang upon and die. Now we need hide behind trees blaming others no longer. There is an end and a new beginning. God, the Divine Helper has made an end of the Adam man and a New Man pleasing to God is our heredity and home. “Jesus, Thy Cross is sweet to me, a gift unspeakably great” expresses it exactly.
