The cross ended and judged the old and then began the new; it fulfilled the shadows and ushered in the eternal age of spiritual substance. The first was divided from the second, flesh was divided from spirit, and Adam was forever divided from God. After Christ's work on the cross, God had but one thing to say to the entire adamic race: “If you want to see the kingdom of God, you must be born again.” God did not have to destroy the planet or kill human bodies in order to judge the world.
Far more devastating and conclusive than the fire and brimstone that destroyed Sodom and Gomorrah, or another universal flood, was a cross that forever divided the living from the dead.
The work of the cross declared only one Man alive to God, and all others “dead in trespasses and sin.” From that moment on, any human soul desiring to live had to be made alive together and raised up in the resurrected Son of God.
It is true that after the cross, the adamic man continues to live and to fill the earth with the increase of his kind, but God now has no relationship with this man.
The cross stands forever as a fixed boundary between the first and the second, the old and the new, and God no longer relates to natural men in natural covenants. He no longer involves Himself with the physical symbols, ceremonies, and places that merely represented aspects of Christ and His work. Now God relates exclusively to the risen Son of God Himself, and to those who share His life.
He has rejected Adam and accepted another Man, and we can now become “accepted in the Beloved.” The reality of this new relationship is the focus of coming chapters. But now we must understand what changed at the cross from God's point of view.
Adam did not change. But God's relationship to Adam ended abruptly when Jesus cried out, “It is finished.” Adam was not repaired. He was incorporated into the sacrifice of Jesus Christ and put away from God. In one perfect judgment, God executed His wrath, vindicated His righteousness, and divided from Himself all things that were not born of His Spirit.
In saying this, I am not at all denying the reality of God's Spirit still present in the world, always drawing and inviting natural men and women to find life in Christ. Nor am I suggesting that God never touches the world with miracles or intervenes in natural things. I am, however, saying that God has no covenant relationship with Adam or with his natural world. The difference should become clear in following chapters. “We died in Him as the last Adam, we live in Him as the second Man. The cross is thus the mighty act of God which translates us from Adam to Christ.
Jason Henderson -2013