Listen or read the following transcript as D. A. Carson speaks on the topic of Gospel from Romans 5:12-21
Imperfections can be seen more clearly when you cast light on them in such a way as to bring out the contrast. For example, I like to do woodwork, and sometimes when you have fine scratches on good furniture you can’t see exactly what the problem is. You can’t see exactly what needs to be fixed, how deep things are or how bad the problem is, unless you cast light from an angle. If you put it down from the top you don’t see the problem. If you cast it from an angle and see the contrast, things come out in a certain kind of relief.
It’s a bit like wrinkles on an aging face. You get a full glare on it and you don’t see the problem. You cast light from the side, and then you see what the true age is. Likewise, in some of the black and white photography of Ansel Adams and people like that, what makes it so spectacularly arresting is the way he deals with light in contrast. There are parts of the Bible that are set up like that. That is, the author presents things in contrast to help us see what we’re really dealing with, and this is one of those passages.
In some ways, these paragraphs, Romans 5:12–21, look back on what has already been covered. In some ways, they look forward. They look back, and they say unambiguously that justification (that is, our status as just before God) is secured for us by Christ. As you know by now, that is a major theme from 1:18 to the end of chapter 4. Yet at the same time, it points forward.
We are now introduced to the fact that, in some ways, grace and sin and death reign. They’re like powers. They’re personified, and they have a controlling force. Here too we’re introduced to this huge bifurcation, people in Adam (whatever that means) and people in Christ (whatever that means), and that bifurcation starts surfacing again and again in Romans and in others of Paul’s writings. All of this is done, nevertheless, to paint a kind of sweeping picture of what the gospel is about, of what salvation is about.
Here there is no picky focus on an individual or even a narrow focus on Israel and its role in the whole sweep of redemptive history. Here the canvas is all of human history. Here the canvas is all of humankind. You begin with Adam, and you end up finally with Christ and all he has achieved, right into the new heaven and the new earth. There is a sweeping canvas here, and on this canvas you’re painting everything in contrast in order to help us see clearly what is at issue. There are several of these.
1. A suspended contrast.
Verse 12. That is, a contrast that begins, and then it’s suspended. It doesn’t really resume until a little farther on. That’s why in most of our English Bibles there’s a dash at the end of the verse. “Therefore, just as sin entered the world through one man, and death through sin, and in this way death came to all men, because all sinned …” You want the rest of it, and it’s not there.
This paragraph is full of “Just as … so also.” There’s one in verse 18. There’s another one in verse 19. “Just as … so also.” There’s another one in verse 20, although it doesn’t show up in our English translations. “Just as … so also.” Or other kinds of contrasts. You have “Not as … but so” and that sort of thing.
Here you begin with a “just as” that doesn’t go anywhere. “Therefore, just as sin entered the world through one man, and death through sin, and in this way death came to all men, because all sinned …” Clearly a reference to Adam. Then you don’t get the “so also.” The “so also” falls out of all of the rest of these verses, but it’s made explicit by the time you get down to verse 18. It’s worth looking ahead.
“Consequently, just as the result of one trespass was condemnation for all men, so also the result of one act of righteousness was justification that brings life for all men. 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.” There’s clearly an Adam/Christ contrast that runs right through here, and yet at the moment the thing is merely suspended. It’s introduced.
What is the point of this suspension? Certainly what is at stake is that Paul introduces it and then realizes that before he gives the last half he wants to flesh out some elements to make sure he’s not misunderstood. That’s the way the argument is structured. But now look at verse 12 itself. There are four clauses: (12a) Sin enters and produces (12b) death; (12c) all die (12d) because all sinned. In other words, you have sin, death, death, sin. Sin enters and produces death; all die, which shows that all have sinned. That’s the way the argument works.
Look at it a little more closely. Here we’re talking about sin entering. A little farther on, sin reigns. In chapter 6, sin can be obeyed. You can obey sin. In 6:23, sin pays wages. In chapter 7, sin seizes opportunities. In chapter 7 also, sin deceives, sin kills. In other words, what you get is a picture of sin seen not as the breaking of an individual rule, as an, “Oops, missed that one,” but sin as a power, a reigning authority that controls, contaminates, destroys, and deceives. Sin, powerfully personified.
First, sin enters. What Paul has in mind certainly, with all of his background, steeped in the Old Testament, is Genesis 3. Sin entered into the world. In some ways, it’s getting harder and harder to deal with that sort of theme today (even though I’m sure you spent a lot of time on it when you were going through chapters 1:18–3:20 a little earlier in the year), because sin is not the sort of word that is used commonly in university circles, one of the words that falls off our lips easily.
It’s a religious word. It’s a theological word for people who are somewhat on the right, culturally speaking, or else it’s a word that has been relativized to the point that it has meaning only in particular subgroups. What’s sinful to one person is not sinful to another person. The result of all of this is that sin isn’t odious to us. It’s not serious. It’s not offensive. It’s not heinous. It’s an, “Oops.” It’s not more than that.
I don’t think you can come to grips with this passage unless you see how deeply Paul feels about this matter of sin. We’ll face this two or three times in the paragraph, but begin by thinking through how Adam and Eve fall in Genesis 3, just a couple of the elements there. Satan says, “Don’t you know that when you eat of this fruit you will be like God, knowing good and evil?” In one sense, of course, he was telling the truth. God himself says so at the end of Genesis 3. He says, “Now the man and the woman have become like us, knowing good and evil.”
The point is that Adam and Eve are presented initially as being gloriously naÔve. That is, without any remembrance of wickedness, no memory of evil. None. Now they’re being invited to increase their moral horizons so that they will have introduced to them categories that are not yet theirs. The problem is what they are not told is that there’s a stinger in the tail. They will learn about evil not as God knows evil but from the inside, by becoming evil.
My wife, for the last two and a half years, has been battling cancer. We almost lost her two years ago. She knows cancer from the inside. She doesn’t pretend to know as much about it as her oncologist knows or as much as her surgeon knows, but on the other hand, she knows it in a way that neither of them knows it: from the inside.
God knows about sin in the same way he knows about everything. God knows all that has been, all that is, all that will be, and all that could have been under different circumstances, so of course he knows about sin, but that doesn’t mean he is sinful. We learn about sin by shaking our puny fists in God’s face and de-Godding God. That’s what sin is about. It is about the de-Godding of God. Now we become god instead of God.
Originally there is God, and his image bearers think about him, love him, and are devoted to him. They wake up in the middle of the night, and they orient all of their thinking automatically toward him. They are rightly related to each other because they’re rightly related to him, and they know what it means to love God with heart and soul and mind and strength. He is the center of their universe.
The entrance of sin does not simply mean, “Oops, I chose some fruit from the wrong tree; sorry about that,” but rather the defiance of God. What is introduced is not the breaking of a rule but the de-Godding of God, so that now, in effect, I become the center of the universe and God, if he, she, or it exists, had jolly well better serve me or, quite frankly, I’ll find another god, thank you. That’s the beginning of idolatry.
Now because I am at the center of the universe and you, you stupid twit, think that you’re the center of the universe, then sooner or later we have to build fences and we have to fight over the spoils and we have to consider the introduction of war, envy, jealousy, rape, one-upmanship, arrogance, malice, nurtured bitterness, all because I have de-Godded God and made myself god.
That’s the heart of the Bible’s picture of the introduction of sin. That’s the kind of thing Paul presupposes when he says sin entered. He does not simply mean there was a broken rule, a nasty mistake but not too serious. He means rather that there was a revolution. God was de-Godded. He was relativized.
I was speaking in French Canada along these lines (I’m from Canada) earlier this year. This was a bilingual conference, so most of us who were speaking spoke sometimes in English and sometimes in French, because we’d been brought up in the area. So there was simultaneous translation going on, and you have to think when there’s simultaneous translation of putting things in a form that is easily translatable. Limericks are not translatable, for example. Puns are not translatable, and so forth.
At this particular point I was speaking in English, and out slipped “the de-Godding of God” and it was supposed to go into French. At the back of my mind, even while I was speaking it, I think, “Oh, my poor translator. What’s he going to do with that one?” What he said was “the dethroning of God,” which isn’t bad.
Afterwards I was talking with him with a former student, and the student smiled and said, “I think I would have said ‘the thing-a-mafying of God.’ ” Isn’t that clever? God is reduced to being a thing. God is thus de-Godded. He’s turned into one more object. That’s what is going on here when Paul says sin entered.
When you read through the Old Testament accounts, you come across plenty of rape and pillage and war and malice and family dysfunction and all kinds of things we see at a social level today, but what is it in the Old Testament when you read through it quickly that most narks God? What is it in the Old Testament that is repeatedly said to make God angry or to raise his jealousy? Murder? Profanity? Lust? Idolatry, again and again and again.
When we try to talk about sin today to our peers, that’s not what we think of first. We try to show the socially malevolent effects of sin to prove that we’re serious people as we confront the culture. “If you do certain things, there are negative effects in the culture.” That’s true. There are. But from God’s perspective, that isn’t the heart of the issue. That’s the result of the heart of the issue. The heart of the issue is the dethroning of God, idolatry, the de-Godding of God.
That’s why in the New Testament Jesus says the first command is to love God with heart and soul and strength. What that means is that the first sin is not to love God with heart and soul and strength. It’s the one sin you commit every time you commit any other sin. You cannot commit any other sin without committing that sin. It is the foundational sin. It is the de-Godding of God. It is elevating you, your concerns, your wishes, your pleasure, or your self-identity above God.
Sin entered, and death ensued. Verse 12b: “Just as sin entered the world through one man, and death through sin …” Death does not only mean physical death (although it certainly means that) but being cut out from eternal life, being destroyed before God. God becomes dead to you, as it were, and you become dead to God. Death is introduced massively, and there is only, finally, eternal ruin.
“… and death through sin, and in this way death came to all men, because all sinned …” Now there is not only entrance but now there is universal death. Why? Because, we’re told, all sinned. As death came to Adam through sin, so death came to all through sin. That is what is meant by “And in this way.” That is the way death multiplied: because all sinned.
It is true of all individuals. That’s the argument of 1:18 to 3:20, as we’ve seen. But is this passage simply saying we all die, we all face various kinds of death, because, in fact, we all do empirically sin? It’s true, but is that all it is saying? Verses 18–19 suggest there is more here; namely, that there is a corporate dimension to sin.
“Consequently, just as the result of one trespass was condemnation for all men, so also the result of one act of righteousness was justification that brings life for all men. 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.”
It sounds now as if people are condemned not only for their own individual sins committed as individuals but that there is a condemnation that has come from that first man and his sin, and across 2,000 years of church history Christians have struggled with how this can be. How can this be and God remain fair? What does it mean? Basically, these things have resolved into two options, both of which are believed by many devout Christians.
One group says there is a sense in which all human beings who are quite literally in Adam … That is, if we all come originally from one pair, there is a sense in which when Adam sinned we were part of him. We’re just the effluent from Adam, as it were. We cannot escape what we were. We were in Adam. Not as full-fledged individuals. Of course not. But we’re human beings. We descended from Adam.
In one profound sense, what Adam did, we did. It’s not as if we can say, “What Adam did has no connection with me whatsoever.” When he did it, I was in Adam. That is something of an argument that the epistle to the Hebrews uses with respect to Abraham and Levi in Hebrews, chapter 7. I don’t have time to go into it. That’s the so-called realist view.
It seems strange to us in the West, partly because we tend to think in such individualistic terms. My identity is who I am as an individual. My identity is not primarily who I am as part of a family or a clan. I don’t think of myself primarily as a race or as an extended family or as a person foremost belonging to all other human beings. I think of myself very individually in the Western world.
But this larger corporate way of thinking has at least some plausibility to it when we stop to consider how often the traits and characteristics, the potential for good and for evil that we find in our own lives, have been found already in our parents or grandparents. Haven’t we found that again and again?
But there’s another way of taking it. It’s sometimes called the representative way. That is to say, there is a sense in which Adam stands for all of us. He represents all of us. He’s almost in a contract with God in which he becomes the figure that represents all of us, so when he did it, God saw all of us in him.
In one sense, this issue is not crucial for our purposes. If I had more time, I would try to unpack it. What is crucial is that we see how this initial sin sets the stage for how we think of what Christ has done, because, in fact, the author is about to say Adam is the first part of the contrast and Christ is the other part. As sin was introduced by Adam, so also righteousness was introduced by Christ.
What that means is that we are not properly going to understand what Christ did until we see what Adam did. Some presentations of the gospel are like this: “My life was a mess, a very big mess. Jesus came along and died for me to clean up my mess, and now I’m okay.” Well, there’s a sense in which that’s true, of course, except you have to define mess.
What’s the mess? That I’m unhappy? That I’ve come from a dysfunctional family? I’m not getting the grades I hoped to make? I have some problems with social dynamics? My fiancÈe just jilted me? I have a nasty disease? My funds have just been cut off? What defines the mess? In the Bible, the mess is defined first and foremost in terms of our relationship to God. That’s our mess.
We were made by God and for God, and by making ourselves god, by de-Godding God, we are alienated from him and he stands over against us in judgment. The wonderful thing about this God is that though he stands over against us in judgment, he still pursues us and provides the means for returning to him. Unless we see that that’s the mess, we cannot see how wonderful is the solution. Unless you get agreement on what the problem is, you can’t get agreement on what the solution is.
If you think the mess is defined first and foremost in terms of bad relationships, then probably what you need is a psychotherapist. If you think your problem is first and foremost in terms of money, then what you need is an economist or a very fat donor. If what you think is your problem is first and foremost that you’re not getting enough sex, well, then there are other solutions along those lines too.
But if your problem is first and foremost that you, like every other human being, are alienated from God, standing under his judgment, and righteously so, because deep down in all of us we want to be god … we want to be at the center of the universe, we want others to serve us, we want the world to revolve around us … then God help us.
We need someone who will bring us back to God. We need a mediator. We need someone who will deal with our rebellion. So this verse turns out to be critical for understanding everything that follows. Even though it is a suspended contrast between Adam and Christ, in fact, it sets the stage.
2. A presupposed contrast.
That is, a contrast between sin and death after Moses and sin and death before Moses. Listen to the argument. Verses 13–14: “Before the law was given, sin was in the world.” Here, the law means the Mosaic law, the Ten Commandments, the entire sacrificial system, all the law that was given at the time of Moses from Exodus on in the Bible.
“But sin is not taken into account when there is no law. Nevertheless, death reigned from the time of Adam to the time of Moses, even over those who did not sin by breaking a command, as did Adam, who was a pattern of the one to come.” You may recall Paul’s own teaching in chapter 4, verse 15. Paul says, “The law brings wrath, and where there is no law there is no transgression.”
There were some people at the time who thought somehow the law brought salvation. God gives a whole lot of law, and if you follow all the law, somehow you’ll get enough brownie points that you’ll get into heaven. Paul says, “No, that’s not the way the law functions.” What the law does is hit us where we are. It gives us a whole lot of “You shall do this and you shall not do that,” and we discover all the more how badly we don’t line up.
In fact, now it means that when we don’t line up, it’s not just that we’re sort of oriented against God, but we’re actually transgressing something explicit. God says, “Don’t do that,” and now we do it. So it’s not just that we’re oriented toward our own selfishness. Now we’re actually breaking something that God has explicitly said.
In that sense, the giving of the law, far from bringing release, actually brings more condemnation. Paul has taught this explicitly in chapter 4. He expands upon it at great length in Galatians, but now he realizes that some people might draw the wrong conclusion from this. “Hey, wait a minute, Paul. If the law brings transgression and condemnation and wrath, what about all the people who lived before Moses? Does that mean there’s no wrath on them because they didn’t break all those rules?” His answer is in these verses.
Before the law was given, sin was still in the world, because after all, sin was introduced back with Adam in Genesis 3. Sin was there when there was a breaking of the first commandment. “You mustn’t eat of that particular tree.” So sin came into the world. When it came into the world, it’s not as if there was an ongoing sin of eating the forbidden fruit and that was the only sin there was, so that all of the wars or all of the hate or all of the lust …
The first fratricide, a brother killing a brother in Genesis, chapter 4, doesn’t really count. It’s not really evil because there was no law that said, “You shall not bash your brother on the head.” It wasn’t that. No, no, no. He says, “That’s not the real issue.” He says, “Sin entered and you’ve de-Godded God. You’ve made yourself god.” Sin has entered, and there is the deep defiance. Death has come about, and it reigns.
It has this controlling power all through history until you get to Moses, when God puts in place a whole lot of law, so now when you act selfishly, not only are you acting selfishly, de-Godding God sinfully in that sense, but now also, in addition, you are transgressing something. You’re breaking a specific law. You’re going over a line. It was still wrong before. It was still wicked before because you were thinking of yourself as at the center of the universe.
Now at this point someone may well say, “Wait a minute, Don. This is really over the top. I don’t think of myself as at the center of the universe.” No? Supposing I hold up a photograph of your graduating class from whatever public school or grammar school you went to. There is a picture of your graduating class. Where does your eye go first?
You have an argument with someone in the lab or someone on your staircase. It doesn’t really matter. And not just sort of a little nasty argument, but a real humdinger, a knock-down, drag-em-out, one-in-ten-years argument, a real stinger. You go away, and you’re thinking about all of the things you could have said and all of the things you should have said and all of the things you would have said if you had thought of them fast enough. You play the whole thing over in your mind. Who wins? In my time, I’ve lost a lot of arguments. I’ve never lost a rerun.
I know there are civilizing influences upon us and family discipline and all of that. We’re a pretty civilized bunch, but if we’re civilized enough, we can actually use our civility with these classic put-downs so people can be smashed to little pieces in such a sophisticated way they may not even know they’re being sophisticatedly smashed. We call it education. Class. No, no, we’re at the center of the universe.
We wake up, and we don’t automatically think to ourselves in the middle of the night as we sort of rouse into self-conscious thought, “I wonder how my mother looks at that.” We don’t immediately start thinking, “I wonder how my tutor looks at that.” We don’t immediately start thinking, “I wonder how God looks at that.” We immediately look at everything from how we look at it, and thus sin reigned from Adam on.
Even where there were no explicit taboos saying, “Thou shalt not do this” or “You must do that,” it still reigned, and so death reigned. With the coming of the law, that didn’t change. It just meant that in addition to sin reigning, now transgression is added. You’re actually breaking explicit prohibitions and failing to do what God has explicitly commanded.
Then with the reference to Adam at the end of this passage, “As did Adam,” we now have a relative clause that introduces the next contrast. This Adam who was a pattern, a type literally, of the one to come. A type in Scripture is a person or an institution or an event in the Old Testament that somehow functions in God’s wise counsel to point forward to someone or something else. So Adam is a pattern, a type, that in God’s wise counsel looks forward to something else.
3. The fundamental contrast.
Verses 15–19. This is the fundamental contrast: the reign of sin and death in Adam and the reign of grace and life in Christ. In these verses, there are four axes to this fundamental contrast. First, verse 15: “The gift is not like the trespass. For if the many died by the trespass of the one man, how much more did God’s grace and the gift that came by the grace of the one man, Jesus Christ, overflow to the many!”
The word gift here is the word charisma, and it’s referring to the gift of Jesus Christ and all that he brings. In that sense, all Christians are charismatics whether we like it or not. In fact, there are a lot of things in Scripture that are called charisma. In 1 Corinthians 7, marriage is a charisma. So is celibacy. On that score alone, we’re all charismatics one way or the other.
Marriage is seen as a gracious gift from God (that’s what a charisma is), and celibacy in the right context is also seen precisely as a gracious gift from God. You may not always believe it, but it’s the truth. Those who are married don’t always believe it’s a gracious gift from God either, because we can manage to turn almost anything into a hideous, grotesque mockery of itself. Nevertheless, it is, in God’s wise purposes, a gracious gift from God.
In this passage, the gracious charisma in view, this grace gift, is Christ himself, his salvation, and this gracious gift is not like the trespass; that is, the trespass that Adam committed and introduced sin to the entire race. “For if the many died by the trespass of the one man, how much more did God’s grace and the gift that came by the grace of the one man, Jesus Christ, overflow to the many!”
Do you see what the argument is here? We are a fallen race because sin was introduced in one act of disobedience, just one act, but it was such a revolutionary act, an act that made the whole race become rebellious in principle, me-centered at its core, with a fallen nature that begins all of life’s experience by making God other, by making ourselves god by preference. That one act controls so much of what follows.
When Christ died on the cross, he didn’t just pay for that one act. Since that one act, you and I have sinned again and again, and not just you and I, but men and women from every tongue and tribe and people and nation. All the sins of arrogance, pride, and hatred; all the sins of violence, resentment, and lust; all the cruelty; the petty bitterness; the nurtured resentment; all the cheating on the income tax; all the really grotesque genocides, perhaps 100 million people killed in the twentieth century apart from war.
Then we come to the end of the twentieth century and the beginning of the twenty-first century, and not a few academics try to teach us that there is no such thing as evil. It’s not only a contrast of direction. By the one act you get the de-Godding of God and all of the violence and sin that flows from it, but the one act that restores men and women to God does not deal with just that one act but with countless rebellions and sins.
“The gift is not like the trespass,” Paul says. “For if the many died by the trespass of the one, how much more did God’s grace and the gift that came by the grace of the one man, Jesus Christ, overflow to many!” There’s a second axis. On the one hand, judgment and condemnation, and on the other, justification. Again, the gift of God, the charisma of God, is not like the result of the one man’s sin. The judgment followed one sin and brought condemnation. The one act brought death, decay, suffering, and finally hell.
My parents have died. My wife’s parents have died. Somehow or other we’ve gotten tangled up with several couples that are in their high 80s and early 90s who have no one to look after them, so at the moment we seem to be looking after, in one fashion or another, with one degree of proximity or another, people who are not far from eternity.
Two or three weeks ago, one old man … He turns 89 next week. He’s virtually now bedridden. He can hardly walk. He has stenosis of the spine and all kinds of problems. His mind is going. He’s in a nursing home. His wife gets in to see him from another part of the nursing home. A couple of weeks ago, he was trying to chew something and he chewed down and his dentures broke in four places and he swallowed them. You’d make a cartoon out of that, but to an 89-year-old man, that’s not funny. He almost died before they got them out.
This man has written 40 books for Christians. He’s one of the great Christian leaders of the twentieth century, influential and amazing counsels for years and years and years. You know what? There’s nothing dignified about old age and death. I know the Bible does say to be absent from the body is to be present with the Lord, which is far better. Of course. There is something to look forward to. The Bible does say, after all, to be with Christ is far better. Yes, yes.
But one of the reasons we rebel when we come across death is precisely because that’s not what we were designed for. In that sense, it’s not natural. It’s natural because we now live in a fallen nature, but you don’t think when you lose a spouse or a child or a sibling or a parent … You don’t think as you’re approaching your own time, “Oh well, it happens to all of us. My turn next, I suppose.” There is something deep within human nature that says, “This is not the way it’s supposed to be.” That is a true intuition.
Nevertheless, the trespass resulted in this death. Worse, shut out from the presence of God. But by another act, an act of immeasurable grace, a grace gift … This gift that followed many trespasses brought justification. Now we return to these great themes from the earlier chapters. You and I, men and women, may stand before God and be declared just, even though we’re not, because someone else bore our sins in his own body on the tree, absorbed the penalty, absorbed the guilt, and we may be declared just.
The direction of the two acts is profoundly different. Notice the language of verse 17 in passing about death reigning. That may not grab us the way it would grab someone in the first century, because when we think of reign and monarchs, we think of constitutional monarchs. Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II reigns. It doesn’t mean she rules very much in any sort of dynamic sense, but she reigns. She’s a constitutional monarch. In the first century, there were no constitutional monarchs. If you reigned, you controlled things. Death reigns, and it’s not a constitutional monarch.
Then the third axis, verse 18. This is, in some ways, a reiteration, but now the contrast is slightly enriched. Something is added. “Just as the result of one trespass was condemnation for all men …” We’ve already seen that. “… so also the result of one act of righteousness was justification …” We’ve already seen that. “… that brings life for all men.” That’s added. In other words, it’s not just that we stand before God and God says, “Not guilty. I declare you just, not because you are experientially just but because of what my Son has done on your behalf.
I grant you life; life already now by the Spirit; life that issues in eternity; life that consummates in resurrection life in a new heaven and a new earth, a home of righteousness; life where there is no more hate, no more death, no more sorrow, no more dying, no more resentment, no more ‘me-first-ism,’ no more de-Godding of God; life in all of its glorious fullness with God at the very center, with all of his creatures surrounding him in glory and praise.” Read the last two chapters of the book of Revelation, and learn what life finally is. All of it secured by Christ.
Then in verse 19, there’s a further elaboration. “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.” Now the whole thing is cast not only in terms of the disobedience of Adam (we’ve seen that) but also in terms of the obedience of Christ. That’s a theme we often don’t think about, but it’s a theme that’s rich in John’s gospel, the epistle of Hebrews, and elsewhere.
When you stop to think about it, it’s one that is really quite glorious. That’s why you find Jesus in the garden of Gethsemane saying, “Not my will but yours be done.” It cost Jesus to be obedient even unto death. So by the one man’s disobedience, death reigns. By the other man’s obedience, grace overflows.
Note too in this passage this running contrast between the many and the many. Some people want to see, because the same language is used both ways, that all of those who are under death, which means all of humankind without exception, also come under life. Thus, for example, in verse 19: “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.” Aren’t they the same many?
Then you have also all/all language. Doesn’t this give hope for some kind of universalism? Everybody gets saved, just as everybody is lost in the first place? Well, there are many who hold that view, but I would want to argue that it means that Paul has contradicted himself rather badly. When you read the earlier chapters of the epistle and discover how many things Paul says of a more discriminating nature, you realize it is a hope that is not going to be fulfilled.
What Paul is saying is something more profound than that. He’s saying that all who are in Adam, because of the trespass, die. All who are in Christ, because of the obedience, live. Christ’s salvation is effective. It works. It transforms. It forgives. It gives life. All under the one regime face one thing, and all under the other regime face another thing.
4. An explanatory contrast.
Verses 20–21: “The law was added so that the trespass might increase.” In other words, people might well say, “If death reigned already from Adam, why do you have to have the Mosaic law coming along? What does it do?” The law was added so that the trespass might increase. “But where sin increased, grace increased all the more, so that, just as sin reigned in death, so also grace might reign through righteousness to bring eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord.”
Now there is a contrast between the rising ugliness of sin across human history multiplied by law and the surpassing overflow of grace that has been brought to us by Christ. There is always a danger that Christians who use biblical words: grace, forgiveness, truth, Jesus, death, substitution, and that sort of thing … These just become clichÈs that ripple off our lips without them moving us or grabbing us anymore.
What Paul is trying to do is paint in such a huge sweeping picture that we see how ugly and grotesque and odious this sin is and, therefore, how spectacularly overflowing and powerful is the grace of Christ that brings us release. Yesterday, at the lunch hour talk, I mentioned a woman by the name of Claudia whom I knew in DC. I didn’t tell the end of the story.
I mentioned her because when the story begins, she was one of the editors of the most influential political weekly in DC, and she openly held the postmodern view that there is no such thing as sin in any objective sense. She held that about the Holocaust. She argued vociferously in all kinds of private conversations with a good friend of mine that from the point of view of those who were gassed and burned at Auschwitz and Birkenau, and so forth, no doubt it was pretty ugly, but from the point of view of Aryan supremacists, it was a good thing; the only problem was that it didn’t go far enough. It all depends on your point of view.
But she liked my friends in DC, Mark and Connie, so when they invited her along to a Bible study, because she was interested in texts and she liked them personally, she started to go to this Bible study on Mark’s gospel. She didn’t believe it, but she liked the discussions, which seemed to be pretty evenhanded to her. She didn’t buy into what was being said about Jesus and his coming not to be served but to serve and to give his life a ransom for many, but she liked them and she went.
Then she was posted for a quick visit to Papua New Guinea to deal with certain political things that were going on, and just as she was leaving she heard the story of a priest who was arrested just before he was to leave the country after 35 years of service in that country. He was arrested for pedophilia. It turned out that he had sodomized hundreds of boys under his care during his 35 years there. For some reason, this story grabbed her.
She thought in terms of what it would mean for the boys and their marriages and their relationships and their families and, because abusers are often the abused, how this could be passed on and hurt so many others. She came back and told Mark and Connie. Mark said, “Claudia, was it evil? Was it wicked?” She said, “We know that most people who do these things were themselves abused. Probably the priest himself is from that sort of home. I like to think in terms like that.”
Mark replied, “The Bible itself says, ‘Sin is visited upon the children to the third and fourth generation of those who hate me.’ The Bible is fully aware that sin is social. There are very few sins that you can commit entirely in private. You might think, for example, that pornography is something you commit entirely in private, but eventually, enough pornography and it will poison your relationships with the opposite sex.
There are very few sins that we commit that remain private, and certainly not abuse. So nobody is denying that sins get passed on from generation to generation. That’s true. That’s not the question. The question is … Was it evil? Was it wicked?” Every time Mark saw her, he said, “Claudia, was it wicked?” She’d come to a Bible study another week. “Claudia, have you decided? Was it wicked?”
It began to affect her sleep and her eating. She couldn’t bring herself to say, “No, no, it wasn’t wicked. It was just one of those things. It all depends on the point of view. If he had gotten away with it, for him it wouldn’t have been wicked.” She couldn’t bring herself to say that, but she couldn’t bring herself to say that it was wicked either.
Then one night, in the middle of the night, she couldn’t sleep. She was turning this over and over, and she finally said, “This was wicked. This was really wicked.” Claudia told me this, and I said, “What happened then?” She said, “It then dawned on me that I had a category for wickedness and maybe I was wicked too.” Within weeks she became a Christian.
Let me tell you frankly that if you’re not a Christian, you’re not ready to become a Christian until you see that you’re in Adam and from God’s point of view, wicked. And if you are a Christian, you will only grow in appreciation of the glories of the gospel in proportion as you grow in appreciation of the ugliness of sin. In particular, your sin.
Across church history, the saintliest and godliest men and women have, without exception, been men and women who have come to witness something of the sheer horror and ugliness, the odium, of defying God Almighty in word and thought and deed and then have turned to the cross and found the greatest charisma of all, the greatest grace gift, Jesus himself, and all the forgiveness, life, and hope that only he can give. Let us pray.
We confess with shame, Lord God, how easily we can relegate sin to mere peccadillo and think of it as momentary weakness, in our case, certainly, excusable. Open our eyes, we pray, by your Spirit so that we will see how sweeping, how epochal Adam’s sin was and how we participate in it and repeat it. Then we beseech you, do not leave us in despair because of it, but bring us back again and again to the cross, where alone such evil as this is dealt with.
It was my sin that held him there
Until it was accomplished.
His dying breath has brought me life.
I know that it is finished.
So grant, Lord God, whether we are Christians or not, the heart cry of our very being will be, “Lord, be merciful to me, a sinner.” Through Jesus Christ, our Lord. Amen.
