Sunday Sermon: Dead in Adam (Romans 5:12-14)

You're listening to the preaching ministry of Gabriel Hughes, pastor of Providence Reformed Baptist Church in Casa Grande, Arizona. Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday on this podcast we feature teaching through a New Testament book, an Old Testament book on Thursday, and our Q &A on Friday.

Each Sunday we are pleased to present our sermon series. Here is Pastor Gabe.

Romans 5:12-14 and the Spread of Sin in Adam

Let us stand together as we read Romans chapter 5 looking just today at verses 12 to 14. This is Romans chapter 5 beginning in verse 12. Hear the word of the Lord. 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. Yet death reigned from Adam to Moses, even over those whose sinning was not like the transgressions of Adam, who was a type of the one who was to come.

You may be seated as we pray. Heavenly Father, as we come into this passage today, I pray that we do come to an awareness of who we are as sinners, but even in that awareness seeing you as holy and the demands that you have required, perfection and holiness, in order to be in fellowship with you and dwell with you where you are.

Those are demands that we could not meet if left to ourselves, if left to our own devices. And so you have graciously given your Son to die for our sins, and more than just being forgiven our sins, that we would be made righteous and be able to have fellowship once again with the Most High, and more than this, but even dwell with you in your glorious heaven.

Lord, may we be convicted over our sin. We don't see the things that we're going to be considering today in light of what's said in these three verses as something abstract. It is a reality that all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God.

But so that we may see the glorious truth that we are justified by His grace through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus, whom you put forward as a propitiation by His blood to be received by faith.

Strengthen our faith this morning and the conviction in our hearts to live lives of godliness in the present day. It's in Jesus' name that we pray, Amen.

Amen.

In Genesis 1 -3, this is of course where we read of the creation of the entire universe, of the first man and woman, and they being placed in the garden of Eden, God told them, From any tree of the garden you may surely eat, but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat from it.

For in the day that you eat from it, you will surely die. When the serpent tempted the woman to eat the fruit, he countered God's word. You will not surely die. For God knows that in the day that you eat from it, your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.

And Eve found this argument persuasive. In Genesis 3, 6 -7 says, The woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was a delight to the eyes, and that the tree was desirable to make one wise.

So she took from its fruit and ate, and she gave also to her husband who was with her, and he ate. And the eyes of both of them were opened, and they knew that they were naked. And they sewed fig leaves together and made themselves loin coverings.

Then from that point on, when God encounters the man and woman in the garden, and each one kind of deflects their responsibility to the other, the man says, Oh, the woman that you gave to me, she gave me the fruit and I ate it.

And the woman said, Oh, the serpent deceived me and I ate. And so then you see the giving of the curse then in that order, God to the serpent, and then a curse to the woman, and then a curse to the man.

And though God issued a curse to the serpent, and to the woman, and then to the man, we don't really come to understand the theological implications of what Adam did until later chapters. As many who have scrutinized this narrative have pointed out, well, Adam and Eve didn't surely die.

They ate the fruit and they were still standing there. They didn't immediately die. But death surely came upon them in that moment. And as you go on to read Genesis, of course we read of the first murder in chapter 4 when Cain killed his brother Abel, but it's really in chapter 5 when the weight of the understanding of death enters the narrative.

Not death at the hand of another as what happened to Abel, but death as a result of the curse. Chapter 5 is where we have the first genealogy and you're surely familiar with this over and over throughout the chapter.

We have various generations mentioning the descendants of Adam and his son Seth by name and how long each of them lived. Usually the takeaway from chapter 5 is how long everyone lived. Wow, Seth lived 912 years.

Enosh lived 905. Kenan lived 910 years. But what all the men of Genesis 5 have in common, except for Enoch, he would be the one exception, but what they all have in common is what's said of them after their ages are.

Mentioned.

Every man's life ends with these three words, and he died. So and so lived this number of many years and he became the father of this guy and he had other sons and daughters, so all the days of so and so were this many number of years and he died.

No matter how many years he lived, everyone, again except for Enoch, died because they were all sons of Adam. And as Adam had eaten the fruit and so he fell and all of creation was put under a curse as we will read later in Romans chapter 8, all of creation was subject to futility because of Adam's sin.

So all died. And as we arrive at this middle portion of Romans 5, this is another chapter of the Bible that we are given to explore a deeper understanding of Adam's sin and its effects. Between Romans 5 and 1 Corinthians 15, which our brother Alan read for us this morning, there are not many words between the two sections in these two chapters, but what is said is deeply profound and affecting the way we understand our anthropology, which is the study of man, our harmardiology, which is the study of sin, and of course even our theology, which is the study of God Himself.

And we will consider those things as we go. We have three verses that we're looking at this week, so that should make things easy for us to break this into three main points. I'm going to spend the most time on the first point, which is out of verse 12, and that is understanding sin's spread.

Through Adam's disobedience, sin entered the world and spread to all humanity, resulting in death for all humanity. Number two, we will consider sin's supremacy. Verse 13, even before the law was given, sin reigned over all humanity, though no explicit commands had been given.

And then third, sin's side effect, which is in verse 14. Death is the result of sin, even over those who did not sin like Adam sinned. So again, we have sin's spread, verse 12, sin's supremacy in verse 13, and sin's side effect in verse 14.

And we consider these things this morning, that we may understand what Paul hints at, he kind of foreshadows in the last part of verse 14 that Adam was a type of one who is to come. Who is that about?

That is, of course, about Christ, who frees us from sin and undoes the curse. And so, let's look again at verse 12 as we come to understand sin's spread. Verse 12 again, 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, emdash.

Kind of sounds like an incomplete thought, doesn't it? I'll explain why that emdash is there here in just a moment. But first of all, the one man we're talking about here is again, Adam. Now Adam was created sinless.

God does not create sin in the Garden of Eden. He makes Adam and Eve without sin. Genesis 131 says, God looked at his creation and behold, it was very what?

Good.

And that included Adam and Eve. Adam was not only the first man, he was a good man. Adam was created with the moral capacity to choose right or wrong. And though he was created without sin, he chose to do wrong.

Now, as many of us want to blame Adam for the fall of creation, any one of us, when put in the same position, would have done the same thing. Essentially, it was inevitable that this was going to happen, because Adam was not God.

If you had been created instead of Adam and put in that spot, you would have done the same thing. Chosen your own way over God's way. I was in my backyard over the weekend pulling weeds, and I was complaining about the curse.

Literally, that's how my complaints come out. They're very theological. So I'm yanking weeds out of the ground, which incidentally, my three-year-old son loves. Like it was his idea, Daddy, let's go out to the backyard and pull weeds.

He just wants the time with Daddy. That's what he wants. And he doesn't quite understand yet how hard and difficult and annoying this is to pull these weeds out of the ground. But as I'm pulling a weed out of the ground, I'm, oh Adam, that came into my, I'm serious, that came into my head.

Because of the curse, and God's curse is given there in Genesis 3, the ground will not yield for you what you want it to yield. Instead it will be weeds. So that's what I'm pulling out of the ground. But I can no longer, I can no more curse Adam than I can curse myself.

For I in the same position would have done the same thing. And Adam having transgressed the commandment of God, Hosea 6, 7 says that Adam transgressed.

The Covenant of Works and Original Sin

The covenant.

Now what covenant? I don't remember God ever making a covenant with Adam. He told him not to eat from a certain tree, that's right. But the commandment was a conditional agreement with consequences. And this really makes up the nuts and bolts of a covenant.

In the Bible, a covenant is a solemn agreement, a binding promise, a formal contract between God and humanity, or a group of people, or an individual that establishes a relationship with specific obligations and expectations for everyone involved.

It is a serious commitment that defines the relationship between the two parties, often with implications for future generations. And it specifies what each party is to do or not to do. Many of you probably watched a wedding yesterday online as we celebrated Blake and Genesis getting married.

Didn't happen here in Arizona, but thanks to the wonders of technology, we could watch the wedding via live streaming. And you heard the pastor say that they were entering into a covenant with one another.

And not just a covenant of man, though the laws of man may recognize such an arrangement, but this is a covenant that has been established by God. And so the marriage must be entered into based on the rules that God has set for marriage.

And that makes marriage a covenant arrangement. Here are the stipulations, here are the parties involved. You must do this, you must not do this. And you heard that in the vows that they exchanged with one another.

I pledge to do this, I will not do this. Even in the reciting of this covenant to each other. The covenant that God made with Adam was contingent upon Adam's obedience. God promised life for obedience and death for disobedience.

This was a very serious command. God did not have a do what you want attitude about Adam's role in the garden. Okay, I've made you, I've made this garden, go off and play. These were very specific instructions and his covenant gave clear terms.

Adam could eat from any tree except the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. The consequences for breaking this covenant are explicitly defined. Quote, for in the day that you eat of it, you will surely die.

Eating in the tree would result in death. In theological terms, we refer to this doctrine or this particular covenant as the covenant of works. That term exactly doesn't appear in scripture, nor does it appear in our confession of faith.

But in our own confession, it is defined in chapter six. As said in paragraph one, quote, although God created man upright and perfect and gave him a righteous law, which had been unto life, had he kept it and threatened death upon the breach thereof, yet he did not long abide in this honor.

Satan using the subtlety of the serpent to subdue Eve, then by her seducing Adam, who without any compulsion did willfully transgress the law of their creation and the command given to them in eating the forbidden fruit, which God was pleased according to his wise and holy counsel to permit, having purposed to order it to his own glory.

There's a lot said there in that one paragraph, which we won't unpack. But nonetheless, to express that the description of this covenant of works is given even in our statement of faith. This sin and its consequences and the implication it has had on the rest of creation and mankind also has another theological name attached to this particular doctrine.

There are various theologies that you can say come out of an exposition of Romans 5, verse 12. And another one that you're probably more familiar with is the doctrine of original sin. That again is not a term used in the Bible, but it is the label that we give to that doctrine, which is clearly taught in the Bible, especially here in Romans 5, verse 12.

The doctrine of original sin does not simply refer to that first sin, although that's what we might think of. It's original sin, so it's the first sin. It's the eating of the tree in the garden. There are others who might think original sin is lust.

This is actually a cultural perspective of the doctrine of original sin. In pop culture, you might often hear that term original sin applied to sexual sin. It's sung about in songs. It's referenced in TV shows and movies.

But the doctrine specifically refers to not only that first sin that Adam committed, but the implications or the effects of that first sin that Adam committed. So it's not just the sin, but what sort of effect did that sin have?

And the study of that, or the doctrine of that, is what we call original sin. And here in Romans 5, verse 12, even in this one verse, we have a clear statement of how the sin of Adam has affected all of humanity.

This is not the first place where Paul has talked about the universality of sin. If you've been in this series with us from the beginning, we considered this previously in chapter 3, where Paul said, all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.

He argued from the Scriptures, none is righteous. No, not one. No one understands. No one seeks for God. All have turned aside. Together they have become worthless. No one does good. Not even one. And here in Romans 5, verse 12, Paul returns to the subject to show that this all started with Adam.

Now, there are other doctrines that I could say come out of this. We could also talk about a doctrine of federal headship. That's something we will get to later. In fact, Brother Chris may expound on that next week when we talk about being alive in Christ.

Under Adam, all have sinned and all die as a result of that sin because Adam was the federal representative of all of mankind. So as in Adam, all die, as said in 1 Corinthians 15, so also in Christ, who becomes our federal head when we put our faith and trust in Him.

In Christ, all will be made alive. So again, we have another doctrine that even comes out of our study of this passage. Now, though this verse says that sin and death have spread to all men through Adam, the debate has continued in pretty much all of church history as to how deep this corruption goes.

So many may agree, yeah, sure, all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God. That's what the Bible says. But how deep is man therefore corrupted by having sinned? Over the summer, I started a discipline of reading a bit of church history every day, what happened today in church history.

And I'll find one event, one little tidbit, like a fact of the day website or something like that. Today in church history, da-da-da-da, and it'll just give you a sentence or two. But then I'll do a deeper dive to read about that event as it happened in the history of the church.

And it just so happened, by God's providence, that while I'm preparing for this sermon in Romans 5 .12, I came upon this bit of trivia for just this past week. On July 3rd, in the year 529, the Second Council of Orange was held in France.

Now, what does a synod named after a fruit have to do with what we're reading today? Well, it was called the Synod of Orange because it was held in Orange, France. It's because of the city that it was in.

This was the synod that condemned a false teaching called semi-Pelagianism. The teaching of Cassian of Gaul, that a sinful person still has enough moral capability to accept God's grace or reject it.

Now, this has roots in the 5th century debate between Augustine and Pelagius over human free will in salvation and the doctrine of original sin. Pelagius argued for the freedom of the human will and that a person can be morally good without God.

But what did we just read from Romans 3? There is no one who does good, not even one. And we'll see that come up again even in Romans 8, where it says that the person who does not have Christ cannot keep God's law.

It is not possible for the person to do good who does not have the Spirit of God dwelling within them. But Pelagius wanted to argue that a person can be morally good even if they are not followers of God.

A person can will themselves to do the right thing, or that a person is born naturally good and it's sin that somehow corrupts him. Augustine argued from the Scripture that all have sinned and cannot do good without the grace of God.

He further argued that Scripture teaches we are so fallen that we are unable to incline ourselves to God unless God draws us to himself. As Jesus said in John 6, 44, no one can come to me unless the Father who sent me draws him.

Those whom God is predestined for salvation, Augustine said, he shows his grace to and regenerates their hearts by the Holy Spirit, bringing them to saving faith through the hearing of the gospel. The Council of Ephesus that was held in 431 sided with Augustine and declared Pelagius a heretic.

That's how seriously wrong this teaching was, to say that we can be good without God. That is exactly contrary to what the Bible says. Now Cassian, fast forward 100 years later, Cassian and his fellow monks agreed that Pelagius' teachings were justifiably condemned.

But Cassian also believed that Augustine's teaching on predestination went too far. He argued for a middle way between Augustine and Pelagius. Though the fall of man is serious, it's not as serious as Augustine taught because there remains in a person an ability, a person has an ability to either accept the grace that God is offering or to reject it.

Now essentially, Cassian was arguing against the doctrine that would eventually be called irresistible grace. And we also see in here hints of total depravity. These are doctrines that would later be defined in other councils.

But further Cassian argued, God desires to save all people and he made atonement of Christ's sacrifice available to everyone. And it was this teaching that became known as semi-Pelagianism. So whether a person today might call themselves Arminian, or might call themselves a freewheeler, or might call themselves a provisionist, whatever other terms might be made up for this, it's really semi-Pelagianism.

There's nothing new under the sun. And it comes back to the same false teaching that was condemned at the second council of Orange. They affirm the teachings of Augustine as biblically orthodox. Human beings are born with original sin and do not have the ability to choose God or do any good without an act of God's sovereign grace.

And they ruled Cassian's teachings as unbiblical. As elevating man and reducing God. And though this was the determination of the synod, that did not bring semi-Pelagianism to an end, as you probably know.

It actually became the majority view in the Roman Catholic Church, eventually set in stone at the Council of Trent in the 16th century, and remains the Roman Catholic position to this day. The Reformers would go on to affirm what the Bible teaches about original sin, man's total depravity, and God's irresistible grace in synods such as the Council of Dort in 1611, which was linked to the tradition of the second council of Orange through a commitment of what Scripture says.

Now, as much as Roman Catholicism wants to claim that they're the ones who are committed to church tradition, they have actually broken away from their own tradition. The true church that is committed to what Scripture says has been consistent on this subject through these generations that God has been working out through His Word to His saints, which we have in the Bible.

Though even among Protestants, however, I must say, semi-Pelagianism has been the majority view. But really, when it comes down to it, if I may interject my own opinion here, there is not much difference between Pelagianism and semi-Pelagianism.

Either a person can be good without God, or he cannot be. There is not a middle way between the two. But semi-Pelagians want to argue, okay, we admit we're bad. We're just not that bad. You're probably aware that this past week, Jimmy Swaggart died.

The televangelist who was most famous for committing adultery with prostitutes. That's what he's most famous for. That's what most people remember him for. In 1988, he delivered his tearful, I have sinned speech on live television, which many believe might be the most watched sermon on television in history.

It was live broadcast in 145 countries. Now, contrary to what you might have remembered about this speech, or what your impression is of Swaggart, he never actually admitted to what he did in that tearful, I have sinned speech.

You had to watch the news later on to find out what it was he actually did. And as time would go on, Swaggart didn't just carouse around with a prostitute one time, for which he repented. He would go on to repeat this offense several more times to demonstrate that he was not really repentant.

And though he was tearful the first time in subsequent offenses, he told his church, it's none of your business. I did a video on Swaggart earlier this week, and I mentioned that legacy of his. And many of the comments I got on that video very much wanted to minimize Swaggart's sin.

They would say things like, oh, he just struggled with lust. Don't we all struggle with lust? Repeatedly looking for prostitutes is not struggling with lust. It's being a slave to your sin. As Jesus said in John 8, 34, truly, truly, I say to you, everyone who practices sin is a slave to sin.

And there were other comments that were like, come on, this was over 30 years ago. Are you going to keep bringing this up? I'm sorry. I think I missed that verse in the Bible that says time heals all wounds.

What do all these kinds of comments have in common? Semi-Pelagianism, these comments about Swaggart's sin, this thing that would say, oh, it was so long ago, or we all struggle with it. We all sin. We all do the same thing.

What do they all have in common? They all minimize the sin. And if they're willing to do that to Swaggart's sin, they would be willing to do that to their own sin. They will minimize the severity of the sin so that they will feel more comfortable in doing it.

My friends, it is a very, very dangerous thing. To minimize sin is no big deal. And it doesn't matter whether you're saying it to yourself or you're pronouncing it publicly to somebody else. Sin is a big deal.

Sin is the reason we die. The reason we get sick. The reason we struggle. The reason we suffer. The reason why life is hard. The reason why you can't find an answer or solution to this problem that you're facing right now.

The reason why mankind is in a general state of wondering what's the meaning of life. All of these things are a result of sin. Sin sent all of creation into upheaval. Sin is the reason why God subjected all creation to a curse.

Because the one who was made in God's image, took that image and instead of glorifying God, glorified himself instead. Did what he wanted to do instead of what God had commanded. And because the one made in God's image rebelled against the Creator in this way, so God cursed all of creation, which he had given to mankind.

We even hear this done with the sin that was in the Garden of Eden. What's the big deal? All they did was eat a fruit. And that's going to plunge all of mankind into ruin? The reason why you don't think that's a big deal is because you think way too much of yourself and way too little of God.

God is holy. Which the very definition of that word means set apart. But as it applies to God also means perfect. And immediately implies that we are not. God demands perfection. In order to be worthy to stand in the presence of God, we must be, as he said to Israel, as Peter repeated, we must be holy as God is holy.

And we can't get there. There is nothing that we by our power can do to make ourselves right to be in the presence of God. Even insisting to yourself that we can be good just by trying to do the right things.

The power of your positive thinking is never going to make you right with God. The only way we are made right with God is through what Christ did for us. And then by faith in him, that righteousness is imputed to us that we would be declared righteous by faith.

This is something I'm going to come back to when we get to the application because we're more than just forgiven our sins. It's more than just the slate was wiped clean. Remember what we read back in Romans 4.

Abraham believed God and it was credited to him as righteous. We're more than just forgiven. We're declared righteous by faith in Jesus Christ. But you can't get there without knowing first that you've sinned and you need a Savior.

And so again, Romans 5 .12 reminds us that there is no one who gets out from under this accusation and the effects of it. Adam sinned and through his sin it came into the world and death spread through sin.

So death spread to all men.

Why?

Because all who were descended from Adam sinned and we all face the consequences of that sin which the consequence is death. Now before jumping into verse 13 where we read about sin supremacy, I said that I was going to mention to you the reason for that em dash there at the end.

The way the sentence is structured, it seems like an incomplete thought and it is. Most of you probably have an em dash. You may have some other kind of punctuation there at the end of the verse indicating a break in the sentence.

But where does it pick up? Because it obviously doesn't pick up anywhere in the three verses that we're looking at today. This is Paul introducing a thought, like I said to you regarding Romans, kind of the way Paul unpacks these theological concepts as he goes through Romans.

He introduces his thought that he won't resolve until verse 18. So you don't get to the other side of the em dash for two more weeks. Just to let you know. So Paul is introducing this idea that kind of becomes the thesis or the header of everything that we're looking at in verses 12 to 21.

So he says, so death spread to all men because all sin and then pretend for a moment that we've taken out verses 13 to 17. So let me read the statement and then include verse 18 so that you can hear the complete thought.

And like I said, we'll come back to it here in a couple of weeks. 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. Therefore, as one trespass led to the condemnation for all men, so one act of righteousness leads to justification and life for all men.

You hear it? So that's the thought. That's the understanding. Sin came into all people through Adam and death being the consequence. But it's through Christ and his act of righteousness that all who are in Christ are justified and receive his life.

We'll come back to that in two weeks. Like I said, I'll spend most time today on that first, that that first subject sin spread, which is in verse 12. So let's go quickly through the next two. And then I want to give some applications.

So number two is sin supremacy, which we have in verse 13. Look again for sin indeed was in the world before the law was given, but sin is not counted where there is no law. So sin was in the world before the law was given.

These almost look like two contradictory subjects. So how is it that sin is in the world before there's a law, but sin is not counted where there is no law? Remember, we had read previously in Romans chapter two about how mankind will even rebel against his own law.

Man has in his heart, this inclination to rebel against the law. And as was said in chapter three, the law is given to reveal to us our sins so that every mouth may be stopped before God and everyone would be held accountable before him.

It doesn't mean that mankind wasn't sinful because there wasn't a law there to rebel against. The inclination of man's heart to rebel against the law was already there. We'll even make up our own laws and rebel against them.

We can't even keep our own standards that we impose upon somebody else. So sin indeed was in the world before the law was given. And we see that as you go through Genesis. And again, you see the effects of sin, those who are listed as dying in the genealogy in Genesis chapter five.

But even before you get to Noah, there is wickedness that becomes prevalent in the earth. So much so that the scripture says that God regretted that he had made man upon the earth. Not that God changes his mind, but we get that anthropomorphic, can't even say that word, anthropomorphic understanding of God expressing his judgment against man because of the wickedness that had spread upon the earth.

And so God was going to wipe out mankind because of their sin. But God found favor with one man whose name was Noah. Through the preservation of Noah and his three sons and their wives, eight people on an ark, God would continue the human race after destroying the entire world in a flood.

But you see, even with the sin that existed at that time, though the law of Moses had never been given, but people were wicked and evil and rebelled against God and went their own way. They were violent men.

They were immoral men. They destroyed lives. They made themselves great. So sin was in the world even before the law was given. And again, in this, we see sin's supremacy. Sin had a reign over people and we were enslaved to it.

Every single one of us are there before we come to Christ. We are all enslaved to our sin. We all desire to do the passions of the flesh, carrying out the desires of the body and the mind, as talked about in Ephesians 2.