People sometimes ask if Jesus was like Adam before the fall or like Adam after the fall. The answer is Yes!

In order to understand the answer, we have to understand what aspects of Jesus’s life we are talking about. We might divide His personality as a human being into four aspects: spiritual nature, physical strength, mental power, and moral worth or backbone.

Jesus was like Adam before the fall in His spiritual nature.

“Christ is called the second Adam. In purity and holiness, connected with God and beloved by God, He began where the first Adam began. Willingly He passed over the ground where Adam fell, and redeemed Adam’s failure.” – S.D.A. Bible Commentary, vol. 7A, p. 650.

Christ was completely human, but completely sinless–the only human being since Adam to be able to make such a claim. He could say, unchallenged, at the close of His ministry,

“The prince of this world cometh, and hath nothing in me.” John 14:30.

Selected Messages, book 1, page 256 says:

“We should have no misgivings in regard to the perfect sinlessness of the human nature of Christ.”

And Ellen G. White Comments, S.D.A. Bible Commentary, volume 7, page 912 says:

“He was to take His position at the head of humanity by taking the nature but not the sinfulness of man.”

At first glance, you may see a contradiction here, for there is a sense in which Christ took upon Himself our guilt, our sin, and even our sinful nature. Although He took our guilt, He did not become guilty, or He, too, would have needed a Saviour. When He took our sinful nature, it did not make His nature sinful. He took our guilt and sin as our Substitute.

When the angel came to visit Mary with the tidings of the Messiah soon to be born, he said,

“The Holy Ghost shall come upon thee, and the power of the Highest shall overshadow thee: therefore also that holy thing which shall be born of thee shall be called the Son of God.” Luke 1:35.

Jesus was born differently from the way we are born. None of us could ever be called “that holy thing.” Like Adam before the fall, Jesus had man’s human nature, with the possibility of yielding to temptation. But since He never yielded to sin, He remained sinless. See The Desire of Ages, p. 117.

Thus He became the second Adam and redeemed us from the failure of the first Adam. See 1 Corinthians 15: 21, 22.

“For since by man came death, by man came also the resurrection of the dead. For as in Adam all die, even so in Christ shall all be made alive.”

But Jesus was also born differently from Adam. In the first place, he was born! Adam was not; Adam was created! But Jesus did not begin with the advantages with which Adam began.

“For four thousand years the race had been decreasing in physical strength, in mental power, and in moral worth; and Christ took upon Him the infirmities of degenerate humanity. Only thus could He rescue man from the lowest depths of his degradation.” – The Desire of Ages, p. 117.

So Christ accepted less physical strength than Adam had possessed. He was not as tall as Adam, for the race had been decreasing in size since the time of Creation. He was not as strong as Adam.

He got tired and needed rest when Adam probably would not–such as that night on the lake and by the well in Samaria, times when even His disciples were able to keep going. Christ the human was not as smart as Adam! The wisdom seen in His ministry came from above Him, not from within Him. He did not use His divine “IQ.”

He depended upon His Father for wisdom and even for His plans for each day.

Neither did Christ have the measure of moral worth that Adam had. What is moral worth? Ellen White, who used the term, did not define it. But moral worth has to do with how much backbone a person has, how much control over his behavior. If Christ had less moral worth than Adam, then He would have been weaker than Adam, less able to resist temptation in His human nature apart from power from above.

What a statement of the love of God, that He was willing to allow His Son to come and take such a risk in our behalf! The Desire of Ages tells us that the Father permitted Christ

“to meet life’s peril in common with every human soul, to fight the battle as every child of humanity must fight it, at the risk of failure and eternal loss.”

We long to shield our loved ones from Satan’s power. But

“to meet a bitterer conflict and a more fearful risk, God gave His only begotten Son, that the path of life might be made sure for our little ones. ‘Herein is love.’ Wonder, O heavens! and be astonished, O earth!” – Page 49rd silence