Since “last names” didn’t exist in ancient Israel (or anywhere else until relatively recent centuries), it was quite common for people to be called "X son/daughter of Y", that is, to have abbreviated “genealogies”. For example, for persons unaware of the Virgin Conception of Jesus, he would have been called “Yeshua ben Yosef” (Jesus, son of Joseph) by his contemporaries. Still— a long genealogy going back for scores of generations was by no means common. Who would need such a record? Obviously, one type of person would: a prince or a king. The genealogy would authenticate his right to succeed to the throne.
I don’t know if you ever saw the delightful film starring a young Alec Guiness, entitled Kind Hearts and Coronets. But if you did, you remember that his mother, who was distantly in line to inherit a magnificent estate and a title for her son, kept a genealogical table, and instructed her son just what uncles or cousins intervened between him and inheriting the dukedom.
So why do Matthew and Luke give us such long genealogies of Jesus? It has been claimed that Matthew presents Jesus as the messianic King of Israel, heir to the throne of David. But does Luke also? Usually, the answer given is “no”. Luke presents Jesus, it is said, as the perfect Man. If so, then tracing him back not just as far as David or Abraham, but all the way to Adam, makes sense. Of course, you may say, what is so unique about that? Any one of us can assume ourselves to be descended from the first human being! But that is precisely the point. If Jesus was only Son of God in the sense of being totally divine and not human also, he could not trace his lineage back to Adam. But his divine Sonship was of a dual type: he was truly God and born without human father by miraculous virginal conception, but also truly human, born of a human mother and by her descended from the first human being Adam.
Yet did you notice that Luke doesn’t stop with Adam? Adam, Luke tells us, was “the son of God”. Does Luke want us to see this as another way in which the title “Son of God” might be applied to Jesus? Adam was "son of God" not by sexual generation, but by creation and commission. He was made by God's creative "hand" in the image and likeness of God, and was commanded to rule over creation as God's vice-regent.
“Then God said: “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness. Let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, the birds of the air, and the cattle, and over all the wild animals and all the creatures that crawl on the ground.” God created man in his image; in the divine image he created him; male and female he created them.” (Genesis 1:26-27 NAB)So in a very real sense, since God Himself is King of the Universe, and he commissioned Adam to rule His earthly creations like a king, Luke's genealogy of Jesus is a royal one just as much as Matthew's!
Adam was to be like God. This was his sonship. Yet, by disobeying God and sinning, he lost that special sonship.
Adamic Christology—that is, seeing Jesus as the Second Adam who reversed Adam’s fall—has no obvious place in Luke’s theology, as seen in his gospel and in the Acts. But Luke, more than any of the other gospel writers, was closely associated with Paul. And Paul clearly does have a pronounced Adamic Christology—see Rom 5:14; 1Cor 15:22, 45; 1Tim 2:13-14.
And since reversing Adam’s fall meant, in the first place, reversing his response to temptation, Luke follows up the genealogy which he climaxed with “son of Adam, son of God” with … Jesus’ temptation by Satan, and his victory over the tempter (Luke 4:1-13).
Luke tells us in this subtle, but effective, way that Jesus was not only “tempted in every way as we” (Heb 2:18; 4:15), but also that he was tempted in every way that Eve (and through her, Adam) was. As Eve was tempted in a threefold way by the prospect of eating the forbidden fruit, so Jesus was tempted three times by the Devil.
The woman saw that the tree was good for food, pleasing to the eyes, and desirable for gaining wisdom. So she took some of its fruit and ate it; and she also gave some to her husband, who was with her, and he ate it (Gen. 3:6).Threefold temptation also reappears in Peter’s threefold failure to confess Jesus on the night of Jesus’ arrest. The threefold aspect is supposed to signify the completeness of the testing, which Eve and Peter failed completely, and in which Jesus triumphed completely.
Of course, reversing Adam’s fall entailed much more than Jesus’ merely himself refusing to succumb to temptation to sin. It necessitated his exchanging his own perfect sinless righteousness for our sinful unrighteousness, in what one modern Christian hymn-writer vividly and beautifully called “The Great Exchange”.
ONCE UPON A TIME
UPON A HILL FAR WAY
AN UNFAIR PROPOSITION
BEFORE A RIGHTEOUS MAN WAS MADE.
COULD'VE CHANGED HIS SITUATION,
BUT INSTEAD HE CHOSE TO OBEY, AT
THE GREAT EXCHANGE
AN ETERNITY HE TRAVELED TO
BE THERE AT THAT PLACE,
THE CHOSEN DESTINATION TO
SHOW MANKIND GOD'S GRACE.
HIS LONGING TO REDEEM US
COULD ONLY BE EXPLAINED AT
THE GREAT EXCHANGE
AT THE GREAT EXCHANGE,
EVEN THEN HE KNEW ME.
HE BORE SUCH PAIN,
AND HE DID IT ALL FOR LOVE OF
AN UNDESERVING SERVANT
WHO'LL NEVER BE THE SAME,
SINCE
THE GREAT EXCHANGE
I WALKED THAT SAME HILLSIDE,
AS I KNELT DOWN TO PRAY.
HE SHOWED ME ALL THE WRONG
I'D DONE AND THE PRICE HE
PAID THAT DAY.
AND THEN I AROSE FORGIVEN,
HIS LOSS BECAME MY GAIN AT
THE GREAT EXCHANGE
EVERYTHING THAT MANKIND
LOST, JESUS HAS RECLAIMED.
THE PATHWAY TO ETERNITY BY
HIS DEATH IS ARRANGED.
AND ALL OF THIS HE OFFERS, IF
YOU'LL MEET HIM TODAY AT
THE GREAT EXCHANGE
“[God] made him who had never sinned [i.e., Jesus], to become sin for our sakes, so that we might become the righteousness of God in him” (2 Corinthians 5:21).Interestingly enough, Luke himself gives us another subtle clue that this second phase of Jesus' reversal of Adam's fall will be more demanding than the first, when he cryptically wrote in verse 13: “The devil … departed from him until an opportune time”.
When do you think that “opportune time” for Satan’s next desperate attack on the Savior was?
We will certainly return to that subject, when we reach that point in Luke’s gospel. But think about it. When was Jesus tempted not to go to the cross and bear our sins in his own body? When was the stress of temptation so great on him that he literally “sweat great drops of blood”?
This is how much he loved you and me! This is what we need to remember already at this early point in Luke’s gospel.
P.S.: If you can't figure out when this opportune time was, and the curiosity is just killing you, you can always drop a question in the comment box on this page, and I'll let you in on the answer ahead of time!
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