18 Consequently, just as one trespass resulted in condemnation for all people, so also one righteous act resulted in justification and life for all. 19 For just as through the disobedience of the one man the many were made sinners, so also through the obedience of the one man the many will be made righteous.
20 The law was brought in so that the trespass might increase. But where sin increased, grace increased all the more, 21 so that, just as sin reigned in death, so also grace might reign through righteousness to bring eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord.
Dig Deeper
A few days ago a good friend and a brother in Christ and I ran in a marathon together in our home town. It’s actually a rather large affair that has several thousand participants and has countless thousands of spectators that line the entire 26.2 mile route. As you settle into a race of that length, you get to a point a few miles in where you pretty much have a group around you that you will be running with for a long time. You get fairly familiar with that group and it’s pretty common to even talk with them and get to know them a little bit as you run. By the twenty mile mark, though, everyone is flushed, sweaty, tired, and just looking to power through to the finish line. Even runners that are still feeling strong are not wasting any energy anymore by talking and their strides are steady, controlled and calculated. Suddenly, though, around mile twenty-one things changed. I hadn’t noticed as I passed through the water station that I had also passed through a relay station. There were a couple hundred teams that ran the marathon as relay teams rather than as individuals. I began to hear the unmistakable sound behind me of a large number of people that were running much harder and faster than the runners with whom I had become quite accustomed. The course was suddenly filled with people that looked fresh, they were running hard, they were passing people quickly, and to top it all off, they weren’t sweating. For a moment, I was dumbfounded until I realized that a whole new group of people, these relay runners, had been released onto the route. These relay runners were, in some ways, completely different than the runners that were trudging along just trying to finish.
The relay runners, of course, weren’t a completely different species or type of human being, they were just different in that they didn’t have 21 miles behind them. They went about the race differently because they had just burst onto the scene. Paul has spent most of the first five chapters describing, in various ways, the lot of humanity that has rebelled against God and are trudging along on the same path of sin and death. Everyone looks the same, they’re headed the same way, they’re hopeless and helpless. But suddenly a whole new type of humanity has burst onto the path. Something new has been unleashed into the world through the resurrection of the Messiah and these people don’t look the same, they’re not heading in the same direction, and they are anything but hopeless and helpless.
After dealing with some potential objections or roadblocks to his point in verse 12, Paul now finally returns to that thought in verse 18. He described in the previous passage the inequity between the gift and the trespass but now he points out the parallels and balance between Adam and Christ. Adam’s trespass has brought all people into a state of condemnation resulting in death but Christ has made the way available for justification and life for all. Everyone that is born into this world, in other words, is born into the condemnation of a world in which sin and death rule. We all participate in that sin and conjure up our own measure of guilt, thereby earning our own piece of that condemnation. The righteous act of Christ going to the cross has resulted in anyone who responds in faith to be declared part of God’s covenant family, or justified. Adam’s sin brought death but the act of God’s obedient servant will bring life. Isaiah 53:11 declared that “After he has suffered, he will see the light of life and be satisfied; by his knowledge my righteous servant will justify many, and he will bear their iniquities.” Rather than fulfilling their role as God’s faithful servant, Israel subjected themselves to the reign of sin just as everyone else had. It was Jesus, the obedient servant of God who had broken open a new path, a new humanity, who are given a new status in anticipation of the final verdict of life that will be declared over them at the final judgment.
Adam had acted in disobedience and brought the enslavement of sin to all his descendants but the obedience of Jesus offers a new way. But to what was Jesus obedient? Some have asserted that Jesus was perfectly obedient to the law but in light of Isaiah that doesn’t seem to fit. The servant was obedient to God’s plan to bear the sin of many and intercede for the transgressors. He was the obedient servant who fulfilled God’s plan that was purposed for Israel from the very beginning. The ethnic nation of Israel could not bear up to that plan because they were infected with the same sin that the plan was intended to solve. But the Messiah had finally enacted that plan and through his obedience, many will be declared to be in the covenant family. Only through the life of Christ can we be considered righteous, or faithful to the covenant.
Paul’s sudden switch back to the topic of the law in verse 20 can be a bit difficult to follow if we don’t step back and look at things from the perspective of a first-century Jew. It is not a stretch to think that many Jews of Paul’s day would have seen the true humanity unleashed onto the world as those who followed the law. The law was given to make Israel different from the world and so they were. In one sense, it did make them different but the law did not and could not accomplish the ultimate goal of creating a new humanity because it only highlighted the problem within the old humanity that was there all along, that of sin. The law couldn’t deal with sin only highlight and define it. For instance, the room I am sitting in has millions of dust particles floating around but I had not been able to see them. It’s a cloudy day and there is no sunlight shining in through the windows. Just a minute ago, though, a beam of sunlight suddenly came into the room and I could instantly see that there are dust particles everywhere. The sun doesn’t create the dust but it makes it all the more visible. Rather than having to wait to see the effects of the dust, to see it building up on a table or shelf, the sun shows it immediately. This is exactly what the law did for Israel. It made it all the more visible the presences of sin.
The law was given to Israel but it didn’t solve the enslavement of sin, it only showed it to be all the more apparent in Israel. This was part of God’s plan all along, says Paul, giving an advance position to an argument to which he will return in Romans 7:7-25. The law didn’t free Israel from Adam’s sin, it shined a bright beam of sunlight onto it. But God didn’t leave things that way. Where sin increased, a reference to Israel, grace increased all the more. The law magnified the problem of Adam’s sin but now God has sent his faithful servant to solve that problem. God came to the very place where sin was shown the most, because the law had highlighted it, and has dealt with it right there.
What Paul has shown and will continue to show is that although sin is highlighted under the law, the problem of sin stretches out far beyond the law, so the solution must come from outside of the reach of the law. Paul has demonstrated that the source of condemnation goes back to Adam not Moses. Moses’ law did not solve the problem of sin, it highlighted and magnified it in many respects but it did not cause it. It did not bring sin into the world. That was Adam’s work. That means that since the law was not the cause of the problem it could not be the solution either. The problem of sin is bigger and stretches back farther than Moses and so the source of the solution, justification, must go beyond the scope of the law and Moses. The solution to sin and death is the resurrection and the life of the new humanity made available through Christ. The law couldn’t defeat sin and death but only make them more powerful. But in Christ, God has been faithful to his covenant. He has worked though the descendants of Abraham to usher in the new humanity, the family that has been made to be faithful to the covenant and had their sin dealt with.
The reign of sin and death seemed insurmountable but it has been stood up to and defeated. God’s sovereign purposes as demonstrated through his grace have defeated the tyranny of sin and death through the covenant faithfulness and obedience of the Messiah. It is this obedience to death and his subsequent defeat of death and vindication that has brought “eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord.” We have often reduced “eternal life” in our vernacular to mean eternity in a non-physical heaven. But that is not what Paul means. He is more correctly referring to the life of the coming age which has broken into the present age and will be available fully at the time of the resurrection. Sin and death have reigned but now, in Christ, eternal life has opened up a whole new world and let a whole new group of runners onto the course.
Devotional Thought
If the new model of humanity has been unveiled through the death and resurrection of Christ have you taken hold of that life? Have you truly entered into the life of the Messiah and subjected your will to his? In the Lord’s prayer of Matthew 6, Jesus declared that the way to resist evil and temptation is to seek God’s will over our own. What does that mean for your life?
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