ADAM, GOD’S SPECIAL CREATION 

Adam’s uniqueness was the result of two divine things – he was animated by God’s breath, and made in His image, thus giving him His likeness, so that he, and all human beings after him, became ‘the offspring of God’, Acts 17. 29 – spirit, soul and body. Adam was not the climax of slow evolution, but rather the crown of God’s creation week. Every possible future human variation was present within Adam, with all the different racial features nascent within his genes. In him God had invested all things necessary for human life on any part of the earth, at any time and under any circumstances.

Although created with great intelligence, there was still a lot for Adam to learn, and God taught him in the garden that He had planted in Eden, where the very best arrangements were made for him, which afterwards he himself was responsible to maintain. The plants in the garden had been chosen by God to best delight Adam’s senses and best feed his body. God gave him something that could not be bettered, and all Adam had to do was to cultivate and guard it. The well-taught Adam and Eve were afterwards to go out into the earth, to multiply and fill it with human beings, who would then subjugate and dominate it by cultivation of the vegetable kingdom and domestication of the animal kingdom.

Outside the garden, nature flourished in unchecked profusion, while within was organization and order. In obedience to God, Adam used his physical and mental abilities to the full: he tended the garden as received to maintain the order – making him the first horticulturist – and he also extended the organization to the extent of naming the animals as they were brought to him, making him the first scientist (a taxonomist)! Thus his body and mind were fully occupied.

What a good and fulfilling life Adam and Eve had together, and what havoc sin wrought in robbing them of these ideal conditions. However, in the long run, such is the grace of God that men and women were to gain through the death of Christ more than they lost through the disobedience of Adam.