Did God create other people in addition to Adam and Eve?

As regards the single pair, Christ and His apostles, particularly Paul, speak of the first man and woman as alone; and all Paul's doctrine is based on it. I am aware that our Essayists, and all their party, think themselves far wiser than the apostles; but, as the same Paul says, "not he that commendeth himself is approved." I suppose they would have a little modesty as yet as to treating the Lord as a person of inferior wisdom; but the whole account in both chapters speaks, as the Lord says, of one man and one woman. He planted a garden, and there He put the man whom He had formed. He was alone, all the beasts subjected to him, but no companion; and then Eve taken out of his side: when fallen and driven out, he begets a son in his own image. It is not merely the doctrine of Paul, but the historical statement is as clear as possible. The fall and redemption are all set aside in the part of the essay I allude to.

114 I have already commented on the pretension that it is a second narrative. The whole subsequent history goes on the supposition that there was no other man. The whole moral meaning of the history is a brutum fulmen, if there were others. The history is written to shew an innocent man fallen and driven out, as the head of a race, from God. If this is not so, what does the history mean? Genesis is a book in which all the elements of the divine history are brought out, and anticipatively passed in review. In the first chapter the man is carefully spoken of in the singular, and then plural when the woman is added. It is quite evident that all kinds of traditions were afloat in the world as to creation, or formation rather; and when God called out a people, He informed them as to the origin of the world around them, put them into a right relationship to Himself as to it, and only spoke of it as far as that was needed; but did that, knowing everything and speaking according to that knowledge. We may rest in peace in that. Discoveries may interest us deeply, like the discovery of antiquities of Celts or Saxons in an old castle we live in. Our own relationship with God flows from the revelation He has made of Himself in Christ.

In the light of Gen. 1:27, it is sheer infidelity to speak of man as an evolution from some other being. Three times in this one verse the Spirit is pleased to use the word "created" in relation to man. Man is thus a work of God distinct from every other. The whole human family has sprung from a single pair, Adam being the federal head of the race. He is thus the type of Christ as head of a new race, i.e., of the whole company of those who believe the Gospel. The dream of pre-Adamic man is absolutely forbidden by 2 Cor. 15:45, not to mention other Scriptures. "The first man Adam" leaves no room for man in any form before him.

Man was created on the sixth day — last of all the works of God. The work of the sixth day (as that of the third) was in two parts, first cattle etc., then man (Gen. 1:24-31). In connection with the latter there was divine consultation. "Let Us make man in Our image, after Our likeness." When lower creatures were required it sufficed to say: "Let the waters bring forth … let fowl fly," etc., and the creatures required were forthwith alive upon the scene. The grave consultation recorded in Gen. 1:26 should of itself suggest to the most cursory reader that now a being of a different order from all others was to be brought into the world. Man is thus a distinct and independent creation, having no link whatever with beast, fish, or fowl. "Created" is repeated three times in v. 27, as if the Spirit of God would be beforehand with his rebuke of evolutionist absurdity. Moreover, Adam was the FIRST man. The whole structure of Holy Scripture falls to the ground if there were really men before, or independent of, Adam; for the entire volume of inspiration revolves around two men — the fallen first man Adam, and the peerless Second Man, the Lord Jesus (1 Cor. 15:45-47). One man and one stock is God's account of our race and its head. "He has made of one blood all nations of men … we are the offspring of God" (Acts 17:26-29). Such was the elementary lesson administered by Paul to the learned heathen in Athens.

It is not only that mankind sprang from a single pair created innocent as Adam and Eve were. A fresh start for the race began after the deluge which judged the guilty mass. From Noah and his three sons preserved from destruction, conditions began which subsist today and will for their descendants till, with the clouds of heaven, the Son of man come to Whom shall be given dominion, and glory, and a kingdom, that all peoples, and languages should serve Him. His dominion is an everlasting dominion which shall not pass away, and His kingdom that which shall not be destroyed. So recent comparatively is the history of man, and his tripartite separation of land and tongue, family and nation. For instead of beginning with a single line, we have three heads with their wives, three great families to renew the history of man on earth with the experience derived from the antediluvian earth.

Man was God's crowning work of creation (see ADAM), and He set him in dominion over the sphere in which he was placed. It is impossible that man could by evolution have arisen from any of the lower forms of created life. God breathed into Adam's nostrils the breath of life, and man is responsible to Him as his Creator; and for this reason he will be called to account, which is not the case with any of the animals. "It is appointed unto men once to die, but after this the judgement." Heb. 9:27. All have descended from Adam and Eve: God "hath made of one blood all nations of men for to dwell on all the face of the earth, and hath determined the times before appointed, and the bounds of their habitation; that they should seek the Lord [or God]." Acts 17:26-27.

1871 194 I desire to express a few thoughts to your readers on some of the various groupings of the scriptures. Every one, for example, must have been struck with the family circle at Bethany, and the outflow of divine and human affections which made that scene of resurrection, power, and life, what it was — but that Lazarus, was a man who came forth from death and the grave. What was true and suitable, when the time was come for Jesus, as "the resurrection and the life" to form the centre of that circle was equally in keeping with the ways of God as Creator, when the man and the woman were originally introduced into the world, as the heads of the whole human race, and when God walked in the garden of Eden in the cool of the day. This man came out of the dust of the earth, and was called therefore Adam. The woman was formed out of the man and was called Eve, or "the mother of all living." How different!

In the word of God, the incarnation of the Son is recorded, not as a creation, but as a birth: we read that “the birth of Jesus Christ was on this wise..." (Matt. 1:18; 2:1). God created Adam the first man, but Eve gave birth to Cain and Abel (Gen. 1:27; 4:1, 2). In the case of Adam, life in maturity was directly bestowed by Jehovah upon the inanimate dust of the ground, of which man was formed by his Creator; but in the case of Cain and Abel, their infant life was received by transmission from their living parents. And the whole of Adam's race to this day began their being in a similar manner.

Who and what, then, was Cain? Simply Adam reproduced. Adam "begat … in his own likeness, after his image" (Gen. 5:3). "In the day that God created man, in the likeness of God made He him" (Gen. 5:1). This likeness, alas, was marred by the Fall, and it was not until he was a fallen creature that Adam begat "in HIS OWN likeness. He reproduced his fallen self both morally and physically. Hence from the point of view of this passage in 1 Corinthians 15 there was nothing but "the first man" until the appearance of Christ, who is the second. Adam was a marvellous and complex being, and every one of his millions of descendants during that time was an individual with characteristics, that showed on the surface, if we may so put it, some fresh permutation or combination of the many features which make up the Adamic nature; yet fundamentally all were one in both nature and character.

Now scientific experiments seem to show us increasingly that there are many hidden features and potentialities in any given species, whether of animals or plants. No one specimen exhibits all the features of the species. That is equally true with men. No one man expresses all that is in man. Today we have the Adamic race, having run perhaps through two hundred generations, and numbering roundly two thousand million; so we begin to see working out in humanity all the features that were in Adam, when as a fallen man he became the progenitor of the human race.

So again he speculates that man sinned before he was born, "and that that alone can account for the statement that we were born in sin!" Was there ever greater infatuation? Adam and Eve were not born at all, still less born in sin; but having sinned before being parents, they transmitted the taint to the race. This is a fact that explains the truth to all believers. God created an innocent pair, who did sin and left the sad heirloom to their children. Can any thing be simpler or more satisfactory Not men as such, but believers are called "pilgrims" in scripture. The faithless are of the world, and at home on the earth.