Romans 5:13

Romans 5:13. For until the law. Romans 5:13-14 present a historical confirmation of the statement that ‘all sinned.' All sinned when Adam sinned, far the penalty of sin came from the very first, and that, too, when there was no such transgression of positive precept as in the case of Adam. Hence the penalty was the result of Adam's sin, an idea familiar to all who believed the Old Testament.

Sin was in the world. Sin as a tyrant, with its penal consequences. This thought is resumed and expounded in Romans 5:14.

But sin is not reckoned; ‘fully reckoned' is perhaps the best reading of the compound verb in the original. In a certain sense it is reckoned (comp. chap. Romans 2:9-16), but it cannot be fully reckoned as ‘transgression,' where law is not, or, in the absence of law. This proposition would be self-evident to the readers, and it was emphatically true of the Mosaic law, which, as Romans 5:14 shows, was in the Apostle's mind.