BORN SLAVES

Scripture references are to the NIV, British text

Adam’s race as a whole is one of serfs ‘sold as a slave to sin’ (Rom. 7:14).

In Eden Adam sold himself and, by heredity, all his potential offspring.

And so all are corrupted and all die.

What value did Adam himself get in return?

He got his own way.

He got his choice of companionship with his wife for a time but in the course of disobedience rejected God and the Divine law.

For this tawdry reward of self-gratification he bargained off himself and his future children to sin and dying, severed from his status as a son of God, thrown into a struggle with his own humanity and earth’s now-hostile environment (Gen. 3:17-19; Rom. 5:12).

Sin and struggle have ruled humanity ever since.

Under this bondage all suffer disease, sorrow and death the inevitable terminus of this dreadful curse. We read, ‘the soul who sins is the one who will die’, ‘the wages of sin is death’ (Ezek. 18:4; Rom. 6:23).

In due time God ‘gave his one and only Son’, Jesus, to redeem the one man, Adam, who had precipitated the curse, laying down His own righteous life as an equivalent ransom to buy back the perfect human life which Adam had forfeited.

As the Apostle Paul succinctly puts it, ‘since death came through a man, the resurrection of the dead comes also through a man. For as in Adam all die, so in Christ all will be made alive” (1 Cor. 15:21, 22; emphases added).

How is this to be achieved?

In the great Resurrection on earth the returned race will then be given the full knowledge of saving Truth and the applied benefits of Christ’s death on their behalf.

All will then have a comprehensive opportunity to prove themselves under an individual test worthy of eternal life on earth. This will be the Millennium, the world’s judgement day not a time of condemnation, but a time of restoration and rejoicing.

At the end of this period, the faithful will enter eternal life on earth as perfect sons of God, slaves no more.

For the creation was subjected to frustration, not by its own choice, but by the will of the one [God] who subjected it, in hope that the creation itself will be liberated from its bondage to decay and brought into the freedom and glory of the children of God. – Rom. 8:20, 21

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