Livro Expositions

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THE DIVINE ROOT OF THE HUMAN PEDIGREE. Adam, who was the son of God.?Luke iii. 38. The pedigree of our Lord, as given by the Evangelist of the Gentiles, ends with a wonderful leap, a leap from earth to heaven.

Noah was the son of Lamcch, Lamcch the son of Methuselah, Methuselah the son of Enoch, Enoch of Jared, Jared of Mahalaleel, Mahalaleel of Cainan, Cainan of Enos; Enos was the son of Seth, Seth was the son of Adam, Adam was the son of?God.

There is no bolder word in Scripture, none that strikes us with a deeper surprise and awe. The nearest approach to it is, perhaps, Habakkuk's abrupt but splendid inference from the eternity of God to the immortality of man: Art not tlwu from everlasting ?

We shall not die. Most of us have doubtless wondered at times why, when space was so valuable, Luke should have inserted this long pedigree in his Gospel, this barren list of names.

But the pedigree is of immense value, if for nothing else, yet for this, that it connects the second Adam with the first Adam, that it places a son of Godat either end of this list of names; that it makes us out to be the children of God both by nature and by grace, by birth and by second birth.

For, of course, if Adam was the son of God, we are all the children of God, since we are all children of Adam; there is a divine element in our nature as well as a human element, a capacity for life and holiness as well as a liability to sin and death.

God made man good, and even very good, for He created him in his own image, after his own likeness. And though Adam marred that image when he fell, he did not annihilate it; though he may transmit to us the wrong ply or bias which he himself took when he transgressed the law of his own being, he also transmits to us the original love of that w...