In the first installment of this series on the knowledge of man, the truth was set forth that man once walked with God in paradise. How glorious! How blissful it was when man walked with God as the friend-servant of Jehovah in the garden! Only Adam and Jehovah could have described how blissful that covenant fellowship was between God and man. Though earthly, it was indeed blessed beyond compare. No one besides Adam could have accurately described the experience of being the first man in paradise.

Man was created in the image of God, yet man was not God. Man was not equal to God in paradise, but man reflected God’s image. Though Adam was made perfect, it is undeniable that he was not perfect in the highest sense. Adam was perfect in only an earthly sense, and he had to guard himself from falling into sin. Adam was lapsible.

God had established covenant fellowship with Adam in paradise, and as a result Adam communed and walked with God. God is always first, and man is dependent upon God. Adam’s pre-fall state was insufficient to initiate or achieve greater life and covenant communion with God, even by Adam’s best works. He was just a man and nothing but a man. While I agree with Hoeksema, who wrote that Adam “lived a higher life, the life of God’s covenant in the fellowship of his friendship,”¹ Hoeksema was stating the fact that Adam was living a higher kind of life in comparison to the living creatures that roamed the earth. The viewpoint is the higher life in paradise—the earthly garden of Eden—but not beyond that. To go beyond that realm, Adam would have had to receive greater life, which things “eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, neither have entered into the heart of man” (1 Cor. 2:9), and which things are only possible in the person and work of Jesus Christ. Certainly Adam lived with God, but Hoeksema’s statement is not in any sense suggesting that Adam by his own obedience could have attained greater life and communion with God. Adam had no power to do that. Only God could give Adam that kind of life, whether yet in paradise or finally in the new heaven and earth. Adam was a mere man, regardless of what state he was in.

In the second installment of this series, we saw that this mere man almost immediately manifested his lapsible nature. Adam was perfect but able to sin. When Satan entered paradise, the man who was called to keep the garden listened to Satan’s lie and fell almost instantly. “A wicked doer giveth heed to false lips; and a liar giveth ear to a naughty tongue” (Prov. 17:4).

Because of his transgression, Adam was expelled from paradise and barred from communing with God at the tree of life. While Adam was in the garden, that tree testified to him that what he needed was God alone. Jehovah was Adam’s wisdom, strength, nourishment, blessedness, knowledge, holiness, and righteousness. Adam left God and all his good gifts in exchange for knowing good and evil. “Pride goeth before destruction, and an haughty spirit before a fall” (Prov. 16:18).

After the fall Adam had to beg from the ground for his provisions because of sin. The man who at one time had rested perfectly in God in the garden was cursed to work all his life until he returned to the dust. One simple act of sin ruined everything Adam had.

Adam plummeted so badly in the fall that all his posterity was left in spiritual ruin, and he was destitute of hope in his inescapable misery. All mankind inherits Adam’s guilt and corruption. There is nothing left for man but death in every sense. The life man has after the fall “is nothing but a continual death” (Form for the Administration of Baptism, in Confessions and Church Order, 258).

Nevertheless when Adam fell, he did so according to the eternal counsel of God in Jesus Christ. The fall happened not by chance but by the sovereign determination of Jehovah. While Adam’s sin was a transgression of God’s probationary law, it was indeed inevitable according to God’s eternal good pleasure.

Adam had to sin, so to speak. He had to sin according to the perfect determination of God. Adam and paradise were only ectypes of higher realities, of Jesus Christ and the consummation of all things in the new heaven and new earth.

Adam and paradise had to die so that Jesus Christ might be the firstfruits of those who sleep, so that in all things he might have the preeminence. Those who sleep had to be buried so that Jesus Christ might stand triumphantly over their graves. “O death, where is thy sting? O grave, where is thy victory?” (1 Cor. 15:55).

Of man’s first disobedience, and the fruit
Of that forbidden tree whose mortal taste
Brought Death into the world, and all our woe,
With loss of Eden, till one greater Man
Restore us and regain the blissful seat.²

Surely God’s justice had to be satisfied regarding fallen man, but God immediately gave his grace to him so that the first Adam’s personal fall into sin was not meant for his eternal damnation but for the revelation of the anticipated covenant promise of redemption for those who belong to the last Adam, Jesus Christ. God graciously revealed his covenant promise to Adam in the curse upon the infernal serpent. There we see that the first man had to decrease so that Jesus Christ might increase. In the way of sin—oh, how dreadful and shameful that way is—we see the embracing arms of the Lord, glorifying himself even in the pitch-dark places of his elect people’s misery, attesting to his electing love to save and redeem them while the majority of the human race perishes. The entrance of sin into the world was nothing but a passageway for his people’s salvation and God’s inscrutable and ineffable way of saying, “Where sin abounded, grace did much more abound: That as sin hath reigned unto death, even so might grace reign through righteousness unto eternal life by Jesus Christ our Lord” (Rom. 5:20–21). The fall happened in order to glorify Jesus Christ in the salvation of his people.

In the ruin of man, Adam only was to blame. His damnable deed made all that was good and fair beyond repair. Man plunged headlong into the pit of sin and death along with his posterity.

As all men have sinned in Adam, lie under the curse, and are deserving of eternal death, God would have done no injustice by leaving them all to perish and delivering them over to condemnation on account of sin (Canons of Dordt 1.1, in Confessions and Church Order, 155).

If it were not for God’s good pleasure to reveal Jesus Christ, the fall would have been the end of the human race. Apart from God’s grace, the elect are by nature a people beyond repair, and their state is totally hopeless and impossible. But God’s grace in Jesus Christ is far greater. God’s grace in Jesus Christ is grace upon grace. God’s people were saved by grace with the anticipation of the coming of the seed of the woman.

The fall inevitably served Jesus Christ; God ushered Christ into his work of redemption through the darkest way of sin, so that he might gloriously come as the light of the world. “The god of this world hath blinded the minds of them which believe not, lest the light of the glorious gospel of Christ, who is the image of God, should shine unto them” (2 Cor. 4:4). This world had to fall into a dark pit so that Jesus Christ only could shine with the radiant glory of the Father to perform salvation and damnation.

God is glorious in everything he does in eternity and in time. Eternally God seeks his glory in everything he does. When sin originated from the heavenly spirits and part of the host of angels rebelled against the majesty of God under the leadership of Satan, and when that sin was introduced into the world, God was not passive. God did not sit idly on his throne, waiting to react to whatever event might happen in heaven and on earth. God is ever active. Amid all apparently independent actions and energies in heaven and on earth, God actually moves and acts in undisturbed majesty. He controls and determines the course of every aspect of history above and below. God always is performing all things according “to the praise of the glory of his grace” (Eph. 1:6). Satan and his host rebelled against God, and while their purpose was to overthrow God’s authority and might, their rebellion unwittingly served God’s glory. The psalmist makes plain in the second psalm that any attempt of rebellion against Jehovah and his Christ is vain:

1. Why do the heathen rage, and the people imagine a vain thing?

2. The kings of the earth set themselves, and the rulers take counsel together, against the Lord, and against his anointed, saying,

3. Let us break their bands asunder, and cast away their cords from us.

4. He that sitteth in the heavens shall laugh: the Lord shall have them in derision. (Ps. 2:1–4)

God always receives the glory that he desires and he deserves, for he “sitteth in the heavens.” Satan’s rebellion was indeed a rankly blasphemous act. Satan wanted to glory in his own strength and wisdom, but God never gives his glory to anyone.

That God never gives his glory to anyone also holds true with the fall of Adam and Eve. Adam and Eve despised God’s glory and trusted in themselves. Their ears, eyes, hearts, hands, and mouths connived with Satan to overthrow God’s majesty. “Every one that is proud in heart is an abomination to the Lord: though hand join in hand, he shall not be unpunished” (Prov. 16:5). Jehovah sits in the heavens, and the glory infallibly belongs to him alone. All things are aimed at the glory of God.

God’s glory is his lofty desire and pleasure to always seek his praise, according to which he beholds himself as praiseworthy and beautiful in everything he does. Regarding the creatures, God’s glory is the end of all things in life and in death and in all eternity. The Westminster Shorter Catechism asks and answers: “What is the chief end of man? Man’s chief end is to glorify God, and to enjoy him forever.”³

Moreover, the Westminster Confession of Faith teaches that all things visible and invisible—angels and men—were made for the glory of the triune God:

It pleased God the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, for the manifestation of the glory of his eternal power, wisdom, and goodness, in the beginning, to create or make of nothing the world, and all things therein, whether visible or invisible, in the space of six days, and all very good.⁴

But God’s goal is not just his glory, but his goal is also “the praise of his glory” (Eph. 1:6). Despite the strong rebellion of Satan and man, God displayed his glory in a way that superseded all conceivable beauty. Praises shall always be paid whenever that glory appears. God’s pursuit of his own glory implies that he manifests himself in all beauty. God’s glory is praiseworthy. The content of God’s glory is the implication of all divine perfections. The eternal majesty of God and his infinite wisdom are clearly seen as exclusive perfections of Jehovah in his glory. Fully adorned with divine perfections, God is to be served by his creatures and worshiped by them. “Give unto the Lord the glory due unto his name: bring an offering, and come before him: worship the Lord in the beauty of holiness” (1 Chron. 16:29). “O worship the Lord in the beauty of holiness: fear before him, all the earth” (Ps. 96:9). “Out of Zion, the perfection of beauty, God hath shined” (Ps. 50:2).

No one can escape the truth of God’s praiseworthy glory and the duty to adore him as the glorious God. Whether wittingly or unwittingly, the very essence of his creatures is to reflect God’s glory, to serve God’s glory, and to adore God’s glory.

From the viewpoint of the fall, man consciously despised God’s glory. Man was not blameless. He made himself a vessel of dishonor. But in light of how God created man—for God’s glory and enjoyment—whether in the way of sin or in the way of obedience, man was created to serve that glory. “A man’s heart deviseth his way: but the Lord directeth his steps” (Prov. 16:9). God remained glorious and praiseworthy even when Adam fell. God did not need any recognition of his glory from a mere creature; God was glorious even in the way of sin. God was determined to glorify himself regardless of what means he was using.

Why does God have such a deep affection for his glory? Because God in himself is praiseworthy. God is gracious. Grace, aside from being an attribute of God and his power to save, means beauty. God’s beauty is praiseworthy.

When Paul says in Ephesians 1:6 “to the praise of the glory of his grace, wherein he hath made us accepted in the beloved,” he means that the purpose of all things is not just the glory of God but also the glory of God’s grace. What is being displayed by God in the creation and in his sovereign control of all things is the glorious grace of God to the end that his grace might be praised.

That grace and beauty of God that is being displayed is Jesus Christ, his Son, who is “the brightness of his glory, and the express image of his person” (Heb. 1:3). God is seeking his own glory for the praise of his grace because that grace is his beautiful face, and that beautiful face is Jesus Christ. The Lord declares, “He that hath seen me hath seen the Father” (John 14:9).

Jesus Christ is the express image of God. For this reason the image of God in Adam had to fail because Adam was not the express image of God. The image-bearer of God in paradise had to fall into sin because he was not the image of God. The fall paved the way for the express image of God. This became evident when right after the fall Jesus Christ was revealed as the seed of the woman. Jesus Christ is the ultimate image of God that God seeks.

The image of God!

The face of the living God!

The grace!

The beauty!

The salvation of his people!

Adam fell into sin, but the fall was directed by God in such a way that it served the very purpose of salvation. Jesus Christ was the end of all things. Since we are elected in him and accepted in the beloved “before the foundation of the world” (Eph. 1:4), even the rebellion that happened in heaven and entered our world, which same rebellion our first parents committed by the instigation of the devil in the fall, serves our salvation as it is established in the person of Jesus Christ.

To the praise of the glory of God’s grace!

Though man failed to glorify God in Jesus Christ, nevertheless God meant that failure, fall, transgression, and rebellion for the glory of his name in fulfilling salvation by and through Jesus Christ. God receives the glory that is due to his name.

God saves his people in spite of the fall, for in saving them lies the revelation of his glory. The fall not only underscored destruction but also salvation because Jesus Christ was meant to be glorified by God himself through the fall.

God directed the steps of man by his eternal counsel to glorify his Son, which counsel we cannot approach by either our thoughts or our imaginations. We cannot fully comprehend how God for his glory ordained the entrance of sin by the fall while leaving man without excuse as he despised the glory that God eternally seeks.

But let us humble ourselves before this incomprehensible God, and out of darkness let us see Jesus Christ, rising as the “Sun of righteousness” (Mal. 4:2) “to give light to them that sit in darkness and in the shadow of death” (Luke 1:79). Light after darkness. Post tenebras lux.

What a paradox!

A divine paradox of sin and grace!

God’s people are saved. Jesus Christ saved them, is saving them, and will surely save them. Rejoice! As David did in 2 Samuel 6:14, gird yourselves with a linen ephod and dance before Jehovah with all your might because salvation has come.

Nevertheless, keep in mind in all humility that though man now is saved and restored to the favor of Jehovah, he is yet insufficient. When will man be sufficient for anything spiritual and good? Man remains a sinner. He confesses from the depth of his heart, “This is a faithful saying, and worthy of all acceptation, that Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners; of whom I am chief” (1 Tim. 1:15). Even in his renewed state, man should never attempt to get even a shred of God’s glory for himself. Man still depends on God. Renewed man is what he is only because of the grace of God. All minute aspects of renewed man’s salvation are wrought by God for the sake of God’s own glory in Jesus Christ.

This I will treat in the next article, the Lord willing.