The scope of Adam’s transgression has been described as universal, that there was no aspect of creation not impacted and altered by it. Adam’s transgression turned the entirety of creation into something God had not created it to be when He pronounced it very good after the sixth day. Not only did man and all his progeny, including us, fall with him and in him, but, also, all over which Adam had been given dominion fell also. The well-ordered world God created crashed into chaos, maladjustment, and, eventually, death. Man, animals, vegetation, you name it…the original creation by God became a sorely wounded recreation at the hands of man through this one evil act of disobedience. This has been designated “the fall” from time immemorial, and fall it was, and is. It’s not a stretch to call it “a crash, a mega-crash”, a crash the effects from which no single entity could escape. All living things, then, had an appointment with death. Adam and Eve died spiritually immediately upon their disobedient act just as God warned them they would. Later, they also died physically. And, so it is with us. We, too, died spiritually when each of us reached our personal age of accountability. Subsequent to our spiritual death, we will also die physically, just as Adam and Eve.
Our only salvation is to be made spiritually alive after our spiritual death and before our physical death. If we are, then, upon our physical death, we become absent from our body and present with the Lord. To make this possible, Jesus Christ died for us and made the payment for our sin in full in His own Person. Second Corinthians 5 tells us God was in Christ reconciling the world unto Himself…not part of the world, nor even most of the world, but the world in its entirety. All the world that was fallen was all the world Christ reconciled. The scope of His reconciliation was equal to the scope of Adam’s transgression. There is no aspect of God’s creation that was not purchased, redeemed, reconciled in the sacrificial and efficacious death of Jesus Christ. All that fell in Adam was redeemed in the payment…more than adequate payment, by Christ. He balanced the moral scales of the universe in His substitutionary death.
This universal redemption must not…I repeat…must not be confused with universal salvation. Universal salvation is a pernicious heresy that claims all men will one day be saved and, eventually, none will be lost. Universal reconciliation does not render all men saved, but it does render all men savable. Because Christ died for the sins of the entire world, as in 1st John 2, it means there is no one who ever lived in the world that could not have been saved or that could not be saved. Most are not, but it does not mean salvation was not available to them or possible. God proved His love for His fallen world by Christ dying for the world…all the world.
CC 09-19
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