Romans 5:12-14

Coram Deo Reformed Baptist Church iconCoram Deo Reformed Baptist Church

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So, I'm gonna take my time with this. We're in verses,
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Romans chapter 5, verses 12 through 14, not a lot, it's three verses, but they're super important, very, very important.
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So today, we're gonna spend a little extra time on them. I think it's necessary for two reasons.
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One, I don't think that this text is covered enough, certainly in Reformed churches, but in most churches, it's hard, it's a difficult text, and I don't think it's covered enough.
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Number two, the text also deals with several things that most people find unpleasant to the ear, something that they don't want to hear.
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We're gonna spend a bit more time on it, and I'm gonna use certain terms, and I'll do my best to define those terms, but if you have a question, write it down,
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I'm more than happy to answer it once we finish with service.
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So, starting in verse 12, Therefore, just as sin came into the world through one man, and death through sin, and so death spread to all men because all sinned, for sin indeed was in the world before the law was given, but sin is not counted where there is no law.
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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.
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One common question that is often asked when evangelizing is, how can
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I be guilty of something that was done before I was born? When learning, people often ask, what is the sin nature?
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Why is there a sin nature? The answer isn't a short one, and it's not necessarily overly complicated either.
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In Genesis, to review, God tells us about the creation of mankind on day six.
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Genesis chapter one, verses 26 through 27, it says,
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Then God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness, and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the birds of the heavens, and over the livestock, and over the earth, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth.
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So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him, male and female he created them.
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And then in chapter two, which Reid read earlier, it goes into more detail of the creation of man,
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Adam having been given dominion and responsibility over creation.
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In Genesis 2, 15 through 22, again it says,
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The Lord God took the man and put him in the garden, to work it and keep it, and the
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Lord God commanded the man, saying, You may surely eat of every tree in the garden, but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for the day that you eat of it you shall surely die.
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Then the Lord God said, It is not good for the man, it is not good that man should be alone,
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I will make him a helper fit for him. Out of the ground the Lord God had formed every beast of the field and every bird of the heavens and brought them to the man to see what he would call them.
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And whatever the man called every living creature, that was its name. To pause for a second, this is an expression of Adam's dominion, his responsibility that he's been given over creation, and God honors that.
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It says that whatever Adam called the creature, that's what God called it.
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That was its name. Back in verse 20,
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The man gave names to all the livestock and to the birds of the heavens and to every beast of the field, but for Adam there was not found a helper fit for him.
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So the Lord God caused a deep sleep to fall upon the man, and while he slept, took one of his ribs and closed up the place with flesh.
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And the rib that the Lord God had taken from the man he made into a woman and brought her to the man.
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Then we move to chapter 3. In chapter 3 we have the fall.
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This is chapter 3, verses 6 through 13. So when the woman saw that the tree was good for food and that it was a delight to the eyes and that the tree was to be desired to make one wise, she took of its fruit and ate, speaking of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.
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And she also gave some to her husband, who was with her, and he ate.
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Then the eyes of both were opened, and they knew that they were naked, and they sewed fig leaves together and made themselves lowing cloths.
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And they heard the sound of the Lord God walking in the garden in the cool of the day, and the man and his wife hid themselves from the presence of the
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Lord God among the trees of the garden. The Lord God called to the man and said to him,
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Where are you? And he said, I heard the sound of you in the garden, and I was afraid, and I hid myself.
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And he said, Who told you that you were naked? Have you eaten of the tree of which
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I commanded you not to eat? And the man said, The woman whom you gave me, she gave me fruit of the tree, and I ate.
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Then the Lord God said to the woman, What is this that you have done? And the woman said,
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The serpent deceived me, and I ate. So how does one man's sin affect everyone and everything?
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There is a doctrine in the Reformed tradition. The name of that doctrine is federalism.
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Adam, being the first man created, was our representative.
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He represented not only himself before God, but all of mankind. And as our federal head, he had dominion over all of the earth, as expressed in chapter 2 and chapter 3.
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So when he sinned, everything was affected, everything that he had dominion over, everything that he was responsible for.
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In the garden, before they sinned, Adam had a complete nature.
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He had the ability to be obedient, and he had the ability to not die.
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He also had the ability to sin and the ability to die. But when
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Adam sinned, because he was our federal head, he sinned not only for himself, but for us as well, as our representative.
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Humanity lost the ability to not sin. And we lost the ability to not die.
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Our nature, therefore, became one of a state of sin and corruption.
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The nature of man is now one of inability. The guilt of Adam's sin is spread through all of mankind, and death with it.
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For the wages of sin is death. And before anyone, at any point, to paraphrase a very good teacher named
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Sproul, before anyone claims that it's not fair that they were represented by someone that they did not choose, realize also that you are represented by the second
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Adam, Christ, whom you did not choose. This is a very bad logic to follow.
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In his articulation of the exegesis of Romans, R .C.
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Sproul says, In Augustine's debate with Pelagius, he argued that at creation, before the fall,
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Adam had two abilities, like we spoke about earlier. He had what
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Augustine called the posse peccare, the ability of sinning, or,
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I'm sorry, the possibility of sinning, and the ability to sin. The word peccare means to sin.
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We use the word impeccable for someone who is without stain or blemish.
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We talk about little sins, or peccadillos, a word that comes from the
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Latin root peccare. Augustine said that in creation, Adam and Eve were made with the ability to sin, the posse peccare, but they also had the ability not to sin.
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They were not fallen or corrupt. Adam and Eve had the power to resist temptation and not fall into sin.
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They had the posse non peccare, the power or ability not to sin.
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Looking at it from the perspective of morality and death, Augustine argued that just as Adam and Eve in creation had the posse peccare and the posse non peccare, they also had the posse mori and the posse non mori.
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That is, they had the ability to die and the ability not to die.
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They were not created immortal. They could die under certain circumstances.
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Death was not necessary for our original parents.
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Had they obeyed the command of God, they would not have died.
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They had the ability to live forever, the posse non mori. We see that they had twin abilities, the ability to sin, the ability not to sin, the ability to die, and the ability not to die.
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After the fall, Adam's progeny lost the posse non peccare, the ability to die and not to die.
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Since the fall, no human being has the inherent power to live a perfect life.
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Nobody can live without sinning, just as nobody can live without dying. Augustine said the cause of the fall is this.
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The curse of the fall is now this. We are now in a state of non posse non peccare.
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This is double negative, so bear with me. It is not possible not to sin.
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Likewise, we have the non posse non mori, which is the inability not to die.
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What Augustine is explaining here is our basic humanity.
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In heaven, after we are fully glorified, however, we will have the non posse non peccare and the non posse mori.
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We will not be able to sin, and we will not be able to die, which is what we look forward to.
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Let me use an illustration just for a moment that maybe will help clarify federalism a little bit more.
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Say that the King of England declares war against France. This has happened multiple times.
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France would then be at war with all of the English, and all of the
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English with France, not just the King, because he represents the entire country.
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Thus, his decisions about war and laws directly affect the people and their posterity.
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You have things like the Hundred Years' War and things like that, where they were literally at war for a hundred years.
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There have been many a war fought where the person who initiated the war, the king or the regent, died and the war continued.
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He wasn't even fighting it anymore, but yet the consequences of his decision still affected his people.
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The analogy does break down at a certain point, granted, but it is similar enough to a second doctrine, that is also very important, the doctrine of imputation.
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As stated in the Baptist Catechism, I think it's question 34,
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I believe. What is justification? Justification is an act of God's free grace, wherein he pardoneth all our sins and accepteth us as righteous in his sight, only for the righteousness of Christ, imputed to us and received by faith.
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In our natural state, as the progeny, or us being in Adam, him being the federal head of mankind, his sin is imputed to us, and therefore we bear the consequences of it.
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Similarly, but not the same, Christ being the new federal head, when we are born again, we are now in Christ and our sin is imputed to him and his righteousness to us.
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1 Corinthians 15 verses 21 -22 says,
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For as by a man came death, by a man has come also the resurrection of the dead.
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For as in Adam all die, so also in Christ shall all be made alive.
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Regarding verse 13, and I've hit the button.
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For sin indeed was in the world before the law was given. It is very obvious that sin was in the world before the law was given, if you read scripture.
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We have examples of Cain, Lamech, and many other examples of mankind doing things that they ought not.
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However, let's make the distinction between what we talked about before as imputed sin and personal sin.
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Imputed is also a word that is translated as accounted or counted to.
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Personal sin is that which you personally commit. The most common analogy that is used to explain how
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Adam's sin is imputed to us is that of an infant. While the infant is not yet committed personal sin, not having a knowledge or understanding of the law, and therefore not being able to distinguish right from wrong, sadly, many infants still suffer the consequence of death.
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We know this. We have a problem with it in the United States. There's a problem with it all over the world.
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But how can an infant suffer the consequence for something that they haven't done? Because of having had
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Adam's imputed guilt given to them by him being their federal head.
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We're also going to tackle verse 13b, which is a specifically tricky passage to articulate.
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I found very few notes and commentaries, but we'll go over it regardless.
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But sin is not counted where there is no law. Some versions, some translations say imputed.
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But sin is not imputed where there is no law. The word in Greek here only appears one other place in Scripture, and that's in Philemon, making it a bit more difficult to understand the point that Paul is making here.
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But it is also translated as accounted or counted, as in counting.
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But let's say, again, to use the analogy of a king. You have a king with a moral standard by which he governs his people.
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But he has yet to publish this moral standard. So when the people offend that moral standard, they are offenders, but they cannot be given a specific list of charges that have been published.
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They do not have a standard by which to judge the crimes, only that they have committed a crime.
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They would be, in general, offenders, just as a man has a sin nature and is thus sinful.
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So men before the law were sinners and offenders, but there was no written standard by which they could be charged line by line.
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There was no standard for each and every sin committed. While there was not a way to account individual sins, they were still committed.
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There was a general transgression of the law of nature, and therefore, condemnation.
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John Gill says this, But sin is not imputed where there is no law.
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This looks like an objection, that if there was no law before Moses' time, then there was no sin, nor could any action of man be known or accounted by them as sinful, or be imputed to them to condemnation.
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Or rather, it is a concession, allowing that where there is no law, sin is not imputed.
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But there was a law before Moses, which was transgressed, and the sin or transgression of it was imputed to men to condemnation and death, as appears in the verse that follows.
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This is also something that we have already covered in Romans chapter 1.
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Verse 19 and 20 says, For what can be known about God is plain to them.
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God has shown it to them. For His invisible attributes, namely
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His eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly perceived ever since the creation of the world.
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In the things that have been made, so they are without excuse.
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The death reigned over them, like Paul says, even when the transgression was not like that of Adam, who was a type of the one to come.
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Now, what is a type? What does Paul mean by type? In short, a type is a physical foreshadowing or a fuzzy image of something greater.
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The first Adam was an image of the second Adam, Christ, who is greater than the first.
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Christ is the one who could complete the work given to Adam, that he could not complete, that work being obedience.
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And because of the completed obedience,
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Christ, our new federal head, and His imputed righteousness to us, we now have, we now having been born again in the
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Spirit, we are covered with His righteousness and kept as His people.
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Everything that we just went over albeit not the best articulation granted, is so very important.
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It is so very important that you believe every single word of Scripture, not just the parts that we like, not just the parts that we agree with, but every word.
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Pause for a moment on this thought. The first thing in a child's life, especially in the
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West and in our country, the first part of Scripture to be attacked is
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Genesis. The very first thing. And I know
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I've spoken about this before, but what child have you ever known in your life, preschool or before preschool age, that was not introduced to dinosaurs?
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What is culture's common belief about dinosaurs? That they're much, much older than the
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Bible says the world is. The indoctrination starts early.
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And when the church makes the stories in Genesis cartoons and childish, it doesn't help.
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The reason that it is important because we also have very popular speakers that do not believe
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Genesis is true, which is a problem. A very serious problem.
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The reason that we also have to agree with the parts that we don't understand or may not have a good grasp of, specifically speaking of Genesis, is that if a single passage of Scripture isn't true, throw out the entire book because it's not inerrant, it's flawed, and it is not
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God -breathed. The whole thing has to unravel.
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If you do not have a historic Adam, as we are told about in the first three chapters, if you do not have his fall from grace, then there is no need for a
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Christ. If Genesis isn't real, historically, if we do not believe it, then neither is the rest of the entire book.
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Because the whole rest of the book is God's fulfillment of the promise to redeem mankind that he makes in chapter three.
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However, since we know these things to be true, we can rejoice in our very real
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Savior, our very real Head, in the gifts that are freely given, in justification, in righteousness, and in the life everlasting.