Hebrews Lesson 95
NKJ Acts
We are in Romans 5:12 and we’ve been working our way
into this trying to answer the question related to the transmission of sin and
guilt in the human race. This is a very important issue because the very
root of this has to do with how believers handle the guilt of sin and personal
sin. After salvation of course, that is related to confession and I John
1:9. But this is such a problem for so many Christians.
In fact, recently there was a young man from our
extended congregation who attended (I will say) a Christian conference.
He spent a couple of weeks there. It was mostly high school, college age
people there at the conference. The leader of his group was college aged
kid. He said that they were so caught up with dealing with their own
personal sins. Everybody seemed to be so overwhelmed with guilt and so
focused on the fact that they committed sin and what could they do about
this? And nobody understood the principle of I John 1:9 and nobody
including the group leader really had a good handle on how the cross really
wipes out the condemnation of sin and how we are free and have liberty in
Christ and rather than focusing on the sin and the failure, focus on the grace
provision of God. It just comes down to a failure to understand a lot
of things that we have in passages like this. It is because these things
are not taught very well today in many cases.
As I was studying this and working through a number of
issues, one of the commentaries that I consulted which is a recent commentary
by a well-known professor at an evangelical seminary makes the comment that
this is the position of the vast majority of scholars. The basic
understanding of Romans 5 is that it relates to sin and guilt, but it is not
taught today because everybody is so afraid they are going to teach something
and somebody won’t quite understand it and they won’t come back. So they
just keep watering everything down. These are the kind of passages you
can’t water down. It takes a lot of time to work through them because as you
initially read a passage like this in the English it seems to us that it is
saying one thing when in fact it is saying something else. But we get confused
because of the way we use a lot of terms in our everyday Christian American
evangelical jargon and we don’t use them the same they are used scripturally or
biblically number one and number 2 in the Scripture there is a certain
ambiguity that is only resolved if you stop and think logically about what is
being said. Then it clears itself up. For example as we get into
Romans
NKJ Romans
Now frankly there are a couple of things in here that
can be clarified by amplifying the translation based on the original
language. But before we get into that let me just remind you of the
overview of this section.
Verse 12 begins this comparison and contrast between
the entry of sin into the human race through one man and salvation through the
one Man, the Lord Jesus Christ. So there is the comparison and contrast
between the first Adam and the Second Adam.
In verses 13 and 14 we have an aside that begins, that
deals with the issue of sin and death and qualifies what kind of sin and death
he is talking about. Therein lies part of the confusion, because the word sin
is used three ways in the New Testament. You have Adam's original sin,
the sin nature and personal sin. And then death is used at least 7
different ways in Scripture to describe physical death, spiritual death,
positional death, carnal death - all these different kinds of death that you
have in the Scripture that we have gone over in the past. You have to stop
and think what we are talking about here.
Then when we come to the passages such as the end of
the verse or phrase where it says “because all sinned” - is that personal sin
or is that a corporate sin that was a sin in Adam. The understanding that
this is a corporate sin in Adam is what I referred to a minute ago. That
is the correct understanding, the proper understanding of the vast majority of
Bible expositors down through the centuries. Just a minority have
diverged from that trying to make it personal sin. We will talk about
that a little bit more as we go through the class tonight. The basic problem if
you make it personal sin, then condemnation is related to your personal
sin. That is a heavy burden to bear. This passage rejects that
whole idea that your condemnation is based on your personal sin. Yet so
many Christians or unbelievers are caught up with the fact that God is
condemning them for their personal sin. Then when they are saved they
have a really hard time understanding how to deal with their post-salvation
personal sins because for them they think this is the basis for all the
condemnation of God.
Now when we look at the issue of personal sin we also
have to understand some various other aspects in terms of Christ’s
substitutionary work and we will do that as we go through the lesson tonight.
So verse 12 begins the comparison. Verses 13 and
14 give a qualification related to the kind of sin, kind of death
being covered. Verses 15 through 17 then contrast Christ and Adam in terms
of the one issue that is the point of the analogy and then verses 18-21 bring
out that one point of the connection which emphasizes the fact that Adam’s sin
affects the whole race and the comparison is that just as one man’s action
affected the whole race in terms of the first Adam so another man (the Lord
Jesus Christ, the Second Adam) one Man’s actions can affect the entire human
race.
So we come to the expanded translation emphasizing the
articles in the original Greek. It should be understood that:
Just as through one man the sin entered the world
And as I pointed out last time this is a use of the
Greek article that is defined as par excellence. Now that doesn’t mean that it
is indicating something that is qualitatively high. It is simply setting
apart a particular thing from everything else within its category. So it is not
talking about just any sin, it is talking about a particular sin that is unique
and distinct from all other sins.
So Paul writes:
Just as through one man the sin
Not just sin, not just evil, not some sort of nebulous
abstract general principle of sin entering into human history, but the sin -
the sin of Adam – that sin that we refer to as Adam's original sin.
entered the world and the death.
Once again the use of the article there is going to
distinguish this death from all these other kinds of death. He is not
talking about physical death. So many people read physical death into the
penalty for sin. It is a consequence of the penalty as we have seen, but
it is not the penalty. So it is this death that comes in through the
sin.
And then the last part or the conclusion of that verse
as we have seen “thus” is the Greek word houtos
which indicates thus, that is “in this manner” death spread to all men because
all sinned. It is the “all sinned” that is the issue. Is it that
all sinned personally or all sinned corporately? As I pointed out already
we have the issue of whether this is talking about all sinned personally or whether
all sinned in terms of some sort of participation in Adam's original sin.
Now if this is “all sinned personally” that would mean (just think with me
logically here) the condemnation or the penalty of sin only comes once somebody
commits personal sin. The implication of that is that they are not born
condemned; they are born innocent. I don’t mean innocent in the sense of
naïve. I mean innocent in the sense of not guilty, innocent in the sense of not
tainted by Adam's original sin. So if the sinning is understood to be
personal sin, then you have infants and everybody being born neutral.
That was the Pelagian heresy – thinking people are born in the same state Adam
was created in – in a state of absolute neutrality, not condemned, not guilty –
and therefore possible that they could live their entire lives without
sinning. That view has been rejected by orthodox theologians on the basis
of numerous scriptures including the correct exegesis of this passage down
through the ages. Paul is rejecting that in the way that he is dealing
with sin in this passage. That is why he qualifies things to illustrate them in
verses 13 through 14. By the way he qualifies things in verses 13 to 14
plus what he says in verse 17, we understand that the sinning at the end of verse
12 is Adam's original sin, not personal sin. Let me show you. Look
at verse 17.
NKJ Romans
See right there it tells we are talking about the sin
of the one who brings about this death and condemnation that goes to the entire
human race. So it is that distributive use of the Greek preposition dia which I mentioned a couple of lessons
back. So in light of verse 17, verse 12 can only refer to a corporate
sin, a corporate participation in Adam’s sin.
Now the next question we address is what kind of death this is. I have already alluded to that, but this death – all through here - has to be spiritual death. I have had ongoing discussions with some close friends of mine who try to convince me that the penalty for sin is not spiritual death, that when God said to Adam in Genesis 2:17 that the day you eat from the fruit of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil you will surely die that it would be physical death. As I pointed out when I discussed that, you will find in a lot of the creationist literature this blending of these ideas and they see physical death as part of the penalty. I know that I have read that from men in ICR and read that from men from Answers in Genesis. You just need to be aware of that.
I am in the process by the way of trying to get Ken
Ham to come here for the Chafer Conference. Unfortunately he is booked
through 2008 and 2009 so I am working on booking him for 2010. Hopefully
we will have a conference in March 2010 on evolution and creation.
But he is one. I have heard him on several of
his tapes occasions and we will show some of his DVD’s here at times and you
will hear things like that. You just need to think intelligently.
Just because somebody disagrees on this point or that point, doesn’t mean that
you wash out everything else they say. You always have to exercise a
little discernment.
By the way this is as good a time as any to prepare
you for next January. It looks right now that when I go Kiev we are going
to have (aside from Ike speaking on Sunday mornings and he may not speak all
the Sunday mornings we don’t know what the schedule is going to be but we have)
a situation we are trying to resolve. It looks like it is going to be resolved
in an extremely efficient manner for Christians. Usually things aren’t
this simple. Ariel Ministries has been trying to kidnap Bruce back there
to videotape Arnold Fruchtenbaum teaching a number of courses so they can get
these courses on permanent record on video. At the same time Chafer Seminary
has been using
The reason I got off on Arnold is because when I had
Arnold come in and teach on the same subject which is the Jewish perspective on
the life of Christ in Connecticut one of the first things I heard when I got
back (I hardly walked in the door) I got somebody mentioned four things that
Arnold taught that I would disagree with. You will spot them.
We deal with people like that in graciousness. So there are some
differences here. This issue on the penalty being spiritual death instead
of physical death is one of them. But it is so important. Ephesians2:1 as
I pointed out is very clear.
NKJ Ephesians 2:1 And you He made alive, who
were dead in trespasses and sins,
They were physically alive, but they were dead. In
a few minutes I am going to go through Romans 7 and we will see the same thing
there. It has got to be spiritual death and not physical death. The
point that Paul is making in these next two verses (13 and 14) is number 1
there was no law from Adam to Moses. Why is that important? We will
see the reason it is important is because Jews in the audience were defining
sin in terms of breaking the law. So he is going to go to a period of
time when there was no Mosaic Law. Yet there was condemnation and there
was sin.
The second thing he is pointing out is nevertheless
though there was no law all or everyone from Adam to Moses was born spiritually
dead. They were born under condemnation. So their spiritual
death and condemnation wasn’t related to breaking any specific commandment or
prohibition in the Mosaic Law. That is sort of the overview, the bird’s
eye view of this.
Now let me break it down in a little more
detail. First of all in terms of Gentiles, many people believe that you
are condemned for what you do. That it is your personal sin.
If you go out and commit murder then condemnation is based on
murder. If you tell a little white lie then your condemnation is based on
a little white lie. So therefore condemnation is really rather relative.
Some people are going to be condemned a lot more than others. Somebody
who is a sweet little old legalistic self righteous lady sitting at First Metho-Presby-Bapterian church but never trusting Christ and
just has little sins of gossip and maligning and things like that doesn’t get
condemned as much as someone like Adolph Hitler or Stalin or Ayatollah Khomeini
or Saddam Hussein or somebody who is a pervert and mass murderer and all these
other things. Right? That is how the average person thinks - that
there has got to be relativity to this condemnation because your sins aren’t as
nice as my sins so you’re going to get punished more. Too often that is their
position. The problem with that is that underlying it is a basic
assumption. Let me test you to see if you are listening.
Underlying that is the basis assumption that you are
good or bad? Good. Underlying the whole idea that you are condemned
based on you personal sin and there is this relativity there assumes that man
is basically good. That is the underlying assumption that you only become
a sinner by committing sins. The old thing that used to confuse students
in Bible college - are you a sinner because you sin or do you sin because you
are a sinner? Well, we sin because we are sinners. But the problem
is that people think that we are basically good so we are sinners because we
commit sin. But that is not the biblical picture. That would
indicate that we are born free from sin, free from guilt, free from condemnation,
and not spiritually dead. It would also imply that one person could be
better than another person and because one person only committed some small
insignificant socially acceptable sin and the other was a sexual pervert and
committed all kinds of politically incorrect sins that there would be different
levels of condemnation and different levels of depravity. We don’t like
to think that people are all that bad. We are pretty good. But
that’s not the picture the Bible has. So that is the problem with
gentiles. That would be the first point that gentiles tend to think that
people are condemned only for what they do for their own personal sins.
For the Jews on the other hand the problem is the law,
the Mosaic Law. Under the Pharisees after the Jews returned from the
Babylonian captivity they were so concerned with protecting themselves from
ever being kicked out of the land again that instead of turning completely to
God and obedience to God they set up this external rigorous system of obedience
around the Mosaic Law with all of these different rabbinical traditions.
So for the Jews the problem is the Law and they defined sin as a violation of
the Mosaic Law. But Paul is going to do an end run around them by
focusing on a period of time in history prior to the Mosaic Law. Okay, if
you are going to define sin as violating the Mosaic Law, then what do you do
with all these people who lived for those 2500 years between Adam and Moses who
died physically as a result of sin and who were born spiritually dead and were
under condemnation? So in verses 13 and 14 Paul is going to explain
exactly why that is wrong. He says:
NKJ Romans
Actually I should have capitalized that because he in
not talking about law in general. He is talking about the Mosaic
Law.
I put that in there (inserted that personal sin) just
for clarification because he is understanding that personal sin – all of these
people are committing personal sins; but the only commandment that God has
given is related to what He told Adam. Adam had specific revelation and
prohibition. Moses has not only specific revelation, he has 613
commandments in the Mosaic Law. It is not just 10 commandments; it’s 613
commandments. So Paul is saying that until the law personal sin was in the
world but personal sin is not imputed when there is no law. Now that is a
confusing statement for a lot of people. We will develop that in a minute.
NKJ Romans 5:14 Nevertheless death reigned from Adam to Moses, even over those who had not sinned according to the likeness of the transgression of Adam, who is a type of Him who was to come.
Let me make a couple of more points about the law.
This reference is to the Mosaic Law. It’s not to just governmental
law. The law had a variety of purposes. It was given as part of an
entire document that was designed to regulate the people in terms of criminal
law, civil law and ceremonial law - criminal law, civil law and ceremonial
law. So it’s not just dealing with criminality. It’s not just dealing
with civil issues or judicial - just with that which refers to ritual or
ceremony. It’s purpose spiritually though was to expose sin, not to
provide a way for salvation. It wasn’t that if you obey all these
commandments you can be saved. That is how it has been
misunderstood, but that wasn’t its purpose.
In Romans
NKJ Romans
So, one of the purposes for the Mosaic Law was to
expose the sinfulness of man.
In Romans 7, you might just turn over. We are
going to look at several key verses in Romans 7.
NKJ Romans 7:5 For when we were in the flesh,
Paul is talking about being an unbeliever from his
position as being a believer.
the sinful passions which were aroused
Let’s clarify things. When we were in the flesh
is a term for the unbeliever who can’t do anything but sin. He doesn’t
have an alternative operating system. He just has one operating system
which is the sin nature. So all he can do comes out of the sin
nature. All of his morality comes out of the sin nature; all of his
immorality comes out of the sin nature. So Paul says:
NKJ Romans 7:5 For when we were in the flesh, the sinful passions which were aroused by the law
Now if you don’t think that law can arouse sin just
watch some three-year old and tell him not to do something. As soon as
you tell them not to do something, they are going to try to do it. You
have by establishing a law aroused their sinful passions. That is just
the way we are. So Paul says that the Law arouses these sinful passions.
by the law were at work in our members
The term “our members” refers to the physical
body. As we will see before we are done the sin nature is located within
the physical part of our makeup.
to bear fruit to death.
Is this death spiritual or physical? It is
spiritual. They are still dead and are living in carnality. It is
the realization of spiritual death. That is where he is going here.
He leaves a lot out, but it is very interesting. As you will see when we
get down into verses 7, 9, 12, 13, he keeps talking about the law killed me.
The Law didn’t kill him; he was already dead spiritually and it didn’t kill him
physically. So he is talking about how the law exposes the fact that we
are spiritually dead. So when he talks about bearing fruit to death, the
production of the law is to expose the fact that we can’t save ourselves.
We are spiritually dead. That’s the underlying argument in these verses
from 7 to 15. In verse 7 we read:
NKJ Romans 7:7 What shall we say then? Is the
law sin?
I have had people tell me the Mosaic Law must have
been horrible because look what the Pharisees did with it. No, the
Pharisees perverted the law. The law as we will see in a minute is
inherently righteous. So Paul is asking the same rhetorical question - if
the law produces sin or exposes sin is it sin itself? He says;
Certainly not! On the contrary, I would not have known sin except through the law.
In the Greek it is meganoito
which is an extremely strong rejection of the idea.
He says, “Is the law sin? No! The law
exposes and reveals to us that we are sinners and spiritually dead.”
For I would not have known covetousness unless the law had said, "You shall not covet."
So the law not only exposes sin; but it also reveals man’s inability to live up to God’s standards. The law wasn’t given to give you a way to live up to God’s standard but to expose the fact that you can’t.
NKJ Romans 7:9 I was alive once without the law, but when the commandment came, sin revived and I died.
The law exposed the fact that he could not lived up to
it. When he thought he could do the first 9 commandments but when God
said, “Don’t covet” that revealed mental attitude sins and he couldn’t live up
to that standard. So it revealed the fact that he was dead.
When he says, “And I died”; he didn’t become
dead. He was already spiritually dead, but experientially he came to the
realization that he was spiritually dead.
NKJ Romans
What is good is referring to the law. That is the
Mosaic Law.
Certainly not! But sin, that it might appear sin,
Or be revealed or exposed as sin.
was producing death in me through what is good, so that sin through the commandment might become exceedingly sinful.
What kind of death? It is revealing it. It
is not making, manufacturing the death at this time. He is an
unbeliever. The law is functioning to expose to the unbeliever that he is
spiritually dead and unable to have a relationship with God based on what he
does. So sin was producing. We could paraphrase it:
Sin was producing a knowledge of my own spiritual
death in me through what is good so that sin through the commandment might
become exceedingly sinful.
In other words that I might realize how bad sin really
is. So, physical death wouldn’t work in any of these passages because he
was still alive. He was alive many years later when he wrote this epistle
to the Romans. So, it has to be a reference to spiritual death.
So in terms of the nature of the law we read back in
verse 12:
NKJ Romans
That characterized the entirety of the Mosaic Law. It wasn’t a system that was designed to bind men or to imprison men or to enslave men to some sort of rigorous, awful law code. That doesn’t fit what everything says in the Scripture. The law by its very nature was holy, just and good.
Now let’s go back to Romans 5:14.
NKJ Romans
That is spiritual death.
reigned from Adam to Moses, even over those who had not sinned according to the likeness of the transgression of Adam, who is a type of Him who was to come.
So it sins over all these people who lived from Adam
to Moses – Cain and Abel and Seth and Enoch and Methuselah and Lamech and all
the others who lived in that period. They were all spiritually dead, but
they didn’t sin according to the likeness of the transgression of Adam.
What in the world does that mean? That means
that their sin was personal sin but unlike Adam’s sin. It wasn’t in
violation of a revealed prohibition of God. The word there for “transgression”
for Adam isn’t the same word we have seen up to this point which is hamartia(missing the mark). It’s parabasis meaning a transgression or a violation of
a particular or specific law. The idea is that people were spiritually
dead and they committed spiritual sin, but they are not condemned for violating
any specific prohibition from God. You have the prohibition that God
revealed in Genesis 2:17. You have later specific prohibitions that are
revealed in the Mosaic Law. But Paul says that their sin was sin and they
were born spiritually dead, but it isn’t the same kind of sin as Adam’s because
Adam is violating a specific revealed prohibition. So he is narrowly
defining sin as breaking a stated or revealed mandate or prohibition. So
Adam’s sin broke a law of God as it were.
He is saying to the Jews, “See all these people
sinned. They are spiritually dead and condemned before the Mosaic Law was
even articulated.”
So what is the basis for their condemnation? They did not
sin in the same way that Adam sinned who was a type of Him who was to
come. So we ask that question – why were they condemned. The cause
of death is sin, but it can’t be their personal sins in light of Romans 5:17-18.
NKJ Romans
See it is that one man’s offence again. It keeps going back in Romans 5:17-18 to the one man’s
offence.
NKJ Romans
It is Adam’s sin and we refer to it as Adam's original
sin because first of all it is Adam’s sin, not Eve’s. Second, it is
original in the sense that it is a unique sin – a one-of-a-kind sin. It’s
not the same sin that Eve commits. It is different. It is
qualitatively different because he is the designated head of the race.
So, only Adam could commit this kind of sin. Eve could not. It is
the basis for the condemnation of the entire human race. So we read in
verse 18:
Therefore, as through one man's offence judgment
Katakrima indicating that condemnation.
came to all men, resulting in condemnation, even so through one Man's righteous act
That is where we see the comparison with what happens
on the cross.
That is the Lord Jesus Christ.
the free gift came to all men, resulting in justification of life.
See Adam's original sin automatically goes to
everybody; but, the benefit of the work on the cross doesn’t automatically go
to everybody. The point that he is making is that one man’s decision
affects the whole in both cases.
NKJ Romans
That’s the point of the analogy. One man’s
decision affects an entire group. So the point that he gets at which we
emphasized last week going back to Romans 5:13 is that all people sinned in and
with Adam. That’s the conclusion of verse 12. It can’t be personal
sin; it’s got to be corporate sin. Therefore he says that death spread to
all men because all sinned in Adam – in and with Adam.
Then he goes on in
NKJ Romans
Now what exactly does that mean? The word
for imputed is ellogeo. Ellogeo is your primary verb used for imputation.
It means to reckon, impute or charge something to someone’s account. It
doesn’t mean they actually have done anything. Let’s think about
salvation. When Christ saves you, you do not have any moral change in
you. That is one of the hardest things for people to understand.
There are basically two different views on how you get
righteousness. One is called imputed righteousness and the other is
infused righteousness. If you are Roman Catholic you have a view of
infused righteousness. If you are lordship you don’t know it, but you
have really bought into this idea. It is the idea that you somehow
between qualitatively less depraved because there is some sort of internal
moral change that takes place. But the Greek verb dikaioo
means to make or declare righteous. It is a judicial term. It
doesn’t mean you are righteous; it is just legally you have been declared
righteous. You have been declared righteous because you have been given
the righteousness of Christ.
Let me use a somewhat simplistic illustration.
You want to buy a house. You want to buy a nice $200,000 home, but you
don’t have any money. Not only do you not have any money, but your credit
rating is in the double digits. You have a credit rating of 10. So
there is no way that you can get a loan or qualify for a loan. Nobody is
going to loan you a dime. But, your cousin is Bill Gates. So you go
to Bill Gates and you see if he will cosign on a loan. He is going to
cosign on the loan. Now he doesn’t put any money in your bank
account. You still don’t have any credit and you are still a credit risk
and you still don’t have any money. But what the bank looks at is the
money in his account – not the money in your account. Nothing has changed
with you. You are not any better than you were before. But on the
basis of what somebody else has done, you are going to get the mortgage.
You are going to get the blessing. That is what justification is.
On the basis of Christ’s righteousness, we get saved. There is no
transaction at salvation that changes you and makes you righteous. You
are declared righteousness. Condemnation
We go to II
Corinthians 5:19.
NKJ 2 Corinthians
That is the violation of a standard.
and has committed to us the word of
reconciliation..
So II Corinthians
NKJ Romans 4:8 Blessed is the man to whom the LORD shall not impute sin."
See, our personal sins aren’t imputed to us.
They are imputed to Christ. God in His wisdom, in the way He sets up
salvation is that He imputes to us Adam's original sin so that you are
condemned not because of your little white sins and you are condemned for you
black sins so that there is a difference in condemnation. We are all
condemned for the same sin. So our condemnation is totally equal.
There is a complete equivalency there. Nobody is any better or any
worse. There is no sliding scale. There is no relativity.
Everybody is equally condemned for the same event which is the sin of Adam’s in
Genesis 3. God in history postponed dealing with personal sin until the
cross. At the cross He imputes to Christ all of our personal sins so that
Adam's original sin and our personal sins are all dealt with on the cross so
that personal sins aren’t an issue. The issue is focused on the sufficiency of
the work of Christ on the cross.
Now that leads us to two other important points.
Number one, because Christ died for our personal sins as a real
substitute. That means those sins are paid for even if you reject Christ
as your savior. Your sins are still paid for. Remember I have
taught many times that there are three things you have to have to get into
heaven.
So you have to have the imputation of righteousness
(number 2) and you have to have regeneration (number 3). Now Christ died
for everybody so everybody has number 1 taken care of. Everybody has
their personal sins paid for. Everybody has the penalty paid by Christ on
the cross so that’s not the issue. The issue is to trust in Christ.
If you trust in Christ, then you will receive the imputation of Christ’s
righteousness and you will be regenerated. But if you don’t trust in Christ
those two things don’t happen. So when you show up at the Great White Throne
judgment, your sins are paid but you can’t get into heaven because you don’t
have righteousness and you are spiritually dead. The result is that you
will spend eternity in the
In Romans
NKJ Romans
That is spiritual death.
reigned from Adam to Moses, even
over those who had not sinned according to the likeness of the transgression of
Adam,
Their sin was a different kind of sin. It wasn’t
like Adam's original sin.
who is a type of Him who was to come.
He uses the word tupos
which is where we get the word type of Christ. (When I was little and I
heard pastor say that, I thought it was one word.) Type of Christ means there
is an element, a point (but not everything) of analogy, a foreshadowing used
for teaching purposes between some person or some event in the Old Testament
and something to do with the person or work of Christ in the New Testament.
Then Paul goes on in verses 15 through 17 to begin to
explain and narrow the point of the analogy.
Literal translation: But not like the transgression is the free gift.
Now this is my own translation from the Greek because
the word order in the Greek is very different from the way it is translated in
most English versions.
Most English versions say, “But the free gift is not
like the offense”.
But in the Greek it starts with “but not”. That
is the emphasis. “But not like the transgression is the free gift” to
really draw out the contrast that the free gift isn’t anything like the
transgression. You can’t go to this comparison and contrast between the
first Adam and the Second Adam and just willy-nilly pull out anything you
want. It’s a very narrowly defined comparison and contrast.
Paul says, “For if by the one man’s transgression.”
That is by Adam’s transgression. He violated a
specifically stated commandment. He is consistent in using the word for
transgression here.
Literal translation: Many died spiritually much more the grace of God and the gift by
the grace of the one Man Jesus Christ abounded to many.
And I add for clarification many who believe. It
is not automatically given to them. It is based on their belief in
Christ.
Now when we look at this whole concept of the sin
nature and how that is transmitted, we have to understand the difference.
That is how we got into this study - what is transmitted physically and what is
transmitted through federal headship. The point that he has been making
so far and in many ways in this analogy between Christ and Adam there has to be
this representative aspect.
Last week I looked at how this ran its course through
the Old Testament. You had the case of Achan in Joshua 7 who disobeyed
God and horded the plunder from
God says, “No.
It is the idea of corporate representation and
headship. So that is there, but there is also the physical relationship because
we are all physically tied into Adam. So the sin nature gets transmitted
physically.
There are all these verses. I have only listed a
few up here that use very physical terms to talk about the sin nature. Of
course there are those who say that this is all metaphor and it is all
figurative. But once you start down that road you can’t explain other things.
Paul says:
NKJ Romans 6:6 knowing this, that our old man was
That is an unregenerate nature.
crucified with Him, that the body of sin
Very physical term.
might be done away with, that we should no longer be slaves of sin.
That’s this corporate body that we have that is
condemned and is under the condemnation of sin. It’s corrupt.
NKJ Romans 7:5 For when we were in the flesh, the sinful passions which were aroused by the law were at work in our members to bear fruit to death.
Again a reference to the physical aspect of our make
up.
NKJ Romans 8:5 For those who live according to the flesh set their minds on the things of the flesh, but those who live according to the Spirit, the things of the Spirit.
This term flesh or sarxz
is used all the through the New Testament as a term for the for the sin
nature. It is a very physical term.
Then we use the term sin nature. The whole
aspect of nature I have been told is now theologically incorrect in
evangelicalism. You can’t talk about nature, what you mean by
nature. Everybody is confused about it. Well, the term is used in
Scripture and it talks about the fact that we are born “by nature”. In
Ephesians 2:3 Paul uses the word “by nature.”
NKJ Ephesians 2:3 among whom also we all once
conducted ourselves in the lusts of our flesh, fulfilling the desires of the
flesh and of the mind,
I guess he is theologically incorrect. At
the last line he says:
and were by nature children of
wrath, just as the others.
That is our makeup. We are constitutionally
corrupt and spiritually dead. There is this thing in us that when the law
says “don’t do it”; we can’t wait to do it. That is a propensity to
disobedience to God that is our sin nature – this inclination to disobedience,
to doing it our own way rather than God’s way.
So the sin nature, this corruption is passed on
physically and the guilt of Adam's original sin – I don’t know if you remember
but back 2 or 3 classes ago I put a chart up with the different ways in which
theologians tried to solve this. You had Pelagianism and
semi-Pelagianism. You had Augustinianism and federalism. One of the
issues is that with Pelagianism and Arminianism you have either man not fallen
at all and no guilt or he is fallen but no guilt. But the point is by
nature that sin nature is passed on; but by birth the sin nature, the guilt of
Adam’s sin, is imputed to that sin nature. So the passing on of the sin
nature is that physical seminal aspect and the imputation is based on
representation. That has to do with the federal headship. So they
both come together in God’s plan. So it is not one against the other, but
they are both true.
In conclusion, we got off in a 3 month diversion with
the origin of human life and the origin and transmission of the soul, origin
and transmission of the sin nature based on Hebrews 7:9-10. In conclusion
what I want to point out from Romans 5 is this verse is cited like a proof text
(where you make a statement and put it in parenthesis and move on) just as
Hebrews 7:9-10 is. If we go back and look at it briefly as we wrap
up, we read the New King James (it translates it like most English versions
do.) with the phrase “so to speak” or “in a manner of speaking” at the end of
the verse. But, in the Greek it is at the very beginning. It should
be translated
In a manner of speaking (or in figurative speech) even
Levi who receives tithes (paid tithes) through Abraham.
Again and again and again I find that this verse is
thrown out there to support this idea that somehow Levi is cognitively almost
and responsibly paying tithes to Melchizedek and he is 4 generations down from
Abraham. The emphasis here is on that first phrase in the Greek - in a
manner of speaking. It is figurative. All the writer of Hebrews is
saying is that if the father Abraham is subordinate to Melchizedek, how much
more the descendent of the father and the priesthood that comes from him (the
Levites) would be subordinate to the priesthood of Melchizedek. If
Abraham wasn’t as great as Melchizedek, Levi certainly wasn’t as great as
Melchizedek and the Levitical priesthood wouldn’t be as great as
Melchizedek. That is all that he is saying. But, what happens is
that people have jumped to wrong conclusions in the process of exegesis.
Then, they go to Romans 5 and Romans 5 gets equally
pulled out usually for federalism. There are problems there. What I
have pointed out to you is based on inference and using this comparison and
contrast with Adam and with Christ. They both can have what they do
transmitted to the whole race because there is a physical connection. You
understand that from the text; but it is also true that they represent the
whole group that they represent. So that is federalism. So both aspects
are true. The importance of the bottom line on it is as we have looked at
tonight in Romans 5 is that it helps us to understand that we are not
condemned for what we do. We all equally condemned for Adam’s sin as our
representative as the physical head and as the federal head of the human
race. We are not condemned for our personal sins. Those personal
sins were not imputed to us. They are imputed to Christ on the cross and
He pays the penalty. So the issue for us either at salvation or after
salvation isn’t sin. Now that doesn’t mean we are minimizing sin.
It doesn’t mean that we are promoting licentiousness. It is recognition
that Christ paid the penalty and grace provides the solution.
Let’s bow our heads in closing prayer and next time we will get back into Hebrews 7 and start getting ahead there.