What the heroes of the Old Testament teach us about Jesus, part I: Adam

Anyone who has read the Old Testament knows it can be difficult to understand. But in Luke 24.27, Jesus taught his disciples that everything in “all the Scriptures” teaches about himself. Much could be said about how the various narratives, poetry, and prophecies in the Old Testament point to Jesus, the coming Messiah, but in this six-part series, let us look at just a few examples of what the heroes of the Old Testament teach us about Jesus.

The very first hero in the Bible is Adam. But after reading Adam’s story (Genesis 1.26-3.24), you might think to yourself: he cannot be the first hero in the Bible – he is not really a hero at all! He is given a beautiful, perfect world, but he ruins everything. He is anything but a hero.

If you think that, then you understand Adam’s story perfectly. In literary terms, Adam is the quintessential tragic hero. Tragedy starts high, with a noble person in a state of peace and happiness, but that person’s situation rapidly deteriorates – usually because of some lack of knowledge or understanding – and he ends up utterly ruined.

Examples of classic tragedies include Sophocles’s Oedipus Rex; Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Othello, and Romeo and Juliet, among several others; modern plays like Henrik Ibsen’s A Doll’s House, Tennessee Williams’s A Streetcar Named Desire, and Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman; and films like The Alamo and Bridge on the River Kwai. Adam’s story certainly belongs at the top of the list:

1. He was made in the image of God (Genesis 1.16-27), but he caused that image to be marred by sinfulness. In many ways, he became more a reflection of the serpent than of God.

2. He was given a chance to ‘be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it’ (1.28), but instead of being the father of a fruitful, productive people, he became the father of sin and destruction, passing it along to all who come after him.

3. He was given a beautiful bride – look how he sings about her in 2.23! But instead of preserving and protecting her, he stood silently by and allowed her to fall into sin (3.6) and then blamed her for his own sin (3.12).

4. He was given paradise: see how the beautiful garden is described in 2.8-14. But instead of tending and nourishing it, he turned it into wasteland: 3.17-19.

This is the true tragedy of tragedies: God’s own representative, made in his image to be like him as he governs the world, has turned his back on God and become a source of sin and cursing rather than of goodness and blessing. Because of Adam, the perfect, wonderful world has been cursed and the beautiful bride has been corrupted.

Why would God let this happen? If he knew Adam was going to ruin everything like this, why did he create the world at all?

The answer is that he had a better plan in mind all along: he allowed Adam to ruin everything in order to demonstrate the glory of the one who is greater than Adam: Jesus.

Everything that Adam destroyed, Jesus restores. And he does not simply restore, but rather he makes these things far better than they ever were:

1. Jesus bears the image of God in that he is God himself in human flesh. Unlike Adam, he does not allow that image of God to be marred by sin, even though he was “in every respect . . . tempted as we are, yet without sin” (Hebrews 4.15). Instead, he takes the most sinful and corrupt things in the world – human hearts – and makes them clean again.

2. Unlike Adam, who was the father of a sinful people, Jesus is the father of a holy people, a people who will carry out God’s command to “fill the earth and subdue it” by obeying Jesus’ words, “Go and make disciples of all nations.” Jesus’ people are described as “a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people for his own possession, that you may proclaim the excellencies of him who called you out of darkness into his marvelous light. Once you were not a people, but now you are God's people; once you had not received mercy, but now you have received mercy” (1 Peter 2.9-10).

3. Unlike Adam, who allowed a perfect, beautiful bride to be ruined, Jesus took a corrupt, unfaithful bride and made her pure and beautiful again. The New Testament repeatedly calls the church “the bride of Christ.” That bride was once marred by sin, but she has now been made holy and beautiful again.

4. Unlike Adam, who took God’s perfect world and ruined it, Jesus will take this cursed world and create a new heavens and earth that far exceeds this one: “Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth, for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away, and the sea was no more. And I saw the holy city, new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband. And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, ‘Behold, the dwelling place of God is with man. He will dwell with them, and they will be his people, and God himself will be with them as their God. He will wipe away every tear from their eyes, and death shall be no more, neither shall there be mourning nor crying nor pain anymore, for the former things have passed away.’ And he who was seated on the throne said, ‘Behold, I am making all things new.’” (Revelation 21.1-5).

Jesus is the new Adam, only he is infinitely greater than the first. Only Jesus can undo the tragedy that grips our world and even our souls. He has created a new world, a new bride, a new people, a new image of God given to man, and each is even better than the first.

Embryo Adoption: Questions Answered

Published in Christian Renewal magazine, 12 Sept 2007

In the December 13, 2006 edition of Christian Renewal, I described my family’s experience with embryo adoption(see also here). There are more 400,000 frozen embryos in the United States left over from in-vitro fertilization procedures. Thanks to our own often-difficult experience infertility, my wife and I had the opportunity to adopt three of those embryos. Only one survived: our beloved son, Iain, who has recently celebrated his first birthday.

I will never forget how strange embryo adoption sounded when we first heard about it, nor all the difficult questions we had to sort through as we considered it. Since we have been asked many of these same questions in response to our story, perhaps it would be helpful to offer some answers.


Does in-vitro fertilization always threaten embryonic life?

One of the main reasons my wife and I chose to adopt an embryo rather than try in-vitro fertilization (IVF) is that there are several standard IVF practices that would be objectionable to anyone who believes, as we do, that even the smallest embryo is a human being. In order to increase their success rates, which in turn enable them to attract more customers, IVF clinics do a number of things to sift out which embryos are more likely to survive, and these practices can result in the destruction of embryos. My wife and I were not willing to risk that our children would be exposed to such practices, so we were unwilling to try IVF as a solution to our infertility.

However, IVF can be done in a way that respects human life. Doctors could fertilize only as many eggs as they are willing to implant, which would prevent leftover embryos from being cryogenically frozen. They could transfer all the fertilized embryos regardless of their ‘quality’, giving each one a chance at life instead of being discarded. With each decision that might place human life in jeopardy, doctors could choose to act in such a way that safeguards it.

Why, then, are such tests and procedures common practice? Simply put, doctors generally do not regard embryos as human beings. Consequently, their policies and choices are based on increasing their success rate.

There are, however, some few clinics that are willing to follow the parents’ preferences over their own standard procedures. These clinics might be difficult to find, but there are some. Also, certain nations – for example, Italy – have strict laws governing IVF practices that protect human life. Consequently, IVF tends to be done well in such countries.

So although those who believe that human life begins at conception might have certain problems with common IVF practices, those problems are attributable to the doctors who practice IVF and are not intrinsic to IVF itself.

Can the transfer of multiple embryos cause unnecessary problems?

In either IVF or embryo adoption, multiple embryos, usually three, are transferred in an effort to increase the probability of successful pregnancy. Usually only one of these embryos successfully implants. Very rarely do two implant, and the likelihood of all three implanting is next to nil.

This survival rate gave us pause: if typically only one in three embryos are successfully transferred, then do IVF and embryo adoption unnecessarily threaten life? We were surprised to learn, however, that the survival rates for natural pregnancies are along very similar lines to what eventually happened with our embryo adoption: one of our embryos did not implant at all, the second implanted but did not develop, and the third is our now-baby boy. Since natural pregnancy has roughly these same proportions of “success,” IVF and embryo adoption do not unnecessarily threaten life.

Another risk associated with the transfer of multiple embryos is the health of the mother and babies. As IVF procedures have increased over the last thirty years, so has the number of multiple pregnancies – twins, triplets, and more. Such multiple pregnancies have increased risk for the health of the mother and for the children. Consequently, many doctors encourage women carrying multiple babies to undergo “selective reduction,” which means the killing and extraction of one or two babies in order to protect the life of the mother and other babies.

Although IVF has caused an increase in the number twins and triplets, pregnancies of more than that are almost always caused by other, non-IVF reproductive medicine, such as using drugs to stimulate ovulation. As medically caused multiple pregnancies have increased over the past thirty years, so has the ability to care for mothers and babies in those situations.

Especially given this medical development, I cannot think of any reason why selective reduction would be absolutely necessary to protect the life of a mother or baby. It is most often done simply out of a desire to have fewer children than one is carrying. This motivation is morally shocking and repugnant. If human life begins at conception, as has been argued elsewhere, then selective reduction is no different than someone killing a toddler to reduce his family size.

Anyone who undergoes fertility treatment knows that it can result in a multiple pregnancy. If someone is unwilling to carry multiple children, then she should not undergo fertility treatment. It is far better to exercise wisdom before such a choice than to so brutally correct it afterward.

The embryos associated with embryo adoption are often created in morally questionable circumstances. Does embryo adoption encourage this?

Our embryo adoption falls into this category as it involved an egg donation. While my wife and I think these kinds of practices raise serious moral questions, the fact that the three embryos we adopted were created in such circumstances did not bother us for even a moment.

Embryo adoption does not involve theoretical children being possibly created, somewhere and at some point. These embryos are real human beings who already exist, whether we approve of their circumstances or not. No one doing a regular adoption would ask whether a child in an orphanage was conceived under morally pure circumstances before accepting that child. The child exists through no fault of its own, and in both regular and embryo adoptions, our first question should be, what am I going to do about it?

If more couples adopt embryos, does this create a new “market” for them, thus encouraging the very kind of thing embryo adoption seeks to prevent?

That is, my wife and I chose to adopt an embryo instead of trying IVF because we objected to some common IVF practices. If more and more couples – specifically Christian couples, perhaps – adopt embryos, does it encourage clinics to produce more embryos, knowing they have a new market that would adopt them to prevent them from being destroyed?

First, embryo adoption would not likely encourage increased production of embryos. Since clinics’ practices are dictated by an attempt to increase success rates, and since they almost universally do not consider embryos to be human beings, most clinics are already producing as many embryos as they can without regard to who is adopting them.

Second, even if embryo adoption did have some stimulus effect on embryo production, the now-existing embryos are human beings who already exist. Are we to let them perish in the name of discouraging questionable medical practices? The Christians of the first centuries did not ask whether their adoption of the abandoned children of Rome would encourage Roman parents to continue the practice. Instead, they saw human life in jeopardy and acted to preserve it.

Embryo adoption is a similar situation. These embryos are no different than the abandoned children of Rome. In either case, adoption is nothing more than obeying the repeated and strong biblical admonition to care for the fatherless. Further, the two are not mutually exclusive: we can be vocal and active in opposition to objectionable practices while at the same time acting to save life.

There is some degree of urgency about embryo adoption: the longer these children are left frozen, the less likely it is that they will survive. Consequently, the preservation of life should not be left until we have all the ethical issues sorted out. These are human beings who already exist and whose lives are in jeopardy; the biblically appropriate response to such a situation is plain.

At what stage in the embryo adoption process do the embryos become ‘our’ children? And how will they react to their own story – and to that of their siblings who did not survive the embryo adoption?

These questions are more difficult to answer. I do not know at what stage Iain became our son. Was it when he became legally ours – that is, when the property transfer contract was signed – when he was transferred, when he implanted, or at some other point? There is no clear-cut answer, but I think the same is true with any adoption: does the child become a part of that family at the time of the referral, when the paperwork was completed, or when the child is first in his new parents’ arms? I do not know, but I do know that by God’s grace, Iain is my son.

Only time will tell how Iain reacts to his story. We know another family who adopted an embryo several years ago. They were among the first to do so, and their campaigning against embryonic stem cell research has taken them even to the White House. Their son knows his story but seems just like any other boy, though he is still young.

Other kinds of adoption again come to mind. An adopted embryo’s story might be unusual, but it is still an adoption story. There are elements of both loss and grace in every adoption story. In so many ways that reflects the gospel itself, and we believe that is what makes them so beautiful: the fatherless is orphaned no more, what was once lost has been found, and what was once empty has been filled. It is beautiful and glorious.

We hope our son will react to his story in much the same way as other adopted children do and that he will someday come to understand his adoption in light of his adoption into the family of God.

--------------------------------

Embryo adoption is not for everyone. With any such decision, it can be very difficult to sort through all the facts, lay aside all the desires and emotions, and make the wisest, most God-honoring decision possible.

That being said, embryo adoption is the kind of thing that Christians should be doing. We cannot forget that embryos are human beings, made in the image of God, and when human life is threatened, Christians are obligated to intervene. While not everyone can and should adopt an embryo, all Christians should support and encourage those whom God has called to do so.

In a Vineyard with the True Vine: Thoughts on the Christian Life in Southern France

Published in Christian Renewal magazine, 22 August 2007

I recently returned from a trip to the south of France, where my family had been invited to stay ten days at a friend's house. We made the most of our sightseeing opportunities, travelling east as far as Monaco, south as far as Figueres in Spain, and west as far as Andorra.

Before we travelled, I knew very little of Languedoc, the region of France in which we were staying. I learned while I was there that it is the biggest wine-producing region in the world. In 2001, more wine was produced there than in the entire United States. The drive from the airport to the house was memorable: as the sun was setting, we drove up a country road through miles and miles of vineyards, which stretched on either side as far as we could see.

The Languedoc-Roussillon region spans the Mediterranean coastline from the Pyrenees mountains at the Spanish border to the Rhone River in Provence. It is hilly, even mountainous in some areas, with wide, flat valleys stretching between the ridges. It is also very dry. Outside of the rainy winter months, the reddish earth cracks for lack of water. The plains near the coast are the hottest and most arid regions of France.

Languedoc's wines have been considered of the highest quality for centuries. In the 1300s, some French doctors prescribed them for their "healing powers." During the nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth, the region was a center of France's various republican movements, and its vine growers shifted production toward wine for the "common man." Since the mid-twentieth century, however, the region has again shifted production toward higher quality wines.

It would be impossible to know exactly how many vines grow in Languedoc. Greek settlers planted the region's first grapes in the fifth century B.C., and some of those original vineyards exist to this day. Vineyards cover the broad, flat valleys and are scattered around the largest of the Cévennes mountains and terraced up the hills of the smaller ones. The backyard gardens of the local residents nearly always contain a few vines. They even grow in neatly planted rows in the middle of roundabouts on the roadways. The vineyards on the Côte Vermeille – where the mighty Pyrenees meet the majestic Mediterranean, with each natural beauty magnifying the other – are said to be the world's most difficult to harvest as they are terraced up the steep slopes from the water's edge to the mountaintops.

One morning during our stay, I was awakened even earlier than usual by the town bells, which seem to be omnipresent in the small towns of southern France. The bells ring around the clock: twice on the hour, just to be sure you know the time, and once on the half-hour. And at seven-thirty every morning (except Sundays), the bell rings several dozen times – a downright cacophony! – to tell everyone to get to work. We found the bells pleasant and quaint during the day, but somewhat of a nuisance to the unaccustomed at night.

The sunrise was barely beginning when I awoke, and I decided to take a walk. I walked out of our small town and into the surrounding vineyards. It was still mostly dark – there was only just enough light to find my way. As I rambled for an hour or so, that first hint of dawn bloomed into a full morning light. I picked and ate a few syrah grapes as I walked. Some were still green and not yet ripe; they were bitter, but still worth trying. Others were deeply purple and just right. They were the juiciest and most flavorful grapes that I have ever tasted.

I also read and pondered John 15 as I walked. "I am the true vine," Jesus said. He describes his people as branches on that true vine. He taught about the importance of abiding and bearing fruit once one is made a part of the true vine, and that the fruit the branches produce proves them to be disciples, friends, and those who truly love him.

It is too easy for Christians to forget about bearing fruit. We daily overlook the extent of our sinfulness and justify our shortcomings, as if they are just little things. We so often forget how much these "little" sins grieve our Savior and how destructive they are of his Kingdom and of ourselves. I was greatly convicted of my fruitlessness as I walked through those vineyards.

However, it is also too easy to turn our faith into moralism – that is, to make it seem as if our salvation depends on how well we live the Christian life. Whereas the true gospel says, "It has been done – salvation is found in Christ's work alone," moralism teaches, "It must be done – salvation depends on trying harder and doing better."

In John 15:3-4 Jesus says, "You are already clean because of the word I have spoken to you. Abide in me and I in you." His entire discussion of bearing fruit presupposes a preceding cleanliness; it assumes that his people have already been made holy, at least to some degree. That is, it presupposes his own saving work already begun in their hearts.

Finding the balance between resting in the finished work of Jesus and striving toward the unfinished work of becoming holy is probably the most difficult aspect of the Christian life. We swing like a pendulum from one side to the other, one moment trying desperately to please God by our works and the next "resting" in Christ and lazily ignoring our own sins. Wrestling with this balance has caused quite a few theological controversies through the years, but perhaps this wrestling is what it means to work out our faith with fear and trembling.

The good news is that it is God who is at work within us. The same divine power that brought about our justification will one day bring about our sanctification. We will be made fully, perfectly, and beautifully holy even though we can never achieve that end on our own. We should never despair, for he who has begun the work will assuredly complete it – he has, in fact, vowed that he will.

Praise be to God that we have been grafted into the one true vine, and thanks be to him that he prunes mercifully. "I call upon the LORD, who is worthy to be praised, and I am saved . . ."