Death in Adam, Life in Christ

For the Christian who objects to having a representative in the fall and makes that objection in principle saying it is never appropriate for God to accept the representation of one person for another, then you must not only reject any identification between you and Adam, but you would have to reject equally any representation of you by Christ. The principle of representation, dear friends, is at the very heart and soul of our salvation.

Even when we vote to elect someone to be our representative in government, no one perfectly represents all of our wishes. So how should we think about Adam in the garden and Paul's argument in Romans that Adam did represent us, that through one man sin entered the world and death through sin and thus death spread to all men because all sin? This question gets to the heart of the Gospel, so I'm glad you're joining us this week on Renewing Your Mind as we spend time with Dr. Sproul in the book of Romans.

Speaking of Romans, if you'd like to spend 2025 in Romans with R.C. Sproul as your guide, then I encourage you to reserve your copy of the soon-to-be-released year-long devotional, The Power of the Gospel, with added application for each reading. You can spend a year walking through the Apostle Paul's magnum opus, gleaning insights from Dr. Sproul's teaching and preaching ministry.

It'll ship in just a few weeks, and you can secure your copy when you give a gift of any amount at renewingyourmind.org. Well, here's Dr. Sproul in Romans 5, beginning in verse 10. For if when we were enemies we were reconciled to God through the death of His Son, much more having been reconciled, we shall be saved by His life. Now we notice here that we have a comparison that is not one of equality.

He doesn't say on the one hand it was like this and on the other hand it was like that. He says on the one hand we have been reconciled through the death of Christ, much more than have we been reconciled through His life. And so the theme of this verse has to do with reconciliation.

The one absolute essential precondition, necessary condition for reconciliation between parties ever to take place is estrangement, because without estrangement there is no need of reconciliation. But we don't sense, we don't feel the weight of that burden of our natural hostility towards God. And yet the New Testament speaks about reconciliation because reconciliation to God is so greatly and earnestly needed because we are estranged from Him. But beloved, the thing that's even more difficult to get across as we've labored already in this study of Romans is the fact that in that estrangement not only are we at enmity with God, but God is at enmity with us. God is the natural enemy of corrupt sinners. Yes indeed as we've explored in the past there is a love of benevolence and beneficence that He displays to creatures indiscriminately, but yet at the same time the Scriptures replete with those descriptive terms that tells us how God's face is set steadfastly against the wicked. He is too holy as to even look at us. So great is that gulf of estrangement between God and us.

But there is a big difference of the driving force of the estranged parties. What drives our opposition towards God, which we have innately, is evil. Our estrangement is based in a wicked opposition against God. His estrangement from us is found in a holy opposition to sin. Let's understand that difference and not project onto God's character the same unjust grounds for enmity that we are guilty of ourselves.

It is not right for the creature to be estranged from the Creator, but once the creature is sinful it is right and proper for the Creator to be estranged from the sinner because God is holy and we are not. But what Paul is declaring here is the glorious work of redemption in which God takes the initiative for our reconciliation. Verse 10, For if when we were enemies we were reconciled to God through the death of His Son, how much more, having been reconciled, we shall be saved by His life.

Now there's a couple of things that we need to pick up on here. In the cross, by the satisfaction of the atonement rendered by Christ to the Father, by His work of propitiation, Jesus reconciles the Father to the Father's people. On Good Friday, when Christ paid for my sin and for your sin, if indeed you are in Christ, when Christ made His atonement for His people, made the perfect sacrifice, satisfied God's wrath completely for those for whom Christ died, that was the end of the estrangement on God's part. So we were reconciled in the sense that God, who was the injured party in all of this, was assuaged, was satisfied, and was no longer in opposition to His people. And yet what Paul is saying is that God was reconciled toward us while we were still estranged toward Him. Think of that, that in this drama of reconciliation, Christ satisfies the righteousness and the holiness of His Father, satisfies God's opposition towards us while we are still opposed to Him.

And the day that God was satisfied and was no longer in opposition to His people, that did not automatically change us. We did not experience that reconciliation until the removal of our opposition towards Him, until the removal of our hostility towards Him when we were regenerated by the Holy Spirit, our hardened hearts were broken, and we were brought joyfully into a loving relationship with the Father through the Son. So it's one thing to experience the reconciliation through the death of Christ, but how much greater is that reconciliation that occurs through the life of Christ?

Now we can look at that in two ways. I've said until you're tired of hearing it that our justification is not secured simply by the death of Christ, but also acutely through the life of Christ because of His life of perfect obedience to the law by which His righteousness was merited and earned and is now given to those of us who have no righteousness of our own. We can say it is the life of Christ, even more than the death of Christ, that is the ground of our justification. That may be true, it is true, but I'm not sure that's what Paul's talking about here when he talks about how much more are we reconciled through the life of Christ. Remember he's already introduced the idea that we are justified not only by the death of Christ, but that Christ was raised for our justification, that we are reconciled because we have a mediator not only who died for us, but who has been raised from the dead for us, who continues to make intercession. He is our peacemaker.

He is our peace, and He lives forever continuing in that role, representing us before the Father. And as wonderful as that once for all death was on the cross, how much greater is that reconciliation that we realize and experience because He lives and ever intercedes for us. Now there's one more point I want to cover here before we go into that next session where the comparison and contrast is made between the work of Christ as the new Adam and the work of the old Adam. And that is just a little bit more exploration of the meaning of this term reconciliation. Now some of you remember when we started this study of Romans when we were back in Romans 1 and we talked about the revelation of the wrath of God beginning in Romans 1 18 because God has revealed Himself plainly to all people and the universal response of fallen humanity to the brilliant manifest revelation of God Himself in nature is to refuse to honor Him as God, nor were we grateful. And then later on in that indictment when Paul brings the whole world before God in that tribunal, he mentions that the substance of our universal guilt and corruption before God is this, our proclivity for idolatry, the sin of exchanging the truth of God for the lie, serving and worshiping the creature rather than the Creator.

Now you maybe remember that. You may remember also that when I talked about that, I made mention of the word that is used there by the Apostle Paul, the word metalloso, which indicates an exchange, a trade, a swap where we trade the glory of the eternal, immortal, everlasting God, swap it for the glory of contemptible things, creeping things, bugs and snakes and idols of other sorts. And I said there was that metalloso, that exchange that took place. And that word has the prefix meta, which means with. You trade something in for something other.

You carry it with and trade it for something else. Well, the same root word is the root for reconciliation. It's not metalloso, but cotalloso is the verb, and then the noun form is cotallage. And that's the word that Paul is using here when he says, we were reconciled to God through the death of His Son, much more having been reconciled, again that form of cotalloso, we shall be saved by His life and not only that, but we rejoice in God through our Lord Jesus Christ through whom now we have received the cotallage. We have received the reconciliation as if it were a concrete noun that that reconciliation is a substantive reality. It is a gift that God has given to His people because of the death and resurrection of Christ.

And so what is the result of that? Unspeakable joy. Do you understand, folks, that the Christian life is to be from beginning to end a life of joy because we have much to be happy about. There is no room for the sourpuss in the kingdom of God. There is nothing dour about our redemption.

If I am the most miserable of people on this planet, suffer to the degree that nobody else has ever been called to suffer. If I were a modern-day Job sitting on the dung heap, I would have no right to say anything different from what he said when he declared, though he slay me, yet will I trust him. Because there is no affliction so dire, no sorrow so deep, no pain so intense that is worthy to be compared with the glory of that cotallage, of that reconciliation that we have received in the Beloved. And so when we contemplate our state of affairs in this world, as long as we keep our eyes on this plane of this world and we see our bank accounts slipping away, we see our homes destroyed, we lose our jobs, our bodies are torn by disease, we have every reason to complain and to whine and to weep, but if we lift our eyes for one second to the cross and to the resurrection and see that the Lord God omnipotent who is too holy to even look at us now not only looks at us but embraces us, adopts us as His children because He has been reconciled to us. Paul says that's another benefit that flows from our justification. Not just these things, but we rejoice in God through our Lord Jesus Christ through whom we now have received the reconciliation. You see this is just an expansion of what he says at the very beginning of this chapter being justified, therefore we have peace with God and access into His presence. And we can now glory in tribulation because it works perseverance and perseverance character and character hope which is never ashamed.

He's still talking about this same motif. Alright now, then he changes a little bit here in verse 12 where he introduces a most difficult concept. Therefore, just as through one man sin entered the world and death through sin and thus death spread to all men because all sinned for until the law sin was in the world but sin is not imputed when there is no law. 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 the type of one who was to come. Now there is so much in that text that I just read to you that it keeps the theologians busy studying and arguing ever and ever because this is one of the most important texts in the Bible to talk about the fall of the entire human race through Adam.

And just let me briefly talk about the way in which the argument goes. One man brought sin. It was Adam. And with that sin came death. And death came on the whole human race because all have sinned but not after the similitude of Adam's sin.

What's he getting at here when he says everybody dies after Adam. Even babies are born and live a few hours and they die and death is the penalty for sin. Without sin there can be no death and without the law there can be no sin. So Paul is saying to remember death reigned from Adam to Moses. Death was in the world before God gave His law through Moses because since Adam's fall all creatures have died because all sinned there and they sinned before the law of Moses. But remember Paul is saying here there can be no sin, there can be no transgression unless there's law because the definition of sin is a transgression of the law of God.

There's no law, no foul. But if there's a law then the penalty is incurred when we break the law and since the penalty for sin is death and since death reigned from Adam to Moses there's a sense in which everybody in the world broke the law somehow in Adam. That's the point here of Romans 5.

Through one man sin and death came into the whole world. But again people squirm under this, they say wait a minute I didn't choose my representative. Well let's look at that for a minute. Can you imagine if King George listened to the protests of the colonists who were saying no taxation without representation? He said, oh you don't feel like you're adequately represented? I'll tell you what I'll do. I'll give you a representative.

He's going to be my brother. And he appoints his brother to represent us. How would we scream about that? We say, wait a minute that's no good because we would have no confidence that our interests would be represented by a representative that was chosen for us by somebody else. That's why we want to be able to elect our own representatives who govern over us.

But do you see the complaint here? It's built into our American democratic heritage. How can it be just for God to appoint one man to represent all kinds of people? And the people don't even have a voice in that election, but there's a big difference between King George and God. When God selects your representative, He makes that selection infallibly.

He makes that selection impeccably. Nowhere in time and space have you ever been more perfectly represented than you were in the Garden of Eden by the representative that God selected to act in your place? And if that be true, we can never curse God and say it's not fair because if I was there, I would have done something different. When we complain about being misrepresented by Him, all we do is prove the perfection of that representation as we manifest our fallen nature, our Adamic nature when we complain against God for that. Also for the Christian who doesn't like that and who objects to having a representative in the fall and makes that objection in principle saying it is never appropriate for God to accept the representation of one person for another. If you want to hold to that principle consistently, then you must not only reject any identification between you and Adam, but you would have to reject equally any representation of you by Christ. The principle of representation, dear friends, is at the very heart and soul of our salvation. So be careful if you reject that idea in principle because if you do, you've rejected your only hope of salvation. One last point about this is that there is perhaps a more deep combination of realism and federalism expressed in the profound thinking of the Puritan divine Jonathan Edwards who manifested his identity theory, and you'd have to have some idea of Platonic philosophy to really grab this, but the idea is that in simple terms that in the garden you were present not because your soul was there, but you were present in the mind of God. And what is present to the mind of God is present in reality, not because your soul was there, not because your body was there, but because in the mind of God you were there in Adam, perfectly present there.

One last thing about it, I keep saying one last thing and give you another one. In Edwards' great treatise on original sin where he gave his monumental study of the biblical texts for the fall and original sin, he also gave an argument from reason. He said, if the Bible never taught about a universal plunge into ruin of the human race at the beginning in Adam, if there was no such word of the fall in the Scripture, reason would require that we posit such an event. How else could we explain the universality of sin in the human race? Now our culture is schizophrenic on this point because on the one hand they don't want to acknowledge the reality of sin at all, only mistakes. And they want to say the origin of sin is environment, that the reason why people go bad and become corrupt is because they are reared in a culture or a society that's flawed, that's fallen, that's corrupt.

Going back to the noble, savage idea of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, he thought that man was born free and now is everywhere in chains. And the idea is we're all born neutral. We're all born innocent. But the reason why we all sin is because we're overwhelmed by the corrupting influences that are all around us. And so we all, sooner or later, fall into sin. Edward said if that were the case, if we were all born innocent, neutral, you would expect at least fifty percent of the population to stay in that state of innocence. You have to look beyond the external influence of fallen society and cultural inducements to sin to explain the universality of it. And the question that goes begging is this, if we were all born innocent, how did society ever get so corrupt in the first place? Because what the society is, is people. But it's not like five percent of the people are evil and they seduce the other ninety-five percent.

No. The reason why it's a hundred percent is because we're born in that fallen state. In Adam comes sin, comes death, comes destruction into the whole world. And this is Paul's premise here when he then turns our attention away from Adam and the destruction that he brings to the world to the new Adam, the new representative who doesn't succumb to the enticements of the serpent, but who lives a life of perfect obedience, not just for his own sake, but for the sake of his people whom he came to represent, to reconcile and to save.

You're listening to Renewing Your Mind on this Reformation Week, and that was R.C. Sproul in Romans chapter 5. The book of Romans lays out the gospel message so clearly, and it's been used throughout church history to strengthen God's people. You may recall it was reading Romans that Martin Luther was able to say, the doors of paradise swung open and I walked through. A new resource to help you slow down and spend a year reflecting on this letter of Paul will soon be released. It's called The Power of the Gospel by R.C. Sproul, and it's a year-long devotional that uses Dr. Sproul's commentary on Romans, along with additional application for each reading. It will ship in just a few weeks, so secure your copy when you call us at 800-435-4343 with a donation of any amount, or when you give your gift online at renewingyourmind.org. For three decades, Renewing Your Mind has been broadcasting truth. Give your 30th anniversary gift today at renewingyourmind.org, or by using the link in the podcast show notes. Thank you for fueling the next 30 years of Renewing Your Mind. Next time, we'll jump ahead in Romans to chapter 8, as R.C. Sproul considers the golden chain of redemption. So join us then, here, on Renewing Your Mind.