The Authority of the Believer, Part 2
We ended the last post with a mess.
God still owned the earth. The legal deed had never left His hand. But the operational authority He had entrusted to Adam had been handed over to an enemy, and every generation since Eden had inherited the consequences. The garden was closed. The ground was cursed. And the serpent who had lied his way into the keys was now strutting around a planet he had no business running.
If the story stopped there, we would have no story. We would have a tragedy. An owner locked out of His own property by the treason of His own steward, with no legal way back in without breaking His own word.
But God does not break His word. God keeps it.
And the way He kept it is the single most stunning move in the entire Bible.
He sent another man.
Why It Had to Be a Man
This part gets skipped by almost everybody, and it shouldn’t. Pay attention to how the writer of Hebrews sets it up.
“Inasmuch then as the children have partaken of flesh and blood, He Himself likewise shared in the same, that through death He might destroy him who had the power of death, that is, the devil, and release those who through fear of death were all their lifetime subject to bondage. For indeed He does not give aid to angels, but He does give aid to the seed of Abraham. Therefore, in all things He had to be made like His brethren, that He might be a merciful and faithful High Priest in the things pertaining to God, to make propitiation for the sins of the people.” — Hebrews 2:14-17 (NKJV)
Read that again. He had to be made like His brethren.
Had to. That word matters.
Why? Because the authority that got lost in Eden was not angelic authority. It was not divine authority. Divine authority never left. The authority that got lost was human authority, the delegated operational rule that God had placed in the hands of humanity in Genesis 1. And an authority that was lost by a man could only be won back by a man.
That’s the logic of the Second Adam. The legal problem was human. The legal solution had to be human too.
Paul builds this out twice. Once in Romans, once in 1 Corinthians, and in both places he is making the same move.
“For if by the one man’s offense death reigned through the one, much more those who receive abundance of grace and of the gift of righteousness will reign in life through the One, Jesus Christ. Therefore, as through one man’s offense judgment came to all men, resulting in condemnation, even so through one Man’s righteous act the free gift came to all men, resulting in justification of life. For as by one man’s disobedience many were made sinners, so also by one Man’s obedience many will be made righteous.” — Romans 5:17-19 (NKJV)
One man’s offense. One man’s obedience. Adam and Christ. Two representatives. Two federal heads. Two actions with structural consequences for everyone standing under them.
Then Paul says it even more plainly to the Corinthians.
“And so it is written, ‘The first man Adam became a living being.’ The last Adam became a life-giving spirit.” — 1 Corinthians 15:45 (NKJV)
The first Adam. The last Adam. Two bookends of the human story. The first one handed the keys away. The last one came to take them back.
And He came as one of us. Not as a visiting angel. Not as a floating spirit in a borrowed costume. As a man. A real man. With skin and lungs and tired feet and a mother who had to teach Him to tie His own sandals.
God did not bend the rules to fix this. He got inside the rules, from our side, and solved it as a man.
The Wilderness, Round Two
Most of us read the temptation of Jesus like a character moment. A test of piety. The devil shows up, throws three curveballs, and Jesus swats them away with three Bible verses. Good lesson, memorize the references, move on.
That reading is too small.
The wilderness temptation is not a character study. It is round two. The enemy who had won in a garden came back to try again in a desert, and this time the stakes were not Eden. The stakes were the world.
Look at what Luke does. He gives us a genealogy of Jesus, and he runs it backward all the way to Adam, ending with the words “the son of Adam, the son of God” (Luke 3:38). Then, immediately, in the very next verse, he takes us into the wilderness. Jesus, full of the Spirit, led by the Spirit, forty days. Hungry. Alone. Confronted by the same voice Adam heard in the garden.
This is a rematch, and Luke is making sure we see it.
Watch the three moves.
The serpent went after Adam and Eve first with food. You can eat. It will make you like God. The devil goes after Jesus first with food. You are hungry. Turn these stones to bread. Jesus does not argue. He quotes Deuteronomy. “Man shall not live by bread alone.”
Adam reached for the shortcut to being like God. Jesus refused the shortcut. He would get there the hard way, through obedience and suffering and the long road.
The second move is the one we covered in the last post. The kingdoms of the world, offered on the condition of worship. This has been delivered to me, and I give it to whomever I wish. Jesus does not dispute the claim. He does not bow. He quotes Deuteronomy again. “You shall worship the LORD your God, and Him only you shall serve.”
Adam bowed to a lie. Jesus refused to bow.
The third move pushes Jesus to the edge of the temple and tells Him to throw Himself off. If You are the Son of God… The same question the serpent planted in Eve. Has God really said? Can you trust what the Father said about you? Prove it. Make Him show up on demand.
Adam lost his grip on God’s word in Eden. Jesus held His grip on God’s word in the wilderness.
Three temptations. Three Scriptures. Three refusals.
And at the end of it, Luke writes something that most English translations hurry past. “Now when the devil had ended every temptation, he departed from Him until an opportune time” (Luke 4:13).
The Greek is achri kairou (G891, G2540). Until a season. Until a fitting time. The devil did not give up after round one in the wilderness. He was waiting for the next round. And we know when that came. It came in a garden called Gethsemane, where another Adam, in another garden, sweat blood and said the one sentence Adam never said.
Not My will, but Yours, be done.
That sentence ran back through the whole story and untied the knot.
The Cross as Legal Transaction
Here is where the theology gets a little dense, and it matters. Stay with me.
Most Christians have been taught the cross primarily as a moral and personal transaction. Jesus died for my sins. True. Not wrong. But if that is all you see on the cross, you miss the legal dimension that Paul lays out explicitly, and you miss the moment the enemy was stripped of what he had taken.
Read Colossians 2 slowly.
“And you, being dead in your trespasses and the uncircumcision of your flesh, He has made alive together with Him, having forgiven you all trespasses, having wiped out the handwriting of requirements that was against us, which was contrary to us. And He has taken it out of the way, having nailed it to the cross. Having disarmed principalities and powers, He made a public spectacle of them, triumphing over them in it.” — Colossians 2:13-15 (NKJV)
Three words in that passage need attention.
| Greek | Strong’s | Meaning |
|---|---|---|
| cheirographon (χειρόγραφον) | G5498 | handwriting, handwritten document, a certificate of debt |
| apekduomai (ἀπεκδύομαι) | G554 | to strip off, to disarm, to remove like a garment |
| deigmatizo (δειγματίζω) | G1165 | to make a public example, to display openly |
The handwriting of requirements is a debt instrument. A legal document signed in our name. Our IOU. Paul says it was wiped out, erased, taken out of the way and nailed to the cross.
And in the same breath he says something extraordinary about what happened to the enemy in the same moment.
Apekduomai. Jesus stripped the principalities and powers. He did not just defeat them. He peeled them. He undressed them like a man pulling off a coat. Whatever claim they had, whatever legal standing they held against humanity, whatever authority they had been wielding under the old arrangement, Jesus stripped it off them at the cross. And then He made a public example of them, deigmatizo, parading them like conquered enemies in a Roman triumph.
This is not metaphorical in some weak spiritualized sense. Paul is using the language of legal disarmament and public victory because he is describing a real, cosmic, legal transaction. The enemy lost his grip on humanity because the debt he held against humanity got cancelled, and the Second Adam did it by becoming the debt and paying it off on behalf of everybody He represented.
This is why Peter can stand up on Pentecost and say, without flinching, “God has made this Jesus, whom you crucified, both Lord and Christ” (Acts 2:36). Not “will make.” Has made. Past tense. Settled.
The transaction was complete at the cross, ratified at the resurrection, and proclaimed at the ascension.
All Authority
Which brings us to the sentence that almost nobody takes as seriously as Jesus meant it.
“And Jesus came and spoke to them, saying, ‘All authority has been given to Me in heaven and on earth. Go therefore and make disciples of all the nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all things that I have commanded you, and lo, I am with you always, even to the end of the age.’ Amen.” — Matthew 28:18-20 (NKJV)
Two Greek words here will not let you look away.
Pasa exousia (πᾶσα ἐξουσία). Pasa (G3956) means all, every, the whole. Exousia (G1849) means authority, the right to act, legal jurisdiction. Not dunamis, which is raw power or ability. Exousia. The right. The warrant. The standing.
All authority, in both domains, heaven and earth, has been given to the Son.
The perfect tense of the verb edothe (G1325, a form of didomi) tells us this is a settled state. It happened. It stands. Nothing can reverse it.
Notice what this does to the problem we laid out in Post 1.
In Eden, God gave operational authority on earth to Adam. Adam lost it. The enemy functioned as the theos of this age. The legal mess sat unresolved, generation after generation, until a man who was also God stepped into the story, lived the life Adam failed to live, died the death Adam deserved to die, and rose again with every last shred of authority that had ever been stolen or forfeited or contested.
Adam handed the keys to the enemy.
The enemy had the keys by legal concession.
Jesus took them back at the cross and held them up at the resurrection.
And by the time He is standing on that Galilean hillside telling His disciples to go, He is standing as the only legally authorized ruler of this planet. The one who holds the deed and also the keys. The one true theos and the only legitimate kyrios of the world, as a man.
Everything the enemy still does in this age, he does as a squatter. A trespasser. A defeated foe who has not yet been evicted from every property line but no longer holds any legal right to anything. Every jurisdiction he is operating in is borrowed or stolen, and it is running out.
That changes everything about how we are meant to live in this world. But before we can live in it, we have to see it.
What This Means for You
Here is what I want you to sit with before the next post.
The keys are not still missing. They are not still in enemy hands. They are not lost, hidden, waiting to be rediscovered by the right theology or the right seminar or the right move of the Spirit.
The keys are back in human hands.
They are in the hand of a man who refused to bow in the wilderness, who refused to come down off the cross, who walked out of a tomb, and who now sits at the right hand of the Father with every knee eventually bowing to Him.
That is not a sentimental image. That is the legal state of things, right now, as you are reading this sentence.
Which means the problem has shifted. The problem is not whether authority exists for the people of God on this planet. The problem is whether we know who holds it, how it flows, and how to operate under it.
That is where we are going next.
The One who has all authority in heaven and on earth did not come back for the keys so He could keep them to Himself. He handed something to His Church that most of the Church has never fully received.
This is Part 2 of The Authority of the Believer. Part 3, “Delegated to the Church,” lands next.
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