Romans 5:12-21

 

The main theme of Romans 5-8 is this idea of TRANSFORMATION, the change which God makes in the heart and life of the believer, beginning at initial salvation and continuing until the resurrection. A major component of this discussion—and the thing which Paul will primarily address here—is the problem of sin. The main topic of Romans is the righteousness of God and, by extension, the unrighteousness of man. Romans shows how God, through faith, imparts to the believer both legal and actual righteousness. But that only makes sense in the context of the fact that man was, legally and actually, unrighteous before. You have to understand something about a disease before you can understand the cure.

The second half of Romans 5 is aimed at examining and explaining the nature of sin. In our previous article, I said that Romans 5 is like an observation room with windows on the past, the present, and the future. We see that very much in this passage which looks far back as Adam and as far forward as eternity.

This passage is considered one of the most difficult in the New Testament. There are two reasons that this passage is so hard to deal with one. One is that Paul is writing here in a very dense style, saying in a couple paragraphs what could easily have been stretched over several chapters. The other difficulty is that Paul is writing as a Jew to a partially Jewish audience and dealing with ideas that would have been very familiar to a first-century Jew but which are somewhat distant to a 21st-century Christian and completely alien to a 21st-century worldling.

Because of the difficulty of this passage, rather than starting with a verse-by-verse exposition, we are going to approach the whole issue from a different direction. (The general approach I am using comes from Albert Barnes' commentary on this passage.)

If you look at the world, you will find human beings living all over the planet, and they have been as long as anybody remembers. And no matter where you go, you find certain general characteristics. So, physically, humans have two arms, two legs, hair, two eyes, and so forth. Of course, there are specific unusual circumstances where these general characteristics do not apply to a specific individual—some people are born without fully formed limbs, and some people lose them by accident later—but we can say, generally speaking, that these are the characteristics of a human. If you were trying to describe humans to somebody who had never seen one, you could broadly say that this is what a human is. Again, within this general framework, there is a lot of variety—hair color, eye color, and the size and shape of the limbs can differ vastly—but these are still variations upon a basic pattern.

This is what a human is and what we know humans to be wherever we meet them, in any time period, geographical location, or social strata. If we found a group of humans living in some remote place who did not fit the general pattern, not as individuals but as a group—if we found a city inhabited by people who had feathers or scales instead of hair or who had three eyes and five arms, we would be mildly surprised and might even suspect that these people were not truly human at all.

This is what we find in this world. As Christians, we believe that humans exist and have the characteristics they do because they were created by God. Many modern atheists believe that humans exist and have the characteristics they do because they evolved through random chance from lower primates. If I recall correctly, many ancient myths said that humans exist as an accidental byproduct of the work or warfare of the gods. But whatever your religion or philosophy, we all have to deal with the existence of humanity. These general facts are here, regardless of what sort of explanation you make for them or what conclusion you draw from them. 

And just as certain general physical characteristics hold true for all humans, so certain patterns of behavior hold true for all humans—and part of that general pattern is what we can broadly call 'evil.' Take any general sampling of humans you like in any location or time period, and you will find acts of dishonesty, of cruelty, of injustice, of neglect, of betrayal. Just as wherever you find humans, you will find two arms and two legs, so wherever you find humans, you will find evil in some form. Two thousand years ago, the Roman poet Seneca said of the human race: “... human affairs grow worse and worse and men leave no wickedness or sin unsought after... We are all evil and (unwillingly I speak it) we always shall be.”

As with the physical attributes of man, there is a deal of variety in what form evil takes from individual to individual or even from culture to culture, but the general fact remains the same. Just suppose for a moment that explorers claimed to have found a remote society somewhere that had no evil—where nobody was ever dishonest or unkind or selfish. I think most people's initial reaction would be skepticism—we wouldn't believe that people anywhere are naturally like that, just as we would be skeptical if someone claimed to discover people with feathers or fins. Evil seems to be as much a part of human nature and human society as the general physical pattern of man.

And this is a fact we face regardless of our religion or philosophy. Whatever sort of conclusion we draw from this or what explanation we give for it, we have to face the fact that mankind is evil. Even if you believe, as some do, that evil isn't an absolute reality, you still have to face the general problem in some form. If you believe that the only true value is survival of the fittest, then you have to face that humans frequently choose behavior that is destructive to them and to the race. If you believe that evil and guilt are merely an illusion, you have to explain how such an illusion is so widespread and so deeply rooted.

Now, if you asked the ordinary man on the street why it is that all humans have the same general physical characteristics, they would probably answer DNA. It is DNA that determines the parameters of the human body. Probably that common man couldn't really explain to you exactly how DNA works—exactly what role it plays in human development. The odds are very high that he couldn't tell you what DNA stands for or pronounce it if he could. Obviously, if he were a scientist, he could give you a more in-depth explanation. But for a common man, this one word itself would be a sufficient explanation—that there is a common bond that links all people and determines that they are what they are.

And the Bible gives us a word to explain the moral nature of man—why it is that evil is one of the characteristics of man. And that word is ADAM. This is verse 12 of our text: “Wherefore, as by one man sin entered into the world, and death by sin; and so death passed upon all men, for that all have sinned.” This looks back to the story of the first sin and the fall of man, recorded in Genesis 3. This is the picture that the Bible gives us. Adam, the father of the human race, sinned. And so sin and death came into this world. Paul puts it in verse 19 that “by one man's disobedience many were made sinners.” The first sin of Adam is placed in a causal relationship to the evil of mankind. And because evil or sin is a universal attribute of mankind, so is death as the consequence of sin.

This brings up several questions. How could one man's sin create sin in other people? If sin is inevitable, how can we be held morally responsible for it? And if death is the consequence of sin, why does it come on infants or on animals which are incapable of moral action? We will not address those questions here because I don't know the answer to them. What is clear is this general fact--this story, if you will, which gives us at least a context for this problem of universal evil. The first man sinned and brought a corruption into the world. Adam sinned and fell under the guilt of sin and the punishment of death. And that fact stands in a causal relationship with the fact that all mankind has sinned and is under the guilt of sin and the punishment of death.

Some people in the world will tell you that it is religion's fault that there is sin in the world. They will say that it is priests and preachers who create a sense of guilt by telling people what they're doing wrong. And there is an element of truth to that. Look at verse 20: “Moreover the law entered, that the offense might abound.” The proclamation of a law does create a definite recognition of guilt. Sometimes it drives people to do worse things. Parents can usually testify to this—telling your children not to do something often causes them to do it. This is an idea Paul will explore more fully later in Romans. Given that that is true, wouldn't it be better if God had never given us His law? Wouldn't it be better for there to be no Bible and no teaching?

No--because of verses 13-14. From the time of Adam until the time of Moses—and even after Moses in the world outside of the Jewish covenant—there was no extensive, systematic revelation of God's law. And yet there was still sin and death. People then didn't sin exactly the same way Adam did; they “had not sinned after the similitude of Adam's transgression”—many commentators suggest this means they didn't sin against an explicit, plainly revealed commandment from a plainly revealed God as Adam did—but there still clearly was sin. And since you can't have sin without a law, there must have been a law. This is something we already touched on earlier in Romans—God did give a revelation of Himself and His law even to those who did not have the revelation of Moses.

These three general facts, then, attach to all humans—a law, sin, and death. The difference which the Mosaic law and the specific revelation of scripture make—the reason why the law was slipped into the equation--is this. If you get a cut or a broken bone, you will know it through the feeling of pain. A majority of physical ailments and sicknesses we have will manifest themselves to our consciousness in one way or another—through pain or through a change in physical processes. (In some cases, a lack of pain would be an even greater indicator that something is wrong.) You can know that you are sick without going to a doctor. But going to a doctor will tell you more exactly what is wrong with you. It will (theoretically) pinpoint exactly what is wrong; show you symptoms you didn't recognize; help you disregard incidental symptoms—and show you clearly and definitely what is wrong with you.

People who have never read the Bible are sick with sin. Most of them know that they are, regardless of how they describe it and what they intend to do about it. But the Bible shows us specifically and expressly the problem of sin. The law even sometimes makes the problem of sin worse—as examining a broken bone can cause more pain—but the final purpose is still to pinpoint the problem so there may be a solution. Because even though it has taken us a while to get here, Paul's whole point here is not to talk about the problem but to talk about the solution.

I said before that this is a very dense section, and we have spent several paragraphs just to come around to the basic point, Paul is making here. By one man sin entered into the world and death by sin. Adam sinned, and the universal problems we see are the fruit of that. But also by one Man, righteousness and the possibility of curing all man's problems is in the world. One man opened the gate of death; another Man opened the gate of life.

The heart of this passage is this comparison between Adam and Jesus (who Paul elsewhere calls 'the last Adam'--1 Corinthians 15:45); the bringer of sin and death versus the bringer of righteousness and life. But we shouldn't picture it as a 1-to-1 contrast, as if we had equal columns with the works of Adam on one side and the works of Christ on the other. Paul's overpowering idea was that Christ has not merely repaired or undone the work of Adam but has gone further than that. Over and over throughout this passage, we have this idea—that the effect of Christ's atonement goes above and beyond the reach of Adam's sin. I'll admit, I have trouble following all the contrasts Paul makes here, but the general idea is clear: wherever sin abounded, grace did even more abound. Adam ruined an old creation, but Christ is making a new creation. Adam—in some sense or another—forced sin unto us all, but Christ brings 'a free gift.' Adam was the founder of the human race; Christ is the founder of a new, more glorious race, the race of the redeemed.  Adam brought death, but Christ brought life and something better than life—eternal life, a hope for this world and beyond this world. Everything that sin undid, Christ is doing better. That is the work of Transformation, the work which Christ is doing in us and in this world, overturning the kingdom of sin and building a better kingdom in its place.