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.
NKJ 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.
NKJ 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.
NKJ 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.
NKJ Genesis
This is the first mention of the
gospel called the proto evangelium. To the woman he says:
NKJ 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.
NKJ 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:
NKJ 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.)
NKJ Romans
NKJ 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.