Not the Completion

The text never calls it a fall. Paul says the spiritual comes after the natural. Hebrews says the teleios had not yet arrived for anyone. Adam was the first stage of the building project, not the perfected state the gospel restores.

Document 4 of 10

 

The house was declared in the first letter. The blueprint was humanity, tzelem (shadow or image) and demut (likeness or resemblance). The breath was breathed in. The house stood up and opened its eyes. And then something happened in the garden that changed the condition of the house, and how we understand what happened determines everything about how we understand what the cross accomplished.

Two readings compete for the same event. The first reading says Adam was created in original perfection and divine union, perfectly righteous, perfectly inhabitable by YHWH, fully complete, and what Genesis 3 describes is a fall from that perfection. The gospel on this reading restores to what Adam was. The second reading says Adam was the beginning of the house, genuinely made, genuinely breathed into, genuinely the tzelem of YHWH, but not yet the completed house. The spiritual comes after the natural. The teleios (completion, the telos, the goal, the destination arrived at) had not yet come. The gospel on this reading is not restoration to Adam. It is arrival at what Adam was always pointing toward.

The covenant text supports the second reading entirely. Let the text speak.

The text never says Adam fell. The word naphal (to fall) does not appear in Genesis 3. The tradition imported the fall, largely through Augustine of Hippo in the fourth century, shaped by Neoplatonic philosophy. The text describes a changed condition, not a fall from perfection.

 

First, Genesis 3 does not use the Hebrew word naphal (to fall). It does not describe the event as a fall from a height of perfection. It describes a choice, a consequence, and a changed condition. The serpent spoke. The woman considered. The man ate. And the condition of the house changed, not from perfection to corruption but from the initial state of the building project moving toward its destination to a condition moving away from it. The house was not destroyed. The tzelem was still the tzelem. The neshamah (breath of life) was still in the nostrils. But the direction changed.

The theological category of the fall came primarily through Augustine of Hippo, writing in the fourth and fifth centuries CE, trained in Neoplatonic philosophy (the Greek framework in which reality flows from a perfect divine source and progressively diminishes as it moves away from that source), who read Genesis 3 through that philosophical lens and produced the doctrine of original sin as the fall of humanity from original perfection. This reading became so embedded in Christian thinking that it is now read back into the text as though the text placed it there. It did not. The text describes what happened. Augustine named it a fall. The text never does.

Augustine read Genesis 3 through Neoplatonic philosophy and produced the doctrine of the fall. The category was imported. The text describes a changed condition, not a fall from perfection that the gospel must restore.

 

Second, Paul says directly in 1 Corinthians 15:45-47 what the relationship between Adam and Yeshua actually is. He writes: the first adam became a living nephesh (soul or breathing creature, the tzelem animated by the neshamah, the house built and breathed into). The last Adam became a life-giving pneuma (spirit, the fully inhabited, fully righteous, fully complete condition). But the pneumatikon (spiritual, the fully spirit-filled state) is not first. The psychikon (natural — the soul-animated, breathing-creature state) is first. And afterward, meta, the pneumatikon.

Paul is not describing a fall and a restoration. He is describing a sequence. First the natural, Adam, the house built and breathed into, the beginning of the building project. Afterward the spiritual, Yeshua, the last Adam, the completion of the building project. The afterward is not a return to a prior state. It is an arrival at a subsequent state that the first state was always pointing toward. Adam was not the goal. Adam was the beginning. Yeshua is the goal, the completion, the teleios, the house finally ready for full permanent habitation.

Third, the writer of Hebrews says in Hebrews 11:39-40, and all these, though commended through their faith, did not receive what was promised, since God had provided something better for us, that apart from us they should not be made teleios (complete, brought to the telos, arrived at the destination, finished). The teleios had not come for any of them. Not fallen from it. Not yet arrived at it. Waiting for it. The entire covenant people from Abel through Avraham through Moshe through all the prophets, genuinely faithful, genuinely in covenant relationship with YHWH, and not yet at the teleios. The completion was ahead of them, not behind them. The gospel brings them to what they were moving toward, not back to what they had and lost.

Hebrews 11:40, apart from us they should not be made teleios (complete, brought to the destination). Not fallen from it. Not yet arrived at it. The teleios is what the covenant was always building toward. The cross is what accomplished it.

 

What is the teleios? It is the completed state of the house, the condition of the tzelem that has been brought to the righteousness required for YHWH to dwell in it permanently and fully. Not the righteousness of a creature performing well enough for the divine presence to tolerate. The righteousness constituted by the completed covenant, by YHWH passing between the pieces alone, holding both sides, sealing the covenant unconditionally for the seed, abolishing sin as a condition of the house, constituting righteousness as the permanent condition of all flesh, finishing judgment so that nothing stands between the builder and the house he has been building toward since the first letter of the first word before anything was made.

Adam was the tzelem without the teleios. The house built but not yet finished in righteousness. The breath breathed in but not yet the full inhabitation. The beginning of what the Bet of Bereshit declared, not its arrival. The gospel is not the restoration of Adam. The gospel is the declaration that the teleios has come, in the cross, in the resurrection of the firstfruits of all who slept and the house that was always being built for YHWH’s own habitation is now ready. For all flesh. From Adam. For all who slept. The builder has moved in.

 

Adam was the beginning. Yeshua is the completion. The text never calls it a fall. Paul says the spiritual comes after the natural. The gospel is not restoration, it is arrival.

 

 

The text never says fall.

Paul says: the psychikon (natural) first, then the pneumatikon (spiritual).

Hebrews says: the teleios (completion) had not yet come for any of them.

 

Adam was the beginning of the house.

The house was real. The breath was real. The destination was not yet reached.

 

The gospel is not restoration to Adam.

It is arrival at what Adam was always pointing toward.

 

The Gospel Revolution  •  Mike Williams Ministries

William Ethan Massengill  •  Michael Lilborn Williams  •  Daniel Thomas Rouse

Published by Audrey Williams