This Easter sermon, preached by Rev Clint LePage at Bundoora Presbyterian Church, announces several truths which Christians ought gladly to confess. Christ is bodily raised. His death matters for forgiveness. His people possess the hope of resurrection. The Scriptures testify to Christ, and unbelief cannot be overcome without the gracious opening of blind eyes. The sermon also speaks of Christ’s sinlessness, sacrificial death, final judgment, and the future resurrection of believers.
Yet the sermon’s governing weakness, like many sermons examined in this series, is its failure to preach the Adam–Christ federal structure of the gospel: Adam’s guilt is not presented as imputed to his offspring, and Christ is not presented as the last Adam whose righteous obedience, atoning death, and vindicated resurrection remove His people’s condemnation and secure their justified standing before God. As a result, (a vague) forgiveness is affirmed, but righteousness—Christ’s, God’s judicial righteousness, and the believer’s imputed righteousness in Christ—has no real theological place in the sermon’s account of salvation.
This does not mean a particular covenantal grid has been imposed upon the sermon. Rather, it is a judgment about the internal theological demands created by this sermon’s own claims. The preacher undertakes to explain why Christ had to suffer, why He had to rise, what redemption means, what death means, why His death brings forgiveness, and why the resurrection gives hope. Once these questions are raised, the federal relation between Adam and Christ is not an optional refinement. It is the structure that explains the human predicament, the necessity of Christ’s death, the nature of His obedience, the meaning of His resurrection, and the ground of a sinner’s acceptance before God.
The sermon describes death as the consequence of “our turning away from God” and speaks of “eternal, spiritual death and separation from God” But such statements go nowhere near explaining the biblical condition of fallen humanity.
The reason the logic fails is that the governing problem of the sermon does not name Adam as the covenant head of mankind. It does not explain that Adam’s first transgression was legally reckoned to those whom he represented, or that his corruption is propagated to his natural descendants. Thus it never articulates Paul’s argument that “one trespass led to condemnation for all men” and that “by the one man’s disobedience the many were made sinners” (Rom. 5:18–19). Death reigns universally not merely because every individual eventually chooses to turn away from God, but because all stand guilty and corrupted in Adam, liable to the death and condemnation brought by his fall.
This omission has immediate consequences when preaching the ressurection. “Our turning away from God” is vague enough to make sin sound principally like an individual relational failure. It leaves unspoken the judicial reality that human beings are born under condemnation. It softens the fact that death is not merely an unfortunate biological condition or the result of a generally disordered world. Death is the judicial consequence of sin. “The wages of sin is death” (Rom. 6:23), and Paul expressly grounds the reign of death in Adam’s representative trespass (Rom. 5:12–14).
The preacher refers to Genesis 3:15 and says that sin and death entered through “humanity’s sin”. But this is precisely where the sermon needed to be clearer. Genesis 3 is not merely a story of humanity’s general moral collapse. It records Adam’s covenant-breaking rebellion, the entrance of guilt and curse into the world, and the first promise that the offspring of the woman would crush the serpent. Without Adam, the gospel’s logic of representation is obscured. There is then no clearly defined condemnation from which sinners need deliverance, only an undefined experience of separation, death, purposelessness, and personal brokenness.
The sermon defines redemption as liberation by the payment of a price. Yet the substance given to redemption is strikingly thin. Christ is said to free people from “an empty way of life” and to give “meaning and purpose and fulfillment in relationship with God”. He frees people from hopelessness, death, and separation from God, and brings “total forgiveness”.
Surely a minister of Reformed theology understands that these benefits are not the controlling categories of biblical redemption. Redemption is not principally Christ’s provision of meaning, purpose, fulfillment, or psychological reassurance. It is the costly deliverance of guilty and enslaved sinners from condemnation, curse, wrath, sin’s dominion, and death’s judicial claim. It is deliverance unto God, by the blood of the covenant Mediator, for a people purchased to belong to Him.
The sermon states that Christ’s own life was the price of this freedom, but it does not explain what that price accomplished before God. Why must a price be paid? Why is forgiveness not a simple divine relaxation of judgment? What did Christ endure as the substitute for sinners? How can God forgive guilty people while remaining righteous? These questions are left unanswered.
The sermon alludes to Leviticus 17:11 and says that blood must be shed for atonement and forgiveness. It also cites Isaiah 53 and says that Christ was pierced, crushed, and killed for sins. But the sacrificial and judicial logic of these texts is not opened. Leviticus speaks of blood given by God upon the altar to make atonement. Isaiah describes the Servant as bearing iniquities, being wounded for transgressions, and being crushed under the Lord’s will. These are not merely images of costly love. They explain the substitutionary bearing of judgment by the righteous Servant in the place of guilty people.
Without the federal guilt of Adam and the judicial condemnation of his descendants, the atonement is stripped of its necessity. Christ’s death may remain moving, sacrificial, and effective in some undefined sense, but it no longer appears as the righteous substitute’s bearing of the curse that lay upon His covenant people. The sermon declares forgiveness; it does not show why forgiveness required the death of the sinless Son.
Here is where the sermon truly collapses. The absence of representative Adamic sin inevitably produces the absence of Christ’s representative righteousness. The sermon calls Jesus “the only sinless human being” able to give His life for others’ sins. That is true, but it is not enough. Christ’s righteousness is more than personal innocence. He is the last Adam, the obedient covenant head of a new humanity. Where Adam disobeyed, Christ obeyed. Where Adam’s trespass brought condemnation and death, Christ’s one righteous act brings justification and life for those united to Him (Rom. 5:18–19).
This is why the omission of righteousness in the sermon is so serious. The sermon’s preached exposition fails to mention righteousness. It does not explain Christ’s active and passive obedience to the Father, His fulfillment of the law for His people, or His righteousness imputed to believers. It does not explain justification as God’s forensic declaration that the ungodly are righteous in Christ. Forgiveness is repeatedly proclaimed, but forgiveness alone is not the whole gospel benefit of justification. The forgiven sinner is not left morally neutral before God. United to Christ by faith, he is accepted by the imputed righteousness of another.
The distinction is not academic. If salvation is reduced to forgiveness, then Christ’s work can be understood chiefly as the removal of a debt. But Scripture declares more: Christ is made sin for His people so that they might become “the righteousness of God in him” (2 Cor. 5:21). The believer is not accepted because guilt has merely been overlooked, nor because inward change has made him adequate, nor because personal faith has supplied a missing condition. He is accepted because the righteous obedience of Christ is reckoned to him.
The sermon’s theology has no clear place for this reality because it lacks the corresponding Adamic structure. If Adam’s guilt is not imputed to his offspring, Christ’s righteousness will appear unnecessary or peripheral. If mankind is simply made up of individuals who have turned away from God, salvation may be described as an individual return to God. But the gospel is covenantal and representative: in Adam, condemnation; in Christ, justification. “As in Adam all die, so also in Christ shall all be made alive” (1 Cor. 15:22).
The sermon says that, if Christ had not risen, His death would not have been effective for forgiveness and believers would remain in their sins. This is a true assertion derived from 1 Corinthians 15. Yet it is left largely unexplained. That is true but insufficient. It had to happen not merely because prophecy required a future event to occur, but because the Father’s righteous purpose in the obedient Son could not end in the grave. Righteousness must be vindicated. The Messiah had to suffer and enter His glory, as Luke 24:26 declares. His resurrection and exaltation are not simply the next stages of a promised sequence. They are the fitting divine vindication of the Son whose obedience unto death has accomplished redemption.
Romans 4:25 gives the necessary theological connection: Christ “was delivered up for our trespasses and raised for our justification.” The sermon never reaches this conclusion. It does not show that resurrection confirms the acceptance of Christ’s sacrifice, nor that the risen Christ is the righteousness and justification of His people. It therefore offers Easter hope without grounding that hope in the completed and vindicated righteousness of Christ.
This deficiency carries special weight when a senior minister occupies a position of influence in the formation of future ministers. Ministers in training learn not merely from formal doctrinal statements but from sermonic instincts: what is named, what is assumed, what is passed over, and what is treated as the center of the gospel. When an Easter sermon can speak at length of redemption, death, forgiveness, and resurrection without explaining Adamic guilt, federal headship, without mention of righteousness, justification, penal satisfaction, or the Father’s vindication of the Son, it models an impoverished homiletic theology.
The sermon does not deny these doctrines. It does something more subtle and, in ministerial formation, more dangerous: it makes them dispensable. Its gospel can proceed with meaning, purpose, hope, peace, forgiveness, future resurrection, and personal experience, while the covenantal and forensic core of salvation remains absent. The result is not the outright rejection of the Christian gospel, but its functional reordering. The sinner’s greatest need becomes relief from emptiness, hopelessness, death, and separation rather than deliverance from guilt and condemnation before the righteous Judge. Christ becomes the giver of a meaningful life and future hope more clearly than the last Adam, righteous substitute, curse-bearer, and vindicated Lord.
A sermon faithful to Luke 24 and to the whole counsel of God should be proclaiming that Christ suffered because God’s righteous judgment against sin had to be borne; that He rose because the Father vindicated His righteous Son and accepted His completed work; that those in Adam are condemned and subject to eternal death. Christ as the first born of the new creation is the underlying urgency and necessity of the new birth, and all of this is missing here.
