Were Adam and Eve saved?

Ans. — That alone would not, for it might have been done simply as a type of what to us is salvation. But in calling his wife Eve (Gen. 3:20) Adam shows his faith in God's testimony concerning the promised Seed of the woman (v.15), and wherever there is true faith in what God reveals, there is salvation. The measure of spiritual intelligence depends upon the measure of the revelation given, and received in the heart; but whatever the measure of the revelation, the believing God is salvation. Abraham believed God's promise of a son when he was old and childless; “He believed the Lord, and it was counted to him for righteousness” (Gen.15:3-6).

It was thus in the story of Adam at the very beginning. He was tested, and under the testing he failed, and destroyed himself; he was then taken up in grace, and saved through the death and resurrection of Christ — by faith in the bruised and bruising Seed of the woman.

8 But there are some very interesting circumstances to note in connection with the judgment under which man had fallen. We have seen that Adam fled from the presence of God. The judgment pronounced upon him, upon Adam and Eve (Gen. 3:14-19) is an earthly judgment, not a judgment of the soul. Adam, and Eve also, are placed in a state of misery, and under the yoke of suffering and death. Before being driven out, Adam, by faith, as it seems, recognises life in the place wherein death had entered (Gen. 3:20); but there is more; there is the promise made to the woman, of the seed which should bruise the serpent's head: the Christ, seed of the woman by whom evil entered into the world, was to destroy all the power of the Enemy. Then as sin had destroyed innocence, and given, through the shame of nakedness, a conscious sense of its loss, God Himself, by causing death to intervene, clothed Adam and his wife, and covered their nakedness (Gen. 3:21). Before this, there was unconsciousness of evil; now evil is known, but is covered by God's own act. Man had sought to hide his sin from himself; but when he hears God's voice, his fig-leaves are nothing worth; they are of no avail to an awakened conscience in the presence of God: "I hid myself," he said, "for I was naked." So also before driving him out, God did not restore his innocence, which indeed was impossible; He did better: He clothed Adam and his wife, so that He might see His own work, that is, what was suited to Him in the state in which they were, accomplished by Him in His grace, besides the crushing of him who had led them into evil. Still man was driven out of the garden, where he had enjoyed all God's blessings without faith, to till the ground, to die, and until death to be separated from the God who before had walked in the cool of the day in the garden where he had dwelt. Man, thenceforth, knew God only by faith, if faith was in his heart - a new, all-important principle: he had lost God, had acquired a conscience, and, if he could, must live in painful toil to gain a temporal subsistence; he must find God, if he could; but he was from thenceforth outside the precincts which God frequented, and where His abundant blessings were dispensed without suffering or labour. Man had fled from God's presence, and God had driven him out. Adam was no longer in the relation in which God had formed him to be with Himself, either as to the state of his soul, or judicially: he was in sin. I repeat, man had fled from the presence of God, and God had driven him from the position in which He had placed him when He created him; he was estranged from God with a bad conscience, knowing God just enough to be afraid of Him, having learned however that the seed of the woman should bruise the serpent's head, and being clothed by the grace and the work of God in a garment that bore witness to death, but which, as coming from God, covered, and that perfectly, the nakedness, the consciousness of which was the expression of man's fall and of his state of sin. Man was now outside - could he enter, anywhere, into God's presence to adore Him, to be morally with Him whom he had forsaken?

So we find here the man and his wife hid themselves from the presence of Jehovah Elohim in the midst of the trees of the garden. No more flagrant proof could well be of the mischief the enemy had wrought. The wiles of the mighty and subtle Satan had drawn the first pair into rebellion, and their instant attempt to conceal themselves was the unmistakable evidence of it. They "hid themselves from the presence of Jehovah Elohim." Had there been the least working of repentance, they had sought Him in self-reproach and horror at their sin, they had cast themselves in confession on a mercy which endures for ever. But there is no genuine repentance without faith, and faith in Him was wholly wanting. The voice of Him as He walked in the garden alarmed them, and they hid themselves away from Him.

It was too plain. They had believed Satan, they had forgotten and rebelled against God. In both the sin was aggravated. The man was bound to lead the woman aright, not to follow her in disobedience; the woman was not to direct but obey her husband, instead of inducing him from natural affection to join her transgression against the Lord God Who had blessed and warned them. Nor as yet was there repentance toward God. They were convicted and compelled to own their respective acts of sin; but there was no true self-judgment, no grief at their dishonour of God, no horror at the evil and their own guilt. On the contrary, there was the self-justification that proves the spirit unbroken, and the shiftings of the blame one on another, and even on God Himself.

Such a work as the recovery of a lost sinner He had never previously undertaken. The sentence pronounced against the sinner cannot be cancelled or recalled. It must be executed. But how then can the sinner be saved? It is in the garden this great secret begins to leak out. Here the problem is solved, at least in type. The judgment that rested on them falls upon a victim that dies in their stead. The clothing for the two naked sinners is found through death, and the victim that died for them becomes their covering under the eye of God. Here we see the mighty intervention of God in grace, and here we see the way of salvation set forth. Adam and His wife do nothing but submit themselves to the mercy of God. And regarding any poor penitent sinner, there is nothing be can do but confess in the words of the well-known hymn— “Nothing in my hand I bring, Simply to Thy cross I cling. Naked, come to Thee for dress, Helpless, look to Thee for grace; Vile I to the Fountain fly: Wash me, Saviour, or I die.”

He made the coats and He clothed them. Who else could have done it? Who other than God could have invented the salvation of which this was a simple figure? In whom else could the grace and compassion for such a work have been found? Was there a creature in the heavens above who at that moment beheld in vision the anti-type of that work of God? What must the devil have thought of it? Could be have connected it with the word still ringing in his ears, “It shall bruise thy head, and thou shalt bruise His heel.” What did Adam and his wife think of it? Is it not almost a certainty that they saw in this gracious work of the Lord, that the judgment of their sin must be executed, but in grace another will bear it?

Although, then, the Lord's address to the woman afterwards speaks of nothing but pain and humiliation, and to the man himself of toil and suffering and death, yet we read immediately upon this that "Adam called his wife's name 'Eve' [or Life'], because she was the mother of all living." Life he apprehends, according to the divine announcement, to be in the woman connected by grace with her victorious Seed; weakness and evil in her thus met and triumphed over, while the headship of the first man is set aside. Adam bows, then, to this sentence, while in faith he receives the mercy; and it is upon this that we find God significantly replacing the inadequate apron of fig-leaves, the first human manufacture, with the coats of skins, the fruit of death itself, now made to minister to their need, and by divine gift, not by human acquisition. We may thus very clearly see how God accepts the faith of Adam, and in this clothing, how the shame of our moral nakedness is put away forever, clothed, in divine mercy, with Christ Himself, as the fruit of His death for us.

Scripture is decisive in showing that judgment is always the opportunity of grace. God gave coats of skin to Adam and Eve, who had vainly tried to hide their misery: and the moment they accepted their sentence of death as the wages of sin (for “Enos” means “mortal”) they were able to call upon Jehovah, even though banished from the garden; and their relations with God were reset upon the footing of grace. (Gen. 4:26.)

In what measure, can we exactly say? Adam's naming his wife Eve, the mother of all living, is surely an utterance of faith. Abel's offering, as we learn from Heb. 11:4, was an action of faith. On what revelation were these based? In the doom pronounced upon the serpent, we can read the forecast of a wondrous deliverance, and the darkness of judgment is relieved by that light of mercy, a veritable silver lining to a dark cloud, if ever there was one. God's action in clothing the guilty pair with skins of animals, implying death, has also significance for us. Whether for them also, or whether these constituted the whole truth for them or not, there was, at any rate, sufficient material for faith to build upon right through those early days.

Thus does his faith lay hold on God, — the faith of a poor sinner surely, to whom divine mercy had come down without a thing in him to draw it out, save only the misery which spoke to the heart of infinite love. Like Abraham, afterward "he believed God," and while to the sentence he bows in submissive silence, the grace enclosed in the sentence opens his lips again. Beautifully are we permitted to see just this in Adam, a faith which left him a poor sinner still, to be justified, not by works, but freely of God's grace, but still put him thus before God for justification. And we are ready the more to apprehend and appreciate the significant action following: "Unto Adam also, and to his wife, did the Lord God make coats of skin, and clothed them." Thus the shame of their nakedness is removed, and by God Himself, so that they are fit for His presence; for the covering provided of Himself must needs be owned as competent by Himself. And we have only to consider for a moment to discern how competent it really was.