The corporate understanding, first of Adam, then of Israel, is really the right starting place for understanding the good news of God for the world. If we want to say that the God of the Bible is our God, and that, for example, His ten commandments apply to us, then we must begin by acknowledging that He is our God - not because we lay claim to Him but because He lays claim to us. How he lays claim to Israel is very plain to see. "I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage." It is because of this that Israel is commanded to have no other gods than the God who has corporately redeemed her from Egypt. But how is it seen that God lays claim to us who are not Israelites so that we might understand his ten commandments as applying to us also?
We need to take a step back. I am not sure what approach you take to interpreting the account of Creation in Genesis, but whatever approach anyone takes, it should be clear that if the Bible is read in its own terms of reference it teaches that Adam is defined by God equally as a corporate entity as an individual entity, equally as a family entity that is fruitful and multiplies as an individual entity that can be identified either as a male or a female. Indeed, it can be seen from the Bible that God did not design Adam as a self-sufficient individual or group of individuals who then had the choice to love or not to love, so that the individual could be defined as complete with or with out love and love could be defined as something that was non-essential to the individual's definition by the design of the Creator. To the contrary, it is written of the individual Adam that it was not good that he should be alone; he was not a complete creation like the other creatures until love was an inherent part of his definition, until he - and she - were able to be fruitful and multiply out of love, until Adam was corporate. So then, once Adam was a corporate creature, a creature of love, then the male was defined as an individual in relation to the female and the female was defined as an individual in relation to the male, and so would it be with their offspring. First the corporate, then the individual. In this way God was pleased with his creature and with all of his creation and saw it as being very good. Now before we can understand anything else, we must understand that when God acted to redeem the creature, Adam that he had made, he acted to redeem it in the way that it pleased him to create it, first as a corporate entity, then, out of the corporate the individuals who derived from the corporate.
We also need to look at the question of what it means to say that God, the Creator of all, is uniquely called the God of Israel. Why is this? When correcting the Sadducees for not believing in the resurrection of the dead Yehoshua (Jesus) said to them that God is not the God of the dead but of the living. We understand that the hope of the resurrection to eternal life is not the inheritance of all but only toward those who convert to the way of repentance from sin and of faith toward God. Adam, without repentance, is counted by God as condemned, as though he were dead already. Because Adam is first corporate, (not first an individual), by the design of creation, all who are of Adam are counted as dead, as though they were dead already, (Romans 5, II Corinthians 5). If Adam were first an individual and only then by an act of free will corporate then the condemnation that came upon him for his sin would have come upon him alone as an individual and not upon the whole of his corporate family. We must also see clearly that the promise made of the seed of the woman in the garden was not given to Adam personally but was made as a promise against the serpent and in Adam's hearing. Thus, there was reason there for Adam as an individual to have hope but corporately speaking this was a judgement upon Adam because the promise as a corporate promise for humanity was being given through and therefore to the seed of the woman and not to Adam. Only when, for the first time, God gave Abraham the promise of blessing and of blessing humanity through him and his seed was the corporate promise of good news first given to any sinner. Before this, the same promise was alluded to by God in dealing with sinners, such as in the case of Noah, but the promise itself was not given to Noah or anyone else before Abraham. The covenant with Noah and all creatures only specified a mitigated judgement; this was an allusion to good news but cannot be called the good news itself.
When all there was in the world was the curse of God, suddenly the good news of the blessing of God came in the form of God's promise, which was made both to Abraham and to the seed of Abraham, and was given by God personally to Abraham, to Isaac and to Jacob. We see now that it was possible for God to make this corporate promise of blessing, and therefore of atonement and resurrection unto eternal life, to these fathers of Israel, who were sinners because he made that promise through and to that seed of Abraham who is his holy Mashiach (Christ). This is the understanding of the corporate redemption of Israel as the corporate redemption of Adam. As there is this chosen branch of corporate Adam which is given a new corporate head, the Son of Adam, the Last Adam, (Daniel 7:13; Matthew 9:6; Romans 5, II Corinthians 15), the first Adam is removed from the headship of the redeemed body of humanity. For Christian theology to have said for so long that Christ redeems only individuals and then God assembles them into a new corporate entity that never existed in any form before has only created confusion on every level. For replacement theology to continue to maintain this teaching today, after the Holocaust, is no longer tolerable. It is time for this to be rectified.
In my next installment in this series of emails I will speak specifically about how Israel as a corporate entity can be forgiven when even the majority of the Jews have yet to recognize the person and work of their Mashiach (Messiah).
May Israel's Savior save us in all our thought and words and actions.
