Violated Images: Sin, Violence, Abuse, and Redemption

I. In the Beginning

The Bible begins with God, the sovereign, good Creator of all things: “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.”¹ God’s creative handiwork, everything from light to land to living creatures, is called “good.”² But humanity, being the very image of God, is the crown of God’s good creation (“Behold it was very good”).³ As the pinnacle of God’s creation, human beings reveal God more wonderfully than any other creature as they were created like God,⁴ by God,⁵ for God,⁶ and to be with God.⁷ In Genesis 1:26, God says “Let us make man in our image.”⁸ In the very beginning, our Creator gave us a remarkable title: He called us the image of God. This reveals the inherent dignity of all human beings.

To fully understand what “image of God” means, we need to look at the context of Old Testament history. Moses, the author of Genesis, and his Israelite readers understood these words because they lived in a world full of images. The most dominant images in the cultures of the ancient Near East were those of kings, who made images of themselves and placed them in various locations in their kingdoms. Pharaohs of Egypt, the emperors of Babylon, and the kings of other empires used images of themselves as a way to display their authority and power. This custom of Moses’s day helped him understand what was happening when God called Adam and Eve his image. Just as human kings had their images, the divine King ordained that the human race would be his royal image. Put simply, the expression “image of God” designated human beings as representatives of the supreme King of the universe.⁹

Immediately after making the man and woman, God granted them a special commission: “And God blessed them. And God said to them, ‘Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over every living thing that moves on the earth.’”¹⁰ This verse contains five commands: “Be fruitful,” “multiply,” “fill,” “subdue,” and “have dominion.” These decrees reveal our most basic human responsibilities.

It was God’s design that humanity should extend the reign of God throughout the world. This involves two basic responsibilities: multiplication and dominion. First, God gave Adam and Eve a commission to multiply: “Be fruitful … multiply … fill.” Their job was to produce so many images of God that they would cover the earth. Second, God ordered them to have dominion over the earth: “Fill … subdue … have dominion.” Adam and Eve were to exercise authority over creation, managing its vast resources on God’s behalf. Having dominion means being good stewards of creation and creators of culture, not dominating.¹¹

Richard Pratt argues that multiplication and dominion are deeply connected to our being the image of God. To explain this, he describes the ancient Near Eastern context:

Many kingdoms in the ancient Near East stretched for hundreds of square miles. The kings of these empires were powerful leaders, but the sizes of their domains presented serious political problems … Ancient kings simply could not have personal contact with all regions of their nations. They needed other ways to establish their authority. Many rulers solved this problem by erecting images of themselves at key sites throughout their kingdoms. They produced numerous statues of themselves and endowed their images with representative authority … When citizens saw the images of their emperor, they understood to whom they owed their allegiance. They knew for certain who ruled the land.¹²

Moses described the twofold job of humanity against this historical background. To be sure, God had no problem filling the earth with his presence, but he chose to establish his authority on earth in ways that humans could understand. Similar to how ancient emperors filled their empires with images of themselves, God commanded his images to populate the landscape of his creation. In the command to “multiply,” God wanted his images spread to the ends of the earth. Just as an emperor conferred authority on their images, God commanded his likeness to reign over the world. His command to “have dominion” is God giving humans authority to represent him in his world.¹³

II. Shalom and Violence

In Genesis 1 and 2, we see that God’s plan for humanity was for the earth to be filled with His image bearers, who were to glorify him through worship and obedience. This beautiful state of being, enjoying the cosmic bliss of God’s intended blessing and his wise rule, is called shalom. One scholar writes, “In the Bible, shalom means universal flourishing, wholeness, and delight—a rich state of affairs in which natural needs are satisfied and natural gifts fruitfully employed, a state of affairs that inspires joyful wonder as its Creator and Savior opens doors and welcomes the creatures in whom he delights. Shalom, in other words, is the way things ought to be.”¹⁴ Shalom means fullness of peace. It is the vision of a society without violence or fear: “I will give you peace (shalom) in the land, and none shall make you afraid.”¹⁵ Shalom is a profound and comprehensive sort of well-being—abundant welfare—with its connotations of peace, justice, and the common good. While it is “intertwined with justice,” says Nicholas Wolterstorff, it is more than justice. In Until Justice and Peace Embrace, Wolterstorff argues that shalom means harmonious and responsible relationship with God, other human beings, and nature. In short, biblical writers use the word shalom to describe the world of universal peace, safety, justice, order, and wholeness God intended.¹⁶

Genesis 3 records the terrible day when humanity fell into sin and shalom was violated. Adam and Eve violated their relationship with God by rebelling against his command. This was a moment of cosmic treason. Instead of trusting in God’s wise and good word,¹⁷ they trusted in the crafty and deceitful words of the serpent.¹⁸ The royal image of God sinned and fell into the severe ignobility we all experience.¹⁹ In response, the Creator placed a curse on our parents that cast the whole human race into futility and death as we are now guilty and corrupted. This tragic fall plunged humankind into a relational abyss. First, the harmony between God and people was broken. We are at enmity with God and have sided with God’s enemy. Adam and Eve committed cosmic treason, and all humans after have continued that rebellion. Second, the harmony between humans has been distorted. Paul Tripp writes:

What seemed once unthinkably wrong and out of character for the world that God had made now became a daily experience. Words like falsehood, enemy, danger, sin, destruction, war, murder, sickness, fear, and hatred became regular parts of the fallen-world vocabulary. For the first time, the harmony between people was broken. Shame, fear, guilt, blame, greed, envy, conflict, and hurt made relationships a minefield they were never intended to be. People looked at other people as obstacles to getting what they wanted or as dangers to be avoided. Even families were unable to coexist in any kind of lasting and peaceful union. Violence became a common response to problems that had never before existed. Conflict existed in the human community as an experience more regular than peace. Marriage became a battle for control, and children’s rebellion became a more natural response than willing submission. Things became more valuable than people, and they willingly competed with others in order to acquire more. The human community was more divided by love for self than united by love of neighbor. The words of people, meant to express truth and love, became weapons of anger and instruments of deceit. In an instant, the sweet music of human harmony had become the mournful dirge of human war.²⁰

God’s good creation is now cursed because of the entrance of sin.²¹ The world is simply not the way it’s supposed to be. The entrance of sin into God’s good world leads to the shattering of shalom. Sin, in other words, is “culpable shalom-breaking.”²² Evil is an intrusion upon shalom. The first intrusion was Satan’s intrusion into God’s garden, which led to Adam and Eve’s tragic disobedience—the second. When sin is understood as an intrusion upon God’s original plan for peace, it helps us see the biblical description of redemption as an intrusion of grace into disgrace, light into the darkness of sin, or peace into disorder and violence. Just as sin and evil are intrusions on original peace, so redemption is an intrusion of reclaiming what was originally intended for humans: peace.

Sin wrecks the order and goodness of God’s world. Sin is the “vandalism of shalom.”²³ Cornelius Plantinga writes: “God hates sin not just because it violates his law but, more substantively, because it violates shalom, because it breaks the peace, because it interferes with the way things are supposed to be. God is for shalom and therefore against sin. In fact, we may safely describe evil as any spoiling of shalom, whether physically, morally, spiritually, or otherwise.”²⁴ Regarding this dimension of sin, Plantinga writes: “All sin has first and finally a Godward force. Let us say that a sin is any act—any thought, desire, emotion, word, or deed—or its particular absence, that displeases God and deserves blame. Let us add that the disposition to commit sins also displeases God and deserves blame, and let us therefore use the word sin to refer to such instances of both act and disposition. Sin is a culpable and personal affront to a personal God.” ²⁵ God’s image bearers were created to worship and obey him and to reflect his glory to his good creation. According to G. K. Beale, “God has made humans to reflect him, but if they do not commit themselves to him, they will not reflect him but something else in creation. At the core of our being we are imaging creatures. It is not possible to be neutral on this issue: we either reflect the Creator or something in creation.”²⁶ After the Fall, humankind was enslaved to idolatry (hatred for God) and violence (hatred for each other). Sin inverts love for God, which in turn becomes idolatry and inverts love for neighbor, which becomes exploitation of others. Instead of worshipping God, our inclination is to worship anything else but God. Idolatry is not the ceasing of worship. Rather, it is misdirected worship, and at the core of idolatry is self-worship. Instead of loving one another as God originally intended, fallen humanity expresses hatred toward their neighbors. Sin perverts mutual love and harmony, resulting in domination and violence against others.²⁷ Both the vertical relationship with God and the horizontal relationship with God’s image bearers are fractured by the Fall. Evil is anti-creation, anti-life, and the force that seeks to oppose, deface, and destroy God, his good world, and his image bearers. Simply put, when someone defaces a human being—God’s image bearer—ultimately an attack is being waged against God himself.

The foundational premise of the Bible after Genesis 3, therefore, is that this fallen world, particularly fallen humanity, is violent.²⁸ The cosmic war begun by the serpent in Eden, described in Genesis 3, produces collateral damage in the very next chapter. Immediately after the Fall, there is a radical shift from shalom to violence, as the first murder takes place in Genesis 4. After God shows regard to Abel’s worshipful offering, Cain responds by raging against God and murdering his brother.²⁹ The downward spiral of humankind and the constant spread of sin continued as God’s blessing is replaced by God’s curse.³⁰ Violence is both sin against God and his image bearers. In our hatred for God, we horde worship for self and strike against those who reflect God’s glory. Plantinga explains: “Godlessness is anti-shalom. Godlessness spoils the proper relation between human beings and their maker and savior. Sin offends God not only because it bereaves or assaults God directly, as in impiety or blasphemy, but also because it bereaves and assaults what God has made.” ³¹ A portion of the Old Testament is a catalogue of cruelty. Widespread violence and the appalling evil of fallen humanity is recorded in detail on nearly every page of the Hebrew Bible:

Acts of reprobate violence explode from the pages of the Old Testament as evil people perform unspeakable acts: Children are cannibalized (2 Kings 6:28–29; Ezek. 5:10; Lam. 2:20), boiled (Lam. 4:10) and dashed against a rock (Ps. 137:9). During the Babylonian invasion, Zedekiah is forced to watch his sons slaughtered, after which his own eyes are gouged out (Jer. 52:10–11). Pregnant women are ripped open (2 Kings 15:16; Amos 1:13). Other women are raped (Gen. 34:1–5; 2 Sam. 13:1–15; Ezek. 22:11); one of them is gang raped to the point of death (Judg. 19:22–30). Military atrocities are equally shocking. We read about stabbings (Judg. 3:12–20; 2 Sam. 2:23; 20:10) and beheadings (1 Sam. 17:54; 2 Sam. 4:7–9). These are normal military atrocities. More extraordinary cases involve torture and mutilation: limbs are cut off (Judg. 1:6–7), bodies hewed in pieces (1 Sam. 15:33), eyes gouged out (Judg. 16:21; 2 Kings 25:7), skulls punctured (Judg. 4:12–23; 5:26–27) or crushed by a millstone pushed from a city wall (Judg. 9:53). Two hundred foreskins are collected (1 Sam. 18:27), seventy heads gathered (2 Kings 10:7–8), thirty men killed for their clothing (Judg. 14:19). Bodies are hanged (Josh. 8:29), mutilated and displayed as trophies (1 Sam. 31:9–10), trampled beyond recognition (2 Kings 9:30–37), destroyed by wild beasts (Josh. 13:8 [sic]; 2 Kings 2:23–24) or flailed with briers (Judg. 8:16). Entire groups are massacred (1 Sam. 22:18–19; 1 Kings 16:8–14) or led into captivity strung together with hooks through their lips (Amos 4:2).³²

III. Sin and Sexual Assault

We have seen how violence is a bitter fruit of the Fall and is, without question, a “vandalism of shalom.” In biblical thinking, we can understand neither shalom nor sin apart from reference to God. David confesses to God, “Against You, You only, have I sinned and done what is evil in Your sight, so that You may be justified in Your words and blameless in Your judgment.”³³ Despite committing adultery with Bathsheba and orchestrating the murder of her husband, Uriah, David can write that he has sinned against God “only.”³⁴ David’s sins against other human beings were also, in the ultimate sense, transgressions committed against God himself. According to Plantinga, “Shalom is God’s design for creation and redemption; sin is blamable human vandalism of these great realities and therefore an affront to their architect and builder.”³⁵

Sexual assault is a vandalization of shalom. It can influence how victims feel about themselves, how they understand connections and boundaries with others, and ultimately, how they relate to God. Throughout the Bible, there is a conception of sexual assault, with an understanding of its devastating emotional and psychological consequences for the victim.³⁶

Sexual violence uses sex as a weapon of power and control against others. Sex is the means by which we fulfill our calling of multiplying and taking dominion. It is noteworthy that the very means of fulfilling God’s plan for humanity is now a tool for violence toward other images of God. In shalom, sex was also a reflection of unity and peace between man and woman. It is a picture of two becoming one. God meant for sexual feelings, thoughts, and activity to be pleasurable and intimacy building in marriage. Satan understands the importance of what God has designed, and sexual assault is one of his chief means of destroying it. Sexual abuse creates in the victim’s mind a tragic and perverse linkage between sex, intimacy, and shame. When someone is sexually violated, one of the most creative and intimate of human experiences—sexuality—is transgressed by violence and subjugation. Sex, the very expression of human union, intimacy, and peace, becomes a tool for violence after the Fall. Plantinga writes: “The story of the fall tells us that sin corrupts: it puts asunder what God had joined together and joins together what God had put asunder. Like some devastating twister, corruption both explodes and implodes creation, pushing it back toward the ‘formless void’ from which it came.”³⁷ Violence is also the outworking and fruit of idolatry as humans have inherent dignity as the image of God:

The Old Testament records some horrific incidents of sexual violence: when people are alienated from God, depravity and violence are inevitable. Biblical stories of rape are infrequent but vivid, including the story of Dinah’s rape and the resulting sexual retaliation by her brothers (Gen. 34), the abuse to death of the Levite’s concubine (Judg. 19) and Amnon’s rape of his sister Tamar (2 Sam. 13:1–21). In a similar vein are pictures in the prophetic books of the ravishing of wives and virgins as the aftermath of a nation’s being conquered (Isa. 13:16; Lam. 5:11; Zech. 14:2).³⁸

Sexual violence distorts this beautiful act of union, pleasure, calling, and worship. God intended humankind to “be fruitful and multiply,”³⁹ spreading divine image bearers throughout his good world. This multiplying of offspring and exercising of dominion was to happen through the God-ordained sexual union between man and woman, husband and wife, in the context of marriage: “Therefore a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and they shall become one flesh. And the man and his wife were both naked and were not ashamed.”⁴⁰

This peaceful, loving relationship was shattered by the entrance of sin into the world. Instead of unashamed intimacy and trust, there is shame and mistrust. Instead of grace, there is disgrace. Hatred toward other divine image bearers, not love, characterizes human life after the Fall:

As soon as human rebellion and self-assertiveness reared their ugly heads, shame, guilt and self-consciousness took over. Pathetic attempts at self-concealment (Gen. 3:7) are replaced by God’s own provision of covering (Gen. 3:21). Henceforth nakedness was unnatural. Clothing is God’s covering, his divine gracious response to human rebellion. Being unclothed thus becomes a metaphor for being exposed to the judgment of God.⁴¹

A foundational element of paradise—sexual innocence in community—has been spoiled by the treachery of sexual assault. Sexual assault is uniquely devastating precisely because it distorts the foundational realities of what it means to be human: embodied personhood is plundered, sexual expression is perverted and used for violence, intrapersonal trust is shattered, and disgrace and shame are heaped on the victim. Sexual assault is one of the most frequent and disturbing symbols of sin in the Bible. It is a complete distortion of relationship, a mockery and devastation of the original intent of being made for relationships with God and others. References to sexual violence is a way that God, through the biblical authors, communicates that sin has progressed so far that sex, an expression of union, peace, and love, is now used as a tool for violence.

The betrayal of creation and the refusal of any sense of covenantal relationship, sexual assault physically, emotionally, culturally, and structurally wounds the victim. Sexual assault is not just a criminal, physical, and psychological act; it is also a spiritual act in which the connectedness of humans with one another and with God is violated and broken, and the reality of defilement, guilt, terror, shame, alienation, and separation can take years to be made whole again. Sin names the reality of sexual assault, and in turn, assault symbolizes sin and its destructive effects. The Bible speaks about the reality and effects of sin in various ways: disease, burden, debt, and defilement. Sexual assault is another way to speak of sin, in both its reality and effects. Sexual assault both names and symbolizes that sin is not only something that is done to us but it also carries the effects of defilement, woundedness, and terror.

Sin is broken relationship with God, self, and others, and sexual assault signifies, even as it causes, brokenness and disruption. Sexual assault reminds us of the double-sidedness of so much sin: It is both personal and in the structures of culture. Sexual assault is an individual act of violence, one person against another. But it’s also cultural: It is used as a weapon in warfare against the enemy,⁴² and it’s an epidemic in nearly all cultures.⁴³ There appears to be a societal impulse to blame traumatized individuals for their suffering. Alexander McFarlane and Bessel van der Kolk suggest that doing otherwise would threaten our cherished conceptions that the world is essentially just and that persons are free, self-determining, and basically good individuals responsible for their destinies:

Society becomes resentful about having its illusions of safety and predictability ruffled by people who remind them of how fragile security can be. Society’s reactions [to traumatized people] seems to be … in the service of maintaining the beliefs that the world is fundamentally just, that people can be in charge of their lives, and that bad things only happen to people who deserve them.⁴⁴

In short, we sacrifice those who suffer so we can maintain our illusions of autonomy and safety.

The distress caused by sexual assault can be described well by Simone Weil’s term “affliction.” An event constitutes “affliction” if it has uprooted and attacked someone in all dimensions: physically, psychologically, and socially. Since affliction involves “social degradation or the fear of it in some form,” it can be argued that one of the factors involved in affliction includes some form of interpersonal neglect or harm.⁴⁵ If victims were offered sufficient social support, they could be spared from the kind of suffering that constitutes affliction.

Marie Fortune describes sexual assault four different ways. First, it is a bodily sin. Sexual assault is a violation of bodily boundaries of personal space and distorts one’s sense of body image. Second, sexual assault is a sin against relationship, violating the command to love one’s neighbor as oneself. Third, it is a sin betraying trust and destroying relationships between victims and those who should have cared for them but instead caused them harm. The consequence of this sin is that it creates barriers of trust for victims in their future relationships. Fourth, it is a sin not only against the victims but also the community surrounding that victim.⁴⁶

It is obvious that sexual assault is a sin against another human involving physical, psychological, and emotional violation through the commission of a nonconsensual sexual act imposed through coercion, intimidation, force, domination, and violence. Such an act entails not only a violation of the physical boundaries of the body but also a denial of the victim’s will or agency—one dimension of being the image of God. Through sexual assault, the assailant aims to reduce the victim to a nonperson. Because the assault is bodily, it is sexed, and the scope of its harm includes the very personhood of the victim. The dominance inherent in an act of sexual assault, by which the assailant forces his incarnate will on the victim, is a hierarchic structure in which the victim’s difference from the assailant is stamped out, erased, annihilated.⁴⁷

This aspect of sexual assault involves the violation of the victim both bodily and mentally. By constraining the victim and disregarding, disbelieving, or deliberately acting contrary to her or his desires, the transgressor undermines the victim’s sense of personhood.⁴⁸ Such acts of violence often result in emotional trauma for the victim, which is manifest in a sense of helplessness, loss, vulnerability, shame, humiliation, and degradation.⁴⁹ A particularly evil effect of sexual assault is that some victims not only feel a sense of radical disgrace but also participate in their own self-destruction.⁵⁰ The self-hatred, defilement, and guilt they experience cause them to act out self-destructively. Violence ensnares the psyche of the victim and propels its action in the form of defensive reaction. This is one of the most insidious aspects of violence. In addition to inflicting harm, the practice of evil keeps re-creating a world of violence, either against others or oneself. Evil generates new evil as evildoers fashion victims in their own ugly image.

In addition to being a sin against others, sexual assault is also a sin against God because the blessing of sexuality is used to destroy instead of build intimacy and because it is an attack against his image in his imager bearers. The ability of sexual assault to obscure internal and external relationships makes it a cosmic affront to the Creator and the order of his creation.⁵¹ Sexual assault is a sin against God because it violates his most sacred creation, human beings made in his image.

There are explicit passages calling sexual assault sin—a violation of God’s law. Deuteronomy 22:25–29 addresses nonconsensual sexual acts and shows concern for the welfare of the violated woman. In Deuteronomy 22:25–27, the perpetrator is put to death by stoning, and it is stressed in the text that the woman is innocent of any wrongdoing and that no harm should come to her.⁵² In addition to these and other biblical texts calling sexual assault sin, there are also depictions of sexual acts that the Bible characterizes as sexual assault resulting in emotional trauma. These passages are 2 Samuel 13, Hosea 2:1–13, Jeremiah 13:20–27, and Ezekiel 16 and 23. They demonstrate an understanding that such acts of sexual assault result not only in emotional trauma for the victim but also in a debilitating loss of sense of self and humiliation. These passages depict sexual assault as deeply traumatizing and resulting in devastating emotional and psychological consequences for the victim.

The Bible says that sexual assault is wrong, should not be done, and is not something the victims should experience. It also claims that God sees, knows, and cares about this sin and its effects and has acted to redeem people from the effects of sin.

IV. Transgression Against God and Victim

Far from being a peripheral issue in the Bible, sexual assault is clearly depicted as sin against God and neighbor, is mentioned frequently throughout the Bible, and is referred to as a symbol of how badly sin has corrupted God’s good creation. The Bible confirms the effects of sexual assault we described in section three. As to what the Bible says about sexual assault, Hilary Lipka writes: “A comprehensive study that includes all biblical texts reveals that there is evidence not only of a core conception of rape, but also an understanding that sexual violence is devastating for the victim, resulting in emotional trauma and a debilitating loss of sense of self.”⁵³

We have seen in this chapter that sexual assault is a sin against the victim and a sin against God. However, it is very difficult in the Bible to distinguish the difference between the transgression against the victim and the transgression against God. It is so difficult that some scholars assert that there is no distinction between these two aspects of transgression. Sexual assault is always a sin against the victim and God because all crimes are depicted as sins, that is, violations of God’s will and the reflection of his glory in others.⁵⁴

The victim’s experience of assault is not ignored by God, minimized by the Bible, or outside of the scope of healing and hope found in redemption. God’s responses to evil and violence are redemption, renewal, and recreation. Evil and violence are not the final word. They are not capable of creating or defining reality. That is only God’s prerogative. However, evil and violence can pervert, distort, and destroy. They are parasitic on the original good of God’s creation. In this way, evil serves as the backdrop on the stage where God’s redemption shines with even greater brilliance and pronounced drama. What evil uses to destroy, God uses to expose, excise, and then heal.⁵⁵ God’s redemption imparts grace and brings peace.

V. Conclusion: Adam, New Adams, and the Last Adam

While the Fall brought a curse upon creation, God did not leave his image bearers to rot under its effects forever without hope of rescue. Before the Fall, Adam and Eve were “both naked and unashamed.” Post-Fall, however, nudity is sheer vulnerability. More than polite embarrassment, shame implied the danger of physical exploitation and humiliation. We see this as Adam’s shame soon festers into Noah’s exploitation. Nakedness and exploitation mark the earliest characters in Genesis and are traced throughout as a symbol of the depth of the effects of sin. Originally, Adam and Eve were naked without shame, enjoying open harmony with each other and God. Post-Fall, however, they recognized that they were naked and ashamed—no longer holy and righteous. They were morally defiled because of sin.

From the very beginning, God made provisions by establishing sacrifices to deal with guilt from sin. After Adam and Eve disobeyed, they realized they were guilty and tried to cover themselves with fig leaves. God replaced their leaves with garments made from animal skins. Bible scholars refer to this as the first sacrifice in the Bible. A life had to be sacrificed before Adam and Eve were clothed. E. J. Young, an Old Testament scholar, writes, “It would also appear that this act of God in the taking of animal life laid the foundation for animal sacrifice.”⁵⁶ In this passage, we see the pattern for all salvation history. God took a sacrificial animal, slew it before the eyes of Adam and Eve, and wrapped the skins about their naked bodies.

Often in the Bible, “nakedness” represents unrighteousness. It symbolizes the ideas of judgment and humiliation in the biblical world. The Bible pictures the sinner as clothed in “filthy rags” or “naked and ashamed.” The prophets described the sinful state of the nation of Israel as “nakedness” before God and the world (Isa. 47:3; Lam. 1:8; Ezek. 16:36). “‘Remove the filthy garments from him.’ And to him he said, ‘Behold, I have taken your iniquity away from you, and I will clothe you with pure vestments’” (Zech. 3:4). “I will greatly rejoice in the Lord; my soul shall exult in my God, for he has clothed me with the garments of salvation; he has covered me with the robe of righteousness” (Isa. 61:10).

God did not desert them to the futility of sin’s harsh dominion. Even before covering them, God declared a plan to redeem them from sin and death: “And I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your offspring and hers; he will crush your head, and you will strike his heel” (Gen. 3:15). This declaration is about the hope for redemption, but notice the violence it involves—enmity, crushing, and striking.

Martin Luther called Genesis 3:15 the “proto-evangelion”—the first gospel announcement and promise concerning Jesus Christ. At first glance, a curse against God’s enemy—the Serpent—may not seem like amazing grace. But this verse reveals God’s plans to redeem humanity by his victory over Satan. The Serpent will continue to trouble Eve’s descendants, constantly nipping at their heels, but one day the offspring of Eve will crush Satan’s head in glorious victory.

The Old Testament depicts a host of potential saviors who end up failing, often spectacularly, to show that even our prospective redeemers need a savior. It is not until we get to Jesus that we find a savior who can bear the crushing weight of our sin, because he himself is sinless. Before we get to the hope fulfilled in Jesus, we will look back at the hope deferred by the would-be saviors of humanity, starting with Adam.

A. Adam

Adam is the Hebrew word for “man” or “humanity,” which is apt because he represents all of humanity with Eve. They were placed in the garden and given the mandate to “be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth and subdue it; and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the air and over every living thing that moves upon the earth” (Gen 1:28). It is a hopeful beginning, but Adam left no legacy as the “progenitor of the righteous people of God, as he would have been if sin had not entered the world.”⁵⁷ His representative bequest was not hope but intrinsic sin and imputed guilt. Adam’s sin polluted all born after him. Humans are now corrupted and guilty.

That may seem unfair or strange, but this idea of original sin handed down to us in Adam’s “representative headship” is actually not a foreign idea to our modern world:

The concept of representative headship exists in all sorts of legal and cultural settings. In the biblical world, the patriarch represents the clan; the father; the family; and the king, the nation. In the United States, parents legally act for their children, and people in Congress represent the citizens. Assuming the corporate solidarity of the race with its progenitors, Adam and Eve represented all people.⁵⁸

After the tragic sin and expulsion of Adam and Eve, this creation mandate is given again throughout Scripture. But to those other individuals, it is a blessing rather than a command.⁵⁹ This is because, as a result of the sin of Adam, all humanity is no longer capable of ruling the earth in God’s image as they were created to do. What was commanded to Adam is promised to men like Noah, Abraham, and David. This means that, after Eden, “being fruitful and multiplying” will be a gift: “Something has happened which means that Adam’s descendants cannot simply be told to do this; the creator God will do it himself, and will (according to Genesis 17) do it ‘exceedingly.’”⁶⁰This makes it clear why these “Second Adams” in the OT must continue to receive rather than be expected to give. Scripture gives a portrayal of them that “highlights their sin in such a way that we can see similarities to the first Adam’s sin.”⁶¹ The Scriptures include a number of Second Adam figures, but each fails miserably. This is ultimately remedied by the coming of Messiah, the antitype of Adam upon whom Adam is indeed modeled before creation. The failures of men like Noah, Abraham, and David to do what Adam could not when given the chance exposes humankind’s need for a true savior.

Daniel Block is helpful here in tracing these Second Adams through the OT to their culmination in Christ:

Although complex, the OT picture of the messiah gains in clarity and focus with time. But the messianic hope is a single line that begins in broadest terms with God’s promise of victory over the serpent through “the seed of the woman” (Gen. 3:15), then is narrowed successively to the seed of Abraham (Gen. 22:18), the tribe of Judah (Gen. 49:10), the stem of Jesse (Isa. 11:1), the house/dynasty of David (2 Sam. 7), and finally the suffering and slain servant of Yahweh (Isa. 53).⁶²

Further, through the idea of total depravity, Protestant theology describes how humanity can never save itself. Bruce Waltke is helpful here: “The end result of total depravity is that without God’s gracious intervention, unregenerate people struggle to live between the demands of their conscience and their drives and appetites,”—that is, “everything they do is with mixed motives and produces mixed results.”⁶³ He continues this line of thought:

Because of original sin and total depravity, humanity builds a culture not to glorify God but self. Because of the Fall, their accomplishments at best are tarnished. The splitting of atoms unleashed unthinkable power to light up our cities and to obliterate them. A computer, which is the result of many collective minds, outthinks and outperforms any individual, enabling people to do the unimaginable, such as landing on the moon or spreading child pornography around the world with just a click. Fuel gives humankind mobility, but its overconsumption threatens the planet’s ecology. In short, because of the Fall, civilization is a mixed blessing.⁶⁴

Notice the behavior of Adam that is reflected in Noah, Abraham, and David. In the garden, Adam blames his wife before God, and the effect of his sin is shameful behavior and violence among his children. We will see reflections of these three in the second Adams before Christ, who is the Second Adam.

B. Noah

Parallels with Other “Adams”

Even though the canvas is dark in this violent world, God continually paints the bright colors of his grace on his people. In the destruction of the earth, only Noah found favor in God’s eyes (Gen. 6:8), and we will not have to look hard to find language reminiscent of Eden used about Noah. Yet, instead of only the mandate to “be fruitful and multiply,” God adds to it a blessing:

God blessed Noah and his sons, and said to them, “Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth. The fear and dread of you shall rest on every animal of the earth, and on every bird of the air, on everything that creeps on the ground, and on all the fish of the sea; into your hand they are delivered.” (Gen. 9:1–2)

In Noah’s story, the flood is a “de-creation” in which God again makes the earth void of life except for this “Second Adam” and his family. It is a story of a “‘re-creation’—a restoration of the divine order and God’s visible kingship that had been established at creation.”⁶⁵Just as in the first creation:

The earth is made inhabitable by the separation of the land from the water (Gen. 8:1–3; cf. Gen. 1:9–10). Living creatures are brought out to repopulate the earth (Gen. 8:17–19; cf. Gen. 1:20–22, 24–25). Days and seasons are reestablished (Gen. 8:22; cf. Gen. 1:14–18). Humans are blessed by God (Gen. 9:1; cf. Gen. 1:28a), commanded to ‘Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth’ (Gen. 9:1b, 7; cf. Gen. 1:28b), and given dominion over the animal kingdom (Gen. 9:2; cf. Gen. 1:28c). God provides humanity—made in his image (Gen. 9:6; cf. Gen. 1:26–27)—with food (Gen. 9:3; cf. Gen. 1:29–30).⁶⁶

Another major parallel is apparent between God’s planting of a garden for the man to enjoy (Gen. 2:8) and Noah’s vineyard (Gen. 9:20). The partaking of the fruit of this “garden” also reveals Noah’s failure as a second Adam.

Noah’s Sins

With echoes of Eden, our hopes are apt to rise at this character so similar to Adam. The old was washed away and behold, the new has come. Noah, alas, was no savior, only another broken man inviting sin into God’s “re-creation.” Hope that the receding waters swept sin away with them is dashed when we see yet another off-putting parallel to Eden.

Having drunk too much of his vineyard’s produce, Noah is found naked in his tent by his son Ham. Instead of covering his father, he “told his two brothers outside,” but they “walked backward and covered the nakedness of their father” so they would not shame him (Gen. 9:22–23). Noah fails as a Second Adam and Ham shames him. Notice the conflict between the sons of Noah and their lineage.

John Ronning sees a parallel between Noah waking up (his eyes are opened) and knowing “what his youngest son had done to him” (9:24) and Genesis 3:7—“the eyes of both of them were opened, and they knew that they were naked.” He also posits there could be “a reminder of the eating of the forbidden fruit in the overconsumption of the fruit of the vine.”⁶⁷ Man had no more than set foot on a world destroyed for sin than he began anew its path toward devastation. But God’s hope was not in Noah.

Despite his failure, Noah—like Abraham after him—represents “a new beginning for humanity through God’s gift of the covenant.”⁶⁸ Paul Williamson says this: “The glue that binds all the biblical covenants together is God’s creative purpose of universal blessing. Each of the subsequent covenants simply takes us one step closer towards the realization of that divine goal.”⁶⁹ God is faithful in the face of these failures, resolute to make his purposes known.

C. Abraham

Parallels with Other “Adams”

Once again, echoing the creation mandate to Adam, God gives a promise to Abraham—a covenant blessing:

“And I will make my covenant between me and you, and will make you exceedingly numerous. … As for me, this is my covenant with you: You shall be the ancestor of a multitude of nations. No longer shall your name be Abram, but your name shall be Abraham; for I have made you the ancestor of a multitude of nations. I will make you exceedingly fruitful; and I will make nations of you, and kings shall come from you.” (Gen. 17:2, 4–6)

Abraham is another Second Adam with numerous parallels: God gives Adam his Garden of Eden while giving Abraham the land of Canaan; “God told Adam to be fruitful and multiply; Abraham is assured that God will make his descendants as numerous as the dust of the earth (Gen. 13:16) and the stars of heaven (Gen. 15:5).”⁷⁰ Additionally, God walked with Adam and Eve in Eden, and “Abraham is told to walk before God and be perfect (Gen. 3:8; 17:1; cf. 6:9). Through his obedient and faithful response to these promises, the promise is turned into a divine oath guaranteeing its ultimate fulfillment (Gen. 22:16–18; cf. 50:24).”⁷¹

Abraham also plays a role as a representative head of the people of Israel in that God’s blessing is always a gift.⁷² N. T. Wright comments:

Israel’s covenantal vocation caused her to think of herself as the creator’s true humanity. If Abraham and his family are understood as the creator’s means of dealing with the sin of Adam, and hence with the evil in the world, Israel herself becomes the true Adamic humanity.⁷³

This shows clearly in the correlation between “the placing of Adam and Eve in the Garden and the promise to Abraham and his family about the land of Canaan.”⁷⁴ The parallel is also vivid in terms of the exile and return: “Adam, given the garden to look after, disobeyed and was expelled. Israel, given the land to look after, disobeyed and was exiled.”⁷⁵ Therefore, “the return from exile ought thus to be like a return to Eden, a reclaiming of the original promises to Abraham and, behind that, the commands to the human race.”⁷⁶

Abraham’s Sins

In Genesis 3:6, Eve takes that tragic bite and is, at first, delighted by the results, sharing with Adam. Later, we hear God telling Adam that “because you have listened to the voice of your wife, and have eaten of the tree about which I commanded you, ‘You shall not eat of it,’ cursed is the ground because of you; in toil you shall eat of it all the days of your life” (Gen. 3:17). We see a similar situation occur between our Second Adam, Abraham, and his wife in Genesis 16:2–3.

Sarai is barren in both womb and faith. To “help” fulfill God’s promise of a child, she tells Abraham to sleep with her slave girl (Gen. 16:2–3). Abram’s sin in taking Hagar as a second wife is not the only parallel to Adam’s failure, but it represents an overarching theme present first in Genesis 3 and throughout the book: Sin is “motivated by dissatisfaction with God’s providence—the attitude that God is withholding something good from people, so they must take action on their own.”⁷⁷

Notice also the conflict between the sons of Abraham—Ishmael and Isaac—and the legacies of each.

In Genesis 12:10–20 and 20:1–19, Abraham tries to pass his wife off as his sister. When we look closely, we see that “the rebuke of the king in each of these incidents (12:18: “‘What this you have done to me?’”; 20:9: ‘What have you done to us?’) is reminiscent of the LORD’s words to Eve: “‘What is this you have done?’” (3:13).⁷⁸ Another direct parallel in Genesis 20 is what God says to the king:

‘‘Now then, return the man’s wife; for he is a prophet, and he will pray for you and you shall live. But if you do not restore her, know that you shall surely die, you and all that are yours.” (Genesis 20:7)

This is identical to what he tells Adam about eating from the forbidden tree: “mot tamut, you shall surely die” (Gen. 2:17).⁷⁹ This parallel addresses the way Abraham fails his wife. The text suggests that treating Sarah as “a mere object of desire is objectionable in the extreme and is likely to yield consequences as dire as those threatened in the Garden of Eden.”⁸⁰ Additionally, the Pharaoh “sends away” (salakh) Abraham and his family like God “sends away” Adam and Eve (Gen. 3:23).⁸¹ Abraham experienced shame and dread before the emperor, and “just as Sarai had no response to Abraham in vv. 11–13, so Abraham has not response to Pharaoh … Abraham is reduced to silence too.”⁸² Humans cannot remedy this problem themselves.

D. David

Parallels with Other “Adams”

Ronning says the parallels between this Second Adam and the Genesis 1:28 mandate are not as apparent as they are with Noah and Abraham, but “the two aspects of the creation mandate (fruitfulness and dominion) are discernible in Nathan’s oracle given to David (2 Sam. 7; 1 Chron. 17). The LORD promises David that he will build him a house, a perpetual dynasty.”⁸³ The promises to the patriarchs involved kings, and since David’s dynasty was perpetual, “it seems apparent that he has now become heir of the promise of the new Adam given to the patriarchs.”⁸⁴

Ronning is more expansive on these parallels in his dissertation:

David is the righteous head of a (nominally) righteous nation, administering “justice and righteousness for all his people” (2 Sam. 8:15). Abraham was to be a father of many nations; under David instead of seeing Israelites going over to the Philistine side (1 Sam. 14:21), Philistines and other Gentiles were joining Israel, professing allegiance to the Lord. Examples would include Ittai and the 600 men who had come with him from Gath (2 Sam. 15:18–21).”⁸⁵

David’s Sins

David’s sin with Bathsheba (2 Sam. 11–12) has been called “an aggravated version of Abraham’s sin in Genesis 20.”⁸⁶ In that passage, “Abraham feared for his life because of a foreign king (Abimelech) who (so he thought) might take his wife from him and kill him.”⁸⁷ The parallel is that what Abraham, the elect patriarch, “fears of foreigners because of his wife is just what David, the elect, the Israelite king, does to Uriah the Hittite because of his wife.”⁸⁸ That is,

in 2 Samuel 11 the king is not a foreigner but David, who knowingly takes the wife of the foreigner Uriah the Hittite, then kills him to cover up the adultery. Perhaps Uriah was one of those foreigners brought to the worship of the true God by David, yet David in 2 Samuel 11 is like the king feared by Abraham in Genesis 20, who rules in a place where there is no fear of God.⁸⁹

What is more, Gage suggests, “David’s palace would have been ‘terraced with gardens,’ and sees an analogy between the forbidden fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil, and the forbidden ‘knowledge’ of another man’s wife.”⁹⁰ Notice also the division, conflict, and even murder of David’s sons and that Amnon (David’s son) rapes Tamar (David’s daughter). Like father like son.

The parallels continue between David’s flight to the east in judgment (2 Sam. 15), God’s proclamation that the sword would not depart from his house, and Genesis 3. Ronning concludes: “David is unworthy to be considered the new Adam, even though he was given the promises of the new Adam, and did more than anyone else to bring those promises to reality.”⁹¹

E. Christ as the Second Adam

Tracing the sins of the “new Adams” provides stark contrast to the obedience and holiness of Jesus: “He was tempted in every way as they were and we are, yet he is without sin” (Heb. 4:15). Jesus was faithful in the garden to lay down his life for his bride and to make us the adopted children of God who are declared righteous and love one another.

Paul highlights the humility and attitude of Jesus toward God by comparing him to Eve. Her mind was set on being like God (Gen. 3:5), whereas Christ “who, though he was in the form of God, did not regard equality with God as something to be exploited, but emptied himself” (Phil. 2:5–8). Paul’s wording in his description of the self-humiliation of Christ is meant to make this contrast with Eve clear.⁹² That is, “the tempter urged Eve to seize this equality with God for herself, thereby expressing discontent with the high status in which the first pair was created (‘a little lower than the angels’).”⁹³ In a complete contrast, “Jesus gave up equality with God in order to become not just a man like Adam, put in charge of creation, but a servant, for the purpose of enabling his followers to truly gain the godlikeness lost in Adam.”⁹⁴

In response to God’s questions of him, Adam blamed his wife, Eve, for his sin (Gen. 3:12). Both Abraham (Gen. 12:10–20, 20:1–18) and Isaac (Gen. 26:9–11) tried to pass off their wives as their sisters in order to save their own lives. David exploited another man’s wife for his own selfish pleasure (2 Sam. 11). The ways the “new Adams” sinned against their own and other’s wives form “an apt contrast to the work of Jesus, once we recognize that the church is his bride.”⁹⁵ This is clearest in the case of Isaac , who “lied about his wife, subjecting her to potential defilement,” because he was worried about his own life (Gen 26:9). Jesus, in sharp contrast, gave up his life for his bride to make her holy (Eph. 5:25–26) and to cover her nakedness with “the garment of salvation” or “the robe of righteousness” (Isa. 61:10)—the white robes (Rev. 7:9, 13–14).

With Romans 5–6, Wright suggests Paul is describing someone who is “under the law” as bound by God’s law to Adam as our representative, “just as a married woman is bound by the law to her husband.”⁹⁶ Using this analogy, the “old husband”/“old human being” dies with the Messiah in Romans 6:6. This means “you,” the widowed woman, are free to marry again. The Messiah is the new bridegroom, and “belonging to him enables ‘you,’ like Abraham and Sarah despite their old age, to ‘bear fruit.’ The resurrection of Jesus as the new bridegroom has opened new possibilities not previously available.”⁹⁷

A clear argument for Jesus as the last Adam is in 1 Corinthians 15:21–49, in which he says Christ must reign until he has put all his enemies and things in subjection under his feet (vv. 25 and 27). This is fulfillment of the mandate to “have dominion” given to Adam. Here is Christ in Matthew 28: “And Jesus came and said to them, ‘All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you. And behold, I am with you always, to the end of the age.’”

Additionally, Christ also fulfills the call to multiply by his creating “children of the kingdom” (Matt. 13:37–38). Ronning celebrates this reality: “Unlike the new Adams of the OT, all his children are righteous because he is the true progenitor of the righteous seed.”⁹⁸ Also, Christ represents Israel in that he fulfills the purpose God gave to Abraham—to make his revelation known to the nations. Waltke explains how this happened:

Since humanity’s first representative, Adam, failed, the elect by God’s merciful and intervening gift of faith identify themselves with the second representative, Jesus Christ, who by his sacrificial death, resurrection, ascension, and giving of his Spirit, cleanses the human conscience, pays the debt incurred by every and all sin forever, and reverses the tragic effects of the Fall (Rom. 5:12–19; 1 Cor. 15:22).⁹⁹

The result is seen in what Peter calls believers: “You are a chosen race” (1 Pet. 2:9), which is a direct allusion to Israel being the Lord’s chosen people (Deut. 7:6–9).

Finally, in Romans 5:12–21, Paul argues that Adam brought sin and death into the world, but Christ has reversed the consequences of Adam’s sin and has given his own life and righteousness to secure their eternal glory. Because of Adam’s sin, through which “sin came into the world” (5:12), “many died” (5:15), “death reigned” (5:17), and “many were made sinners” (5:19). But Christ’s life, death, and resurrection secure for us “the abundance of grace and the free gift of righteousness” (5:17) as well as “justification and life” (5:18). Where Adam, Noah, Abraham, and David failed, Jesus, our new representative, reigns.