Romans 5:12-21

CRITICAL NOTES

Romans 5:12.—Adam the head of a race whose transgressions lead on to condemnation. Christ the ancestor of a seed whose faith and obedience culminate in eternal life. Rabbis spoke of a double death of the soul and of the body, and thought that but for Adam’s sin man would not have died, but only expired, the spirit being dismissed by the kiss of peace. The sin of all men was wrapped up in the one act of Adam’s sin, and developed afterwards in individual cases. Adam’s descendants not accountable for his sins.

Romans 5:13.—The law made sin more manifest. The sin of those who lived between Adam and Moses could not be sin against that law of Moses, which was not promulgated. It must have some other explanation.

Romans 5:14.—Cabbalists spoke of Adam as the later or lower Adam, in contrast with the ancient Adam, the Messiah existing before the Creation.

Romans 5:15.—Mankind generally included in the Fall. In the Redemption is universal provision, though not universal acceptance.

Romans 5:16.—One sin, many sinners; many sins, one Saviour.

Romans 5:21.—In Romans 5:14 death is a monarch, while here sin is the monarch. Death is the sphere where sin shows its power, for “the sting of death is sin.” ἐν indicates death as the terminus of sin; εἰς points to life as the end and reward of righteousness. But where sin abounded, grace did superabound—i.e., the pardoning mercy of the gospel has triumphed even over the sins of the Jews, which were greatly aggravated by reason of the light they enjoyed (Stuart).

MAIN HOMILETICS OF THE PARAGRAPH.—Romans 5:12

The two opposing sovereignties.—St. Peter regarded his beloved brother Paul as having written epistles in which are some things hard to be understood; but there are some who seem to speak as if St. Peter were a weakling. They treat St. Paul in deferential style, as if they would challenge him to come forth from the unseen world and propound more difficulties for them to solve. But we follow in the footsteps of St. Peter, and feel, especially in the Epistle to the Romans, that these are things hard to be understood—things which for their explanation will require the revealing light of eternity. We cannot explain all. We do not make the vain attempt. Sufficient if some help is given to earnest seekers of the truth. In previous Chapter s we have found things hard to be understood, and we enter now on ground that is thickly sown with difficulties. Mystery is everywhere. It begins in the garden of Eden. Its course is the pathway of the human race. We bow in the presence of the mystery, and find sweet refuge in the arms of all-embracing mercy.

I. The two opposing sovereigns.—Sin and grace are the two opposing sovereigns placed before us by St. Paul as ruling in the moral sphere, and with their sceptre touching even the material world. St. Paul does not sever the moral from the material. There are forces working above, beyond, and through all material forces. Sin touches the physical. A soul act taints the race. Sin, the dread sovereign, has brought in death, trouble, moral inability.

1. Death. Solemn word! What does it mean? Our understanding or misunderstanding of biblical expressions and terms has been formed very much by Milton,—of that forbidden tree whose mortal taste brought death into the world and all our woe. We read and speak as if death were unknown before Adam’s fall. Pelagius anticipated modern geologists, for he affirmed that death is not a consequence of sin and that Adam would have died even if he had not sinned. The modern scientist tells us that there is ample proof in the geological remains that physical death has been the lot of the lower animals from all time. All the animals are in one chain of progressive development, and are all related. The lower animals were all subject to death; and the highest animal, man, is by implication and analogy subject now and always in the past to physical death. Let scientists, if they please, reduce themselves to mere animals. Well, there is death and death,—death as the king of terrors; death as a gentle nurse putting the child to sleep, from which it is to awake in the sweet morn of eternity’s day. Death is no death to unfallen Adam, who walks his earthly course of hundreds of years, and then in the eventide, with the sweet balm of the breeze blowing about his frame, with the rich music of the birds and the rippling waters, with a gently falling sound soothing his tired nature, seeks repose upon his bed of flowers, and his spirit passes to commune with the spirit of the Eternal. Surely that apostle who could form the beautiful ideal expression to set forth the transition of Christians, “And some have fallen asleep,” is not to be unthinkingly charged with the idea that mere physical dissolution is of recent introduction to our planet. Death as a terror was brought in by sin. Death in its repulsive aspect was brought in by the dreadful act of the first murderer. Death came in by sin; and the blood of the slaughtered Abel gives emphasis to the utterance, “Death has reigned, for sin has entered.” Earth’s gory battle-fields tell what an awful power is sin.

2. Trouble. Sin brings trouble. Here no elaborate arguments are required. We do not stand on debatable ground. Experience, and history which is recorded experience, declare that sin entails sorrow; and trouble, in the sense of an absence of peace, the presence of unrest.

3. Moral inability. Disobedience. No need to enter upon the discussion of disputed questions. We may dispute until doomsday about the freedom of the will and cognate topics; but man everywhere shows the signs of a fallen nature. Education may do something to restain the outbreak of human depravity, the restraining force of society may check; but on all hands we have marks of man’s sinfulness. Divine grace is needful, and is the only adequate remedy. The one sovereign is baneful, but the other is blessed. Grace, the benign sovereign, has brought in life, peace, and moral ability.

1. Life. In Christ Jesus there is life eternal. And this life eternal is not a future but a present possession. It is life here and now for the believer. In the midst of the groans and pains and tears which accompany and precede death, we may enjoy the blessing of eternal life.

2. Peace. Sia brings trouble and unrest. Grace brings peace and sweet soul-rest. How infinitely blessed the repose which is enjoyed by the children of peace!

3. Moral ability. Obedience. We do not know how far grace reigns and influences. The restraining power of grace may extend to regions and persons far beyond our thought. Grace abounds unto many. Let us not in our thoughts ever turn the apostle’s many into a few. The abundance of grace reigns, and though its sovereign influence many royal persons are walking through the universe of God.

II. The seeming weakness of one sovereign and the apparent strength of the other.—Sin still reigns. Even in our optimistic moods we must confess that sin reigns, and spreads death in all its forms and pains and unutterable agonies. Grace as a sovereign is apparently weak. Grace has been reigning for a long period, and yet, after all, how ungracious is the greater part of humanity! How far does the apostle’s grace reach? Can it touch and bless the millions upon millions that are e as yet outside the pale of Christianity? Oh, our faith sometimes seems ready to fail when we think that grace is still a sovereign, with, apparently at least, a very small portion of the race as its subjects.

III. But the seemingly weak must finally overcome the apparently strong.—Grace, after all, may not be so weak as it may appear to the superficial vision. “In due time Christ died.” The due time was marked a long way on time’s great dial-plate. The due time for the triumphant vindication of grace’s all-abounding force and all-pervading sovereignty may yet be some distance off, if it is to be measured by the due time of the Saviour’s advent. In the past by weak things God has conquered. Base things have overturned the mighty. Seeming folly has confounded wisdom. And grace, though seemingly weak, shall in due time conquer and subdue and destroy sin. “Grace shall reign through righteousness unto eternal life.” Many questions trouble the anxious soul when studying such passages as the one before us. But let us not ask, Why sin, why moral evil, why a taint upon the whole race, from one man’s disobedience? Let us rather say, Here is the sin, here is the undoubted fact of a depraved moral tendency; and thus in the mediatorial work of Jesus is the sovereign remedy. Seek, my soul, for the divine healing. The sick does not ask, Whence and why the pestilence? but seeks after a remedy. The wise Israelite bitten by the serpent did not ask, Whence the serpents, why the infliction, how is the virus infused? but he looked to the brazen serpent, and was healed. Thank God, we may be healed through Jesus Christ our Lord. Let us seek that grace may reign in our hearts through righteousness unto eternal life—eternal life with all its amplitude of bliss. What eternal life means will require an eternal life to unfold. It will be ever developing into divine possibilities through eternity.

Romans 5:19. Adam and Christ.—Up to this point Paul has been discussing condemnation and justification. “Wrath is on all, even on the Jews,” and “the righteousness of faith is for all, even for the Gentiles.” In chaps. 6–8 he is about to consider the theme of sanctification. “Shall we continue in sin, that grace may abound? God forbid.” He is passing from the one to the other. But before he does so he inserts these three concluding verses of chap. 5, in which he tersely sums up the former subject, and consciously prepares the way for the latter. Romans 5:19 is the summary.

I. The apostle’s favourite conception of two representative men.—Adam and Christ. They are the federal heads of the human race. They are not regarded as individual units. No man ever is. He is bound by ties to his fellows that he dare not disregard. You cannot uproot even so much as a tare without uprooting along with it some of the precious wheat. “Whenever one member suffers, all the members suffer with it; or one member be honoured, all the members rejoice with it.” And yet the whole tendency of modern preaching is towards individualism. True religion is represented as a certain definite dealing between the individual soul and Jesus Christ. That indeed is a great truth. Individual salvation is one truth; but representative responsibility is another. The statesman in the commonwealth, the minister in the congregation, the parent in the home, and the teacher in the class are all representative men.

II. The conduct of these two men as under law to Jehovah: Adam disobeyed, Christ obeyed.—The Greek word indicates that the first step in Adam’s fall was simply carelessness—the neglect or refusal to hear. But how much may be involved in that! Carelessness or remissness on the part of the guards, that is the first step in the capture of a city or the wreck of a train. Carelessness is always culpable and blameworthy. In the case before us it was “the moral act which provoked the sentence of condemnation.” It was the sin that opened the floodgates of evil upon a world. The plea of carelessness or thoughtlessness is no plea. All minimising of evil is a corrupting of the mind from the simplicity that is in Christ, “as the serpent beguiled Eve through his subtlety.” But Jesus obeyed. He did not neglect to hear, as Adam did, through listening to the siren voices of evil. His obedience was both voluntary and obediential (cf. Romans 5:6 with Romans 5:19). A voluntary sacrifice, and yet in strictest obedience to law. The two aspects are not incompatible. They are reduced to harmony by the moving element of love. When we do anything in love, that does not exclude the feeling and the fact that it is also a thing of duty. Adam’s disobedience was one act, but not so Christ’s obedience. It was “the entire work of Christ in its obediential character.” The Passover lamb had not merely to be slain; it must be “without blemish.”

III. The fruit or outcome of their conduct.—“The many were made sinners” and “the many shall be made righteous.” Here we meet the great Pauline doctrine of imputation. It is confessedly one of great difficulty. But if there be mystery in it there is also mercy. For read 2 Corinthians 5:21. There are three imputations—Adam’s sin imputed to us, our sins imputed to Christ, and Christ’s righteousness imputed to us. These three must stand or fall together. If the principle of imputation be unjust, it is equally unjust for all the three cases. But when we speak of Adam’s sin as being imputed to us, we are only stating a half-truth. It was our sin—that is, the other half: “As through one man sin entered into the world, and death through sin: and so death passed unto all men, for that all sinned,”—not “have sinned” (A.V.), a fact which no one doubted; but “sinned” (R.V.)—sinned at a special point in time, sinned in the one man. It is all mystery, we say. Well, perhaps so it is; but the fruit need not be so. We are sinners through our connection with Adam; we may be made righteous through our connection with Christ,—only the one connection is that of birth, the other that of faith.—John Adams.

Romans 5:21. Grace abounding.—Two facts are here worthy of attention and suggested by the passage:—

I. That “sin” and “grace” are in the world as ruling powers.—“Sin” and “grace” are two small words, but they represent mighty things. “Sin” here stands for the principle of evil, the root of all wrong; “grace,” the principle of all goodness, the root of all that is virtuous and holy in the universe. In the chapter Paul speaks of these two forces as coming into the world—one through Adam, the other through Christ. These principles are the moral monarchs of the race, and monarchs always in fierce fighting. All the battlings in the world are but the results of their mutual antagonism.

II. That the rule of the one issues in death, of the other in everlasting life.—“As sin hath reigned unto [or, in] death.” It is not necessary to regard death here as meaning the dissolution of the body, for this would have taken place had sin never been introduced into the universe; nor the extinction of our being. But it means the destruction of all that can make life worth having. “Sin, when it is finished, bringeth forth death.” What is the death of a spirit but the life of wickedness? This is sin. But whilst sin leads to death, grace leads to everlasting life. What is everlasting life? Not mere life without end, but life without evil. Everlasting life is everlasting goodness.

Conclusion.—The great question is, Which is our moral monarch, “sin” or “grace”? In all hearts one must be subordinate to the other, one must reign over the other.—Homilist.

SUGGESTIVE COMMENTS ON Romans 5:12

Death by Adam; life by Christ.—“And so death passed on all men”—that is, thus it is, or so it happened, that death passed on all men. As death is the penalty of sin, and as by one man all became sinners, thus it was by one man that death passed on all men. The force of the words “and so” have been much disputed; many understand them as answering to the word “as” at the beginning of the verse: “As Adam sinned and died, so also do all men.” But, in the first place, the words do not admit of this interpretation; Paul does not say “so also,” but “and so,” “thus it was.” Besides, according to the view of the passage, this verse does not contain the first part of a comparison between Adam and Christ, but merely a comparison between Adam and his posterity. It is by one man that men became sinners; and thus it was by one man that death passed upon all men. The scope of the passage is to illustrate the doctrine of justification on the ground of the righteousness of Christ, by a reference to the condemnation of men for the sin of Adam. The analogy is destroyed, and the point of the comparison falls, if everything in us be assumed as the ground of the infliction of the penal evils of which the apostle is here speaking. Not only does the scope of the passage demand this interpretation, but also the whole course of the argument. We die on account of Adam’s sin: this is true, because on no other ground can the universality of death be accounted for. But if we all die on Adam’s account, how much more shall we live on account of Christ? The doctrine which the verse thus explained teaches is one of the plainest truths of all the Scriptures and of experience. Is it not a revealed fact, above all contradiction, and sustained by the whole history of the world, that the sin of Adam altered the relation in which our race stood to God? Did we not fall when Adam fell? If these questions are answered in the affirmative, the doctrine contained in the interpretation of Romans 5:12, given above, is admitted. The doctrine of the imputation of Adam’s sin, or that on account of that sin all men are regarded and treated as sinners, was a common Jewish doctrine at the time of the apostle as well as at a later period. He employs the same method of expression on the subject which the Jews were accustomed to use. They could not have failed, therefore, to understand him as meaning to convey by these expressions the ideas usually connected with them. Whatever obscurity, therefore, rests upon this passage arises from taking the word “death” in the narrow sense in which it is commonly used among men: if taken in its scriptural sense, the whole argument is plain and conclusive. Let “penal evil” be substituted for the word “death,” and the argument will stand thus: All men are subject to penal evils on account of one man. The simple doctrine and argument of the apostle is, that it was by the offence of one man that judgment came on all men to condemnation.—Hodge.

Man might have been translated.—Long before the creation of man the existence of death is proved in the domain of animal life. Now the body of man belongs to the great sum-total of animal organisation, of which he is the crown; and therefore the law of death must already have extended to man, independently of sin. Paul’s words in the First Epistle to the Corinthians, as well as those of Genesis, the sense of which he reproduces, prove beyond doubt the natural possibility of death, but not its necessity. If man had remained united to God, his body, naturally subject to dissolution, might have been gloriously transformed without passing through death and dissolution. The notion of the tree of life, as usually explained, means nothing else. This privilege of an immediate transformation will belong to the believers who shall be alive at the time of our Lord’s return (1 Corinthians 15:51), and it was probably this kind of transformation that was on the point of taking effect in the person of the Lord Himself at the time of His transfiguration. This privilege, intended for holy man, was withdrawn from guilty man: such was the sentence which gave him over to dissolution. It is stated in the words, “Thou art dust [that is to say, thou canst die], and to dust shalt thou return [that is to say, thou shalt in fact die].” The reign of death over the animals likewise proves only this: that it was in the natural condition of man to terminate in dissolution. Remaining on the level of animalism by the preference given by him to inclination over moral obligation, man continued subject to this law. But had he risen by an act of moral liberty above the animal, he would not have had to share its lot (see also on Romans 8:19).—Godet.

Christ paid more than we owe.—Far more than what we owed was paid by Christ, as much more as the immeasurable ocean exceeds a drop. Doubt not, therefore, O man, when beholding such a treasure of blessings; nor ask how the old spark of death and of sin has been extinguished, seeing that such a sea of the gifts of grace has been poured upon it.—Chrysostom.

Calvin as an interpreter.—Mark the language of Calvin on these words: “The free gift came upon all men unto justification of life.” “Communem omnium gratiam facit, quia omnibus exposita est, non quod ad omnes extendatur re ipsâ. Nam etsi passus est Christus pro peccatis totius mundi, atque omnibus indifferenter Dei benignitate offertur; non tamen omnes apprehendunt.” “This free gift of God,” says Calvin in the above passage, “is here declared to be common to all, because it is open to all, not because it actually extends to all. For although Christ suffered for the sins of the whole world, and, by the mercy of God, is offered to all without distinction, yet all do not lay hold of Him.” In this passage Calvin speaks as an interpreter of Scripture, in the Institutes as the advocate of a system. His Institutes, moreover, were written in his earlier days; but his commentaries on Scripture were the labours of his maturer days. It is the observation of Witsius that Calvin uses one language in controversy and another when tranquilly explaining Scripture: “Tantum sæpe interest, utrum quis cum adversario contendat, an libero animo commentetur.”

Words signifying sin.—The first, translated “offence” or “trespass,” means “the falling from a position”; the second, by the general word “sin,” implies the “missing of a mark”; while in Romans 5:19 we have the “disobedience” of Adam, which signifies the “neglect” or “refusal” to hear, and in Romans 5:14 the term “transgression,” or the “overstepping” of a positive law. What is the precise significance of the statement that the “law entered that she offence might abound”? What is this “offence”? The majority of commentators answer, “the first sin of Adam.” But in what sense is it this? In the previous steps of his argument the apostle has asserted that sin reigned from Adam to Moses. That sin, however, could not be a “transgression” of positive law, for as Paul asserts in Romans 4:15, “where no law is, there is no transgression.” It was rather an “offence”—a wider term, embracing definite acts of sin, whether committed without law or under it. Wittingly or unwittingly, it was the actual repetition of the “disobedience” of Adam. Death reigned from Adam to Moses because “sin” reigned; and one object, at least, which was served by the law was to prove that this was indeed the case—was to prove that every “offence” was practically a real “transgression,” and that both were the expression or manifestation of the “disobedience” of Adam. Thus the first way in which the law makes the “offence” to abound is by bringing the “knowledge of sin”—by putting the already existing offence in its true light. But it does so, in the second place, by being a “provocation to sin.” “I was alive without the law once; but when the commandment came, sin revived, and I died.” The principle contained in the law is opposed to the principle of sin. There is an exasperating antithesis between the two. So that when the light of the law is flashed upon the principle of sin in man, it arouses into intense action the slumbering volcano within, until it rushes forth in molten streams of intensified and multiplied transgressions. The office of the law is therefore to show that all the differences in the terms do not alter the real nature of the thing. And the apostle consequently returns to the general term for “sin” (ἁμαρτία), which he has held in abeyance since the beginning of the paragraph, and writes, “But where sin abounded, grace did much more abound.”—John Adams, B.D.