1 Corinthians 15:45-46 Thus it is written, “The first man Adam became a living being”; the last Adam became a life-giving spirit. 46 But it is not the spiritual that is first but the natural, and then the spiritual.
Paul points out the differences between Adam and Christ in the following paragraph. This is his basis for showing the difference between the present earthly life and the resurrected life of our hope. The differences between the earthly body and the resurrected body can be seen in the difference between Adam and Christ. The first Adam was created in God’s image, but something happened to this image because of disobedience. Something was lost and not the same after Adam and Eve ate the forbidden fruit. As Genesis 2 shows, Adam was the first human created. He became a living being when God breathed his Spirit into Adam. Adam was only made of the elements of the earth before that. But after the Spirit entered Adam, a new type of existence started for humanity. Every human participates in this spiritual realm, though many people suppress it and ignore the promptings of the Holy Spirit. Adam could only give earthly life to his children but not the spiritual life. His own life was limited to 930 years, still significant in today’s standards.
Christ, however, operates at a whole different level. Paul calls Christ here the “last Adam.” Christ reversed what Adam brought. Where Adam disobeyed, Christ obeyed. Adam brought death, but Christ brought eternal life. Through his resurrection, Christ became the means by which life is given to the dead situation in which we all find ourselves. Adam gave us bodies that will eventually die. Christ gives us spiritual bodies that will never again die. There are two different existences that humans go through. All humans experience now the dying body of Adam but one day those in Christ will experience the new transformed spiritual body.
Verse 46 shows the sequence of the two bodies. The natural bodies is our first experience. The Corinthians had only experienced the natural body. They may have thought that they were experiencing the spiritual state already. This might be a conclusion drawn from Paul’s teaching as shown in Romans 6. It is possible that he wrote Romans while in Corinth, so it is highly likely that the Corinthians heard this topic in his preaching. Paul has to make clear to them the difference between the physical and the spiritual existence. New spiritual life in Christ begins while we are still in the physical body but there is even more to hope for. The spiritual experience we have now is the prelude to the fuller experience we will have in resurrection when sin and death no longer have any pull upon us.
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