World christian Felloship

Romans 5:12-14

Death through Adam

Romans 5:12-14, Therefore, just as through one man sin entered the world, and death through sin, and thus death spread to all men, because all sinned— ¹³ (For until the law sin was in the world, but sin is not imputed when there is no law. 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.

Romans 1:1-3:21, we have seen the lostness of man.

Romans 3:22-5:11 we have seen how the man was connected with God through Justification by faith in Lord Jesus Christ. Christ has reversed man's lostness. Christ has justified by His death on the cross all who come to Him in faith.

The inevitable question

Every man is sinful, lost, damned and condemned to judgment, then all of a sudden, this One Man Jesus comes along. His dying on a cross and rising and by the one act of one man you say that all men can be justified? How can One Man did, at one time affect everybody?

Answer comes from this section Romans 5:12-21. We will look only one part of it tonight. ➢ The one-man Adam in the one act of sin affected the whole human race. ➢ The One-Man Jesus Christ act of obedience to the cross and His death and resurrection affected everyone.

The analogy is an antithetical analogy. It is an analogy of opposites. In this section, the word "one"is used eleven times. The word "reign,"is used five times. The word "much more,"is used five times. “The whole story of the human race can be summed up in terms of what has happened because of Adam, and what has happened and will yet happen because of Jesus Christ.” Dr.

Martyn Lloyd Jones.

Why there is death in the world? Death reigns because of the presence of sin. Sin exists because of the sin of one man. Through one man sin entered into the world. The whole complex of sin, death, condemnation all of it came through one man.

The reign of death over the human race is the result of Adam’s sin. There are four sequential realities in the verses. 1. Sin entered the world through one man. 2. Death entered world through Sin. 3. Death spread to all men.

4. History proves it. 1. Sin entered the World. Notice it carefully. It does not say that Adam originated sin. Sin had already originated prior to Adam. V 12, Therefore, just as through one man sin entered the world, and death through sin, and thus death spread to all men, because all sinned—

Sin came into humans through that one man who is identified, in verse 14, named Adam.

1 John 3:8, He who sins is of the devil, for the devil has sinned from the beginning. For this purpose the Son of God was manifested, that He might destroy the works of the devil.

The devil instituted, inaugurated, launched sin with the rebellion in heaven. But Adam, succumbing to the devil’s temptations, introduced sin into humanity. Acting as if he were an agent to the devil, carrying the devil’s rebellion into the world, Adam sinned.

God created Adam and Eve and gave them the responsibility to take care of the Garden of Eden.

Genesis 2:15-17, Then the Lord God took the man and put him in the garden of Eden to tend and keep it. ¹⁶ And the Lord God commanded the man, saying, “Of every tree of the garden you may freely eat; ¹⁷ but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it you shall surely die.”

But God did command them not to eat the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. If you fail, then you will die.

Genesis 3:1-7, Now the serpent was more cunning than any beast of the field which the Lord God had made. And he said to the woman, “Has God indeed said, ‘You shall not eat of every tree of the garden’?” ² And the woman said to the serpent, “We may eat the fruit of the trees of the garden; ³ but of the fruit of the tree which is in the midst of the garden, God has said, ‘You shall not eat it, nor shall you touch it, lest you die.’ ” ⁴ Then the serpent said to the woman, “You will not surely die. ⁵ For God knows that in the day you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.” ⁶ So when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, that it was pleasant to the eyes, and a tree desirable to make one wise, she took of its fruit and ate. She also gave to her husband with her, and he ate. ⁷ Then the eyes of both of them were opened, and they knew that they were naked; and they sewed fig leaves together and made themselves coverings.

But Eve ate first. Why does it say, “As in Adam all died”?

Why was it the transgression of Adam? Because Adam was the head, Adam was the head. Adam was the responsible one. The result of sin is curse.

Genesis 3:16-19, To the woman He said: “I will greatly multiply your sorrow and your conception; In pain you shall bring forth children; Your desire shall be for your husband, And he shall rule over you.” ¹⁷ Then to Adam He said, “Because you have heeded the voice of your wife, and have eaten from the tree of which I commanded you, saying, ‘You shall not eat of it’: “Cursed is the ground for your sake; In toil you shall eat of it All the days of your life. ¹⁸ Both thorns and thistles it shall bring forth for you, And you shall eat the herb of the field. 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.”

Right perspective

God gave Adam only one command and that is the only thing that kept Adam submission to God. That is the only thing differentiated Adam and God. If there were no commands and no prohibitions, then Adam would have had the same right to rule as God had.

But by giving him just one prohibition, He put him at that one point under Him. God said you are man, and I Am God. I Am only going to give you one little thing to show the difference.

But there's something about man that can't stand to be ruled, even at that one small point. Adam wants to be like God. The same temptation that made Satan to fell from heaven.

Isaiah 14:14-15, I will ascend above the heights of the clouds, I will be like the Most High.’ ¹⁵ Yet you shall be brought down to Sheol, To the lowest depths of the Pit. So, Satan, who wanted to be like God, came and tempted Eve and Adam to want to be like God. Not to be under anything, not even that one prohibition that was the only thing that separated Adam from God. At the core of Adam's sin was self! Self is at the core of sin always, as it was with Lucifer.

When Adam sinned something terrible happened. His sin brought a constitutional change of unholiness into his soul. Pure stained by sin or disobedience. Notice it says in V 12 that by one man sin entered the world, not sins!

It's not talking about acts, but the nature, and its character. When Adam sinned the corrupt decaying principle of sin entered into the human stream. Just like Adam passed on to his posterity a nose, eyes, ears, arms, and legs, he passed on the corrupting principle of sin. Sin entered the human stream.

Adam was duly constituted mankind.

• When Adam sinned, he was the whole human race. In Adam’s loins was the seed that would bring forth every human life.
• When Adam was polluted, it guaranteed that everybody born out of his loins would be polluted.

All human history is condensed in Genesis chapter 3. The Jews understood this concept of what we call corporate personality. We don't understand it quite as well as they did. The Jew never thought of himself as an isolated individual. He thought himself a part of a tribe, a part of a family, a part of a nation.

In the Old Testament God treated people as whole units. Many times, for example, we see God destroying a whole nation of

people because of a certain number of unrighteous people in that nation. Or God acting in judgment against a whole group of people though a few of them would be initially guilty. For example, Achan, when the children of Israel are going into the land, does exactly what God told him not to do when you go to Jericho, make sure that you don't take any spoil. Achan did.

God judged Achan and God not only took the life of Achan, but he took the life of everybody in his family. When Achan sinned at Jericho, all Israel paid at Ai at the next battle, because God treated the family and the nation.

Abraham intercedes of Sodom and Gomorrah.

Genesis 18:32, Then he said, “Let not the Lord be angry, and I will speak but once more: Suppose ten should be found there?” And He said, “I will not destroy it for the sake of ten.”

The whole city will survive if there are ten righteous. So sometimes a minimal number of people become the righteousness of a whole nation.

Other times a minimum number of evil people become the condemnation of a whole nation. But God sees nations in solidarity, particularly in the Old Testament. Melchizedek was a priest of the Most-High God in the city of Salem, which is the ancient name of Jerusalem. He lived prior to the Israelites. He lived in the day of Abraham before Israel was a nation. Abraham went there after a great battle with the kings. He had won the victory. He wanted to worship God, so he went to this place where Melchizedek was the priest and he offered offerings to God. Melchizedek acted on the behalf of God as the priest.

Hebrews 7:9-10, Even Levi, who receives tithes, paid tithes through Abraham, so to speak, ¹⁰ for he was still in the loins of his father when Melchizedek met him.

The Levitical priesthood proceeded out of the loins of Abraham. He was one of the sons of Jacob. Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and then Levi comes. But here Hebrews says Levi is paying tithes to Melchizedek bound up in the loins of Abraham, so that it sees Levi yet unborn.

Three generations beyond still paying tithes in the loins of Abraham. Now that's a very Jewish concept of seeing people bound up in their ancestor's loins.

• Pharaoh sinned and the whole Egyptian army got drowned.
• Moab and Amalek were all destroyed for the transgressions of their fathers.
• The leprosy of Naaman was to cling to Gehazi and his seed.
• The Lord declared guilt for the blood of all the prophets on the apostate Jews of his generation.

When Adam sinned, just like when Abraham paid tithes to Melchizedek, Levi paid them in his loins. When Adam sinned all the human race was duly constituted in the loins of Adam, we sinned in Adam. We were there. So, Paul presents Adam acting as mankind.

1 Corinthians 15:22, For as in Adam all die, even so in Christ all shall be made alive.

In order to make this analogy work, in order for it to have any validity, since Christ is a historical figure, Adam must be a historical figure too. This is one passage that strikes a fierce blow to the evolutionary hypothesis and to all those people who say that Adam is representative of some sort of mystical pre-historic drama made up by men.

If Adam is not a real one man whose one deed corrupted the whole race, then Christ is not a real one man whose one deed gives righteousness to those who believe.

2. Death entered world through Sin

V 12, Therefore, just as through one man sin entered the world, and death through sin, and thus death spread to all men, because all sinned— When the corrupting principle came, so did its penal consequence. When the corrupting principle entered into the human stream, so did the penalty for that corrupting principle.

Romans 6:23, For the wages of sin is death, but the gift of

God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord.

Ezekiel 18:4, “Behold, all souls are Mine; The soul of the father As well as the soul of the son is Mine; The soul who sins shall die.

Genesis 2:17, but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it you shall surely die.”

God did not create a man who would die. That came as a penal act, a penalty, a consequent punishment to sin. We were never made for death. That is why hell was never made for us. It was made for the devil and his angels, not for us. That was never to be our place.

Matthew 25:41, “Then He will also say to those on the left hand, ‘Depart from Me, you cursed, into the everlasting fire

prepared for the devil and his angels

But when we sinned in Adam and the evil was passed on through all the generations, along with that evil came its penal consequence, death.

If Adam hadn't sinned what would have happened? Adam would have been taken to heaven without ever dying. Would have been Enoch and Elijah.

Take a walk one day and walk to heaven, just jump in a chariot of fire, and blast off. Death came as the penalty for sin. Death then is the unfailing fruit of the poison that entered Adam's heart. Sin and death will never be separated.

Hebrews 9:27, And as it is appointed for men to die once, but after this the judgment, Adam died, so everybody who comes out of Adam's loins is going to die. The sin principle, its penal consequence is there. Death comes not because you commit sins, but because you bear in you a sin principle, a corrupt nature.

How do we know that? What about a baby that’s two hours old or three hours old or three days or four weeks or six months?

Have they committed overt acts of sin? Are they guilty of unbelief and rejection of Jesus Christ?

Lying, cheating, stealing? No!

Why do they die? Because constitutionally they sinned in the loins of Adam, and they inherited that sin principle and with it the penalty as well.

That's why death is in the world because we are born to die. We have inherited a principle, a disposition, a state of existence. Corruption invaded the human realm and none of us can escape! So, from Adam on, everyone has the sin principle.

• You are not a sinner because you sin.
• You sin because you are a sinner.
• You are not a liar because you told a lie.
• You told that lie because in your heart you are a liar.
• You are not a murderer because you killed somebody.
• You kill them because in your heart you are a murderer.

This is what Jesus said in Matthew 5 in the sermon on the mount.

Romans 5:19, For as by one man’s disobedience many were made sinners, so also by one Man’s obedience many will be made righteous.

We didn't have a choice. We just came into the world and that's the way we were. So, death reigns over sin.

Where sin reigns, death reigns.

What kind of death is it? There are three kinds of death. Death is separation. Physical death is separation from the living. Spiritual death is separation from the living God. Eternal death is eternal separation from the living God and the living who are living in the presence of the living God.

• a) Spiritual death.

When Adam sinned, he did not die on the spot physically.

Did he die eternally? No. He just died spiritually.

What does that mean? Separation.

Ephesians 2:1-2, And you He made alive, who were dead in trespasses and sins, ² in which you once walked according to the course of this world, according to the prince of the power of the air, the spirit who now works in the sons of disobedience, You are spiritually dead.

Ephesians 4:18, having their understanding darkened, being alienated from the life of God, because of the ignorance that is in them, because of the blindness of their heart; You don't have any spiritual life. You are alive to the world, You are alive to the physical dimension, you are alive to the things of man, you are alive to the things of the devil but you are dead to God, spiritually dead.

• b) Physical death.

Physical death separation from the living. Inevitable, too. Death is that great enemy holds every man in fear.

Hebrews 2:14, Inasmuch then as the children have partaken of flesh and blood, He Himself likewise shared in the same, that through death He might destroy him who had the power of death, that is, the devil, People are mostly afraid of physical death when they mostly ought to be afraid of spiritual death.

Luke 12:4-5, “And I say to you, My friends, do not be afraid of those who kill the body, and after that have no more that they can do. ⁵ But I will show you whom you should fear: Fear Him who, after He has killed, has power to cast into hell; yes, I say to you, fear Him! If you want to fear something, don't fear physical death. I don't fear physical death. Those who know Jesus Christ don't fear physical death. We might fear the pain and the separation that we anticipate might be there, but we don't fear the death. If there's something to fear it isn't the physical death, it's the spiritual death. But once we have taken care of the spiritual dimension and we are living in spiritual life, then physical death becomes promotion.

Philippians 1:21, For to me, to live is Christ, and to die is gain. So, there is spiritual death and there is physical death.

• c) Eternal death.

Eternal death simply means the eternal state of both. Where you are separated from the living God, and you are separated from the people who are really living and you are with those who are eternally dying apart from God forever in hell.

Revelation 21:8, But the cowardly, unbelieving, abominable, murderers, sexually immoral, sorcerers, idolaters, and all liars shall have their part in the lake which burns with fire and brimstone, which is the second death.”

When Adam sinned, pollution, corruption of a vile nature entered the human stream, and it passed on its influence on every human ever born and we come into the world spiritually dead. We come into the world heading for physical death and if something doesn't happen to make us spiritually alive, eternal death.

How did that happen? It happened from one man. One man did that to the whole human race. If I would have been there, I wouldn't have done it. Hindsight. If he looked back five minutes after he, did it and had to do it over again, he wouldn't have done it.

3. Death spread to all men. V 12, Therefore, just as through one man sin entered the world, and death through sin, and thus death spread to all men, because all sinned— Death passed on all men. Nobody escapes. A very important theological truth. Everybody dies because everybody sins because everybody has a sin principle because Adam sinned and introduced the whole thing and passed it on.

Just like we got eyes, ears, noses, arms, and legs, we got sin from him. But then we could have just left it there and we would have been so easily satisfied, but then he adds that for all have sinned. In time past, all have sinned.

When did we all do that? In the loins of Adam. We were duly constituted there in the loins of Adam. We sinned in Adam for he was the race.

That is why babies die, not because they commit deeds of sin but because they already sinned in Adam, and they can be punished justly. It is impossible for me to understand. I just accept it by faith. We were born dead in trespasses and sin. If we never lived long enough to commit an act of sin, we would be worthy of death because we sinned in Adam.

You may say that I have done that. Yes, you have. Just give it enough time and you will prove it. You will prove the sin principle is fully operating. Our depravity, our sinfulness, our fallenness is not the result of our sinning, it is the cause of our sinning.

When a baby comes into the world you don't teach a baby how to disobey. You take a stick and teach him to obey. Just leave him alone and see what happens to him. You will have to put him in prison by the time he is eight.

Psalm 51:5, Behold, I was brought forth in iniquity, And in sin my mother conceived me.

The fetus is guilty because it bears the Adamic nature.

Psalm 58:3, The wicked are estranged from the womb; They go astray as soon as they are born, speaking lies.

Jeremiah 17:9, “The heart is deceitful above all things, And desperately wicked; Who can know it?

Job 14:4, Who can bring a clean thing out of an unclean? No one! Why Jesus had to be born of a virgin? Why Jesus had to bypass a human father? Because He had to be created in the body of Mary bypassing the human race or He would have been born a sinner.

Is the virgin birth important? Yes! it's important.

Job 15:14-16, “What is man, that he could be pure? And he who is born of a woman, that he could be righteous? ¹⁵ If God puts no trust in His saints, And the heavens are not pure in His sight, ¹⁶ How much less man, who is abominable and filthy, Who drinks iniquity like water!

John 8:44, You are of your father the devil, and the desires of your father you want to do. He was a murderer from the beginning, and does not stand in the truth, because there is no

truth in him. When he speaks a lie, he speaks from his own resources, for he is a liar and the father of it. So, Adam sinned, and he wasn't even tricked.

1 Timothy 2:14, And Adam was not deceived, but the woman being deceived, fell into transgression. Adam just flat out sinned, wilfully, deliberately, in full consciousness of what he was doing. In a perfect realization of the solemn consequences, he deliberately chose to sin.

When he did, he brought death upon himself and he passed it on to everybody else because we all sinned in his loins, as he represented all human history.

Deuteronomy 29:29, “The secret things belong to the Lord our God, but those things which are revealed belong to us and to our children forever, that we may do all the words of this law.

But aren't you glad you can't understand the whole Bible? Because if you could then you would be God. If you were God, things would be worse by far. How can I sin in Adam when I wasn't even there? I didn't literally actually sin in Adam, I wasn't even there.

How can I be held responsible for doing something in somebody when I wasn't even there?

Have you died in Christ as a Christian?

Are you willing to accept that wonderful fact? Did you rise again in Christ to walk in newness of life? How did you do that when you weren't even there? You didn't literally die on the cross. You didn't literally go into the grave.

You didn't literally come out of the grave. But you welcomed the understanding that in a spiritual sense, somehow in the marvellous miraculous mind of God, He put you in Christ on the cross and in the grave with Christ and out to walk in newness of life. You are eager to accept that and excited to accept it.

It's no different. If we can understand that spiritually we were there constituted in Christ when He died and rose again and we walk in newness of life because we died with Christ, we were crucified with Christ, then why can't we understand that we were there in Adam when he fell at the first?

It's the same basic concept.

It doesn't give you an answer, but it gives you another question that's somewhat comforting. The death of Christ legally and effectively was our death. The sin of Adam legally and effectively was our sin.

1 Corinthians 15:22, For as in Adam all die, even so in Christ all shall be made alive.

We were in Adam. We are in Christ. Somehow, we were in Adam when he did what he did. Somehow, we were in Christ when He did what He did. If we don't understand it, that means God has a mind beyond our mind. Not that it can't be understood or that it's in error, simply that we are too frail to comprehend it.

I didn't ask to be born and when I was born, I had two sinners for parents. It wasn't their fault, they had four sinners for parents. If you just keep going back, you are going to find a whole bunch of sinners till you get back to Adam.

Is that just? I didn't ask to be born. You can't blame me. One day I arrived in the hospital and there I was, a sinner, condemned to hell.

Is that fair? Is that just? Is it just that millions of sinners should be saved by the grace of God? Is it fair that you should be able to go to heaven when you never paid the penalty for your sin, somebody else did? You don't want to be a sinner when somebody else sinned, but you sure don't mind getting saved when somebody else paid the penalty for your sin.

That's why this analogy is so masterful. I doubt whether a human mind on its own would ever have thought of this. The infinite nature of this analogy just boggles my mind. The longer I think about it the more frustrating it becomes, I promise you.

All we can say is that the answer is bound up somewhere in the character of God. Habakkuk Habakkuk looks at a situation. He can't understand it, and it doesn't make sense. ➢ He cannot understand why God doesn't bring a revival to Israel.

➢ He cannot understand why God doesn't purify His people.

➢ He can't understand why God doesn't come to bless them. God says, "I am going to do something. I am going to destroy them." He couldn't understand why God didn't do good, He can't understand why God's going to do evil.

He doesn't understand how God could use a worse people, Chaldeans, to be their judge. So, he can't understand the whole thing. He has got the problem of trying to figure out why it is the way it is. Finally, Habakkuk backs off the thing and he just says, God, ✓ You are of purer eyes cannot look on iniquity, ✓ You are from everlasting to everlasting, ✓ You don't make mistakes, ✓ You are a holy God, ✓ You are an almighty God, and ✓ I am going to rest on Your characters.

Habakkuk 3:17-18, Though the fig tree may not blossom, Nor fruit be on the vines; Though the labour of the olive may fail, And the fields yield no food; Though the flock may be cut off from the fold, And there be no herd in the stalls— ¹⁸ Yet I will rejoice in the Lord, I will joy in the God of my salvation.

Habakkuk is saying is when you can't understand things with your own human mind, you back off the quicksand of your own misunderstanding and you get on the rock of the character of God. ✓ God is just! ✓ God is wise. ✓ God is love ✓ God is gracious, ✓ God is merciful.

God who is loving and gracious and merciful and wise unnecessarily going to create souls for hell? No. So, we are comforted in the character of God that we will never be able to unscramble all the mysteries of His infinite mind in this life.

Now God had some options. When Adam sinned, He could have just killed him. That's it! That would have been it. No humans, we tried it with two of them, that was two too many. It’s all over ended human history with the first two.

Why didn't God do that? it's funny when you try to speculate how things might have been. Let me give you my feeble inept understanding.

Why did God create angels? Give Him glory. They just fly around and give Him glory and offer Him praise and do what He asks. But they don't fully understand God. There's a whole side of God that they don't understand. This is what they don't understand.

Grace, mercy, forgiveness, compassion, tenderness, etc., They don't understand any of that. Yet that is in the nature of God. That is in God's character and His living attributes.

Why don't they understand it? Angels were created.

They were made all what? Holy angels.

Does a holy angel need forgiveness? No.

Does a holy angel need mercy, compassion, tenderness, gentleness, grace, long-suffering, patience? No because a holy angel is a perfect being. They were worthy beings. They could say praise and hallelujah and glory to God and give Him honour, but only from a limited perspective because they were worthy beings to begin with.

There was a whole element of God's nature that needed to be glorified and needed to be praised and needed to be exalted that angel couldn't exalt. The angels sinned and they fell, and Revelation 12 says a third of the angels went with Lucifer and they fell.

They were damned, to hell forever and were instantly unredeemable.

• No angel was ever redeemed.
• No angel was ever saved.
• No angel was ever forgiven for that fall.
• They fell individually.

Angels didn't re-create, they were all instantly created at one moment as individuals and each of them acts independently as an individual. The ones that fell, they fell as individuals.

They were constituted as damned forever, there is no redemption of angels.

1 Peter 1:12, To them it was revealed that, not to themselves, but to us they were ministering the things which now have been reported to you through those who have preached the gospel to you by the Holy Spirit sent from heaven—things which angels desire to look into.

The angels wish to look into the doctrines of salvation, because they don't understand those. So here was this whole dimension of God that was never able to be praised and never able to be fully glorified unless God would create some people who, having fallen could be redeemed.

Then out of their redemption would come an understanding.

Do you understand grace?

Do you understand mercy? Do you understand compassion, forgiveness, tenderness, patience? We understand those very well. We have trouble with the stuff the angels understand, the worthiness and the perfections.

We have trouble understanding the perfections of God, the infinite mind of God. But we understand the mercy. I think that's the reason when Adam sinned God said, I am not going to let him go. I am going to give them a message of redemption.

So, God didn't create men and then say in Adam you are all damned to hell. God said, because you sinned, you come prey to death that is spiritual, physical, and eternal. Then God set about to stop men from hell. Remember the cry of Jesus when He wept over the city of Jerusalem?

Matthew 23:37-39, “O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, the one who kills the prophets and stones those who are sent to her! How often I wanted to gather your children together, as a hen gathers her chicks under her wings, but you were not willing! ³⁸ See! Your house is left to you desolate; ³⁹ for I say to you, you shall see Me no more till you say, ‘Blessed is He who comes in the name of the Lord!’ ” Jesus wept when they turned their backs on Him.

God did it back in the prophet Jeremiah.

Jeremiah 14:17, “Therefore you shall say this word to them: ‘Let my eyes flow with tears night and day, And let them not cease; For the virgin daughter of my people Has been broken with a mighty stroke, with a very severe blow. That's the broken heart of God.

God did not say all right, Adam, go ahead and produce your damned race and let them all go to the hell I prepared for the fallen angels. If you think God's out of line for wanting it, then that shows how little you understand about God's worthiness. He deserved the praise from those who would understand His grace.

Ephesians 3:10, to the intent that now the manifold wisdom of

God might be made known by the church to the principalities and powers in the heavenly places, Because we can fill up for their understanding that which they without us would never understand. If the purpose of creation and the purpose of heaven and the purpose of eternity is the eternal praise of God, then it's fitting that we should be there, isn't it?

I believe with all my heart that those who go into hell without Jesus Christ go there because they reject the redemption provided.

2 Peter 3:9, The Lord is not slack concerning His promise, as some count slackness, but is longsuffering toward [c]us, not willing that any should perish but that all should come to repentance.

The death of Jesus Christ was universally applicable to every soul. Sin entered the world through one man, death through that man. Death passed on all men because all have sinned. We all sinned in Adam. But nonetheless He allowed us to be born to call us to redemption so that we could be to the praise of His glory forever and know the eternal bliss that comes to those who make that commitment.

4. Proof of History. History proves this to be true. Sin came through one man, death came through sin, death spread to all men and history proves it to be true. V 13-14, (For until the law sin was in the world, but sin is not imputed when there is no law. 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.

The main thought is this, death reigned, verse 14, from Adam to Moses.

When did the law come?

When did God give the law? Moses. If death reigned, did all the people before Moses’ die? Sure did. If death reigned from Adam to Moses, then death is not a result of sins, it's not a result of breaking a direct commandment, it's not a result of violating a direct statement from God because prior to Moses the law was not there.

V 13, (For until the law sin was in the world, but sin is not imputed when there is no law. Sin can't be charged to one's account when there is no law. How can you be guilty of breaking a rule if there's no rule? So, if you have a period of time from Adam to Moses where there's no law. Death reigns and they are not dying because they broke a law.

Then what is it about them that's causing them to die? It isn't an act of sin they commit. The sin nature. So, this period of history from Adam to Moses verifies that men die not because they do acts of sin, but because they bear a sin corrupting principle within them.

They are born into the world on the way to hell. God in His marvellous mercy calls them to Himself. V 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.

Adam sinned by breaking a direct command.

God says do not eat of the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, and he did it. That resemblance is to break a command. When Moses gave the law, you had that same idea, breaking commands. So, in a sense Adam's sin was a sin against law.

But from Adam to Moses there is not a great revelation of laws. So, everybody didn't sin after the resemblance of Adam's kind of sin, violating a known revealed law, but everybody died. The conclusion then is that we die not because of acts of sin but because we bear the sin principle, which ultimately kills us.

It's like having cancer! It's just there eating you away till ultimate death occurs. God is not doing anything other in this world than trying to call people back from death to life. That's His desire. V 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.

So, Adam then is a type of Christ, as one man's act affected all, so there will come another man, the second Adam, the last Adam, and His one act will affect all.