Romans 5:12-21
“New Adam”
June 12, 2011 - Pentecost

         “I have never before seen a man or a woman.” So says C. S. Lewis’s character Ransom kneeling before the first human pair of Venus, Perelandra, in the “Space Trilogy.” Ransom is from Earth. He’s seen countless men and women, but he means that until then he had not met one as he or she was meant to be, a vibrant, shining reflection of the image of God.

         Ransom’s situation is the same as ours. We read in our text today at Romans 5:12, “sin came into the world through one man, and death came through sin, and so death spread to all because all sinned.” We’ve never met another human being untouched by sin and death. The first couple of our world, Adam and Eve, began it. Their original sin and the curse of death as told in Genesis 2 and 3 became a blight that “spread to all.”

         We know it’s true. G. K. Chesterton wrote that “original sin… is the only part of Christian theology which can really be proved.” No matter how gorgeous a human being is, be it Olrlando Bloom or Jessica Alba, that person’s beauty is stained and tarnished by his or her sins.

         Despite whatever bloom of health and beauty we see in a man or a woman, a shadow hangs over that lovely face. Every human you or I know has been dying since the day he or she was born. Every minute that passes, age steals the most beloved form, steals health and strength and in the end steals life itself. Death came and death comes to all.

         Paul pushes us down this gloomy course of thought because he wants to compare and contrast the entry of sin and death into the world with a happier thought. That’s why verse 12 starts out, “Therefore, just as…” But in verse 13, Paul does not immediately complete that “just as.” He’s been concerned with Jews and Gentiles in relation to Jewish law, so he pauses to address a possible question.

         We suppose that absence of law is an excuse. If there’s no sign on a country road posting a 35 MPH speed limit, you can’t be held accountable for going 55. If there’s no notice the campground is closed, you’re not guilty if you drive in and set up your tent. Where there’s no law, there’s no sin, you might say. As verse 13 says, “but sin is not reckoned when there is no law.”

         Paul is concerned that someone might imagine that, before the law was given, before Moses delivered the Commandments to Israel, there was no sin. But verse 14 makes it clear that sin and its consequence, death, are there throughout human history. “Yet death exercised dominion from Adam to Moses…” Even without breaking the Jewish law, human beings sinned and died. Death ruled over them just as it rules over us.

         Pagans who gave death a name and made it a god had a good idea. Call it Hades or Pluto or just death, we live under its shadow, under its dominion all the time. Sooner or later we will all hear something like those fateful words, “There’s nothing more we can do.”

         The last part of verse 14 returns to what Paul said in chapters 2 and 3 of Romans, that even if one hasn’t, like Adam or the Jewish people, broken a direct and specific command of God, committed a “transgression”, we have sinned. We’ve done what we know by conscience and upbringing, to be wrong. “For all have sinned,” says Roman 3:23.

         But when Paul mentions Adam in verse 14 it pulls him back on the track of his comparison with that little phrase, “who is a type of the one who was to come.” Most of the human race has never seen a man or a woman standing fully in the glory of the image of God, but a few did. In Jesus Christ, there was a new creation of all that we are meant to be.

         Verses 15 to 19 contrast the first man Adam and with the new Man Jesus. Paul marks out the differences: “the free gift is not like the trespass.” On one side we have “the one man’s trespass,” through which everyone dies. On the other side we have the gift of the one Man Jesus through whom everyone receives the grace of God.

         That doctrine of original sin raises a hard question. Why is it that because the first human beings sinned, we all suffer the consequences? Why should the one man’s punishment be passed on to everyone? God seems like a terrorist, wreaking revenge on every man, woman and child for the offense of a few. That question haunts the next few verses.

         So let’s pause to deal with it and another question that arises for us in modern times. First remember how verse 12 ended, “because all sinned.” No one is guiltless. Adam’s punishment is our punishment because Adam’s sin is our sin. If you like, we are each a little Adam or Eve, making our own choices to turn from God and follow our own wills.

         There is more, though. Paul and all the ancient world had a much stronger communal understanding of human nature than we do. They understood that you and I are not just individual, autonomous creatures standing alone before God. We are born into and are part of a shared humanity. Our lives are made up of our relationships with other people. I’m not just Steve. I’m a son, a husband, a father, a brother, a pastor, and a friend. Those relationships are who I am. Take them away and there wouldn’t be much left.

         Human beings were made to live in community, in relationship with each other. When Paul talks about our sin and death in Adam, he’s talking about our connected relationship to the whole human race. Adam stands for and represents us all, like the Crown represents England. When Adam sinned, we all sinned. When Adam died, we all were destined to die.

         Which brings the second modern question: Was there an actual Adam and Eve, two literal first members of the human race? Paul thought so and so have Christians to the 19^th century. But now a scientist and evangelical Christian like Francis Collins, director if the Human Genome Project and is currently director of the National Institute of Health, says that genetics proves the human race had to begin with at least 10,000 individuals. Adam and Eve, he says, are metaphors like the seven days of creation.

         The problem is the Bible wasn’t written to answer questions about biology and genetics. God did not inspire Scripture to satisfy our curiosity, scientific or otherwise, but to bring us to faith and salvation in Jesus Christ. I have no idea who is right between Christians who think like Collins and those who insist there must have been a literal first human couple. My sympathies are with the latter bunch, but neither Scripture nor science gives us enough information to be dogmatic about it.

         What is sure is the contrast between what either literally or metaphorically is true about what Adam did and what is literally true about what Jesus did. The one man’s trespass brings death, but the other man’s gift brings grace in verse 15. In verse 16 the trespasses produces condemnation, but the gift gives justification. Then in verse 17, the one man’s trespass puts us under the dominion of death, but the gift brings an abundance of grace and gives us “dominion in life through the one man, Jesus Christ.”

         The next couple verses, 18 and 19, offer an idea taken up and explored more fully in Eastern Orthodox theology. In the first man’s sin, we are all condemned and sinful, but in the righteousness and obedience of Jesus Christ, we are all justified and righteous. Jesus is a reboot of the human race. As Paul will say later, when Jesus died on the Cross in obedience to God, we died with Him. When He rose, we rose with Him. God shut down the human race on the Cross and started it over on Easter.

         Jesus is more than just a simple restart of humanity. Paul keeps repeating that phrase “much more” and that word “abundance” or “abounded.” When Jesus began the human race again, as the new Adam, He took us to a place we would never have come otherwise. Adam before he sinned was great, but Jesus is greater. An unfallen human race would have been grand, but a fallen and redeemed humanity is absolutely glorious.

         It’s not sin and suffering that make us better, but it gives God the opportunity to make us better. Verse 20 tells us that when the law did arrive through Moses, the result was to make sin worse, “the trespass multiplied.” It’s the hint of an idea about the law Paul expands in chapter 7. But for right now we learn one part of God’s intent in giving the law was to throw sin into clear focus, to make it increase, so that grace can increase.

         English can’t give you the complete effect of Paul’s emphasis on grace here. He coined a word not found anywhere else in Greek literature. He said that sin increased, but that grace “super-abounded.” We throw our very worst at God, but He has more than enough grace to deal with it. In Jesus Christ is gracious forgiveness to free us from the most vicious sin.

         Freedom in grace is the point. Paul used the language of kingdom, of dominion, all along here, five times in this passage. There’s the dominion of death in verse 14 and verse 17. There’s the dominion in life which human beings receive at the end of verse 17. But in verse 21, the contrast is stark and dramatic: the dominion of sin in death versus the dominion of grace “through righteousness leading to eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord.”

         Adam and Eve lost dominion. As C. S. Lewis portrayed in fantasy in Perelandra, they were meant to be the king and queen of creation, to rule the world and themselves in righteousness and beauty and love. But they fell under the control of sin and in the process lost control of both the world and themselves. Much of human history has been our struggle to get dominion back through work and moral effort and science and psychology. But on our own we are as far from being kings and queens as we ever were.

         We can’t control our own selves, much less anyone else or the world around us. Wednesday at Courtsports I watched a man lose control of himself in a dispute over who won a racquetball game. A friendly, easygoing, kind person I’ve know for years was suddenly shouting and cursing at another player who he thought had unfairly claimed a victory. That’s the dominion of sin over us at work.

         In the grace of Jesus Christ God returns dominion to us. He brings us under His own gentle dominion of grace and leads us out into a new life in His eternal kingdom.

         What has any of this has to do with Pentecost today? Part of Adam and Eve’s dominion was language. They talked with God and named creation in a single tongue enjoyed by the whole human race. C. S. Lewis made that the reason Ransom is sent to Venus. He’s previously been to Mars where he learned “Old Solar,” the tongue every sentient being in the solar system spoke before human beings fell.

         As the story of the tower of Babel in Genesis 11 teaches, our inability to communicate across differences of ethnicity and nationality is the result of sin. Pentecost shows that communication restored by the gift of the Holy Spirit through Jesus Christ. A splintered and fragmented humanity is reassembled and brought together in Jesus.

         Once again, the result is “much more” than the original creation. Everyone speaking the same language would have been a good thing. But everyone speaking different languages yet at the same time learning to love each other in Christ is much, much greater. It means a life, a kingdom where people talk to other in such a way that they don’t get into fights about games, or wars about all kinds of things. They speak in ways that help and heal rather than wound. In Christ there is the hope of human community where we hear and understand in each other and live together in peace.

         That new way of life, that new kingdom is what God created in and through the new Adam who is Jesus Christ. The grace to enter that kingdom is for all, for anyone who will place faith and trust in Jesus. It’s for you and for me. It’s for our friends and neighbors. When we accept  and share that grace, then the Holy Spirit arrives and the Church is born. The new Adam has many children. Amen.

Valley Covenant Church
Eugene/Springfield, Oregon
Copyright © 2011 by Stephen S. Bilynskyj