The story of Adam is really our story. From the time of Adam until today the story of disobedience against God has been repeated again and again. In fact, the Hebrew name "Adam" simply means "mankind" or "humanity" because the story of Adam and Eve in the book of Genesis in the Bible is our story as well. We can’t truly make sense out of our lives until we understanding how Adam’s failure has effected us.
We’re in a series through the New Testament book of Romans called GOOD NEWS FOR OUR TIMES. Today we’re going to talk about how to understand our story by placing in the context of the story of the entire human race. Today we’re going to see that our life story is intertwined with the actions of the two most significant people in human history. We can’t understand ourselves without also understanding how these people have impacted us. The two people I’m talking about are Adam and Jesus. These two individuals have impacted us more than our parents, more than our spouse, more than our teachers, more than anyone else in human history.
1. The Story of Adam (Romans 5:12-14)
Let’s begin by looking at Adam’s impact on the human race in vv. 12-14. Here again we’re presented with "sin" as if it were a person on the stage of human history, as if it were a living force (Fitzmyer 411). The way sin as a power entered into the human race was through Adam, the first man.
Notice that Paul treats Adam as a literal, historical figure, not as a myth or a fairy tale. For the apostle Paul, Adam was just as real and historical as Jesus was. According to the Bible, Adam and his wife Eve were the first two human beings in human history. In some mysterious way Adam’s disobedience against God unleashed sin on the human race. Adam’s failure was the bridgehead, the invasion of sin as a power into human experience.
And right on the heels of sin was another power, the power of death. Death followed sin like a shadow, going wherever sin traveled (Cranfield 1:274). And the death here is spiritual death (separation from God), physical death (our physical mortality), and eventual eternal death (eternal separation from God’s presence and love). Like a toxin, death spread to all people, to every human being who’s lived since Adam. Death has dominated the human race since Adam.
And this implies of course that death was not part of God’s original plan for the human race. Our culture tries to tell us that death is simply a part of what it means to be human, that it’s the normal state of the human race. But here we learn that death is a toxin that spreads, that it’s unnatural, a departure from God’s original intention for humanity.
Now the reason why the toxin of death has spread to all people is because everyone has sinned. Paul is telling us that all human beings since Adam have also sinned against God (Schreiner 275). Every person has rebelled against the creator; each one of us has chosen our own way and spurned God’s way. None of us has chosen the way of God, but we’ve turned to our own way. As Paul said earlier in Romans, "All have sinned and fall short of God’s glory" (3:23).
And because all of us have also chosen the way of Adam, death has dominated the human race ever since. In fact, even before God gave Moses the 10 commandments--the law--sin was still in the world. Death is presented in v. 14 as if it were a cruel emperor who’s ruthlessly ruling over the human race. Try as we might to escape the dominion of death with genetic engineering and cryogenics, all people still die. It was true of Adam and it’s still true today.
So here we find how understanding Adam helps us understand our story. Our experience of death is directly connected to Adam’s disobedience.
Death is not natural, it’s not inherent in being human, but it’s a direct result of Adam’s disobedience. As I mentioned earlier, this includes death in all its parts. It includes physical death of course: the fact that we’re mortal, that our bodies are slowly giving out, getting tired, and dying. But it also includes spiritual death, our separation from God, our need for forgiveness and restoration with God. And it also includes eventual eternal death, permanent separation from God.
You see, once sin entered into the world, it was like a virus that spread. I heard recently about an entire national forest in Oregon that had been infected by a fungus (The Daily News [8/5/00], from PreachingToday.com). This fungus started as a single microscopic spore, but it’s been weaving its way through this forest for about 2,400 years, killing tress as it grows. Today this fungus has infected 2,200 acres of this national forest. Essentially the fungus is a gigantic mushroom you can’t see from the ground, but it’s killed hundreds of thousands of tress, all from a single spore. That’s similar to how Adam’s sin opened the door for sin and death to spread like a fungus through the entire human race.
Now this text opens up a centuries old debate about how Adam’s sin has effected us today. Theologians and Bible teachers call this original sin. Now original sin is a very misunderstood concept today. The rock musician Meatloaf thought original sin was simply a sin that he’d never committed before, and so he sang that he was looking for an original sin ("Original Sin"). Many people think original sin has something to do with sex. Original sin doesn’t refer to the nature of Adam’s sin but it describes the effect of Adam’s sin on our original condition, the condition we’re born into the world in (Erickson 631 n.10).
Somehow Adam was the representative for the entire human race when he was in the garden. And as the representative God had appointed, Adam failed, thus opening the door to sin for the entire human race. Adam was like a guard posted at the door of the human race, appointed to keep sin and death out. But instead of keeping it out, Adam opened the door, and it flooded in like a virus, bringing death in its wake.
Because of Adam’s sin, every human being who’s been born since then has been born with a sin nature. This is what Paul means in v. 19 when he says "through the disobedience of the one man the many were made sinners." In other words, we don’t become sinners when we sin, but we sin because we are sinners. We have an inherent bent toward rebelling against our creator.
This of course flies in the face of what many people today believe, that people are born into the world innocent and in a state of moral neutrality, that it’s society that that corrupts people and inclines them to do wrong. The Bible clearly teaches that all humans are born with an internal predisposition to disobey God, that we’re born with an inclination to choose our own way. Every parent of a toddler knows that this is true. We don’t have to teach our children the words "me" and "mine"; they’re somehow already in their internal wiring.
In fact, biologists are coming to a similar conclusion about the human condition. In 1996 Time magazine had an article called "Science and Original Sin." The article claimed that more biologists learn about our genetic make up, the more they’re discovering that we’re born with a genetic predisposition to do wrong, that we have a hereditary dark side. In fact, it’s possible that some immoral behaviors are passed on to us by our parents, such as a propensity for alcohol and drug abuse. That doesn’t force us to sin, but it does give us a predisposition toward certain kinds of sin.
This is what the Bible means when it says that we’re born spiritually dead. We’re death to God, separated from God, lost in the inclinations of our own selfishness. We need spiritual life from God in order to please God and love him.
But along with a sin nature, we also inherit guilt from Adam’s sin as well. Now this is a bit more controversial. It just doesn’t seem fair to us, that God would hold us morally responsible for someone else’s sin. Yet v. 18 clearly says, "the result of one trespass was condemnation for all people." Somehow Adam’s sin brought condemnation for the entire human race.
I think it’s our own sin that confirms us in that guilt. Since Adam was God’s appointed representative for all people, when he sinned we shared in his guilt. But in our legal system, when a person is sometimes found guilty of a crime, the judge can in certain circumstances suspend the sentence. Even though the person is found guilty of the crime and sentenced to prison time, the judge can suspend the sentence, releasing the person on probation. If the person breaks their probation, the sentence is then carried out. So in a sense, even though the person is free, the sentence is hanging over their head.
I think it’s similar with our guilt for Adam’s sin. God suspends the sentence when we’re born, so even though we have a sin nature when we’re born, we’re not yet held personally responsible for Adam’s sin until we personally sin ourselves. It’s like we’re on probation, and when we get old enough to understand right and wrong, and when we choose wrong, God then applies Adam’s sentence to us.
You see, throughout this section we find that OUR EXPERIENCE OF DEATH IS CONNECTED TO ADAM. But it is attributed to two causes: Adam’s sin and our sin. So that’s our inheritance from Adam: the experience of death.
2. The Story of Jesus (Romans 5:15-19)
That brings us to the other most important person in human history: Jesus. In verses 15-19 we find that Jesus was able to undo everything that Adam ruined. The principle here is that it takes far more effort to clean up a mess than it does to make the mess in the first place (Achtemier 98).
As parents of four boys my wife and I think about this principle a lot in our home. I thought about it a few months ago, when my wife went to her music lesson on my day off, and for five minutes our four year old was unsupervised in our living room. By the time I got out of bed, he’d taken all the flour in our cupboard, poured it out on our couch cushions, spread it around, and he was in the process of adding water to it. Now which do you think took more time and effort: to make the mess or to clean it up? That’s the principle that Paul is working from here to show that although both Adam and Jesus are similar in the sense that they are both representatives of the human race, Jesus’ act is far more significant because it cleaned up the mess Adam made.
Notice the contrasts between Adam and Jesus here. In v. 15 we see that through Jesus Christ, we are able to move from death to grace. In v. 17 we see that through Jesus we’re able to move from being victims to death to being victors who rule. In Adam death rules over us like a cruel king, but through Christ we’re able to rule and reign in life as God intended for the human race to do. We’re restored to the dominion God created us for in Genesis 1. We see in v. 18 that through Christ we’re able to move from sinners to saints.
So here we find how we can understand our story by understanding Jesus. OUR EXPERIENCE OF RESTORATION WITH GOD IS DIRECTLY CONNECTED TO JESUS CHRIST’S OBEDIENCE.
Jesus’ role in God’s plan is central, and any attempt to push Jesus to the background misses the point of the Christian faith. Jesus is God’s provision to go from death to life, from victim to victor, from sinner to saint. Just as we can’t escape the effects of Adam’s sins, we can’t escape the central role of Jesus in our restoration. Now of course all of this assumes that we must exercise faith in Jesus to experience these things. Replacing death with grace, victimization with victory, and condemnation with integrity comes as a free gift that’s received by faith in Jesus Christ. It’s not automatic: just as we must be confirmed in Adam’s sin with our decision to sin, so also we must receive the gift God offers.
We live in a world where people are trying to find a way to be restored to God without Jesus. People do everything from watching Oprah to reading their horoscopes, from browsing the religion section in Borders Books to trying out a local witchcraft coven to find a way to be spiritual without Jesus Christ. This is why our role in this community as a church is so important, because no one else in the world will tell people that our restoration with God comes only through Jesus Christ.
3. The Role of God’s Law (Romans 5:20-21)
Now by dividing the human story up between Adam and Jesus, Paul has left out something that the Jewish people thought was very important: The Jewish law, or the ten commandments (Schreiner 294). Paul’s readers would immediately notice this omission, and wonder what role God’s law had in all this. So Paul explains the role of God’s law in vv. 20-21.
Now to understand what Paul is driving at, you need to understand how Israel understood the Law (Wright 262-66). The people of Israel agreed with everything Paul said about Adam’s sin, that it made humans sinners and brought condemnation. All of this was clearly taught in the Jewish Bible, the Old Testament. But Israel believed that when God gave the nation of Israel the 10 commandments through Moses that this undid everything that Adam had done. They believed Israel was the second Adam, the new humanity. They thought that Israel had been successful where Adam had failed (Wright). So after God gave the law in the book of Exodus there were two humanities a person could be part of: Humanity in Israel and humanity in Adam. Humanity in Israel was saved from Adam’s sin by obeying the 10 commandments, but humanity in Adam was still under Adam’s condemnation. Thus, at the end of the age only humanity in Israel would be saved from judgment.
But Paul gives us a very different picture here than what his Jewish contemporaries believed. Paul agreed that God had given Israel the law through Moses, and that the 10 commandments had a role to play in God’s plan to restore the human race and undo the effects of Adam’s sin. But the law itself didn’t undo sin. Instead we learn here that the law increased sin, probably by defining exactly what sin is. Without the law our understanding of sin is vague and undefined, but God’s law tells us exactly what sin is. So instead of liberating the nation of Israel from Adam’s sin, the law simply made the reality of sin even clearer and more ugly in Israel, which is why the continually failed to live up to the law so much.
But then God sent Jesus as the second Adam to undo the first Adam’s failure. Where sin abounded with the giving of the law, God’s grace superabounded, overflowing in Jesus. So from the time Jesus came, humanity is divided into two groups: humanity in Christ (the Christian church) and humanity in Adam, which is the rest of the human race. At the end of the age, those who are joined to Christ will be saved from judgment, but those who’ve rejected God’s gift will suffer judgment.
Here we find why God gave the law. GOD ADDED THE LAW TO SET THE STAGE FOR GRACE.
God’s way of overcoming the power of sin wasn’t by giving law to regulate sin but by drowning sin with a waterfall of grace. We can’t undo Adam’s failure by trying harder or by obeying rules. It’s impossible to overcome the power of sin by our own self efforts. Our own efforts simply produces more sin, more frustration, more failure. So instead we find the water of grace, God’s unearned, unmerited favor that’s offered to us through Jesus. The law simply set the stage for the entrance of grace into the world.
Conclusion
We can’t understand our story without also understanding the human story. And we can’t understand the human story without also understanding how the two most important people in human history have impacted our lives. More than our parents, more than our siblings, more than the world’s philosophers and rulers, we’ve been impacted by the lives of Adam and Jesus. In Adam we all experience death. But in Christ we’re offered restoration with God, liberation from sin and death, forgiveness and love. And the law, rather than giving us a self-help approach to God, simply set the stage for the flood of God’s grace.
People often go to counseling to understand how other people have effected them. We often find ourselves doing things we don’t understand, responding to other people in ways that are destructive and don’t make sense. It’s that kind of confusion that often drives people to a counselor or therapist, and of course the counselor often tries to help the person understand how the significant people in their life have impacted them. Once we understand how a father’s abuse or a mother’s abandonment effects us, we can suddenly understand better why we cut people off or why we can’t express our own emotions, or whatever our specific problem is. Freedom comes through insight into how other people have impacted us. We find something similar here: That we must understand the impact of Adam and Jesus on our lives before we can truly understand what it means to know and love God.
If this is true, then what we do as a church incredibly important to this community. Until people in our neighborhoods understand how Adam has impacted their lives they’ll stumble in spiritual darkness wondering how they got there. Until they understand what Jesus accomplished and the role he plays in God’s plan, they’ll be in the dark about how to be restored to a relationship with God. This is the reason why we exist as a church. Our church mission statement says, "God has called us to reach unchurched people from the Inland Valley and beyond with Christ’s love and to help them grow into fully devoted followers of Jesus Christ, who wholeheartedly love God and others." Every time we walk in the doors to this room we see that bronze lettering reminding us of our mission: Helping people love God and others. We exist to help people make sense out of the spiritual darkness pervading their lives. We exist to introduce people to Jesus Christ, to help them understand his life and the gift of God offered through Jesus. And we just exist to produces followers of Jesus by discipling people, helping them grow and develop so they can love God wholeheartedly and love other people sacrificially. We exist as a church to reach people who don’t know Christ and to help people who do know Christ keep growing. Evangelism and discipleship, ministry to the lost and ministry to the saved, caring for those still in Adam and caring for those in Christ…this is our mission.We must never sacrifice one part of the mission for the other, but we must keep these two tasks balanced together, so we can fulfill the purpose for which God has called us into existence. Without the obedience of Jesus Christ’s Church, people in our world will never understand their story.
Sources
Cranfield, C. E. B. 1975. A Critical and Exegetical Commentary on the Epistle to the Romans. Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark Publishing.
Erickson, M. 1985. Christian Theology. Baker Book House.
Fitzmyer, Joseph. 1993. Romans: A New Translation with Introduction and Commentary. Anchor Bible Vol. 33. New York: Doubleday.
Schreiner, Thomas. 1998. Romans. Baker Exegetical Commentary. Baker Book House.
