Hebrews Chapter Two, Destroying The Devil

 

Hebrews 2:14 Inasmuch then as the children have partaken of flesh and blood, He Himself likewise shared in the same, that through death He might destroy him who had the power of death, that is, the devil, [15] and release those who through fear of death were all their lifetime subject to bondage.

 

We read in a parallel passage, “The first man was of the earth, made of dust; the second Man is the Lord from heaven. As was the man of dust, so also are those who are made of dust; and as is the heavenly Man, so also are those who are heavenly. And as we have borne the image of the man of dust, we shall also bear the image of the heavenly Man,” 1 Corinthians 15:47-49.

When Jesus was first born, He was not in His glorified body yet, for He had not been killed, buried, and raised from the dead yet. He partook of the flesh and blood you and I share, save for one vital difference: He was without sin. In this instance one might say that He was more akin to Adam prior to the Fall than to Adam post-Fall. Before sin the curse (and therefore death) did not exist, and therefore Adam did not have to suffer death. Jesus related that none had claim to His life; He alone had power to lay it down and take it up again, John 10:18. In essence, our Savior did not need to suffer death for His own sin. Rather, His intention was to surrender His life for our sake, John 10:11.

 

Paul clarifies that Adam’s body, comprised of dust, or the constituent elements of the ground, and did not have life until God breathed it into him. God shared His life with Adam, so Adam was spiritually alive courtesy of the life God imparted to him. Likewise Christ was conceived not by human copulation but divine interposition, Luke 1:35. Paul makes a subtle but distinct observation between Jesus and us. He writes that Christ came, “in the likeness of sinful flesh, on account of sin,” Romans 8:3. Elsewhere he states that Jesus took, “the form of a bondservant, and [came] in the likeness of men,” Philippians 2:7. He is the unique Seed of the woman that would bruise the serpent’s head, Genesis 3:15. While we are sinners by choice and by nature, Jesus our Lord is neither. Though in our likeness, He did not come in sinful flesh, but through the power of a sinless life He would do away with the issue of sin and its attendant curse for all time.

 

We are inheritors of Adam’s likeness and sin nature, Genesis 5:3, 1 Corinthians 15:21, 22. Yet this same passage says that while we do share Adam’s likeness, through the resurrection we may partake of Christ’s likeness. We may be, by faith, reborn into the image of the last Adam or the heavenly Man. This does not mean identicalness; this infers affiliation. Through Adam as our head we bear a body that is decaying, betraying the absence of spiritual life that was lost when our first parents sinned. In Christ, or through Him, we can have new life, spiritual life through faith and recover what was lost in Eden. That, and so much more. But before we could be remade in the image of Him who created us, our Lord suffered the ignominy of taking on our likeness to become the representative of the race. If Adam represented humanity in our sin and rebellion, Christ symbolized newness of life.

 

Sin was forgiven; the rebellion was pardoned on account of Him. The life God breathed into Adam to make him alive was given through faith in the One who died for us. The Holy Spirit quickens us, or makes us alive in a spiritual sense. This new life, acquired through faith, abides in us, contrary to our old life, our sin nature, which still exists beside it and is often at war with it. But since sin was condemned and punished, so too must the sin nature and its flesh go with it in due time. But the new nature, the second birth given us through faith in Jesus, is eternal. God imparted life to Adam; Adam shared God’s breath to be brought alive. When he sinned that life departed because a holy God cannot abide sin. The absence of spiritual life brought physical decay and eventually, physical death as the record in Genesis attests. Adam lived a very long life: nearly one thousand years, or the span of time Christ will reign from David’s throne. But die he did, and physical death is his legacy for everyone born of him.