I’VE SAID IT BEFORE, and I’ll say it again: I love C. S. Lewis’ The Chronicles of Narnia, the ongoing story of the great lion Aslan and the adventures of humans and talking beasts in the mythical realm of Narnia. I devoured the first three books in the series when I was still in the fifth or sixth grade, without understanding the theological themes behind them; I wasn’t raised as a Christian, so to me, they were simply good stories. I would have read all seven books, but our school library didn’t have the other four. When I became a Christian in college, though, I finally sat down to read the whole series—one book a night for seven consecutive evenings. I can still picture myself sitting in the living room after my parents had gone to bed, reading by the light of a table lamp, not going to bed myself until that day’s book was done.

In the first book, The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, the four Pevensie children—Peter, Susan, Edmund, and Lucy—enter Narnia through an enchanted wardrobe (a smaller version of an armoire). There, the children are known as the Sons of Adam and the Daughters of Eve, the humans who were prophesied to come. When I first read the books, I didn’t understand the significance of those labels.

But as Luke transitions from Jesus’ baptism and genealogy to the story of his temptation in the wilderness, I think it’s important to have a solid grasp on what it means for Jesus to be “the son of Adam” as well as “the son of God” (Luke 3:38, NIV). After all, Matthew begins his gospel with a genealogy in chapter 1, tells the story of Jesus’ baptism at the end of chapter 3, then immediately begins chapter 4 with the story of his temptation. But Luke inserts his genealogy between the baptism and the temptation. Why?

I would suggest that it has much to do, again, with Luke’s declaration that Jesus is both the son of Adam and the Son of God. And to sketch that out, we’ll need to look beyond Luke to other passages of Scripture.

Let’s begin with the Psalms. The Psalter ends with five so-called “Hallelujah psalms” that all begin and end with a “hallelujah,” that is, with the invitation to “praise God.” In Psalm 146, the first of the five, the psalmist vows to praise God continually before turning to a bit of wisdom instruction:

Do not put your trust in princes,
    in human beings, who cannot save.
When their spirit departs, they return to the ground;
    on that very day their plans come to nothing. (Ps 146:3-4, NIV)

Throughout the psalm, the poet makes a clear contrast: why trust in mere mortals, when you can put your hope in God, the maker of heaven and earth, the one who will reign forever? Here in verse 3, princes are described as “human beings”; in the Hebrew, the phrase is literally “a son of Adam.” Moreover, mortal humans will “return to the ground”: the word “ground” in Hebrew is adamah. Adam, adamah. Even in English the words human and humble are related etymologically to humus—you know, the stuff you buy in sacks at Home Depot to spread in your garden. As God said to Adam after the Fall:

By the sweat of your brow you will eat your food
until you return to the ground, since from it you were taken;
for dust you are and to dust you will return. (Gen 3:19)

To be a son of Adam is to be human, to be mortal. And as the apostle Paul teaches, it was precisely because Jesus was the son of Adam, a flesh-and-blood human being, that he could be our representative before God. In Romans 5, for example, Paul contrasts Adam and Christ. Because of Adam’s sin, the pall of death has hung over humanity ever since; but life is now possible instead through Jesus’ righteous sacrifice:

For if, by the trespass of the one man, death reigned through that one man, how much more will those who receive God’s abundant provision of grace and of the gift of righteousness reign in life through the one man, Jesus Christ! Consequently, just as one trespass resulted in condemnation for all people, so also one righteous act resulted in justification and life for all people. For just as through the disobedience of the one man the many were made sinners, so also through the obedience of the one man the many will be made righteous. (Rom 5:17-19)

And Paul goes further. As he claps back against the false teaching that has the Corinthians denying the resurrection of believers, Paul calls Jesus the “last Adam” (1 Cor 15:45). Paul writes:

The first man was of the dust of the earth; the second man is of heaven. As was the earthly man, so are those who are of the earth; and as is the heavenly man, so also are those who are of heaven. And just as we have borne the image of the earthly man, so shall we bear the image of the heavenly man. (vss. 47-49)

All of this presumes, of course, that Christ himself has been raised from the dead, as Paul argues earlier in the chapter. Jesus was human like us, the last Adam, but also what Paul calls “the heavenly man.” He lived a sinless life and died on the cross in place of sinful humanity; his righteous sacrifice made justification and our own righteousness possible in him.

I imagine Luke and others traveling with Paul, discussing theology along the way. There’s no way to be sure, but I’d be surprised if Luke didn’t know anything about Paul’s thoughts of Jesus as the last Adam. And to me at least, if he did, it helps make sense of why Luke would insert his genealogy between the two stories of Jesus in the wilderness, first his baptism and then his temptation. The baptism highlights Jesus’ identity as the Son of God, reiterated in the final words of the genealogy.

But it’s the humanity of the son of Adam that would be tested in the wilderness, even as Satan provoked him with the words, “If you are the Son of God”—as if to say, “Yeah? Prove it.”

How did that all work out? Let’s find out.