Sunday message · Better:Jesus is Greater series
Listen to the message
Message Summary
In the third message of the Better: Jesus is Greater series, Pastor Phillip Santillan turns to Genesis 3:1–7, where Adam and Eve are tempted in the garden. He starts with the brokenness everyone can see in the world and the growing awareness of more brokenness inside us than we can fix on our own. We reach for pictures of a bright future, from Martin Luther King’s dream to self-love and self-care. Those can be good things, Phil says, but trusting positivity and altruism to bring heaven on earth is like prescribing a band-aid for a terminal illness.
Christians can do the same, and Phil admits he has sometimes treated Scripture as a set of disconnected stories with little morals. He quotes Tim Keller, who calls the Bible a single story about what went wrong with the human race and what will put it right. Keller tells of Beatrice Webb, an architect of the British welfare system, who wrote in her diary in 1890 that she had staked everything on the essential goodness of human nature. Thirty-five years later she admitted how permanent our evil impulses are and how little social machinery can change them.
The series began on the road to Emmaus, where Jesus explained what all the Scriptures said about himself (Luke 24:27). Phil wonders what Jesus said about Genesis 3 and suggests, “When it came to being tested, Jesus chose better, and he was greater.” He is the true and better Adam, as the early church taught. Paul called Jesus the last Adam, a life-giving spirit, and in Romans 5 he contrasts Adam’s one sin, which brought condemnation, with Christ’s one act of righteousness, which brings new life and a right relationship with God.
Phil imagines Jesus pointing to another garden. In Matthew’s account of Gethsemane, Jesus, grieved to the point of death, asks Peter, James and John to stay with him and three times surrenders his will to the Father’s. In the first garden, Adam doubted that God was giving him his best and reached for a life God seemed to be holding back, bringing death into the world. In Gethsemane, Jesus overcame temptation and chose a cup that meant losing his life for our sake. Because he was tempted in every way as we are, yet without sin, Hebrews invites us to approach the throne of grace with confidence.
This leads to the series’ two questions. Who is your Jesus: an inspirational figure no better than a What Would Jesus Do bracelet, or a Savior who meets broken people with mercy and grace and intends to transform them from the inside out? And where is your Jesus: a distant deity whose approval we must earn, someone we keep at arm’s length out of shame, hiding like Adam and Eve among the trees, or Emmanuel, God with us, who seeks us and calls us his children? After a reading from Edmund Clowney on Christ as the true Adam, Phil invites listeners to believe and confess again that God is with them, and closes in prayer.