The first man, Adam, wasn’t created perfect.
He was created sinless and innocent, and he was also meant to grow into maturity, just as we are doing today. But he looked at all the stress of the journey and decided to quit. That is why the Bible says Adam was not deceived. He knew what he was doing. He intentionally truncated the process, formed an alliance with the devil, and led humanity into a new race of sin and death.
Jesus was also not an afterthought.
Jesus was the plan of God to teach Adam about God and bring him to maturity.
That’s the seed of everything I want to lay out in this article. I am not writing this as just an idea, but I want to build a case, because I think this touches something bigger than Adam. It touches on how the church understands concepts like the rapture, death, and what we’re actually doing on earth.
Was Adam created finished or created first?
Genesis 1:31 says that when God looked at everything He had made, it was “very good.” Not perfect. Very good. That’s a description of the design of a thing, not a description of the arrival of the fully designed product. A newly planted seed can be exactly what it was designed to be (good) and still not yet be a tree (fully formed).
This idea is not novel to Christian theology. It’s actually one of the oldest interpretations in church history. Irenaeus of Lyon, writing in the second century, argued that,
“Nothing that has a beginning can be created already complete, because completeness belongs to the one who has no beginning. Only God is uncreated, and therefore only God is finished from the start. Everything else, by the nature of having been made, starts as potential and is meant to become.”
Irenaeus pictured Adam and Eve less like finished adults and more like children: capable, innocent, free, but not yet fully formed by experience.
God didn’t build a finished man and then watch him break and spiral into ruin. In fact, one of the characteristics of perfection is the inability to be lost, because perfection points to a fullness of knowledge, just like God. To be perfect in knowledge and yet become lost is to suggest that God himself can “fall.”
God built a man with the capacity for maturity, and maturity itself was always meant to be something Adam walked into, not something he woke up already carrying.
However, here’s where I am careful and part ways slightly with Irenaeus:
Irenaeus tended to describe Adam’s fall as the mistake of an inexperienced child, someone who was tricked because he didn’t yet know better.
But Scripture doesn’t let Adam off that easily.
Adam was not deceived
Paul writes plainly:
“Adam was not deceived, but the woman being deceived was in the transgression” (1 Timothy 2:14).
Compare that to how Paul describes Eve in 2 Corinthians 11:3, worried that believers’ minds might be corrupted the same way “the serpent beguiled Eve through his subtlety.”
Two different verbs for two different experiences. Eve was deceived. Adam was not. Whatever happened to Eve at that “tree,” something else that was different happened with Adam. He wasn’t tricked into “eating.” He watched the whole exchange, understood exactly what was on the table, and chose the “fruit” anyway, with his eyes fully open. (Of course, we know that the use of the words “tree,” “fruit,” “eating,” etc., was symbolic and not literal, even though they might have literal representations).
Adam didn’t fail because he was too young to know better, as some scholars or schools of thought would want to make us believe. He failed because, knowing better, he decided the process wasn’t worth finishing. He looked at the road ahead of him, the choosing, the learning, the waiting, and the becoming, and he opted out. Not out of ignorance. Out of impatience and arrogance.
That single distinction changes everything about how we read what happened in Eden. This wasn’t a story about a fragile creature getting overwhelmed. It was a story about a capable creature abandoning a process he was fully equipped to walk through.
Jesus was never an afterthought
If Adam’s problem was that he quit the process, then it makes sense that God’s answer wasn’t to cancel the process. It was to send someone who would actually finish it.
Romans 5:14 calls Adam, “the figure of him that was to come,” meaning Adam was never the finished pattern; he was a rough sketch pointing toward someone else. He had always been.
1 Corinthians 15:45 calls Jesus, “the last Adam,” language that only makes sense if the first Adam left a job undone that needed to be picked back up and completed.
Jesus wasn’t a rescue plan improvised after the fact. He was, in the language of Colossians 1:15-20, the one all things were created through and for in the first place.
Now watch what the writer of Hebrews says about how Jesus Himself walked this out:
“Though he were a Son, yet learned he obedience by the things which he suffered; and being made perfect, he became the author of eternal salvation” (Hebrews 5:8-9).
Sit with that for a second, because it’s one of the most striking verses in the entire New Testament. The Son of God “learned” obedience. He was “made perfect,” using the Greek word “teleioo,” the verb form of “teleios,” meaning:
brought to completeness, brought to the intended goal, not made sinless (He never sinned to begin with), but matured through actual lived experience.
If the sinless Son of God walked through a real process of learning and being perfected through suffering, then maturity was never meant to bypass process for anyone, including Him.
Jesus didn’t come to hand us a shortcut around growth. He came to walk the process Adam abandoned, all the way to its finish, and then to make it possible for us to walk it too, empowered by His Spirit instead of by our own effort.
Milk, meat, and what growth actually requires
1 Peter 2:2: “As newborn babes, desire the sincere milk of the word, that ye may grow thereby.”
The writer of Hebrews takes the same picture Peter was painting and pushes it further, in a passage worth sitting in on fully.
“For when for the time ye ought to be teachers, ye have need that one teach you again which be the first principles of the oracles of God; and are become such as have need of milk, and not of strong meat. For every one that useth milk is unskilful in the word of righteousness: for he is a babe. But strong meat belongeth to them that are of full age, even those who by reason of use have their senses exercised to discern both good and evil” (Hebrews 5:12-14).
Notice the phrase “by reason of use.”
That’s not a small detail. The difference between the believer who is still on milk and the believer who has moved on to solid food isn’t how much information they’ve absorbed. It’s how much they’ve used.
Their “senses” are described as “exercised,” a Greek term (gymnazo) that literally describes athletic training, the same root we get “gymnasium” from. Maturity, in this text, is described as a trained reflex, not as a downloaded file.
You must learn, you must experience, you must practice, you must make decisions, you must obey, and you must fail sometimes and learn from those failures.
Scripture doesn’t just support this claim; it defines maturity that way. Full age, or “teleios,” in Hebrews 5:14, belongs specifically to those who, through repeated use, have trained themselves to tell good from evil. Not those who were simply told the difference once.
What “perfect” actually means in the bible
A lot of confusion about growth comes from what people assume the word “perfect” means. In modern English, perfect means flawless, without error. But that’s not primarily what the biblical word “teleios” is doing.
“Teleios” comes from “telos,” meaning an end, a goal, a purpose.
Something is teleios when it has reached the purpose it was made for, when nothing necessary to its completion is missing.
A seed that has become a full tree is teleios.
A child who has become a full-grown adult is teleios.
It’s a word about arrival at an intended destination, not about the absence of flaws along the way. That’s why James can say,
“let patience have her perfect work, that ye may be perfect and entire, wanting nothing” (James 1:4),
and mean something you grow into over time through endurance, not something you either have or don’t have from birth.
It’s why Paul, writing to the Philippians, can say in one breath,
“not as though I had already attained, either were already perfect,”
and then a few verses later,
“let us therefore, as many as be perfect, be thus minded” (Philippians 3:12, 15).
Paul isn’t contradicting himself. He’s saying maturity has stages. You can be teleios relative to where you started and still not yet be teleios relative to where you’re going.
This matters for this whole argument, because it means the rapture cannot be the thing that makes anyone teleios in the character sense. Teleios, biblically, describes a process brought to completion through use, through practice, through endurance. Not a switch that is merely flipped.
The rapture concept as a change of body, not a change of character
So let’s deal directly with the concept of rapture a little here.
Paul describes it this way:
“We shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed, in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trump: for the trumpet shall sound, and the dead shall be raised incorruptible, and we shall be changed. For this corruptible must put on incorruption, and this mortal must put on immortality” (1 Corinthians 15:51-53).
Read carefully what’s actually being transformed there.
Corruptible becomes incorruptible.
Mortal becomes immortal.
This is bodily language, describing a resurrection body no longer subject to decay, sickness, or death. Philippians 3:20-21 says the same thing in different words: our “vile body” will be “fashioned like unto his glorious body.” Again, body. Not character. Not knowledge. Not maturity of understanding.
Compare that with how Scripture describes the process of Christlike transformation happening now:
“But we all, with open face beholding as in a glass the glory of the Lord, are changed into the same image from glory to glory, even as by the Spirit of the Lord” (2 Corinthians 3:18).
This verb is present tense, ongoing, happening as we behold, not as we wait.
Romans 12:2 tells believers, already saved and already indwelt by the Spirit, to “be transformed by the renewing of your mind,” a command that would make no sense if transformation of the mind were something reserved for a future instantaneous event.
There is one text worth engaging honestly here, because a thorough case has to deal with its hardest verse, not avoid it.
1 John 3:2 says, “we know that, when he shall appear, we shall be like him; for we shall see him as he is.”
At first glance, that sounds like instant, total transformation of character at Christ’s appearing. But look at the very next verse:
“And every man that hath this hope in him purifieth himself, even as he is pure” (1 John 3:3).
John doesn’t follow up a promise of automatic future perfection with a command to purify yourself now. That instruction only makes sense if the “like him” of verse 2 is doing something more specific than “instantly matured in every dimension.”
Read in its fuller context, John is most naturally describing what happens when we finally see Christ face to face and are conformed, at last, to His glorified, resurrected likeness, the same bodily transformation Paul describes in 1 Corinthians 15 and Philippians 3. The purifying of the heart, John says in the very next breath, is something you do now, in anticipation, not something you passively wait to receive later.
So the rapture, or the resurrection more broadly, addresses not just the renewing of the mind but more specifically, a body still bound to decay.
Does death make you mature?
Hebrews 12:23 speaks of coming to “the spirits of just men made perfect.” On the surface, this looks like it says the dead are instantly matured the moment they die. But look again at the verb.
Teleioo, again, brought to completion, brought to the intended goal. In context, the writer of Hebrews is contrasting Old Testament saints, who died still waiting for the fulfillment of promises they never saw completed in their lifetime (Hebrews 11:39-40), with New Testament believers who now have access to what those saints were only looking forward to.
“Made perfect,” here, most naturally describes their position being brought to completion, entering fully into what Christ’s finished work secured for them, not a claim that death itself functions as a maturity-generating event that character development never required in the first place.
Nothing in the passage suggests dying retroactively grants someone the wisdom, discernment, or Christlike character that Hebrews 5:14 says only comes “by reason of use.”
If dying instantly produced full spiritual maturity, Scripture would have no reason to command living believers to grow, to be renewed, to be transformed, to be established, or to press on. It commands all of those things precisely because the process happens only in our lifetime or the afterlife if we transition. Death doesn’t end your opportunity to keep growing. Neither does it retroactively complete the growing you skipped.
Why the process at all?
Here’s the theological question underneath everything else: why didn’t God just make Adam mature from the start, and why doesn’t He simply confer maturity on us at salvation, at death, or at the rapture?
Because a maturity that was never chosen isn’t really maturity; it’s programming. God wasn’t interested in manufacturing beings who happened to behave correctly. He was after sons and daughters who freely become like Him through relationship, obedience, and lived experience. That’s the whole shape of the gospel. Not compliance installed in us, but character formed from the inside, through a real relationship with a real God, walked out in real time.
This is why Ephesians 4:11-13 says God gave the church apostles, prophets, evangelists, pastors, and teachers “for the perfecting of the saints, for the work of the ministry, for the edifying of the body of Christ: till we all come in the unity of the faith, and of the knowledge of the Son of God, unto a perfect man, unto the measure of the stature of the fulness of Christ.”
Notice what’s doing the perfecting here:
teaching,
ministry,
relationships,
and “time” (kairos, not chronos).
Not a future event. A present process, staffed by people God specifically appointed for the job.
What this means for the life you’re actually living
If maturity isn’t automatic, then a few things follow, plainly, without needing to be watered down.
Salvation gets you into the family.
It does not, by itself, make you a mature son or daughter. That’s what the son-scrubbing-floors picture in the earlier piece was already pointing to: sonship and maturity are not the same category, and Scripture treats them as two separate things throughout.
The rapture
describes a culmination of the end of our maturity but beams the light specifically on our renewed bodies. It will not retroactively finish the character work you avoided. And death, similarly, doesn’t substitute for it.
Hebrews 5:14 says maturity comes to those whose senses have been exercised through use, through practice, through obedience, through failing and getting back up, and through being taught and choosing to actually apply what you were taught. No substitute event skips that.
The goal was never a place
Adam wasn’t handed a finished character. He was handed a real choice, real capacity, and a real process, and he abandoned all three the moment the process demanded something costly of him.
Jesus didn’t skip that process. He learned obedience. He was, in the fullest and most careful sense of that Greek word, made teleios through what He suffered and only then became the source of salvation for everyone willing to walk the same road behind Him, this time by His Spirit.
So no, the rapture doesn’t get you out of becoming someone. Death doesn’t either. Only the process does that, the one God designed on purpose, the one Adam quit, and the one Christ finished so that you wouldn’t have an excuse to quit yours.
The goal was never simply to arrive somewhere.
The goal has always been to become someone.
To become like Christ.