It is important to bear in mind where Paul begins and where he ends in the paragraph 5:12-21. He launches into this passage from the springboard of God's marvellous, reconciling love, communicated to us in Jesus: "We positively rejoice in God through our Lord Jesus Christ, through Whom we have received our reconciliation." As we have indicated, that summary verse supplies the theme he will now go on to develop.
He ends the passage in praise of God's abounding grace: "Where sin abounded, there - all the more - grace abounded." Clearly his theme is still the reconciling love that overcomes the barriers sin raises against it. That was his theme in the first eleven verses; it is still his theme in these remaining ten. Where is the difference?
The difference is this: in the first half of the chapter he speaks of the way God's love bears on us in our individual experience, where in the second half he speaks of the way it bears on the whole human race. The first is personal, the second is racial.
It is quite obvious that Paul is drawing a contrast between Adam and Christ.
1. Through Adam sin entered into human life, but through Christ a new righteousness has been introduced into it.
2. The aftermath of Adam's sin has been the universal spread of death; but through Christ new life is freely available to all.
3. Adam's legacy to mankind was the condemning Law; but Christ's gift to mankind is forgiving Grace.
4. In Adam the whole human race stands condemned; in Christ that sentence of condemnation is lifted clean away.
Paul himself supplied the best caption over the passage we could wish to find when he wrote, "As in Adam all die, so in Christ shall all be made alive." (I Cor. 15:22)
It is clear that whatever Paul means by these contrasts, he is thinking big thoughts - very big thoughts indeed - and if we are to grasp his meaning we must allow those thoughts to stretch our minds.
Paul is here taking a sweeping view of the whole life of mankind spread out in time, and we shall fail to see what he is showing us unless we lift our eyes to the same wide horizons. This passage is like a mountain-top to which Paul has led us up the steep ascent of chapters 1 to 5; from it he invites us to look back down the path by which we have come, and look forward along the path ahead into the chapters that will follow.
He invites us to see the whole life of humanity from its beginnings, headed up in Adam, as one vast body which is sick with a sickness which is unto death. Then he invites us to look at it again as one vast body, headed up in Christ since Christ has joined it, which has been given healing - such healing as shall restore it to new and radiant and eternal life. The whole life of man, spread out in time before the face of God - that is what Paul has in view in this chapter. And he frames his statement about it - about its evil and about its good - in a single key signature, the way a composer does his musical score: bass clef for man in Adam, treble clef for man in Christ.
"Thus then ..." he begins in v. 12 (and so saying he gathers up in one great armful everything he has said so far), "as sin came into the world through one man, and death through sin, and so death passed to all men inasmuch as all men sinned ...": there is the bass clef: 'Adam.'
"So ..." he goes on - and you expect him at once to write in the treble clef 'Christ.' But he does not! At least, not yet. He breaks off, leaving that first half of the statement hanging in mid-air while he throws in a whole string of explanatory remarks to help us understand the remainder of the sentence when at last he fills it in.
Every sentence that begins with "As ..." should end with a second half beginning with "so ..." It is not all that easy to be sure where he picks up that stranded beginning and completes it. Is it at v. 18? ... "As one man's trespass led to condemnation for all men, so one man's deed of righteousness led to rightwisness and life for all men." It almost is - but not quite! Paul has not got fully back in focus yet the statement he started in v. 12: that was about sin and death, and v. 18 is only about condemnation. So we move on. Is it at the next verse then, v. 19? "As by one man's disobedience many were constituted sinners, so by one man's obedience, many will be constituted righteous." And again we have to say, "No." He has still not got it quite in focus - there is nothing about death here yet, which is what he began with.
Not until v. 21 does he finally get it all together: "As sin reigned in death, so grace also reigns through righteousness unto eternal life." Now he has it all back in focus. The first half of v. 21 recapitulates that stranded beginning back in v. 12. Verse 12 read, "As sin came into the world through one man, and death through sin ..." now verse 21 reads, "As sin reigned in death ..." which is the same thing again. So the whole paragraph boils down to just one simple statement, the final one, v. 21: "As sin reigned in death through one man, Adam, so grace reigns through righteousness unto life through the one man, Jesus Christ our Lord."
The first part of chapter 5 was about the reconciliation with God which we all may receive through His forgiving love revealed in the Cross. Now Paul says that that love-work of God's, wrought out at the Cross, is effectual to remedy, not just the situation of a few men here and there, but the whole human situation from beginning to end of time.
That is a big conviction - so big it prompts all kinds of big and exciting thoughts. It did for Paul; only instead of saying the one big thing first, and then drawing out its many implications, he broke off after he had started so as to get them all said first, and then he finished what he had started.
Why did he do it that way? Was it because Tertius his secretary was writing on papyrus and could not rub out the first draft of what Paul said and write it over ... so they left it written the way it first tumbled out of Paul's mouth, not trying to do a re-write and get it all into better sequence? I think not. Paul deliberately slotted in all those comparisons between Adam and Christ first, because he wanted to be sure we should not misunderstand what he finally said.
He wanted to say that the consequences for all mankind of the Lord's life were no less great than the consequences for all mankind of Adam's life. So he started out to set Adam's deed and Christ's deed side by side so we could contrast the effects of both. But before he finished saying it, he was anxious that we should not misunderstand the comparison he was making by thinking of Jesus as really just another Adam (Adam the 'baddie' and Jesus the 'goodie', sort of thing). The magnitude of Christ's achievement was vastly greater than the magnitude of Adam's, just as Christ Himself was a thousand times the man Adam was. Adam, after all, was only a created being: but Christ, truly man though He was, was the eternal Son Who shared the uncreated life of God from eternity past. So before Paul finally says it right out: "Look what an awful mess Adam's wretched disobedience got us into, but look what a paradise Christ's obedience will bring us into," he wants to be sure we do not think of the two men as being on a level pegging, so to speak.
There is a real point of likeness between Christ and Adam - but only one! By fitting in all those preparatory contrasts, Paul makes sure we understand that.
That one point of comparison is that they were both federal heads of a whole race. The lives of the two men were decisive for the destiny of the two humanities that spring from them; only we must not imagine this to mean that Christ is on the same level as Adam. That would be like saying that Abraham is on the same level as the first rabbit, because they both fathered a species!
The differences between the two that Paul enumerates we can state in a nutshell: the nature of mankind's sickness is sin, its diagnostician is the Law, its cure is God's free gift of Grace-righteousness which comes wrapped up in Jesus Christ, and it is more than adequate to wipe out the whole epidemic.
Let us look at them in turn.
"Sin came into the world through one man, and death through sin, and so death spread to all men inasmuch as all men sinned."
Notice what this verse does say, and what it does not say.
It says that sin entered into humanity's life through its head, the man Adam. The stream was poisoned at its rise. Adam, as the first man, and the whole of humanity that sprang from him, are bound up solid in the one bundle of life. The first man could only reproduce his own kind; once he had sinned, the only sort of life he could pass on to his descendants was sin-infected life.
But the verse does not say that all men die for Adam's sin. It says plainly that we all die for our own sin. Indeed, if Paul had said anything else, he would have contradicted such plain and unequivocal scriptures as Ezekiel ch. 18, where God says through His prophet that no man dies for his fathers' sins, but for his own. Paul does not say, "Sin came into the world through one man and death through sin, and so death passed to all men because the one man sinned." He says, "Death passed to all men because all men sinned."
The notion of imputed sin - that we die of Adam's sin, whether we deserve to or not - is as remote as it could be from what Paul here says. We die of imparted sin, not imputed sin, just as we live through imparted righteousness, not imputed righteousness. The sin we die of is our own. Adam started it, to be sure, but we keep it going all on our own without any help from him. As Paul says in v. 14, not all sins are of the same sort as Adam's; nonetheless, men die of them, as he did.
It is important to say this, because when Paul says that we become righteous with Christ's righteousness he means the same sort of the thing. We become righteous with Christ's righteousness the same way we become sinful with Adam's sin. It is an old dispute among theologians whether the sin of Adam is imputed sin, or sin imparted to us; and the argument is carried into the realm of Christian experience too: is Christ's righteousness imputed to us merely, or imparted to us? And the answer is: both. The righteousness with which Christ makes us righteous has to be as really and truly our own as the Adamic sin that makes us sinful. It is for real! *
Paul's second point is that the Law of Commandments was given to diagnose our sinful condition.
"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 sins were not like the transgression of Adam." (v. 13)
Men were dying of the plague without really understanding what was the matter with them. So the Law was given to tell us.
Again it is important to be clear about the place of the Law and God's purpose in giving it. We are so prone to think that the Law was given to make us good. It was not; it was given to show us where we are bad. It is Grace makes us good, not Law. All the law does is show us our need of grace.
We are to measure our life against the Law, but not base our living on it, or live out from it. We base our living on God's grace, and we live out our life from Christ in Whom that grace comes to us.
Paul's third contrast is between the cause of our sin problem and its remedy, v. 15. The cause was the one trespass of the one man, Adam; the remedy is the free gift of God in the one Man, Jesus Christ.
What a difference between the two there is in the way they are conveyed to us. Sin comes upon us through the trespass by way of tragic inevitability. It is foisted on us. But the remedy is not. The way the remedy is provided, as a gift to be freely received, is itself the beginning of the very freedom we so greatly desire and truly need.
Then there is the contrast between the effects of the two. The effect of the trespass was a universal plague; the effect of the remedy is a universal cure.
Adam had only a single clean sheet to dirty, so to speak, but Christ was faced with the most appalling accumulated mess to clean up.
But He has done it! That is the shout of triumph on which Paul ends.
What a series of exciting contrasts Paul has made between Adam and Christ:
More than that - in doing so He won back all the ground that Adam lost.
Adam's trespass
and Christ's act of righteousness
Adam's disobedience
and Christ's obedience
Adam's heritage of sin
and Christ's endowment of righteousness
Adam's blight of condemnation
and Christ's blessing of justification
Adam's legacy of death
and Christ's gift of life
Our blessed Lord resisted temptation
where Adam yielded to it;
He mastered sin
where Adam was defeated by it;
He won
where Adam failed.
More even than that - He redeemed the whole appalling mess to which Adam's sin had led, so that the whole creation, corrupted as it is by sin and death, shall yet be entirely cleansed and renewed and be filled with the glory of God as the waters cover the sea.
It is a simply magnificent, breath-taking vision Paul presents in this chapter. He will recapitulate it at the end of ch. 8.
We look out upon the world, and it can fill us with dismay. Where is there any good in it? Where is there any hope for it? There is sin everywhere, there is tragedy everywhere, and misery. Paul knew it, and he knew why, as we have seen from our study of chapters 1-3. He saw the world lying under the universal sway of sin, delivered over in every part of its life to the wrath and judgment of God, and lying under the curse of death. "Where sin reigned in death ..." he says. (v. 21) How else can we describe the world? It is all bound together in a tight-knit solidarity of sin, judgment and death. And in this chapter, that is what Paul means by 'Adam.'
God's introduction of the Law of Commandments into the situation had done nothing to remedy it; it had never been intended to. All the law ever does to man in sin is to provoke him to yet more rebellious sin. As Paul says in v. 20, "Law came in to increase the trespass." That indeed was God's purpose in giving it - to bring home to man the sheer wretchedness of it, and dispose him to seek salvation.
But Paul saw more than all that in the world. He had seen Christ. And with that vision he had a new pair of eyes.
In Christ he saw that God Himself had entered this grim arena where all His judgments were abroad, and there fashioned its remedy. When God gave His beloved Son into the world - in Whom, remember, God Himself most fully dwelt - He entered Himself into the arena of this world, where sin and death got to work on Him.
What was seen then was something unique. A light shone - of which in the past only fitful glimpses had been seen - the light of God Himself shining in the darkness. In that light it was seen that none suffer from the judgments to which God delivers man as God suffers Himself. He endures the pain of it all as no man does. All the sin of the world found its fierce and destructive way into His pierced heart, and He bore it.
In the Cross of His Son, there was revealed such suffering in the heart of God by reason of the sin to which He has delivered us as beggars description. The age-long pain of man is but a small thing compared to the immemorial agony of God, in Whose heart it wreaks all its havoc. There, we see the enormity of our sin as the Law never revealed it, for there we see what it does to God. All the sin and misery that afflicts mankind by reason of the judgments to which God delivers us bear too upon His suffering heart. What for righteousness' sake He cannot condone, He must for love's sake bear.
When we pour out our complaint to God about the suffering in the world, we are pouring it into the ears of One Whose own suffering - afflicted as He is in all our afflictions - is so inconceivably great that if we once glimpse it the complaint must die on our lips as the word of a fool.
But in the Cross and Resurrection of Jesus we see, not only the enormity of our sin, but the immensity of God's love. For we see that though sin has wrought unbelievable havoc in the heart of the 'Eternal' it could not overwhelm His love for us. Beyond His suffering He goes on loving. So great is the love He bears the creatures He has made that His love breaks through all the suffering their sin inflicts upon Him - breaks through even His wrath with it - and pours out over them the blessing of forgiveness and reconciliation and eternal salvation. There is no greater wonder in the length and breadth of all creation than the triumph of God's redeeming love over all our sin and His wrath with it.
And it is at the very heart of the judgment on sin (which is His own judgment) that God Himself fashions its remedy. If for righteousness' sake He must condemn the sinner, He must for love's sake join him where he is - in the condemnation and judgment that lies upon him; and this is what it means that Christ 'became a curse for us'. There, out of His own grief and pain, He calls to us to repent of our sin and receive His forgiveness, letting Him draw its sting into His own heart and bear all its curse away.
All this has come to us through Jesus Christ. He has, from the beginning, been God's agent in creation. And of His own free will He joined us in our humanity, assumed the nature of a slave among us, subject to all the conditions of a world under judgment, and in His humanity became obedient to the outworking of the passion that wrings the heart of God, even unto death ... that death of the Cross which alone can speak to us of the awful cost to God of bearing our sin. The pain of God was there seen to be a pain greater than flesh and blood can bear.
But as the fruit of that divine travail,
Paul sees men and women streaming in from the far corners of the
earth to receive their cleansing in the fountain of redeeming love
that flows from Christ's wounded side;
... sees them reconciled to God through the death of His Son, and
embraced in the Eternal Father's arms;
... sees them going forth from the place of their healing instinct
with a new life which is the gift to them of God's amazing grace;
... and with exultant heart, he thrills to the vision of a new
humanity rising up out of the ashes of judgment and entering upon its
predestined glory.
Paul saw a new humanity with Christ, not Adam, as its head ... much as the prophet Ezekiel saw in his vision the bones that lay thick in the valley of this world's death standing up in their places and clothed with flesh, living and breathing like a mighty and resplendent army, coming alive from the death of sin as the sounding voice of God in the preached Gospel summoned them to stand before Him.
All this Paul saw - and over it he stamped a new title: 'CHRIST'
"As by a man came death, so also by a man has come the resurrection of the dead. As all in Adam die, so all in Christ shall be made alive."
"Where sin reigns in death" (and in this world it does) there also "grace reigns through righteousness unto eternal life, through Jesus Christ our Lord."
Paul saw more - much more - than sin and misery everywhere in the world. He saw grace - grace and joy everywhere in the world, because He saw Christ in it ... saw Christ everywhere in it ... saw Him as God's remedy for all our defilement.
Can we wonder that with such a vision thrilling in him, Paul's words came tumbling out with a barely controlled coherence? Though we live a thousand years, we shall never see a vision more glorious than this vision Paul saw - a vision in which all the tragedy of life is included and transmuted into final triumph and eternal glory. The grace of God avails to cover all our sins; and not our sins only, but the sins of the whole world and all their baleful issue, to the end of time.
The God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ is to be worshipped. He is a great God. He it is, and He alone, that doeth great wonders.
* If righteousness is imputed only, Paul might as well not have bothered to write chs. 1-3; they are made irrelevant thereby.
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