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Luk 3:38. [Τοῦ Ἀδὰμ, of Adam) All the posterity of Adam have a natural tie of connection with Jesus Christ.-V. g.] Luke wisely adds this clause. Adam was the first man. He was not sprung of himself, nor of a father and mother; but from God, not only as the sons of Adam are, but in a way altogether peculiar to his case: for whatever the sons of Adam owe to their parents by the bounty of their Creator, this Adam himself received from God. On this account Luke does not stop short with Adam, but adds that crowning point of the series, the Son of God. And here, at last, there is a terminus, beyond which there is none. Luke carries up his genealogy, from the second Adam to the first, in the same way as Moses himself describes “the generations of man,” Gen 5:1, etc. Man was altogether a creation made by God, not merely as all creatures are, but in a peculiar manner so; Gen 1:26 [Let us make man in our image]. If the genealogy had stopped at Adam it would have been abrupt, and not completed. As it is, it is carried up from Jesus Christ to God. The birth (descent) of Jesus from Mary is beautifully compared with the descent (origination) of Adam from God. The origination of Jesus from God has some likeness to both, but yet far exceeds both; it is in some measure mediate, or coming through the intervention of the intermediate fathers, but is much rather immediate and direct, as He is the Son of God. All things are of God through Christ: all things are brought back to God through Christ. Scripture, even in what belongs to the origin of the human race, fixes our knowledge on a firm footing, and makes it sufficiently complete: they who despise or ignore it are in utter doubt and error as to the boundaries between the ante-mundane and the post-mundane times.