“Adam the First and Adam the Last” by Sinclair Ferguson

“Romans 5:12-21 helps us understand who we are. We do not need to make ourselves up. We have a bigger narrative than our own decisions, one that puts our lives in their most basic context.

Dark though aspects of it are, it gives us stability in a destabilized world. People are adrift on an ocean of atheistic world-and-life-views; governments and institutions spend almost incalculable amounts of money in trying to help us decide who we are.

It is just here that Scripture brings us into the light. We are people who by nature are “in Adam, but if we have become Christians, we are now “in Christ.” Asked who we are, we have this answer: “I am a man in Christ” or “I am a woman in Christ.”

Given this environment, it is perhaps not so surprising that Romans 5:12-21 presents us with a perspective with which even many Christians are unfamiliar and perhaps also find difficult to take in.

The basic reality undergirding our lives is that the whole of the history of the human race depends on what two men have done— Adam, the first man, and our Lord Jesus Christ, the second man; the first Adam, and the last Adam.

History is a tale of two unions—with Adam the First and Adam the Last. These verses constitute a theological tapestry of the whole of human history.”

–Sinclair B. Ferguson, Union with Christ: The Blessings of Being in Him (Sanford, FL: Ligonier, 2025), 39-40.