The Reign of Sin and Death

[0:00] Let's take a seat for a moment as you find Romans chapter 5 in your Bibles.

[0:21] If you're using one of the Bibles that we have left around in the chairs for you, Romans chapter 5 will be on page 942 of those Bibles. We have been now in Romans for several months and we are at a very interesting portion of Romans.

[0:36] Here in chapter 5, we're going to be reading this morning the second half of chapter 5, beginning in verse 12, and we'll read all the way down to the end in verse 21. If you're visiting with us, then one of the things that we like to do as we read the Word of God together here is we like to stand together in honor of God's Word and reverence.

[0:53] So I want to ask you guys all to stand as we read. The Apostle Paul begins in verse 12 and tells us, Therefore, just as sin came into the world through one man, and death through sin, and so death spread to all men because all sin.

[1:10] 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 transgression of Adam, who was a type of the one who was to come.

[1:24] But the free gift is not like the trespass, for if many died through one man's trespass, much more have the grace of God and the free gift by the grace of that one man, Jesus Christ, abounded for many.

[1:37] And the free gift is not like the result of that one man's sin, for the judgment following one trespass brought condemnation, but the free gift following many trespasses brought justification.

[1:49] For if because of one man's trespass death reigned through that one man, much more will those who receive the abundance of grace and the free gift of righteousness reign in life through the one man, Jesus Christ.

[2:02] Therefore, as one trespass led to condemnation for all men, so one act of righteousness leads to justification in life for all men. For as by the one man's disobedience the many were made sinners, so by the one man's obedience the many will be made righteous.

[2:17] Now the law came in to increase the trespass. But when sin increased, grace abounded all the more, so that as sin reigned in death, grace also might reign through righteousness, leading to eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord.

[2:33] What a beautiful, intricately written passage we have here before us, Father. We ask that the same Spirit who inspired Paul to write these words would give us understanding that goes beyond our own mental capacities and would give us a bending and a kneeling before this passage that goes beyond the abilities of our hearts.

[2:59] I pray this in Jesus' name. Amen. You guys be seated. There was a movie that came out, I don't know how many of you saw it, several years ago.

[3:11] It was about King Arthur. I think it was just called Arthur. That's a clever name for a movie about King Arthur. But as are so many movies, it was a lot of invention in that movie.

[3:23] But of course when you're dealing with a historical account that really we know very little about in the first place and we're not 100% sure that the cast of characters in that story really all existed anyway, you can have a little bit of creative license when you're telling the story.

[3:38] And so there was this movie about King Arthur that came out and really kind of about the founding of Camelot and the beginning of Arthur's reign and all those sorts of things. And most people that I talked to actually enjoyed the movie and liked the movie and yet I walked out of the movie theater really, really irritated.

[3:56] I wasn't irritated because it was so, because it was historically inaccurate because we don't know the history and you know going into the movie is mostly made up stuff anyway. I was irritated because in the movie there's mention made that Arthur himself has a hero.

[4:11] That he has someone that he's patterning his thinking, his ideology after. He's got someone from the past that he himself is taking cues from and the man's name was Pelagius.

[4:23] Now I don't expect many of you to ever have heard of Pelagius at all, but he was a monk in the British Isles several centuries ago. But what's significant about Pelagius is that he was in fact a false teacher, that he was condemned by the church as a whole, as a false teacher and as a heretic.

[4:44] One of the things that Pelagius taught that I think probably if you were to repeat this teaching to most people today, most people and most Christians, most churchgoers included, would probably not have a whole lot of objections to it.

[4:59] Yet it was part of the reason that he was condemned by the church. Pelagius taught that all people come into the world in the same basic condition in which Adam came into the world.

[5:11] All people come into the world possessing, he believed, the ability to go right or left, to choose good or bad. And that we are basically, when the moment that we're conceived and born, that Pelagius believed that human beings are basically good, and that we only become sinful and corrupted because of our choices, and because of the corruption in society around us that influences him.

[5:34] In a way, Pelagius taught that every human being that is born is sort of their own Adam. Another Adam. Every time a baby comes into the world, you have a new Adam with a clean slate.

[5:49] And yet, that's not what the Apostle Paul teaches. In fact, the Apostle Paul teaches us that there aren't many Adams, but that there are only two Adams. There are only two men, ultimately, that determine the destinies of humankind.

[6:03] There are only two men, really, that can claim the title of Adam. And here, in this passage, he draws a contrast between these two men. You saw, as we were reading through it over and over, how often he refers to the one man.

[6:17] Over and over and over throughout this passage, he cites that. The one man. Sometimes in reference to Adam. Sometimes in reference to Jesus. Because his goal in this passage is to compare and contrast Adam's work with Christ's work.

[6:34] Adam's fall with the redemption provided in Jesus. You can see that pretty clear. I want you to take a look at the passage real quickly. At the end of verse 14, he mentions Adam.

[6:45] And he says that Adam was a type of the one who was to come. Adam is a type of the one who was to come. That is, Jesus.

[6:56] Now, we don't use this language very often today. We don't talk very often about something that is a type of something else in the future. But the biblical writers think this way. They think in terms of types.

[7:09] And a type, really, in the Bible is a person or thing in the Old Testament that corresponds to and points ahead to a person or thing in the New Testament.

[7:22] And the thing in the New Testament is always better and greater than the person or thing in the Old Testament. So, a good example of this, one that's not difficult to understand, is the story of the Passover.

[7:34] When God delivered the Israelites from the land of Egypt and He rained the ten plagues down upon the Egyptians, the last plague that He rained down upon them was the death of every firstborn of every household in Egypt.

[7:47] And yet, God provided a way for Israel, for the people of God, to escape that judgment. It wasn't that Israel didn't deserve the same fate as the Egyptians.

[7:57] It's that God provided a means by which they might escape His judgment upon them. And the means that He provided was a lamb. He told the Israelites through Moses that every family should slaughter a lamb and then take the blood of the lamb and spread it on the doorposts.

[8:14] And then, as the angel of the Lord passed through the land of Egypt, when He saw the blood on the doorposts of the Israelites, He would pass over those homes and death would not be inflicted upon those homes.

[8:28] That's why it's called the Passover, which the Jews celebrate to this day every year as they look back upon that event in which God rescued them and delivered them out of Egypt. But the lamb that was slain, the Passover lamb, the blood that was spread upon the doorposts of the people of Israel, signifies, it points toward Jesus in the New Testament who is called the Lamb of God slain for the sins of the world.

[8:55] So that the lamb in the Old Testament, the Passover lamb is, we would say, a type of Christ. It points to Jesus, and yet the sacrifice of Christ far supersedes anything that the Passover lamb was able to do.

[9:15] The Passover lamb represents what Christ would do ultimately in the future. So anytime in the Old Testament you have a person or thing or an event or institution that points ahead to a person or thing in the New Testament under the New Covenant that corresponds in some way, there is a similarity there.

[9:34] Jesus sheds His blood just as the lamb's blood was slain. The Spirit of God inflicting God's judgment passes over those covered by the blood of the lamb just as He passes over those covered by the blood of Christ.

[9:44] There is a correspondence there, yet there are differences, clear differences. And the New Covenant, anti-type as it's called, is the fulfillment of the type.

[9:58] And so we have here in Romans chapter 5 the use of this language of a type, or sometimes we call it typology. And as we begin to dig into the comparison and contrast that Paul makes between the two Adams, between the first man Adam and Jesus Christ, we begin to wade into some deeper waters.

[10:18] We begin to dig a little bit more deeply than we've dug so far in the book of Romans. Which might be surprising to you, because thus far in the first four and a half chapters of Romans, we've dug pretty deeply at times.

[10:30] It feels like at times that we're covering a lot of ground in more depth than we're used to covering it. We have done that in terms of Romans chapter 1 through the first half of chapter 3, when we've really looked at the sinfulness of man, and the depth of man's sin, and the problem of man's sin, and God's wrath upon man's sin.

[10:50] We've dug in as we looked at how Christ solves the problem of our sins that we have committed. And we've looked at Jesus as an atoning sacrifice. We've looked at how the sacrifice of Jesus upholds the righteousness of God.

[11:02] I mean, those are not simple concepts. Those are not easy things. And some of you have no idea what I'm talking about. So go back. Listen to the sermons online. All right? And review things.

[11:14] But we've waded into deeper waters. We've put our shovels into the ground. And we've dug in a little bit. But here now, we begin to go a bit deeper.

[11:25] And I think that it's worth it, because I think that you find the best and most precious treasures the deeper that you dig. You don't often find gold on the surface of the ground.

[11:37] You find it deep within the mountain. And so we have to dig a little bit deeper this morning. And we're not even going to finish this morning. It's going to take us at least two weeks, maybe three weeks, to get through everything that Paul is telling us here about the correspondence between these two atoms.

[11:53] Because what Paul is talking about here is what has come to be known by theologians and throughout church history as the doctrine of original sin.

[12:05] Now, that terminology in and of itself sometimes throws us. I know that when I was younger and I heard the term original sin, which seemed like a strange concept to a young Baptist kid who never heard anything about that.

[12:17] I thought that was something that other churches taught until I found it clearly in the Bible and within Baptist history. But it seems a strange thing. And I thought that the term original sin, I thought that it simply referred to Adam's sin of eating the fruit from the tree in the garden.

[12:34] I thought that that's what original sin referred to. And yet, that is not what we're talking about here. That's not what the term refers to. Original sin refers not so much to the first sin that Adam committed as it refers to all the effects that flow out of that sin upon all of Adam's descendants, which is you and me.

[12:55] So we're coming to understand here in this passage the effects of Adam's sin upon us. This is deeply personal. This is not merely about events that took place millennia ago.

[13:08] This affects us. This tells us who we are. This tells us how we might have hope to move beyond who we are. And so we need to look and understand this doctrine from this passage.

[13:23] So let me try to, before we dive in here to Romans 5, let me briefly try to summarize for you the doctrine of original sin. Really, you can break it down into three parts, okay?

[13:33] The doctrine of original sin teaches us, number one, that because of Adam's sin, we are all born now with a sinful nature.

[13:44] That we don't come into the world as blank slates as Pelagius would have us believe, but we actually come into the world with a bent towards sin.

[13:56] We are born sinful. That's who we are. So that's the first point that the doctrine of original sin would teach us. Secondly, the doctrine of original sin teaches us that because of Adam's sin, all of his descendants are doomed to die.

[14:12] It's not just Adam who died for his sin. God told Adam, in the day that you eat this fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, you will die. And yet, it was not Adam alone who was consigned to death when he ate the fruit from the tree.

[14:27] It was all of his descendants. So that death is universal. You don't escape death. It is more certain than taxes. You can evade taxes and flee the country, but you can't go anywhere in the world or the universe where death will not find you.

[14:42] We're all going to die. It is universal. In all of the Old Testament, there are only two people who escape death and they're there only to point us toward the one who would defeat death, Jesus.

[14:55] So that death is universal. The writer of Hebrews says in Hebrews 9, 27, that it is appointed for every man to die. We will face death because of Adam's sin.

[15:08] And then thirdly, the doctrine of original sin teaches us that because of Adam's sin, we will endure condemnation. Judgment comes not only upon Adam for his sin, but upon all of Adam's descendants for his sin.

[15:24] So I need to show you these things from the text. Now, let me say out front that this passage in Romans chapter 5 emphasizes and explicitly teaches two of those three points, whereas one of them it merely assumes and sort of hints at.

[15:42] It gives us hints in that direction, but it doesn't teach specifically upon it. But two of those three aspects of the doctrine of original sin are laid out for us very clearly in this passage.

[15:54] So I want to look at them in order. The first I want to consider from this passage and see where I think it's hinted at but not necessarily clearly taught is this idea that we are all born with a sinful nature.

[16:06] We all inherit from Adam his fallen nature. When he sinned, something changed in Adam. Not merely physically in that he was consigned to die, but something changed in his heart.

[16:18] Something changed in who he was and he became sinful. Not merely a sinner because of what he had done, but now a sinner because of who he is.

[16:28] And he passes that trait on to all of his descendants. Let me show you where I think it may be hinted at here in the text and then we'll move on to the other two aspects of original sin.

[16:43] Verse 12. Notice verse 12 says, Therefore, just as sin came into the world through one man, that's Adam, and death through sin, and so death spread to all men because all sin.

[16:58] Now, the single most difficult part of this passage is the word translated because here near the end of verse 12. Notice how it says it. Death spread to all men in the English Standard Version, which I preach from regularly.

[17:12] Death spread to all men because all sin. Now, that's actually a translation of two words in the original Greek. Greek. And those two words are somewhat difficult to render into English because we're not exactly sure what Paul meant by those words.

[17:32] And there have been three different ways that people have really translated them throughout history. Number one, and one way that became very famous because this is the way that St. Augustine understood these words, is St. Augustine took these two words in a somewhat literal sense to mean in him.

[17:48] So that Augustine would translate this and he was relying on a Latin translation that essentially says that death spread to all men because all sin in him.

[17:59] And so he's like, well, who's the him? The only him in the passage is the one through whom sin came, Adam. And so Augustine taught, and many theologians have taught, that this verse teaches us that death spreads to all people because all people in Adam sinned.

[18:16] That we were in Adam, that we participated in Adam's sin. And I think that that's true. I think that's a true statement and we could see it from several other places in Scripture. I think that's true, but I don't think that's necessarily what this verse is saying.

[18:29] I don't think that that's the best way to translate this particular phrase. And so many people translate it as because. They take it as sort of an idiomatic expression that means so that or because of this.

[18:45] And so in that interpretation which we see in the ESV, sin results in death. So that it says that death spread to all men because all individually sinned.

[18:58] So if you translate it as because oftentimes people will take this to mean that everybody dies because everybody sins. That also is a true statement. The wages of sin is death and all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God.

[19:12] that is a true statement. But again I'm not quite sure that that's the best way to translate this phrase here. In fact I think if you translate this phrase in the most literal sense in which you can it would come out something like this.

[19:27] That death spread to all men in which all sinned or upon which all sinned. What does that mean? Death spread to all men or all people upon which in which all sinned.

[19:44] I think the point being made here is that not only does death result from sin but sin also results from death. That the condition in which all sinned the condition that led to all people committing sins was the fact that death came into the world.

[20:06] Death came in through Adam's sin and we are all consigned to death and because we are all consigned to death in that condition all people have now personally sinned.

[20:17] I think that's the best way to understand that particular phrase which means that death here means more than simply physical death because there's no reason to think that physical death in and of itself is automatically going to lead you to sin but I think that Paul has primarily physical death in mind but layered in on top of that or perhaps beneath that is the idea of spiritual death that we are all because of Adam's sin death spreads to all of us in not only a physical sense but in a spiritual sense this is exactly what Paul means in Ephesians chapter 2 when he says that we are all born dead in our transgressions and sins born we come into this world we are apart from Christ dead in our trespasses and sins we are spiritually dead I think perhaps that might be what Paul is hinting at at the end here of verse 12 so that we do have the assumption of the passing on of spiritual death or spiritual depravity or a sinful nature to all of

[21:29] Adam's descendants a hinting at it but it's not the apostles main point in this passage rather he would have us understand how death and judgment come upon us because of Adam's sin notice all the places in this passage where he refers to Adam's death as a result of Adam's sin verse 12 sin came into the world through one man and death through sin and so death spread then look down at verse 15 he says in the middle of that verse many died through one man's trespass and if you move down to verse 17 he says death reigned through that one man so over and over he says that death comes into the world because of the one man Adam's sin that's why death comes to us death exists in the world and death comes to all of Adam's descendants precisely because of what

[22:30] Adam did notice the emphasis over and over upon the one man's sin or the one man's trespass verse 15 many died through one man's trespass he even says in verse 17 and again earlier in verse 14 that death reigns death has a supreme reign in this world as I said you cannot escape it but if you ask why why is death so universal why can we not escape death why is everyone bound to die at some point in time the ultimate answer to that question is because of Adam's sin because of the trespass of the one man trespass of the one but it's not death alone that comes to us because of his trespass it's also that third aspect of the doctrine of original sin judgment or condemnation you see it a few times here as well look at verse 16 the free gift is not like the result of that one man's sin for the judgment following one trespass brought condemnation it doesn't just bring death it also brings condemnation condemnation underline highlight that word if you want verse 18 one trespass led to here it is again condemnation for all men and then he says something a verse later in verse 19 that I think has the same basic meaning the same basic import he says in verse 19 by the one man's disobedience by Adam's disobedience the many were made sinners now that sounds to us in

[24:18] English like he's saying that we were given a sinful nature we were turned into sinners but that's not actually the meaning of the Greek here the Greek indicates that we were put into the status of being a sinner this is a word that's often used to describe the appointment of leaders if you appoint somebody to a leadership position you give them the status of leader well Paul is saying here that because of Adam's sin we now have the status of sinner before God we stand because of what Adam did we as Adam's descendants stand as sinners therefore condemned so that death comes to us because of Adam's sin and judgment and condemnation come to us because of Adam's sin and we don't like that kind of talk we don't like this kind of message number one it's kind of depressing and dark when you talk about sin as often as we're forced to talk about as we go through the book of Romans but number two we don't think this way we're very individualistic in our thinking it strikes us as strange and even wrong that anyone would suffer for someone else's sin for someone else's misdeed that seems very odd very strange to us and we don't understand it because of our mindset we live in America we're a part of western culture and western culture is by its very nature individualistic every man for himself you determine your own way you decide by your actions you determine whether you will be a failure or a success everything is very very individualistic in our thinking but that's not the way that the biblical writers always think yes there's an important place for individual responsibility throughout scripture but there's also the idea that's often called corporate solidarity the the idea that we are all in a sense connected to one another we are all one and more specifically that the actions of someone who is appointed as a leader a head of a group of people that those actions have consequences for the whole group that in a sense we are guilty of the sins of those who are over us as our head we can see this throughout the

[26:43] Old Testament in a number of places often times the kings of the Old Testament the kings of Israel are considered a kind of head and father for all of the nation and when the king does evil it's not just the king who suffers for his sin but it's the entire nation that suffers for his sin so for instance you don't have to turn there but in 2 Samuel chapter 24 David violates God's will by taking a census of the people of Israel I don't know why God did not want David to take a census of the people but he did not and David violates God's command and God's will by taking a census of the people and so God comes in judgment upon David and he says David you have two choices you can you can suffer the nation can suffer famine for three years or they can suffer pestilence for three days your choice David notice neither of those directly involves only David himself they're all about the nation so David chooses pestilence for three days because three days sounds better than three years and as a result of the pestilence 70,000

[27:50] Israelites died and we would say that's not right they didn't do anything David did it but David is their head David is the king and they are in a sense in David and they participate in David's sin in a way that we find very very difficult to understand I'll point you to another place in the Old Testament in Leviticus chapter 4 not about the king but about the high priest the other most significant leader in ancient Israel says that if the anointed priest Leviticus 4 3 says if the anointed priest sins thus bringing guilt on the people then he shall offer for the sin that he has committed a bull from the herd so if the priest sins he brings guilt upon whom not merely himself he brings guilt upon the people as a whole again that that doesn't make a lot of sense for us but the Bible the Bible contains this concept of corporate solidarity of the head of a group representing the entire group and the group itself being in some mysterious sense contained within the head so that what he does they are also guilty of let me show this to you in one place in the

[29:10] New Testament because sometimes I think that we are wrongly we are skeptical of things we hear from the Old Testament we shouldn't be it's the word of God but we are I think many times well that's Old Testament stuff we shouldn't worry about that in the New Testament but notice the writer of Hebrews upholds this concept Hebrews chapter 7 where the writer looks back in the Old Testament of course but he looks back to Abraham and Abraham's encounter with a priest called Melchizedek and he says in verse 9 that after when Abraham paid a tithe to Melchizedek he says in verse 9 one might even say that Levi himself now Levi the head of the tribe of Levi which was they were the priests for all of Israel one might even say that Levi himself who receives tithes so the people of Israel pay tithes to the temple so the tribe of Levi receives tithes one might even say that Levi himself who receives tithes paid tithes through

[30:16] Abraham for he was still in the loins of his ancestor when Melchizedek met him Levi is in Abraham and therefore Abraham's act of paying tithes is counted as Levi himself paying tithe to Melchizedek and the point of that for the writer of Hebrews is to say that Melchizedek is a superior priest to all the Levitical priests that's the point but he proves that by way of proving that Levi was in Abraham doing what Abraham did long before Levi was ever born and his father was even born that concept informs much of what the Bible has to say about our relationship with the rest of humanity and the Bible holds out Adam to be the head of the entire human race and we are all mysteriously in some sense considered counted reckoned to be in

[31:18] Adam so that when Adam sinned in the garden it was not merely the sin of a distant ancestor it was your sin and it was my sin we in Adam participated in the fall in the garden and as much as we might in our American western mindset find that disconcerting nevertheless that truth explains a great many things that we see in the world around us in fact I heard one writer said that the doctrine of original sin is one of the most difficult doctrines to explain and yet it more than any other doctrine explains much of what we see in the world around us so we need to understand original sin to understand the world it's just difficult to understand original sin so let me let me just suggest we'll we'll get to the rest of this passage next week and the week following but I don't want to go on forever and I've given you a lot to chew on and think about

[32:25] I don't want to overload you with too much to think about this morning so let me just suggest a handful of ways in which this truth of Adam's sin counted as our sins and us being in Adam and inheriting a sinful nature and death and condemnation from Adam let me just suggest a handful of ways that that can help us to make sense out of our lives in this world number one it helps us to see why there is in fact so much evil in the world just turn on your television or read the newspaper and you will see that we do not live in a world that is populated by basically good people that's not possible we live in a world that is populated by people with a bent towards sin and violence and destruction that's the world that we live in that's why it is so easy for ISIS to recruit people from nations all over the world the media wants to find all sorts of reasons why people would be willing to join up with such a violent group well they were loners well they were outcasts well they felt this they felt left out of where they were but the root bottom cause of that is the fact that we all have a sinful nature and it seeks expression in the world and so we live in a world in which we express our sinful natures to varying degrees so that the world is full of varying degrees of evil some of it heinous in our eyes some of it we dismiss because it's our own sin and we think it's not a big deal but the doctrine of original sin with its view of passing on the spiritual death that Adam earned with its view of passing on to us a sinful nature helps us to understand the world in which we live but not just in a broad sense like that like understanding the world it helps us to understand ourselves and people around us if you are a parent the doctrine of original sin will help you to not feel like such a failure of a parent when your toddler blatantly disregards everything that you say because if you think my kid came into this world as a blank slate and now they are not even two and they are defying me you think where have

[34:52] I gone wrong maybe you have gone wrong somewhere but more importantly than that is the fact that your little baby is in fact a sinner comes into this world with a sinful nature in fact I found this a little bit humorous that I came across this week it's in a book called the first three years of life written by I mean he's not a Christian but he's considered to be an expert in the field of early childhood development his name is Burton White and listen to what he writes it's kind of funny he says from 15 to 16 months on a baby's self-awareness becomes more substantial something in his nature we don't fully understand will lead him to deliberately try each of these forbidden activities specifically to see what will be allowed and what won't in other words he will begin systematically to challenge the authority of the adult he lives with resistance to simple requests becomes very common he says that there's something in a child's nature that we don't fully understand that leads every child to rebel against authority to which I would say

[36:06] Christian theologians have greatly understood this for 2000 years this is not a great mystery to us we have been telling people over and over that all of us inherit a sinful nature from Adam and a part of your job as a parent is not merely to teach right things to your kids but it is to counter the very nature that they have I know they look cute they look innocent and they look sweet but if you tell them not to put their finger in an outlet they will immediately put their finger in an outlet as soon as you turn your head because that's who they are and that's who you are this doctrine can help us make sense of the world but it can help us make sense of things much closer to home it really can it also helps us to understand the universal reign of death I know that we we read Romans 6 23 the wages of sin is death and that explains why I need to die

[37:10] I sin it's payment due for me I understand that it explains for you why you and all the adults that you know why they should suffer death because the wages of their sin that they committed are death the Bible says but the reality is that death death is far far more pernicious than that it does not merely come to those who have in themselves committed sins in their lives it comes in the womb it comes to very small children before they even reach the stage at which they're ignoring their parents it is truly universal and it strikes in every stage of life and apart from the doctrine of original sin the universal sway of death particularly over those who are either too young to understand right from wrong or over those who do not have the mental capacity to understand right from wrong death for them is incomprehensible apart from the doctrine of original sin but the doctrine of original sin tells us that they die not because of their own sins but because of the sins of our head and father

[38:31] Adam it begins to make sense out of our experience not only of sinful things in the world and sinful things in our lives but it begins to make sense out of the presence of death in every area of life that we encounter helps us to make sense out of it but I think most important and we're going to dwell on this in a couple of weeks most importantly the doctrine of original sin helps us to better understand the work of Christ on the cross and exactly what it is that Jesus has accomplished in his death and resurrection because we were cherry picking out of this paragraph as we went along throughout this sermon but read it in its entirety read the parts that we skipped the whole point is not merely to teach us about Adam and the consequences of his sin for us it is to teach us about how Christ has overcome all of those consequences verse 15 the free gift is not like the trespass much more has the grace of

[39:41] God and the free gift by the grace of that one man Jesus Christ abounded for the many verse 16 the free gift is not like the result of that one man's sin but the free gift following many trespasses brought justification verse 17 much more will those who receive the abundance of grace and the free gift of righteousness reign in life through the one man Jesus Christ verse 18 so one act of righteousness leads to justification in life for all men verse 19 by the one man's obedience the many will be made righteous verse 21 grace might reign through righteousness leading to eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord Christ in his life and death and resurrection has done all that is necessary to deal a death blow to death itself and all the other consequences of Adam's sin you are condemned for Adam's sin in the garden fine you are justified and declared righteous on the basis of Christ's obedience throughout his life and ultimately on the cross

[40:46] I will take condemnation in Adam all day long if it gives me life and justification in Christ I will take it so that understanding the doctrine of original sin gives you a deeper more complete understanding of what Jesus has actually really accomplished on the cross let's pray