The Spread of Death 2 - Romans 5:12-14

Remembering Where We Are

1st Peter 3:18: “For Christ also suffered once for sins, the righteous for the unrighteous…”  Did you hear that?  “The righteous for the unrighteous…”  2^nd Corinthians 5:21 says, “For our sake he made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.”  Here is the message of the gospel.  God treated His righteous Son as if He was a terrible sinner and treats sinners as though they were His obedient Son.  Our sins imputed to Christ, Christ’s righteousness imputed to us – this is the gospel.  Our F’s on Jesus’ Report Card, and He gets the punishment.  His A’s on our Report Card, and we get the blessings.  This is awesome for us.  We praise God for this.  But how can it be?  How can God justly punish the Righteous One and bless sinners?  How can God be holy and do this great gospel thing called imputation? 

That’s the mystery Paul is unfolding for us in these verses.  These verses are important and theologically dense.  If you were not with us last Sunday, I highly recommend that you go to the website and listen to last week’s message.  Each week that we are in this passage I won’t have time to go back and rehearse all that we’ve already said, and these things build on top of each other.  So if you miss a message while we’re on this passage, I highly encourage you to get it and listen to it so that questions you may have can be answered.

Paul begins to explain this glorious gospel truth of imputation in verse 12.  Last week we left off with two suggestions concerning this verse.  My first suggestion, which we did talk about last week, is that the death that Paul is speaking of in verse 12 is primarily spiritual death.  The death that Adam experienced and that all humanity experiences is not mainly physical death, but spiritual death.  We are dead in our trespasses and sins.  All mankind, since the sin of Adam, does not love God nor want God.  What’s more, we are born sinners with God’s condemnation hanging over us.  Physical death points to this.  We die physically because our bodies are cursed, and that reminds us that people’s souls are dead and under a curse.  Only through Jesus Christ can a person’s soul be made alive again.  Apart from His saving work, human beings are the living dead.  We move around and have lives, but spiritually speaking we are dead.  We are dead to God.

My second suggestion about verse 12 is where we pick up now.  My second suggestion is that the words “all sinned” at the end of the verse refer not to the various sins that you and I have committed throughout our lives, but to the one sin of Adam.  When Adam sinned, we all sinned.  Paul is explaining how death came to the human race.  His answer is that Adam sinned and therefore died, and all humanity also dies, because we all sinned.  Not we all sin (present tense).  We all sinned (past tense).  When Adam sinned, we all sinned.

Are We Sure That This Is What Paul Is Saying?

Now, this seems like a radical thing to say.  Is Paul suggesting that God holds all humanity responsible for the sin of one man?  Is Paul really saying that God has punished the entire human race with death because one man broke His law?  The answer is yes.  That is exactly what Paul is saying.  And we know that this is what he is saying, because he says it again and again in the verses to follow. 

Look at the middle of verse 15: “Many died through one man’s trespass.”  Paul says if at the beginning of that clause, but it is clear from the whole verse that he is saying that this is true.  Many did die through one man’s trespass.

Look at the middle of verse 16: “For the judgment following one trespass brought condemnation.” Condemnation on who?  Just Adam?  It is clear from the context that he is speaking of the whole human race.  One sin brought death to all. 

Look at verse 18: “Therefore, as one trespass led to condemnation for all men…”  Is that not clear?  People have been stumbling over this teaching for centuries, but the issue isn’t that Paul was unclear.  Paul spoke plainly.  The reason people have been stumbling over this is they don’t want to believe it.  One trespass led to condemnation for all men. 

Look at verse 19.  “For as by the one man’s disobedience the many were made sinners…”  Do you hear that?  By one man’s disobedience the many were made sinners.  You and I became sinners before we were ever born.  We became sinners when Adam disobeyed God.

You are not a sinner because you sin.  You sin because you are a sinner.  The natural person, apart from Jesus intervening, is rotten at the core.  As Jeremiah 17:9 says, “The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately sick; who can understand it?”  This is why sin is so natural to us.  It is a part of who we are.  It is integral to our nature.  We are not inherently good.  We are inherently evil.  As David says in Psalm 51:5: “Behold, I was brought forth in iniquity, and in sin did my mother conceive me.”  In other words, from my very conception in my mother’s womb, sin was a part of who I am.  This is why human beings are enslaved to sin and cannot stop sinning.  Jeremiah 13:23: “Can the Ethiopian change his skin or the leopard his spots?  Then also you can do good who are accustomed to do evil.”  Evil is as much a part of a human being as spots are to a leopard or black skin is to an African.  It is a part of who we are. 

How did this happen?  How did this spiritual death come to us? 

In Adam’s Fall

We sinned all.

That is what Paul is teaching here.

The Nature of Our Connection With Adam (Physical or Federal)

Now, how does this connection work?  How is that you and I are so intimately connected with Adam that when he sinned, we sinned? 

Well, one view that has a rich history is that it is our physical and biological connection to Adam that is at play here. 

It is because of our biological connection to Adam that we inherit his guilt and his curse.  John MacArthur, who I love and respect and who has had a great influence on my life, is one who has defended this view.  Listen to him explain it:

“Adam was mankind. He was all the mankind there was, along with Eve. And once the sin principle came to dwell in him, he would then pass it on to all of his procreation, just as all the offspring of Adam have human characteristics like eyes and ears, and hands and feet, and nose and mouth and internal organs, so they have the sin principle as well.

It is passed on to progeny. The world of mankind then became corrupted. John Donne must have been musing about this reality when he wrote, "No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main." And then he said, "Any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee." You're not an island, you cannot be isolated, you cannot be separated, Adam acting in a solidarity. Adam was mankind in his loins, was the seed of humanity that would bring forth every human life, and when he was polluted so was everything that came out of his loins, and he produced a polluted race.”

Now, without disregarding what MacArthur is saying there, I do think there is a different kind of connection that Paul is speaking of here.  It seems to me that what Paul has in view here is not mainly a biological connection with Adam, but a federal connection.  Everyone say federal. 

The idea is that as Adam lived before God in the Garden, he did so as the legal representative of the human race.  When Adam entered into a covenant with God, Adam entered into that covenant on behalf of the entire human race.  Thus, when Adam broke that covenant with God, he did not do so as an independent person, but as the representative of you and me and everybody.  He was our covenantal head. 

Now, the instinct of many people is to hate this idea.  They do not like the fact that God chose for one man to represent all of us in the Garden.  Our instinct is to want to be autonomous.  I want to stand and fall on my own, independent of anyone else.  I want to be my own man, disconnected from the human race to who I belong.  I don’t want to look to Jesus for salvation – I want to be good on my own.  I certainly don’t want to be held guilty because some representative of mine failed. 

But God is not treating us unreasonably here.  In fact, as much as we might like to act as though we want to be treated as autonomous, independent people, we know that this just isn’t the way the world works.  I read one illustration this week that I think shows this – see what you think.  A father inherits a great deal of money from his father.  But then, he wastes it all away and has none left over for his children.  How does society work?  Do we declare that those children have been robbed of their inheritance and they should get the money back?  No, our society and every society says that if it is your father who lost it, it is lost.  The inheritance is gone.  Your father wasted the money, and now it is your loss as well as his.  Another illustration is that of generational debt.  Here in the United States, every one of us is now in debt for a great deal of money that we owe to the Chinese and others.  One generation spends a great deal of money that they don’t have, and the next generation inherits the debt.  Now, we could appeal to the government and say we don’t want to be held liable for that debt.  We could say that we want to be exempted from that debt.  But the only way you can be exempted is if you lose your citizenship as an American.  One generation set in place programs that spent money America could not pay for.  The next generation now suffers the consequences.  This is how reality works.

Here’s an illustration of federal headship that I think really comes close to the kind of relationship we have with Adam.  At the end of World War I, when President Woodrow Wilson signed the Treaty of Versailles to make peace with Germany, the whole United States signed with him.  It wasn’t just President Wilson who was now at peace with Germany, but the citizens of the nation he stood for.  In that moment, he stood as the federal head of our nation.  In the Garden, when Adam received the covenant of works, it was not just Adam who received it, but all humanity.  Remember, the name “Adam” means “man”.  He stood for man – male and female – in receiving this covenant

The Covenant of Works

Now, what am I talking about when I talk about a covenant of works?  What was this great sin that Adam committed that brought death to all people?  What was this sin in which we all sinned?  I know that many of you already know these things, but we need to be reminded.  Everything Paul says in Romans 5 is based on Genesis 2-3.  Look back with me at Genesis 2 and look at verses 16-17:

“The LORD God took the man and put him in the garden of Eden to work it and keep it.  And the LORD God  commanded the man, saying, “You may surely eat of every tree of the garden, but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it you shall surely die.”

The word “covenant” is not found here.  Yet this is still a covenant.  This is God revealing Himself to man and making a promise about how He is going to relate to man.  If Adam obeys, God will relate to him with the blessing of life.  If Adam disobeys, God will relate to him with the judgment of death.  Hosea 6:7 and Isaiah 24:4-5 both look back on Genesis 2-3 and describe the Fall of man as the breaking of a covenant.  What covenant?  This one here, the covenant of works.

What was this covenant?  What does the Bible teach about this covenant?  First we need to see that this covenant, like the others I’ve mentioned, was divinely imposed.  It is not as if God sits down with Adam at a bargaining table, and they begin to haggle and over the terms of their relationship.  Nor does Adam come to God and say, “God, let me tell you how I want our relationship to be.”  No!  God chooses to reveal Himself to Adam, and He declares to Adam what their relationship shall be.  And Adam is immediately bound by what God declares.  If he obeys, God will forever bless Him beyond his wildest imagination.  If he chooses not to obey, He will lose those blessings and receive judgment instead. 

God does not ask Adam if this is okay with him.  Today there are many who think that they can stipulate the terms of their relationship to God.  Perhaps some in here have done that.  You’ve been telling God, look, here is what I’ve done, therefore You must accept me.  Or you’ve been telling God that He’s unfair or unjust because He hasn’t worked things out as you’ve wanted.  Yet the pot does not have the right to tell the Potter what to do.  If you think you can tell God how He ought to relate to you, you are not dealing with reality. 

I’ve used this illustration before, but I think it makes the point.  Imagine Jonathan, my eight year old son, coming to me, and saying, “Dad, here is what our relationship is going to be like.  I’m going to do this, and you are going to do that.”  Does he have the right to do that?  No!  I am the father in our relationship, he is the son.  He is five years old, which means that he does not have the knowledge that his father has, nor the wisdom that his father has, nor the understanding, nor the authority.  So it is with you and God.  He made you, He put you in this world, and now He has the right to say to you, “Here are the rules.”

When we look at the terms of the covenant that God imposed on Adam, we can only marvel at how absolutely magnificent they were!  The terms were wonderful!  God loved man and blessed him with a covenant that was for his good and would have secured him in eternal life forever!

As I have already mentioned, there were two parts to the covenant:  If Adam would obey God, he would have the blessing of life.  If he would not, then he would lose that blessing and have death instead.  But let’s look more closely at exactly how Adam was supposed to obey God.

Look at verse 16.  “And the LORD God commanded the man, saying, ‘You may surely eat of every tree in the garden.”  Don’t jump immediately to verse 17, - we’re always tempted to do that.  Rather, first note what God says in verse 16!  “Adam, enjoy My gifts to you!”  There is a force to this verse.  The ESV uses the word “surely” to try and get the idea across.  The point is that God wants Adam to enjoy Paradise.  He wants him to eat the fruit of the trees, to drink from the river, to play with the animals and to fellowship with his wife. 

All the earth was glorious at this time, but the Garden was particularly beautiful, pleasing to the eyes, filled with good things.  God does not want to keep Adam from pleasure; He calls Adam to go and enjoy! 

But then comes verse 17:  “But of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day you eat of it you shall surely die.”  This tree of the knowledge of good and evil was placed in the Garden to remind Adam that he was not God.  For God alone has full knowledge of good and evil.  God alone is infinitely wise.

It is good to have wisdom.  It is good to desire wisdom.  Yet the Bible tells us that we are to gain our knowledge of good from evil by fearing God.  We are to trust Him, learn from Him, let Him teach us true wisdom.  Yet this tree was placed in the Garden as a test.  Would Adam trust God to guide him and teach him?  Would Adam be satisfied with all the blessings God had given Him, including the blessing of fellowshipping with God Himself, or would Adam try and make himself autonomous?  Would Adam try and make himself like God, apart from God? 

Friends, we who are Christians are being taught by the Spirit to learn good from evil.  In heaven, we will bear God’s image in many ways, and one way is that we will share His heavenly wisdom.  I do not know that we will have infinite wisdom as He does, but we will certainly be marked by wisdom and knowledge.  My guess is that if Adam had passed this test, he too would have received those blessings.  But the issue was whether or not he would trust God for wisdom, or whether he would seek it apart from God – indeed, in opposition to God.

Every blessing of the Garden was there for Adam to enjoy, but there was one for which he was not to take for himself.  As you know, the Adam failed the test.  He did not continue to trust the God who had blessed him so greatly, but rather tried to grasp for the one thing God had kept from him.  According to the terms of the covenant, Adam chose death.  Physical death would come.  But spiritual death was immediate.  He lost the Paradise.  He lost the special presence of God.  He lost the promise of God’s blessings.  And his own soul became wicked and opposed to God.  And it didn’t just happen to him.  The curse fell on humanity.  Mankind broke the covenant of works, and mankind died. 

Paul’s Evidence: Verses 13-14

Now, having reminded ourselves of those things, let’s return quickly to Romans 5 and look at Paul prove his point.  Paul brings to us a piece of evidence that we might not have considered.  In fact, he predicts that some people are going to have trouble with what he has just said, and so he breaks off his sentence in verse 12 and interrupts himself.  Verses 13-14 are Paul bringing before us evidence that what he has just said is true so that we can track with him for the rest of his argument.  Look at verses 13-14 with me:

“For sin indeed was in the world before the law was given, but sin is not counted where there is no law.  Yet death reigned from Adam to Moses, even over those whose sinning was not like the transgression of Adam, who was a type of the one who was to come.”

“Wait a minute, Paul!  You want us to believe that this death that has afflicted the human race is the result of Adam’s sin.  But could not others be right?  Could it not be that every human being enters this world inherently good?  Maybe it is when we sin, each of us in our own lives, that we die spiritually, and therefore die physically?  Couldn’t it be that we all die for our own sins, not Adam’s sin?  After all, Paul, you do admit that after Adam people continued to sin.  Maybe they all died for their own sins.”

Paul answers that objection in 4 propositions:

1. Sin indeed was in the world before the law was given.  Before Moses and the giving of the Ten Commandments, sin was in the world.  In fact, if you’ve been with us in our study of Genesis, you’ve seen something of the depths of human depravity already on display there at the beginning of human history.  So Paul is very willing to concede that people since Adam have already been sinners.  But, that does not mean that they brought death on themselves by their own sins.  Death was already upon them from birth.  Why?

2.  Sin is not counted where there is no law.  We all know this to be true.  Can Seth McFarland pull me over for going 10 miles over the speed limit if there is no law against speeding?  Can I be held responsible and given a penalty for a crime if there is no law against what I did?  So, how is it that God could judge all of these people who lived before Moses and the revelation of the law?  The greatest outpouring of God’s judgment this world ever knew before the cross of Jesus Christ was the flood in the days of Noah.  Humanity itself was wiped out.  How in the world could God judge all of these people for sins if they had no law?

The inference Paul wants us to draw is obvious: there was a law.  The law was the law given to all humanity through Adam.  The covenant of works simply stated is this: obey God and live; disobey God and die.  All people are under that law and have been from Creation.  This is the fundamental principle that is written into the hearts of every human being.  Attached to this fundamental principle are moral absolutes that all people understand – principles laid out on stone in the Ten Commandments, but known by humanity since Genesis 1.  So Paul’s point in verse 13 is to say that sin did exist before Moses, but that this sin was connected to Adam.  The Mosaic Law had not been given, but the covenant made with Adam in the beginning was still at play, and thus sins were counted.

“But wait a minute, Paul.  If that’s true, then you haven’t made your point.  For could it not be that each individual person that lived after Adam and before Moses sinned on their own, and therefore they died because of their own sins?”

Paul still has two more propositions:

3.  Death reigned from Adam to Moses even over those whose sinning was not like the transgression of Adam.  Here is the central argument.  If you look at the people who lived between Adam and Moses, there were some who never sinned the way Adam did.  They never consciously, willingly violated God’s covenant of works.  They never chose to break God’s commands and bring death on themselves.  Nevertheless, they all died. 

Who are these people?  They are infants.  They are those children who died before ever developing enough to even know their inherent selfishness was a sin.  Children who died in their mother’s wombs.  Children who died in infancy.  Perhaps even some who were severely mentally handicapped and never had the capacity to grasp the concept of selfishness, or pride, etc.  People who were born in a vegetable-like state still died, though they never sinned like Adam did.  Why?  Why did death reign over everyone, even those people?  The only logical conclusion is that the death that was upon them was a death brought upon them by someone else, namely, Adam.

Matthew Henry says this: [This] is to be understood of infants, that were never guilty of actual sin, and yet died, because Adam's sin was imputed to them. This reign of death seems especially to refer to those violent and extraordinary judgments which were long before Moses, as the [Flood] and the destruction of Sodom, which involved infants. It is a great proof of original sin that little children, who were never guilty of any actual transgression, are yet liable to very terrible diseases, casualties, and deaths, which could by no means be reconciled with the justice and righteousness of God if they were not chargeable with guilt. 

Now I know this raises questions.  If these babies were born dead in sin, guilty before God, under the wrath brought upon them by our federal head Adam, then what did God do with them when they died?  Do infants go to heaven?  Or do they go to hell?  Two weeks from today will mark 5 years since Crystal and I lost our own baby boy.  I hope to take some time on that Sunday night to address that very question.

For now, though, see the logical point Paul is making.  Sin was in the world before Moses.  But how can God call something sin and punish it where there is no law?  There must have been a law, namely, the law of the covenant of works – the law given to us through Adam.  Yet death reigned over everyone, not just voluntary sinners.  Here is evidence that in Adam’s fall, we sinned all.  His death was our death.

Close: One More Proposition

As we close, however, we can’t miss the last proposition Paul makes: Adam was a type of the one  to come.  In other words, there is a way in which Adam bringing death to the humanity he represented points to Jesus.  How?  Because Jesus was the firstborn of the New Creation.  Unlike the rest of all humanity, Jesus was not born dead in sin, guilty before God.  God placed on Jesus a covenant of works – a command to obey Him faithfully, even to the point of death.  Jesus succeeded where Adam failed.  Jesus obeyed God perfectly, even at great cost.  And just as Adam represented humanity in his failure, Jesus was representing all who would trust in Him in His success.  Jesus is the Second Adam.  He accomplished perfect righteousness, perfect obedience, and He did so for His people.  Yes, Adam’s F’s were placed on our report card from birth.  We added lots of our own F’s on top of his.  But now, because of the cross, all those F’s can be taken off.  Jesus bore the punishment and paid the penalty.  And because of His perfect life and obedience accomplished for us, His A’s can be placed on our report cards instead.  His victory was our victory.  His righteousness is now our righteousness – it has been credited to our account, if we are Christians.  Here is the heart of the gospel.  Jesus is the Federal Head of His people, and through faith, His righteousness is given to us.  Thus, when God the Father looks at us, He sees the righteousness of His Son, and He rejoices, and He loves us, and He blesses us, and He will allow no weapon formed against us to prosper.  He will bring us safely to Himself. 

Dear friends, are you resting in Christ?  Are you thankful for what He has done on your behalf?  Do you understand how helpless you were, and how Jesus did everything necessary for you to be right with God?  Run to Him.  Bow to Him.  Humble your heart and cling to Him.  Look to His Word.  Speak to Him in prayer.  Be baptized in His name and be counted among His people.  Christ is the second Adam, and He is leading us into a second paradise.  Will you believe it?  Will you trust Him?  I pray you will.  Let’s pray.