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 offense again.
It keeps going back in Romans
5:17-18 to the one man’s offense.
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 offense 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
is not on the basis of your
personal sin. If it was, you would
probably have been in the
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.