Hebrews Lesson 93
NKJ
1 Corinthians 10:13 No
temptation has overtaken you except such as is common to man; but God is faithful,
who will not allow you to be tempted beyond what you are able, but with the
temptation will also make the way of escape, that you may be able to bear it.
Well, before we get into technical details of Romans 5 we have a couple
of matters of contemporary interest to go over.
For those of you who haven’t heard about this yet, I thought that this
was something that people needed to be made aware of. As most of you know there is a lot of
legislative discussion about developing a bill on hate crimes. The hate crimes
legislation defines certain speech that is, as we will see in the second topic
of current events, certain speech is being hateful just because in the eyes of
our human viewpoint culture disenfranchises or marginalizes or doesn’t validate
somebody’s sin nature and their carnal responses. So there are all kinds of problems with hate
crimes legislation. We have certain legislators who have no idea of any kind of
absolutes who constantly try to slip this stuff in. So Senators Edward Kennedy (no surprise
there) and Gordon Smith who is a Republican from
The problem with this kind of hate crimes legislation is who defines
what hate is? Just the very idea gives
me pause. If somebody gets angry and
kills somebody isn’t that by definition a hate crime. This is a purely manipulative way to go after
certain people for what is considered politically incorrect sins. But, that’s not new in the history of this
country. There have been politically and
socially unacceptable sins going all the way back to slavery in the 19th
century that gained a certain stigma by certain segments of society and they
wanted to make it a broader category crime than what was necessitated. If something is criminal, it is criminal. That is all that needs to be said about
it. But we live in an era today when
nobody wants to hear the truth and if anybody there is a truth as opposed to
equally valid competing truths, then they are deemed the enemy of society.
If you saw it this last Saturday, if any of you still take this rag
called the Houston Chronicle, their religion section which has historically
been much better than most religion sections is probably the only thing I ever
look at in the paper. Whether I agree
with it or disagree with it, at least they try to be somewhat informative. They
had an article here and the big banner headline is “What is the most dangerous
idea in religion today?” Did y’all see
that? This is really good. Now they ask some very interesting people
what they thought the most dangerous idea in religion today is. You can pretty much predetermine what their
answers are going to be once you hear who they are if you are informed as to
who these people are.
The first person they ask is Rabi Harold Kushner. Now Rabi Harold Kushner shouldn’t even have
the term “rabbi” in front of his name because he is basically – he is famous
because he wrote the book on When Bad Things Happen to Good People. I remember looking at that years ago and his
answer is that bad things happen to good people because God can’t control
anything. He is this little bitty god
who doesn’t have any power and the poor thing he just doesn’t want bad things
to happen to good people but he is too impotent and he can’t do anything about
it. So that tells you a little bit about
him. The smaller god gets the bigger man
gets in anybody’s system. So that is his
view. What is his answer?
He says, “The most dangerous idea in religion today is ‘my religion is
right’. There is sense that in order for
me to be right everyone who disagrees with me is wrong.”
Well, that is what being right means.
If something is right it means that everything else is wrong. But what he doesn’t understand is that he is
making an equal assertion of truth and validity. His proposition that all things are right and
there is no one truth is just as dogmatic and just as dangerous and just as
exclusive of the Christian idea that there is only one truth as he deems
Christianity to be. So by his very
assumption that the idea that there is one truth i.e. my religion is right, he
has just said that the most dangerous idea in religion today is Jesus
statement,
NKJ
John 14:6 Jesus said
to him, "I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father
except through Me.
“If you believe that you are dangerous.
You are a danger to society.”
That is going to classify you one day as a hater. That will be a hate crime to say that there
is only one way to God because you are saying that he is wrong and people like
him. So that is his answer.
Now the second person they went to is another one of those people I love
to poke fun at because they are so easy to poke fun at if you come from a
Christian position and that is Deepak Chopra.
You can go down to the religion section of Barnes and Noble or Waldenbooks
or any of the bookstores and you’ll find all of his books there and people
think this simpering, sentimental self-promotion is so wonderful. You’ll never guess how he answers the
question.
He says, “The most dangerous idea is – my god is the only true god and
my religion is the only true religion.”
Gee, just like Rabi Kushner. This
guy is a Hindu.
Okay then, not to leave them out because we wouldn’t want to ignore the
Muslims because they are so peaceful they might blow up the newspaper so they
interview a man who I am unfamiliar with. Abdullah Amed An-Na’im is allegedly
an internationally recognized scholar of Islam and human rights. Of course he believes Islam is a peaceful
religion so he is not very much of a scholar of Islam. He doesn’t understand anything about human
rights – not starting with the Bible.
But he talks about the fact of the notion of superiority and exclusivity
is inherent to religious beliefs and it can be dangerous and not dangerous. So for him the whole idea of missionary work
is the most dangerous idea in the world.
So he just steps back because missionary work flows out of the idea that
I have the truth and you need to hear it.
So he is simply sidestepping the initial statement and going to a second
one. So everybody is against the
Christians.
They did go to a man fairly alert and fairly capable of expressing
himself and very well-educated. I happen to have met him on several
occasions. That is Dr. Richard Land who
is the head of the Southern Baptist Convention Ethics and Religious Liberties
Convention. He has a PhD from a Baptist
seminary as well as a PhD from
This is the direction of our culture when representatives of Judaism,
Hinduism, and Islam all basically agree that the biggest danger in religious
ideas today and is a veiled statement that they make. What they are really going after is
Christianity. So we live in an age today
when Christianity is under assault from every direction in the world.
As believers this is one of the reasons historically that you have to
understand apologetics because apologetics is that field of theology that
teaches you to defend and to give an answer for what you believe. That doesn’t mean that you have to give an
answer to the person next to you every time they say something that is wrong. It just means that you can put up your own
defense shields because you know what the truth is and you can articulate that
rationally to yourself and you understand why you believe what you believe
because Satan is always attacking in numerous fronts and we always have to be
prepared. So this is why Peter wrote
that we are always to be ready to give an answer – apologeia – for the
hope that is within us.
But, just as the early church in the early era of the church, you have
one of the first periods is known as the Age of the Apologists. When they break things down, you have the Age
of the Apostolic Fathers which aren’t the apostles but the group that knew the
apostles that comes right after them.
Then the Age of the Theologians and the Age of the Apologists come towards
the end of the second century and into the third century because as
Christianity spread out and began to impact the
Now let’s get into our passage in Romans 5. We are studying Romans 5:12-21 in order to
understand the answer to the question - how did sin originate and how is sin transmitted from Adam to the rest
of the race. In our passage in Hebrews 7
we have the statement that Levi paid tithes to Melchizedek while he was in the
loins of Abraham. So this has given rise as a proof text to a whole theology
based on both seminalism and based on traducianism. These theologies inform a lot of things. The thing about theology that is so
fascinating is because a lot of these ideas are assumptions that most people
never take out of the box and look at and yet it affects so many things. As I have been doing a lot of work on this
because there are some aspects of this some, questions of this that I have
never fully settled in my own mind so I am trying to settle those and see if I
can dot a few i’s and cross a few t’s that I haven’t dotted and crossed before
to see if I can unscrew a few more inscrutable things. It is difficult because very little has been
written and very little has been thought about it. For example today I took off the shelf a
commentary that I hadn’t had a chance to look at yet. It is written by a well-known contemporary
professor of theology at an evangelical school.
He has been teaching Romans for years.
It is not Dallas Seminary. He has
been teaching Romans for years and he has come out with about a 600-700 page
commentary on Romans which is considered one of the best. Yet when he comes to this issue in Romans
5:12-14 and he comes to address this issue of the transmission of sin and the
sin nature, he cites in two sentences the passage from Hebrews 7 without ever
investigating the mechanics. This is too
often what happens.
I always get questions. In fact I
have two by email this week related to commentaries where people ask me, “What
do you think about this commentary and what do you think about that
commentary?”
There are good things and bad things about every commentary. Those of
you who have been coming to the class that Ike is teaching on how to study the
Bible for yourself need to, are going to run into this in a couple of
weeks. He is going to start talking
about the kinds of resources you can go
to that as you are reading the Bible you ought to have some good resources that
you can go to just to answer some questions. You ought to have a good set of
Bible encyclopedias. You ought to have a
good single or two volume commentary. In
the past in terms historically speaking I would never recommend a one volume
commentary because with the exception of one recent set that came out in the
early 80’s and I am always amazed how many people don’t know about this. One set that came out in the early 80’s -
most commentaries have a general modus operandi. That is when they come to something
difficult, they ignore it.
So as soon as you are reading through a passage and say, “Wait a
minute. What does that mean and how does
that relate to this?”
You go and look at it and they completely ignore the whole issue. They go right passed it as if it doesn’t
exist. So that is standard operating
procedure.
Now in the early 80’s Dallas Theological Seminary published a two volume
commentary set called the Bible Knowledge Commentary. You have one volume on the New Testament and
one volume on the Old Testament. Each
book was written by a different professor at Dallas Seminary so there are some
that are a little weaker than others. I
know which ones those are because I personally know almost every contributor to
the Bible Knowledge Commentary because those men were my professors when
I was at
But you are going to run into problems.
For example I think Martin emailed me the other day to ask me about some
commentary notes that are out on the internet by Tom Constable who is a
professor at Dallas Seminary, been a professor of mine. I have a copy of those
notes on my computer. He is good in some
places; but he completely rejects the reference of Isaiah 14 to Satan (which is
what we are getting into on Sunday morning) and to Ezekiel 28 as Satan. Then he references John Martin who wrote the
Isaiah commentary in the Bible Knowledge Commentary. At some levels I am sure that on some
passages John did a fairly good job, but I also know that John had a position
as academic dean at Dallas Seminary in the 80’s and his unstated agenda was to
reshape the faculty at Dallas Seminary.
He was hiring new younger faculty members that were willing to question
the status quo of the Chafer-Walvoord-Ryrie view of theology and
dispensationalism. He got caught in some
problems in the late 80’s (fortunately) and he was removed. Otherwise he was on the fast track to become
the president of Dallas Seminary. He was
using… The second most powerful position on any school faculty is the academic
dean. Most people don’t know that
because he is in charge of hiring, firing and oversees the faculty. He determines many issues that are related to
what actually comes across in the classroom.
So he wrote the commentary on Isaiah.
But he rejects the view that Isaiah 14 relates to the fall of
Satan. We are going to cover a lot of
that on Sunday morning so I am not going to get off on that.
You have to realize that there is no one book that you can go to or one
commentary set where you …You always have to think. You always have your grid on and be thinking
about what you are reading. There are
great charts in there. There is a
tremendous amount of information. I
frequently go there and am amazed at how much they were able to cram into such
a small two volume commentary. I do
recommend that. Everybody should have
in their own personal library good 2 volume Bible commentary set, a good Bible
encyclopedia (three or four volumes) or a good Bible dictionary just as a
reference so that they can look up things when you are reading their Bible at
home.
They say, “Hmm..I wonder where that place is or wonder who that person
was or wonder what was significant about that?”
They have someplace that they can look and get answers to those basic
kinds of questions.
Well here we are in Romans 5: 12 and I just want to remind you a little
overview of the section that we went into last week. Verse 12 begins a comparison and contrast
between Adam’s sin and how it affects the human race and Christ’s work on the
cross and how it affects the human race.
As Paul begins to develop this, he sets up the first part of the
comparison and says, “Just as.”
Remember if you are doing a comparison you are going to say just as this
…so this. Well he never gets to the “so
this” until you get down to verse 18. As
he sets up the first part of the comparison “just as through one man sin
entered the world”, he recognizes that there are a lot of places people could
go incorrectly in this analogy, in this comparison and contrast between Adam’s
sin and it’s affect on the human race and Christ’s death and its affect on the
human race. So he stops. He abruptly pauses in the middle of this
comparison at the end of verse 12. That
is why you have the m- most English versions.
Then you have a parenthetical aside that is put in there in verse
13. I just noticed in my English Bible
they have the whole section from verse 13 down through verse 17 offset in
parenthesis. That is a good editorial
move to show people that Paul is stopping and he is on a rabbit trail – on an
anacoluthon – to explain a few things and to make sure people understand first
of all what sin and death is all about and how death spread because of sin in
verses 13 and 14. Then in 15 through 17
he is going to contrast Christ’s work and Adam’s sin. This is clear because of the initial
statements in verse 15 and verse 16.
Notice verse 15 begins:
NKJ Romans
See there are places you can’t go in this analogy. The free gift (that is Christ’s work) isn’t
like the offense of Adam in this way.
Then in verse 16 he says:
NKJ
Romans
That is the free
gift of salvation.
is
not like that which came through the one who
sinned.
So you have to be careful in your comparison and contrast between the
sin of Adam and the work of Christ.
There is only one particular area that he is focusing on and that is
that basically he is saying that as Christ (and His work on the cross) is the
person who is solely responsible for our salvation, Adam is the one who is
solely responsible for sin and the spiritual death of the human race. Let me say that again. He is saying that just as Christ is the only
person who is solely responsible for our salvation (It is not up to us. It is
His work on the cross that pays the penalty.) so Adam is the only one
responsible for sin and our spiritual death.
So he introduces the concept in verse 12 of death. He says:
NKJ
Romans
Now we looked at some of the aspects of this last time. I am not going
to review all of the exegesis. The main
question that we are answering here is – how did death spread to all men. Now one thing - I haven’t created a slide on
this at this point yet but we will bring it out later - you have the word
“death” used twice in this passage. Sin
is used three times. Death is used
twice. What is interesting in the Greek
is that every time in Romans 5 and Romans 6 that Paul uses the word death, he
puts it with the definite article. The
first time you see it that kind of strikes you.
“That’s interesting. Why did he
put the definite article here?”
Actually in Greek it is not definite because there is no indefinite
article, just the article. Why did he
put the article with the noun? What is
he trying to emphasize here? That is the point.
There are 10 or 12 different ways that Greeks use an article in grammar
and it is not always like we use the definite article in English to show that
something is definite as opposed to indefinite.
In Greek you have different meanings for your article so you have to
think about why he is doing this. I
stopped and did a study and realized that in Romans 5 and on into Romans 6 he
always uses that article. He is talking
about – he is emphasizing this death as a unique kind of death. It is not just any particular death. So we have to ask this question – how does
death spread to all men. He sets up the
analogy between the “just as” at the beginning and then he is going to break that. He introduces the word – let me go back to
here…
NKJ Romans
I pointed out last time that this word “thus” is houtos which
indicates what follows. Thus or that is
in this manner death spread to all men.
In what manner?
because all sinned
What you must understand there is they all sinned positionally in
Adam. So we would translate that:
Corrected translation: In this manner
(that is what I am about to explain) death spread to all men because all
sinned.
Sin is the cause; death is the result.
But, we have to take some time to understand this. We see it in the passage because you have a
chiasm here. Sin is mentioned first,
then death. Then death is mentioned
again and then sin. It sets up this
chiastic structure which puts the emphasis and draws our attention to the
middle element, whatever that is in the chiasm.
Here we have death. The focus
here is on that transmission of death from Adam to his progeny. So this occurs through one man.
We have something interesting here that I didn’t point out last
time. We have the Greek preposition dia
which is then used. If you noticed down
here the second verb I have in the lower part of this chart is dierchomai
which is a combination of the root verb erchomai meaning to go or to
come and dia as the preposition that is now prefixed to the verb. Dia is a preposition of distribution
as one of its nuances. So the point is
that anything that is distributed you are going to say that it goes through
something. That is where you would use
this particular preposition. So the
focus here is on how sin permeates the human race and as a result death, the
result of sin goes throughout the human race. This is a result of sin.
So thus in this manner death spread to all men because all sin.
There are two views as I pointed out on how this transmission
occurred. The first is seminalism.
Seminalism: The entire human race body and soul, was genetically
present in Adam. Thus according to
seminalism God considered every human being to be physically participating in
Adam's original sin and thus receiving the same penalty even though you weren’t
there. You are there physically and so
you are accountable.
The other view is federalism.
Federalism: The view that
Adam stood as the head and representative of the human race, Adam’s decisions
were on behalf of all humanity. God
viewed Adam’s sin as the act of all people through representation, and thus
Adam’s penalty is judicially imputed to all mankind.
This view is most consistently linked to the creationist view of the
origin and transmission of the soul. The
point that I am making it that – actually this isn’t an either-or. It is a both-and. In some ways, yes, we are all linked
together. The human race has a common
genetic unity and because of that common genetic unity we’re all equally
guilty. We’re all equally connected
biologically to Adam and to one another.
That biological, seminal connection also allows Jesus, the Second Person
of the Trinity, to become a human being and in the plan of salvation as a human
being he can die for everybody else in humanity. So you have to have that seminal connection.
That is true.
But, that is not all that there is it.
There is also the federal headship aspect that we are guilty because
Adam is our representative and that connects over to Jesus Christ
substitutionary work on the cross. He
can die for the rest of humanity because He is genetically related to the rest
of humanity, but He is representing us on the cross and so that ties to the federal
aspect. So they are both true and when
you look at it that way it flushes out your whole understanding of what the
dynamics of Adam as the first Adam and Christ as the Second Adam and what is
happening on the cross and why it had to happened that way.
We also looked at these views on the imputation of sin and I will come
back to discuss this other issue later but I
spent a good bit of time also studying the fact that between the
Pelagian view and the Augustinian view there were two other views that popped
up historically in the early church. One
was the semi-Pelagian view and one was the semi-Augustinian view; but I didn’t
think I would confuse you with all the technicalities of that as we go through
this because there are a lot of rabbit trails that get us away from the primary
thing that we are looking at right now.
The one thing I keep wanting to go back to here is that most people –
most evangelicals even though there is a huge rise of Calvinism in the last few
years – probably the vast majority of Christians in
The difference between the federal view and the even the seminal view
which I have here and classify as the Augustinian view is that sin and guilt
are imputed to every human being. That
is this third column over here.
Depravity is total; sin and guilt are imputed. That is true for both of those positions –
both seminalists and those who believe in federal headship agree on this.
What I mean by guilt – I thought about this after class last week
because most of you have been so brainwashed by Freudian emotionalism that when
you hear the word guilt what you think of is guilt feelings –feeling
guilty. That is not what we are talking
about here. We are talking about the
legal guilt of Adam’s sin. In the other
systems, that legal guilt only comes upon you if you sin. But in a biblical
view (and these two views) guilt is imputed to you at birth. You are legally guilty. Therefore that sin has to be paid for and of
course that leads to imputation of righteousness and justification. So these are all very important things to
understand as we try to understand the rich complexity of our salvation.
So we stopped last time with these four questions.
We looked at the first one last time by looking at the different words
for sin that we have in the Old Testament in Hebrew and in the New
Testament. All of these have to do – we
boil it all down to the fact that they all have to do with violating an
absolute objective standard. There is a
violation of an absolute objective standard and that standard is sometimes
mistakenly expressed as the law. But
that’s a confusing way. Some theologians
will talk about well, the law of God is just His character. But the law is an expression of His
character. It usually follows various
instances and too often when you just use the words “law of God” what is the
first thing that pops into your mind?
The Mosaic Law. So, it is a very
confusing thing. The standard is Gods’
character, His righteousness. We go back
to the teaching that we have had over and over again on the integrity of God
that the integrity of God is composed of His righteousness and His justice as
well as His love and His grace which is an outworking of everything. But, His righteousness is the standard of His
character. It’s the standard. That is the ideal. That is where we find that absolute external
objective standard.
It is the character of God and He reveals that character to mankind
progressively through the pages of Scripture. We start off in Genesis 1,
Genesis 2, and Genesis 3. As each
chapter goes by we learn more about God and who He is. So we start off defining sin as that which
violates and that which misses the standard of God’s character, God’s
righteousness. It is defined as
lawlessness as an act of disobedience, as unrighteousness, as a transgression
or the twisting of a standard. All of
these different words are used. So when
we summarized this last time I simply said that to summarize all that I said
that it is a violation of God’s character.
Now the first sin that entered the universe entered in through
Lucifer. I am not going to take the time
in our study here in Hebrews to go through the issues in Isaiah 14. If I were teaching this and I wasn’t covering
the same thing in Revelation on Sunday morning then I would do that. Those who are listening to the Hebrews
messages need to go over and listen to the angelic conflict special that I am
covering in Revelation on Sunday morning.
That is where I am going through Isaiah 14 and Ezekiel 28 and as I
pointed out both on Sunday morning and here is that we live in an era today
where so many things that you and I were taught what the Bible said when we
were younger are being questioned now by people we thought we trusted, by
schools we thought were orthodox, and they are shifting.
What is interesting is that I find that (you will probably agree with
me) – how many times do you see people change their views and all of a sudden
they go to this church and they say, “Well, I heard this new view.”
We just get enamored in new views.
“Well, so-and-so came along and he’s got a couple of doctorates and he’s
not as old as Dr. so-and-so or pastor so-and-so and he realizes that Isaiah 14
or Ezekiel 28 or both of them don’t talk about Satan. This is new stuff
therefore it must be better stuff. It
must be better scholarship.”
That is simply not true.
Sometimes we do come across new information, better information and as
we stand on the shoulders of those who went before us we are able to study,
think things through and come to a better understanding; but when you come
along and you are reinterpreting passages that have been understood by the vast
majority of solid orthodox theologians down through the centuries and now all
of a sudden you are coming along and saying,
“Those things don’t have to do with Satan at all.”
You’ve got a real problem. Wait a
minute! Maybe Genesis 3 doesn’t have to
do with Adam at all. Maybe that is just
a metaphorical figure for mankind and that’s all it is talking about,
Now see, you have entered a slippery slope and one thing is going to
lead to another. Now I am not saying
that everybody or anybody who believes that Isaiah 14 or Ezekiel 28 don’t refer
to the original sin of Satan are beginning to shift on Genesis 3. I am not saying that. I am saying that it opens the door to that
type of thing. In the study that I have
done several times now to the point that I am getting tired of having to go
back restudy this, but it is always helpful to do that…is that the vast
majority…it was almost a monolithic position in the early church that Isaiah 14
and Ezekiel 28 referred to Satan either typologically or directly. Luther and Calvin didn’t hold it. They taught it was historical - they referred
to the literal king of
The first thing it attacks usually is authorship of Scripture. The reason you always attack the traditional
view of the author of Scripture is because once you get it away from prophetic
authorship or apostolic authorship now you start to question the whole doctrine
of infallibility and inerrancy. These
things gradually begin to erode. I heard
of somebody who should be orthodox, I heard of them just teaching recently that
it wasn’t John the Apostle that wrote the book of Revelation or II John or III
John. It was John the Elder who is
another person. But, since we don’t know
who in the world John the Elder was (if he is a distinct person from the
Apostle John… If we don’t know who John
the Elder was then we no longer have him connected to the apostolic foundation
of the New Testament. The argument for
centuries has been that we know of the veracity of the New Testament because
all of the authors were either apostles or they were working with an apostle. Luke worked with Paul. Mark worked with Peter. So we have apostolic
verification. Ephesians
It was interesting. I heard this
last week and so I did some goggle on this on the internet the other day. One of the prominent proponents of this view
is a Roman Catholic theologian who doesn’t believe anything about the inerrancy
and infallibility of Scripture. His name
is Raymond Brown. He is considered to be
the modern Johannine scholar. He is the
expert. He doesn’t even believe the
Apostle John wrote the Gospel of John.
It was the Johannine community.
It was a committee effort by a bunch of his students. But he is considered to be the expert. So the whole idea that John the Apostle
didn’t write Revelation comes out of a group of theologians who question
inerrancy, infallibility, divine authorship of Scripture. So these things are very important to look at
because they tend to erode gradually over time and not in one felled
swoop. So I pointed out last time that
sin first entered the universe through this creature identified as Lucifer or
literally in the Hebrew Halel ben Shahar.
The second determinative sin of the universe is that of Adam. Adam’s sin impacts man in two basic areas,
first of all in the sin nature.
Something corrupts the nature of man at the instant that he sins. We call it spiritual death. He loses something in his makeup that on one
side gives him the ability to orient to God, to understand God and relate to
God. On the other hand it is not just a
loss.
If you come out of a Roman Catholic background, what you were always
taught was that sin was a privation.
That may be a new word to some of you but the first time I ran across
was when I was taking classes over at the
Did y’all get that email that was going around this week? Everybody was talking about how isn’t it sad
that the pope says we’re not a church.
We’re not going to heaven. He
doesn’t recognize us. This was another
papal announcement this last week that they are the only true church. Everybody else is just playing a game. I just thought you wanted to know that to
have a little chuckle.
So you have this sin nature that is not just the loss of righteousness
or the loss of a relationship to God but it is the positive gaining of evil and
an orientation of corruption that man is now corrupt and death enters into the
human race physically. There is a soul
corruption that comes from sin. There is
a physical and bodily corruption that comes from sin. This is passed on genetically. That’s the seminal side that we have talked
about. On the other hand there is guilt
that is passed on - genuine guilt. That’s the imputation side. So we have the sin nature which is passed on
genetically and we have the imputation of Adam’s guilt to that sin nature. That is a legal guilt that is imputed to us
at birth so that his disobedience is our disobedience. We are just as guilty as he is because he is
our federal head. This goes back to
understanding Genesis 2:17.
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Genesis
So we have to ask the question – what kind of death is this. Now you’ve all heard that this is spiritual
death. Most of your lives you have heard
this. This is spiritual death. Romans 5 I believe is talking about spiritual
death over against physical death because it uses this “the death”. Now I Corinthians 15 uses the same articular
construction with death; but the context is different because the contrast in I
Corinthians 15 is with resurrection.
Resurrection is bodily physical resurrection. It has to do with – the resurrection is in
contrast to physical death. So the
context of I Corinthians 15 tells us that the death that is being talked about
there is physical death. That’s not what
is being talked about in Romans 5. So
when you come to I Corinthians 15 “in Adam all die” we learn that death as
physical death enters into the universe with Adam’s sin. Therefore you can’t have all these geologic
ages preceding Adam with all the stratification and fossilization of dead
things prior to Adam because death as a principle comes into affect according
to I Corinthians 15 with Adam’s sin.
It’s clearly physical death there.
But this is not the case here. It
is talking “the death”. It is a totally
different passage, different context and it’s talking about death comes through
sin and this death spreads to all men.
So we have to ask the question – what kind of death is Paul talking
about here. Since I already introduced
the idea of creation – evolution, one thing you should think about. Most of you have become very well-educated in
the last few years on a lot of issues related to creation- evolution. It is one
of the key battlefield areas in worldview.
All of us need to keep up to date with these things. We need to be reading things that come out
from the Institute for Creation Research and their website is icr.org and
answersingenesis.org. But there are some
things that I would not agree with them on.
One of them is I keep running into when I read these creationists is
that they don’t want to take the penalty of sin as death - I mean as physical
death that Genesis 2:17 is talking about physical death.
I just scratch my head. In fact I
was talking with someone not long ago, a good friend of mine who is also a
theologian, well-known. I am not going
to mention his name because you all know him.
We were debating this and he said, “Where do you get this idea that this
is spiritual death in Genesis
I said, “Ephesians 2:1.”
Ephesians 2:1 is the key passage for trying to understand this concept
or validate this concept of spiritual death.
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Ephesians 2:1 And you He
made alive,
It is regeneration.
Who were what?
who were dead in trespasses and sins,
That’s not physical death. They
were dead in their trespasses and sins at the same time they were physically
alive. So there is a spiritual death in
contrast to a physical death that the first time you have physical death
mentioned in the early part of Genesis comes at the end of Genesis 3. Genesis 2 indicates that that death is going
to be immediate. That death is the
separation from God and that loss of something, that when somebody is
spiritually dead they are missing something.
At regeneration you are born again.
What happens at birth? Something
comes into existence, right? Well, for a
lot of theologians (this may surprise you) because they don’t think of
spiritual death the way you have been taught to think of it, they think of
regeneration mostly as an ethical change that takes place. It’s not that you get something you didn’t
have. Nothing comes into existence. It is just that you have this moral
reformation that takes place inside your soul so golly gee you are not going to
sin as bad as you used to.
All these things kind of connect theologically. I don’t have time to connect all the dots for
you. But that affects a certain segment
of the Lordship - Calvinist view of perseverance of the saints that when you as
a believer get regenerate then you are not going to commit certain sins. You are not quite as bad as you were before
you were saved. But, it is mostly a
nomenclature thing. It’s not a
substantive birth to something new in your nature that you didn’t have
before. The way we usually describe this
is that man is made up of three parts - a soul, a body and a spirit. The term human spirit is used especially in I
Corinthians 2 to describe that immaterial component of the makeup of man’s
person that allows him to relate to God and understand God and to communicate
with God and have fellowship with God.
That was lost at Adam’s fall. It
is gained in regeneration. That is what
is given birth to because you are born without it. Adam lost it and then he got it back. We never had it to begin with. We get it when we trust in Christ. In Genesis 3 you have the penalty for sin is
spiritual death. This is why Christ dies
on the cross, pays the penalty for sin before He dies physically.
He says, “It is finished.”
In John 19 when he describes the death John says, “And when it was finished
(tetelestia which is the perfect active indicative of teleo
meaning it is finished) John just to make sure we get the point he says, “When
it was finished, Jesus said, ‘It is finished.’”
There is that repetition there.
Twice it is stated. John says it
and Jesus says it.
When it was finished, Jesus said, “It was finished.”
That indicates that nothing more can be done. The physical death did not add to the
payment for sin. Genesis 3 talks about
the consequences. When God calls to Adam
and comes and gets a confession from Adam as to what happened, basically he
blamed the woman and she blamed the serpent and then God told them how this
would affect them.
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Genesis
Does it talk about physical death there?
No. If physical death is the penalty,
then that is what you would be getting there.
I am making this distinction.
Then he goes on to talk to the serpent.
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Genesis
This is the first mention of the gospel called the proto
evangelium. To the woman he says:
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Genesis
Is death mentioned anywhere there?
God said the penalty was death in Genesis 2:17. But He never mentions death when He talks
to the woman. He talks about the
consequences now of spiritual death, that number 1 it is going to affect the
command to multiply and fill the earth.
Now that process is going to involve sorrow and pain. Instead of the husband and wife working
together as a team, she would desire to dominate him and to impose her will and
her agenda on him and he would do the same.
When you have two unrestrained sin natures living together in a house
without any doctrine, each person is going to try to dominate the other person
and impose their agenda on the other person.
That is the result of the fall.
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Genesis
Why did he curse the ground?
Because he told Adam his responsibility was to take care of the ground,
the garden. So his work environment now
becomes toilsome. It isn’t that he
didn’t have work or responsibility before the fall; it is that now that work is
going to become toilsome.
I am not going to ask for any men to say, “Amen.”
There are going to be thorns and thistles produced by the soil and make
it difficult. It is going to be by the
sweat of your face, you shall eat bread.
It is now going to be difficult.
How many people are faced continuously with financial problems that
ultimately come back to work and employment issues?
Finally he says:
NKJ Genesis 3:19
In the sweat of your face you shall eat bread Till you return to the ground,
For out of it you were taken; For dust you are, And to dust you shall
return."
That is our first mention of physical death. It is listed with all the other consequences
of spiritual death. So “the death” that
definite article used with death is a reference to spiritual death in Romans
5. This is what gets passed on to all
members of the human race. So we go back
to Romans 5 and Paul says:
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Romans 5:12 Therefore,
just as through one man sin entered the world, and spiritual death
through sin, and thus spiritual death spread to all men, because all
sinned --
He breaks it off but what he is talking about is that all sinned in
Adam’s sin. That will become clear as we
get into verses 16, 17 and 18.
NKJ Romans 5:17
For if by the one man's offense death reigned through the one, much more those
who receive abundance of grace and of the gift of righteousness will reign in
life through the One, Jesus Christ.)
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Romans
It reinforces this idea of Adam’s sin being the determinative
thing.
So we will come back next time and we will get a little further (I was
hoping we would get there tonight but we didn’t) into verses 13 and 14 and try
to understand this parenthesis and the qualifications Paul is putting on his
comparison.