Father, as we come to your word, we remember how desperately we need it. We remember how spiritually dead we were before we heard your gospel preached. And yet, through the preaching of your word, you gave us life. You gave us ears to hear. You gave us eyes to see the glory of your beautiful gospel. And so we pray again today, Lord, that we would have ears to hear and eyes to see the beauty of your word. We pray that by the power of the Spirit working in us, that we would yield our lives, yield our wills to yours in accordance with your word. Help us understand. Give us understanding and fill our hearts with a desire to walk in obedience to You, to live lives that are pleasing and glorifying to You. And we pray these things for the glory of Christ and in His name. Amen. Well, today we are going to be continuing our study in the Gospel of John. So if you've got your Bibles with you, please turn to John chapter 18. Believe it or not, there are actually chapters outside of chapter 17 that we're going to continue looking at today. What a great study John 17 was. All I can say is that after spending, you know, six plus months in John 17, I want to study it even more. I just loved it that much. I want to go back and study it more. Not that I will go back to it and preach for you guys more, but just for my personal knowledge, just for my personal growth, I just love chapter 17 and plan on that being one of those places that I go back to regularly for study. But today we're going to be going into the next section of John's text. We're going to be in chapter 18 verses 1 and 2 today. And this is really an amazing text as well. There is so much just in the first couple of verses. It's such a rich book. This whole book is just so rich, so filled with so much. Do you ever wonder what it must have been like for Adam and Eve to live in a world where there was no stain and no corruption of sin. Do you ever wonder what that must have been like for them? I think, okay, while it's possible for us to speculate, to try to imagine what it must have been like, I don't think we can actually ever truly or accurately imagine what it would have been like. Because you and I have never lived one single nanosecond of our lives in that kind of world or that type of environment. All that we have seen from the moment we opened our eyes as children, All we've ever seen, every single thing that we've laid our eyes on since we first opened our eyes and everything we've ever heard. has been corrupted to some extent, to some degree by sin. The scriptures tell us in Genesis chapter five, verse five, that Adam lived for a total of 930 years. Now, okay, there's some debate among modern scholars as to whether or not we should take that number literally. You know, we know that it's impossible for God to lie though. And we know that the Scriptures are inerrant, that they are inspired, that they are infallible, and that they are therefore trustworthy and sufficient. And for those reasons, there's no reason for us to doubt the number 930. There's no reason for us to think that that isn't accurate. Now we don't know how many of those years, those 930 years, transpired prior to Adam's fall into sin. Reading the text of Genesis chapters 1 to 3 though, Honestly, it doesn't sound like it took very long. I mean, only three chapters that you can read in five minutes. Adam and Eve, after all, they hadn't even started to fulfill the commission that God had given them to be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth. They hadn't even started that by the time they fell. Their first son, Cain, was actually born outside of Eden. He was conceived and born after the fall. So I think we can be fairly certain that out of the 930 years that Adam lived, at least 929 of those were lived after the fall. But only Adam and Eve and God knew how much the world changed once sin entered in. Adam undoubtedly witnessed incredibly reviling, revolting sin. He undoubtedly witnessed the greatest depths of sin taking place all around him before the Lord finally called him home after 930 years. And I have to imagine that as Adam saw every sin imaginable under the sun going on around him, that he must have felt incredible remorse as he had to spend over 900 years looking back and remembering how perfect life was, how perfect the world was before the fall, how amazing the Garden of Eden truly was. So today we begin the final section of John's Gospel, which is going to stretch from chapter 18 to the end of chapter 21, which is where the book ends. The synoptic Gospels, which are Matthew, Mark, and Luke, they all give very similar endings. The endings of their books, they all focus on you know, Christ's arrest, his crucifixion, his resurrection. And they're very similar to one another with slight differences since they came from different witnesses. But John's ending, the ending of John's book is remarkably different from the endings of the Synoptic Gospels. And I believe he's different by design. He intended to give us a different perspective based on what he saw. In fact, John doesn't even cover the events that took place in Gethsemane, while Matthew, Mark, and Luke tell us how Jesus went there to pray in isolation to the Father, bringing only Peter, James, and John with him to watch while he prayed. Matthew, Mark, and Luke all tell us about how Jesus's anguish was so great that he was praying and he was even sweating drops of blood. They tell us that he pled with the Father that there be another way and that the Father, he prayed that the Father would remove the cup of suffering and wrath that he, that Christ, was about to drink. John doesn't tell us any of that stuff. John doesn't go into any of these details and I have to think that there were very good legitimate reasons that he didn't go into the same details that the synoptic authors did. I think we can at least assume that he was familiar with the gospel testimonies by the other guys, by Matthew, Mark, and Luke. And so he probably assumed that his readers would be able to gather those details from those accounts. But I also think John wanted to emphasize different things than Matthew, Mark, or Luke wanted to emphasize. In fact, if you study each one of the four Gospels carefully, you'll see that each one is emphasizing something slightly different. Remember also that John tells us exactly why he gave us this book. He gave us this book. He wrote this book in order that we would believe in Christ and find everlasting life in Him. And to that end, one of the themes that has run throughout this book that we've seen from the beginning to what's coming into the end of John's gospel. One of these themes is the supremacy and the sovereignty of Christ in every single situation that he faced. And so to that end, John has shown us the way that Jesus is supreme. He's shown us the way that Jesus triumphed over and against the religious leaders. Over and over. They wanted to charge him back in chapter 5 with violating the command to keep the Sabbath holy. And John showed us how Jesus stifled their arguments. The religious leaders wanted to have Jesus arrested at the Feast of Tabernacles. And John showed us how those efforts were thwarted as well. The conflict with the religious leaders continued to build and build and build. Finally, it reached a boiling point when Jesus resurrected his friend Lazarus from the dead. In the response of the religious leaders, they knew what Jesus had done. They knew that Jesus was performing supernatural things, but their response was not to believe. Instead, their response was to conspire to assassinate Jesus. And they also thought that they should assassinate Lazarus as well, just to keep them silent. They said this, they said, if we let him go on like this, all men will believe in him. And the Romans will come and take away both our place and our nation, they said. In John chapter 11 verse 53, John told us, so from that day on they planned together to kill him. And as the Passover week came, we read in chapter 11 verse 57, Now the chief priests and the Pharisees had given orders that if anyone knew where he was, if anybody knew where Jesus was, he was to report it so that they might seize him. Now, John was very aware of the anguish that the synoptic gospel authors tell us Christ had in Gethsemane. In fact, John hinted at, he kind of foreshadowed this anguish when he told us back in chapter 12, verse 27, that Jesus said, Now my soul has become troubled, and what shall I say? Father, save me from this hour, but for this purpose I came to this hour. But John's purpose is to show us the supremacy and the sovereignty of Christ in every situation he faced, even when he was arrested by the authorities and whisked away in the middle of the night for what was really a joke of a trial. What John wants us to see, and it's the point of our passage today, is that it is always better that we drink the portion that God has given us in life, regardless of what it may involve, than it is to pursue the portion that another hand offers. What God has for us is always best, regardless of what it may involve. So it's here in the garden of Gethsemane that Christ truly earns the title, the last Adam. So we see Paul refer to Jesus as in 1 Corinthians chapter 15 verse 45. And before we're done today, I think you're going to see why Paul called him the last Adam. My goal is that you would certainly see how that is the case. So John begins this new section. which will show us that the road to Christ's glory goes directly to and through the cross by writing this in verses 1 and 2 of chapter 18. He writes, when Jesus had spoken these words, he went forth with his disciples over the ravine of the Kidron where there was a garden. in which he entered with his disciples. Now Judas also, who was betraying him, knew the place, for Jesus had often met there with his disciples. This passage starts with a noticeable, a very obvious pivot, that is, a change of direction. John writes, when Jesus had spoken these words, that clause serves to close the book, so to speak, on the previous section, which stretched from chapter 12 to chapter 17, which dealt with everything from the Last Supper to the Farewell Discourse to the Lord's High Priestly Prayer. And now at this point we suddenly see the story take a different direction and start advancing in a totally different direction. We're told that from there Jesus brought his disciples with him over the ravine of the Kidron where there was a garden. And it's interesting that he says that. It's interesting that he says that there was a garden. One thing that we should notice is that John doesn't even mention the name of the garden. We refer to the garden as the garden of Gethsemane, right? That's what we know this garden as. But what's interesting to note is that Matthew, Mark, and Luke, they only refer to it as Gethsemane. They don't use the word garden to describe it. We never actually see the full title, Garden of Gethsemane, anywhere in scripture. We only get it by putting the gospel accounts together, combining what the synoptic authors call it, and combining it with what John calls it, and that's where we get the title, the Garden of Gethsemane. It is very obviously the same place. Now, why do you think it is? that John didn't just call it Gethsemane like the other gospel authors. Why do you think he used a totally different word than they did? Again, it's to show us the supremacy and the sovereignty of Christ in every situation in order that we may believe on Him savingly and in order that we may follow the example that He sets for us in resting confidently in God's will. John, I believe, is showing us the supremacy and sovereignty of Christ here by developing what is really kind of a contrast of sorts. And this involves putting some things together. Where else in Scripture do we read of a garden? Of course, this brings us back to where humanity begins, where the Bible begins, where sin enters in, back in the garden of Eden. It was in a garden that Adam, our physical forefather, fell into sin. And it was also in a garden that Christ, in whom we have eternal life, spiritual life, triumphed over evil. There are a lot of contrasting points that you can make between these two accounts, between these two gardens. The first is one that we've really already kind of touched on. It's the fact that there was no sin and there was no corruption in the Garden of Eden. There was therefore nothing that would have inclined Adam to desire to sin. All that Adam had experienced on earth, unlike us, all that we've experienced is stuff tainted by sin. All that he had experienced was never being tainted by sin. His experience on earth was exactly as God had created it, exactly as God had intended everything to be. That was his life experience when he fell. It was literally paradise. It was perfect. The Garden of Eden was perfect in every way, shape, and form imaginable. There were no flaws. There were no defects. There was no stain of sin to speak of. As we've noted in that sense, it was something that you and I, we can't even begin to imagine what it must have been like. We just have no point of reference for comparison. Kind of like how we can't really fully understand the Trinity. We can understand that God is one God, three persons, right? We can understand that. But our minds, when we try to really understand that, There's an element of mystery there because there's no point of reference that we've ever seen, that we've ever experienced for us to compare it to. And the Garden of Eden would be the same way. All we can say is that we know that in the Garden of Eden there was no stain of sin. There was no corruption. There was no death to speak of. They literally, Adam and Eve literally, could not have been in a more perfect place on earth. God is perfect. Everything that He made was perfect. Of the world as it was at that time, He said it was very good. God had given Adam and Eve authority over every animal. He gave them authority in Genesis chapter 1 verse 28 to rule over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the sky and over every living thing that moves on the earth which includes, we should note, serpents and snakes. they had authority over serpents and snakes and yet despite the perfection of the earth and the created order and the garden in which they dwelled and despite the fact that God had given them authority to rule over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the sky and over every living thing that moves on the earth they nevertheless yielded to the tempting words of a serpent. Now, liberal scholars love to point out that serpents or snakes can't talk, and thus the account of the fall must be mythological, which, by the way, only proves what I've been saying, that Earth prior to the fall was nothing like Earth after the fall. We can't even begin to imagine how great the difference is, much less are we able to compare the two. But despite God's warning that eating the fruit from the tree of good and evil knowledge would result in death, Adam forfeited everything perfect for everything corrupted. He gave up perfection and traded it in for a world stained by sin. What inclined Adam to sin? Ultimately, it was selfishness. Jesus on the other hand, Jesus took on flesh and he lived in a world that was complete sin when he was born. He had experienced the pain and the sorrow of sin when his friend Lazarus died, and it caused him to weep. Jesus lived under the curse of sin, even though he himself never once sinned. Nevertheless, the stain of sin, the stain of the corruption of sin that was introduced in the fall of man, surrounded him as he went to the garden of Gethsemane. he would experience the death. And he knew it. He would experience the death that was the consequence of Adam's sin. As on the very next day, he would be nailed to a cross and would die a slow, horrific, agonizing, excruciating death. Jesus knew the terrible nature of what awaited. And we see it in the words of his prayer in the Garden of Gethsemane from Luke 22, verse 42, where he prays, Father, if you are willing, remove this cup from me. What is this cup? It's not just dying physically. It was bearing God's wrath against sin. Jesus knew that this was the very purpose for His mission, to die in the place of sinners and to thereby redeem all who believe in Him from the curse of sin. That was the very reason that the Father sent Him, and He didn't shy away from it. He did not cower. He did not take cover. He went to the cross willingly, knowing that this was the only way to bring salvation to His people. Think about this. How much love, how much respect, how much adoration do we have for, say, a fireman who rushes into a burning building to rescue people from physical death? Or what great respect we have for a police officer who risks his life to take out an active shooter. Think also of how little respect and how much condemnation we have for officers who don't run into an active shooter situation. How much more love, how much more admiration should we have for the Lord Jesus Christ when we consider how willingly He went to the cross to secure our salvation? A second point of contrast. It's seen when we consider that in the Garden of Eden, in all of its perfection, and given that God and man dwelled in harmony together there, Adam and Eve spoke to Satan himself when they were tempted, while Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane spoke to God the Father. While John doesn't record Jesus' prayer for us here, we know that he was within earshot of it, along with Peter and James. And we can read the account of what he prayed in the other gospel narratives. But verse 2 here tells us that this place, the Garden of Gethsemane, was a place where Jesus frequently came to meet with his disciples, presumably for prayer and fellowship with his disciples. And this was certainly central to Jesus coming to the garden of Gethsemane on this night. He not only came there to pray himself, but Luke tells us in chapter 22 verse 40 of Luke's account that Jesus also admonished the three disciples who were with him, pray that you may not enter into temptation. He even returns to them. He stops praying and returns to His disciples twice to encourage them to wake up, to stay awake, and to stay vigilant. In Luke 22, verse 46, which is just the first time after the first admonition, He says to them again, Why are you sleeping? Get up and pray that you may not enter into temptation. Jesus realized that his greatest need in that moment was prayer. To speak to the Father, and for his closest three friends to join him in praying as well. By point of contrast, when Adam and Eve were tempted, prayer does not even seem to have crossed their minds. It doesn't even appear to have been a proverbial blip on their radar. Friends, if you are ever tempted to sin, and you will be, if you're ever tempted to sin, maybe I should say when, and you can't figure out how to escape the temptation to sin, let me ask you this. What prevents you from just falling to your knees and staying there until the temptation passes? When temptation is great, what prevents you from doing that or from also going to your closest friends and asking them to join you in praying that this temptation would pass? James 4.7 says this, it says, Submit therefore to God, resist the devil, and he will flee from you. And Christ, Christ is our perfect, perfect example in this. In every situation, His supremacy and sovereignty are revealed before our dim eyes. when your tempted friends pray. Pray lest you be like Adam and Eve and play the devil's games and entertain his temptations as if you're oblivious to the dangers of entertaining his temptations. James Montgomery Boyce notes of Christ's temptation in the Garden of Gethsemane. He says, quote, We must not think, just because we have the story of the temptation of Christ by Satan at the very start of his ministry, that Jesus was therefore never tempted again. On the contrary, on one occasion, he identified a rebuke by Peter as one of Satan's disguised temptations. And on this night, the night on which he was betrayed, His final night before going to the cross, Jesus was undoubtedly tempted once again. After all, that's why he was also warning the disciples. He was warning them of the same thing. Get up and pray that you may not enter into temptation. Why would they be tempted? Because Satan wants to discourage and dissuade Jesus. And Jesus wants his friends to be praying for him. He didn't want them to be tempted to disobey what he had asked them to do. So what was Jesus tempted to do? Or conversely, what was Jesus perhaps tempted not to do? I think the primary temptation He seems to have been facing, based on the fact that He was asking the Father to find another way and to let this cup pass from before Him. His primary temptation was to leave the work of being a propitiation, an atonement for the sin of all who believed on Him unfinished. It wasn't physical death that Jesus feared. That's not why Jesus was so afraid. There have been many men who weren't afraid to die for a good cause. It wasn't physical death that Jesus was afraid of. It was the wrath of God against all the sins of his people that Jesus feared. God's wrath against even one sin is worse than you or I could possibly ever even begin to imagine. It is terrible. God's wrath against a number of sins that's just too great to count is simply unimaginable. And Jesus was going to take every single sin of his people upon himself. Now, if you were to just ask me, Toby, how many times do you think you've sinned in your life? I'd say it's a number too great to count. I have no idea. I can't count that high. Now you multiply that by 10. How huge is that number? Now multiply it by the number of all the elect. It's unimaginable. There's only been one person in all of human history who knew how serious, who knew how terrible, how horrific God's wrath against sin is. And that's Jesus. If we knew what Jesus knew about how terrible God's wrath against sin is, we would be sweating drops of blood too every time we're tempted to sin. So perhaps Jesus was tempted to leave his work unfinished. Or maybe he was tempted to feel as though he were completely abandoned by the Father already. The fact that an angel was sent to strengthen Christ immediately after Christ prayed in Luke 22, verse 42, that the Father let this cup pass, adds some strength to this possibility that Jesus was tempted to feel abandoned by God. Whatever the case may be, whatever his temptation may be, or maybe it was both, could have been both. The point that we're supposed to see here is that when Jesus was tempted, he prayed, and he prayed, and he prayed, and he prayed until this temptation passed. We see that he was strengthened by this prayer to do what God had called him, had sent him to do. And we will either follow his example, or we will follow Adam's example. When Jesus was tempted, he prayed, he spoke to the Father. When Adam was tempted, he and Eve spoke to the devil. And speaking to God wasn't even part of their thought process. As a result of this, we have a third contrast that we see implied here in this text. Adam and Eve fell when they were tempted, but Christ prevailed through prayer. They fell, they failed, He prevailed. Christ's victory is seen in that even though He was tempted, And even though he desired that there be another way, so that the cup of God's wrath may pass from him, with the very same breath that he prayed that there be another way, he also yielded his human will to the will of the Father, saying, yet not my will, but yours be done. How many of you know that every single time you yield to sin or I yield to sin, it's because we have pursued the fulfillment of our will rather than God's will. We have no excuse. We really have no excuse. Even though the flesh is going to try to find one, we have no excuse for sin. But not so with Christ. He didn't try to make excuses for anything. He didn't try to get away from anything. In the end, He drank the cup of God's holy wrath against His people's sin down to the very last drop, and He did so willingly. See, Jesus didn't let the situation just come upon Him like He was passive in it. He went toward the proverbial flame. If you have your Bibles open to John 18, look down at verse 4, which tells us that Jesus, knowing all the things that were coming upon Him, went forth. He knew what he was about to face. He knew exactly what he was about to face. And yet, he wasn't passive about God's will. He embraced it, and he actively and willingly participated in its unfolding. When Adam fell, he hid from God. When Christ prevailed, he didn't hide from anybody. Christ's example is something for us to be in awe of, of course. He prayed for at least one hour. at least enough time for the disciples who were with him to fall asleep at least a time or two. But scripture is never given to us just to give us a sense of awe. It's always given to give us something more. Christ's example here is one for you and for me to follow, to imitate as we are to imitate Him in every practical way. But we must know That when we are tempted, not if, but when we are tempted, the power to escape temptation is present. Not by our own strength, not by our own power, not even by our own will, but by the power and the will of the Spirit who dwells within us. The idea of prevailing through prayer does not mean that we just pray until God gives us what we want, that we just pray until God gives us what we're asking for, what we hope that He will do. No, to prevail in prayer Which we all have to learn to do, by the way. That's part of our sanctification, is learning how to prevail in prayer. But to prevail in prayer means to pray until our will is aligned with God's. Not until His will is aligned with ours, but until our will is aligned with His. And that's exactly what Jesus shows us here. That we must pray until our will conforms to His. This concept, by the way, is completely lost on the unregenerate man who would only love and only believe in a God who's basically his personal magic mystical butler who does his personal bidding. You know, we can get on the internet, we can get on YouTube, and we can find video and audio clips online of absolutely sinful lost men preaching from a huge stage that God wants to bless you materially. Whether that means giving you health or giving you wealth, but you need to trust God for enough money for that new car by sowing a seed. Or you need to trust God for that healing by writing a check. That is not the way it works. No, God does not want to give you the desires of your sinful heart. God does not want to give you your desires unless He Himself is the greatest desire of your heart. In which case, He will give you more and more of Himself. And this is how Christ prevailed. The human will of Christ was brought into perfect alignment with God's perfect holy will. That was the struggle. That was the struggle going on here. And that was where the victory in this situation is seen. Adam forsook God's will. He turned from God's will. Jesus embraced and turned toward God's holy and perfect will. Friends, you and I face so many temptations every single day, all the time. We face troubles. We face trials. We face distractions. We face possibilities that give us trepidation, that maybe even give you anxiety or fear. But we also have a perfect Heavenly Father who sees us, who is with us, who listens to us, and who has ordained that every single circumstance and every situation that we face would all work for our good. That being to conform us into Christ's perfect image. If God is for us, Who or what could possibly stand against us? What could prevent us from growing in Christ's likeness if God is for us? Nothing. Absolutely nothing. And the way to prevail in prayer is to lay all of our prayers and all of our petitions out before God, knowing that He does hear us, knowing that He cares. And not only does He care, but He loves us. And not only does He love us, but He loves us more than we could ever possibly love ourselves. And we can therefore be confident that He really, really is causing all things to work together for His glory and for our growth in Christ's likeness. And then, having laid out all our prayers, having laid out all our petitions, and having the confident assurance that God has heard us, and that God loves us, and that God wants what's best for us, then whatever happens, happens. Whatever may come, whatever my God ordains is right. In J.C. Ryle's words, he said this, he said, quote, Determination to have our own way and to do only what we like is one great source of unhappiness in the world. The habit of laying all our matters before God in prayer and asking him to choose our portion is one chief secret. of peace, end quote. See friends, there is peace and there is victory to be found in this, in laying down our will and putting aside our insistence on having everything go according to our plans, our insistence on everything being done according to our will, our insistence on never being uncomfortable and we can rest with contentment and confidence knowing that God has heard our prayers, He knows our weaknesses, He knows our fears, and yet have the conscious awareness that His will is always better than our will. What He wants for us is always better than what we want for ourselves. And thus, we can always, with confidence and contentment, yield our will to His. If Christ shows us one thing in this passage, friends, it's that it is always, always, always better that we drink the portion that God has given us in life, regardless of what it may involve, than it is to pursue the portion that another hand offers us or tempts us with. As I've reminded some of you in times of great trials, incredible temptations, if we knew all the things that God knows, and if we loved ourselves with the kind of love with which God loves us, and if we had all of His wisdom, we wouldn't change a single thing about our circumstances when we're facing trials or temptations. In fact, the only reason we struggle with a trial or a temptation instead of finding peace is because we don't know everything that God knows, we don't love ourselves as much as God loves us, and we don't have His wisdom. Now you might say, okay, Pastor, that all sounds great in theory, okay, but how do I actually put this into practice? And the answer is, pray. Pray. And if you say, well, I did, and it didn't do anything, my response would be to say, is it possible that you didn't pray long enough? Or maybe your goal was to pray until God's will aligned with yours. Is that possible? Rather than determining to pray until your will aligns with His. There's one more contrast for us to consider as we consider these two gardens. And this is probably the most important contrast of all for us to think about. And it's simply this, that both Adam and Christ are what we would call federal heads. Now maybe you've never heard this term, federal headship. A federal headship. All that entails. It requires that we take a quick look at the second half of Romans 5. So if you have your Bibles with you, turn to Romans 5. And in this section, in the second half of Romans 5, we see that Paul draws out this contrast for us, and he kind of explains federal headship for us. See, when we talk about federal headship, what we're referring to, what we mean, is that God has appointed representatives. and he's only appointed two. So there are two federal heads, Adam and Christ. So when we're talking about federal headship, we're talking about Adam versus Christ. When Adam sinned, His entire nature changed. Paul says this in Romans 5, verse 12. If you've got your Bibles, open to Romans 5. In verse 12, he says, through one man, sin entered into the world and death through sin. And so death spread to all men because all sinned. What that's saying is that by nature, every man sinned, every woman, every child sinned in Adam when Adam sinned. When Adam's nature fell, when his nature became sinful, so did the nature of all of his offspring. This is how things work. This is how offspring works, right? They take on the nature of where they came from. And so when Adam's nature fell, it was impossible for him to create something that wasn't fallen. in his offspring. So, when Adam's nature fell, so did the nature of all of his descendants, all of his offspring. This, by the way, is one of many, many, many reasons that we must insist that Adam was a literal human being and not just a figurative, hypothetical, mythological man. Paul here is speaking of Adam as a literal man whose nature literally fell. And when his nature fell, guess what? So did ours. So did yours. So did mine. When Adam became guilty of sin, we all became guilty of sin. Because Adam is the natural man's federal head. It's natural man's representative. If Paul would have stopped there, with Romans 5, verse 12, what deaths of despair we would be thrown into. This would have been the single most depressing sentence written in the history of the world. Bar none. If the story ended there, we would all be destined for an eternity in hell. An eternity in which we could not be reconciled to God. An eternity in which we did not have peace with God and could not have peace with God. In which we would just be stuck being bitter, miserable, unbelieving rebels. Praise be to God. He continues, it doesn't stop there. In the verses that follow, still in Romans chapter 5, Paul shows us what great hope we have in Christ who is the other, the second federal head or representative. Paul writes this starting in verse 15 of Christ. He says, but the free gift is not like the transgression. For if by the transgression of the one many died, he's speaking of Adam there, Much more did the grace of God and the gift by the grace of the one man Jesus Christ abound to the many. The gift is not like that which came through the one who sinned, for on the one hand the judgment rose from one transgression resulting in condemnation, But on the other hand, the free gift arose from many transgressions resulting in justification. For if by the transgression of the one, death reigned through the one, how much more those who receive the abundance of grace and the gift of righteousness will reign in life through the one Jesus Christ. So then, as through one transgression there resulted condemnation to all men, Even so, through one act of righteousness there resulted justification of life to all men. For as through the one man's disobedience the many were made sinners, even so through the obedience of the one the many will be made righteous. We see these two characters contrasted through this whole passage and each one is a representative of a people, a group of people. Adam represents fallen man, he's their federal head and Christ is the federal head of all who believe on him. And this is mankind's greatest dilemma. that the natural man thinks that the idea of Christ living a perfect sinless life and yet dying a sinner's death in order that His righteousness may be credited to all who believe in Him may cover us, they think it's foolishness. The natural man, those in Adam think, what a stupid idea. But what we must see is that what man calls foolishness, what unregenerate man calls foolishness, is the only hope of being at peace with God. We have no righteousness of our own to speak of. All of our best deeds are like dirty rags before God. A man will think that he's righteous by his own standards, perhaps, but by God's standards, we have none. We have no righteousness to speak of, apart from God's grace, wherein He adopts us as His own children and brings us under the federal headship of Christ. By grace alone, through faith alone, in Christ alone, we have been fallen by nature and by choice since the day that we were conceived. For that was the day that we had a human nature, Adam's nature, his fallen nature. Sin, death, and enmity with God are the consequence of Adam's fall into sin. But the second Adam, the true and greater Adam, the Lord Jesus Christ, came to offer himself as a vicarious atonement, an atonement on behalf of all who believe in him, and who through him are clothed in eternal life, a life in which we we know God and we're at peace with God and in Christ's own perfect righteousness so that we can stand before God not in our filthy rags but in Christ's perfect righteousness. as though we had lived the perfect life, the sinless life that Jesus lived. Christ still, by the way, to this very day, prays. You know that, right? He still prays to this very day. Paul says to the Romans, Christ Jesus is he who died, yes, rather who was raised, who is at the right hand of God, present tense, who also intercedes for us. By the way, this is yet another key to us prevailing in prayer. If you know that Jesus himself is praying for you when you're facing temptation. If you know that Jesus himself is interceding for you, praying to the Father on your behalf when you are weak, when trials arise, when temptations come, then you can be confident and you can be content in the assurance, the positive, confident knowledge. that, as Donald Gray Barnhouse once noted, it is the destiny of all who are in Christ to be carried on the swell of this majestic love and life and power both now and forever." Friends, you and I have failed God a billion times, and we will continue to fail Him repeatedly. But here's what you must know, and here's what you must believe. that Jesus never did. We have failed God, but Jesus never did. Even when man would have been most likely to have run from God's will, Jesus rose up and went forth toward it. So you must trust in Him. You must look to Him, to His life, to His works, because you must be in Him. He must be your federal head, your representative before God. You must be in him so that you may be covered in his righteousness, lest you be found in Adam and have no righteousness. By one sin, Adam brought upon the whole human race God's just condemnation against sin. In Adam, there is only death. But by Christ's perfect righteousness, all who are in Him are saved, and in Him alone do we find eternal life. While we once had nothing but a fallen nature, by His grace God gave us a new heart. We were born slaves to sin, but in Christ we've been turned from slaves to sin into servants of righteousness. Those in Adam can never prevail against sin or its consequences, but in Christ we not only find an example of how to prevail in prayer against temptation, but we also find the power to do so through Him who dwells within us, to the glory of His holy, blessed name. And so friends, may you and I resolve to follow Christ's perfect example in every temptation, and to find peaceful contentedness in knowing that it's better to drink the portion that God has for us than it is to pursue the portion offered by another hand. God's ways, God's will, is always what's best. Let's pray. Our most gracious Father, we thank You for Your Word. We thank You for the ability by the power of Your Spirit to plumb the depths of Your Word and to see what You would have us know. We thank You for Christ's perfect life. We thank You that when He was tempted, By Your power, He prevailed. We thank You, O Lord, for the example that He set, and we pray that by Your grace, we too would be able to follow His example and prevail in prayer against temptation. O Lord, we confess to You that our flesh is so weak, and that we have so many temptations that we face to sin, to run from Your will, to disobey You, But, O Father, we thank you and we praise you that Christ never did fail, that he never did violate your holy and perfect will, that he followed it in order that we would be saved. We thank you that he drank the cup of your holy wrath against our sin because, O Father, we know that it would have meant being completely separated from your grace, and being tormented by our hatred of you, if it were not for your grace changing us. So we ask, O Lord, for the grace to follow Christ's example here. Teach us to prevail against temptations. Teach us to find contentedness in Your perfect will. And we pray that Your will would be done in our lives for the glory of Christ. In His name we pray. Amen.