Micah Tillman

^{[ Romans 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5: Intro, 1-11, 12, 12-14, 15, 16-21, Summary ]}

I usually try not to do commentary two days in a row, but yesterday was more about Genesis 1-3 than about Romans 5.

So, I still need to deal with the rest of the chapter (in this and following posts).  I’ll start again at vs. 12, but v. 13 will be the first new material.

Romans 5:12-14 (NRSV)

12 Therefore, just as sin came into the world through one man, and death came through sin, and so death spread to all because all have sinned— 13 sin was indeed in the world before the law, but sin is not reckoned when there is no law. 14 Yet death exercised dominion from Adam to Moses, even over those whose sins were not like the transgression of Adam, who is a type of the one who was to come.

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5:12 – Adam’s sin lets sin into the world, and thus everyone ends up dying, because everyone ends up sinning.  Or, to put it another way (as we saw last time), Adam’s sin shuts God out of the world, and thus everyone ends up dying, because everyone is born into a godless world, and therefore ends up turning godless themselves.

Here Paul is contrasting being children of Abraham with being children of Adam.  To be a child of Abraham, he said in chapter 4, is to follow Abraham in becoming righteous through faith.  Abraham’s faith doesn’t make us righteous, but we “follow [his] example of faith“.

Likewise, following Adam’s example makes us sinful.

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5:13-14 — And, just as righteousness is possible apart from the Law (since it, as Paul has been arguing, is obtained through faith), so is sinfulness.

It’s just that the sinfulness isn’t written up in court documents, citations, verdicts, etc.  The fact of sin and its consequences are present, but there is no added layer of legal action and punishment.

The sin has its own consequences, as we saw last time.

(This is just like drug addiction; it doesn’t take laws and court convictions and jail time to make it bad, and to give it consequences.  It’s bad and has consequences before the courts ever get involved.)

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Thus, between Adam and the coming of the Law (Moses), “death exercised dominion.”  (Notice that death, rather than the humans, ended up exercising dominion.  God had told the humans to exercise dominion, but they abdicated their role, and turned things over to death.)

Sin, in other words, had consequences (i.e., death) before the Law, just like faith had consequences (i.e., righteousness) before the Law.

The Law is secondary, Paul is still arguing.  The facts and consequences of faith and sin both historically and ontologically precede the Law.

(Therefore — and this continues to be Paul’s main point! — being an inheritor of the Law doesn’t put you on a higher level than people who didn’t inherit the Law.  Everyone — whether Jew or Gentile — is in the same boat.)

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And there’s no use arguing that only Adam’s sin had the consequence of death.  Even those people who sin in ways other than eating from a forbidden tree actually sin, and their sins have the same consequence as Adam’s.

(At heart, as we saw last time, all sins are the same: they involve putting yourself in God’s place.)

Nevertheless, even though we are all in the same boat as children of Adam (we are born into the world he ruined, physically descended from him, and are his spiritual descendants in that we follow his example in sinning), Adam foreshadows the Person who would later get us all out of that boat and into a different boat together.

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^{[ Romans 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5: Intro, 1-11, 12, 12-14, 15, 16-21, Summary ]}

Tags: Paul, Romans, Romans 5, Romans 5:12, Romans 5:12-14, Romans 5:13, Romans 5:14