Studying His Word and His Works

Listen to the study here: Romans 5:10-14

Read here: Romans 5

Review

• Calvin on the theme of Romans: “Man’s only righteousness is the mercy of God in Christ, when it is offered by the Gospel and received by faith.” Romans 1:17 and elsewhere.
• Luther: Simul iustus et peccator = At the same time, righteous and a sinner! Romans 3:23-25
• In Ch. 1-3 Paul shows us our unrighteousness, and God’s wrath against that, and the switches to Christ’s righteousness as our covering, the propitiation of our sins (Romans 3:25) as the final sacrifice for sin, fulfilling the promise to Abraham, who had faith before any works
• Faith being “counted” or “credited to our account” as righteousness is mentioned 11 times in Chapter 4! If “none are righteous” as Paul wrote in Romans 3:10, then this saving faith must be a gift from God.
• In Ch. 5 Paul writes how believers now have peace with God, access to God, and hope, because of what Christ did for us while we were weak(v. 6), sinners (v. 8), and enemies (v. 10). Christ did this “at the right time,” (v. 6), connecting Christ’s work on the cross and God’s plan of redemption to real history (not just a myth or legend).

Intro

• In the last study we defined atonement: Jesus satisfying God’s wrath through His sacrificial death on the cross.
  • The purpose of militaries is to save us from temporary wrath of enemies. The purpose of Jesus and his death, burial and resurrection is to save us from the eternal wrath of God. 
• In your own words, what is the Gospel? This is a good question to ask yourself regularly, as it helps you stay sharp and ready (2 Timothy 4:2). Take some time to answer this question. Here is my latest version:
  • The gospel is the good news that the Holy Spirit softens our heart in order to receive the gift of faith to believe that Jesus saves us from his Father’s wrath by his work alone on the cross, canceling our sin debt and reconciling us to God forever. Without Christ, we have no righteousness, and there is no work we can do to save us from Hell, but Christ, who knew no sin, became sin for us, imputing his righteousness to us. Because of Christ alone, we are no longer enemies of God. Instead of eternal wrath, we receive eternal life. 
• Verse 10
  • Define reconcile – Greek “katallagentes” having been reconciled.
    • Reconciled here refers to Christ’s work of propitiation(3:25), The full payment of the sins of the world (I John 2:2), remembered annually as Good Friday, through his atoning sacrifice, that SATISFIED God’s wrath completely. 
    • Sproul: We were reconciled in the sense that God, the injured party, was satisfied. God was reconciled toward us WHILE we were still estranged from Him. In this drama of reconciliation, Christ satisfied the righteousness and holiness of His Father. 
      • On the day (the “at the right time” of v. 6) that God became satisfied and was no longer in opposition to His people, we did not automatically change. We do not experience that reconciliation until our opposition and hostility toward Him ends-when we are regenerated by the Holy Spirit, our hardened hearts are broken, and we are brought joyfully into a loving relationship with the Father through the Son.
    • If our pre-salvation life is likened to being sick or a bad injury, and salvation is the cure, we don’t immediately heal in every way. We still suffer the effects of being sick or injured, as the cure takes effect. That’s kind-of what sanctification is like, it’s like getting over a sickness or injury, with eternal consequences and not just temporal. An analogy might be written as “the cure:healing::salvation:sanctification.” The cure begins the healing process like salvation begins the sanctification process.
      • And eternal life is listed in v. 10 as one result of being reconciled. A dead shepherd can’t protect his flock and intercede for them, only a living Shepherd can! Romans 4:25 says He was raised for our justification, 3:26 says He is both just AND the justifier. If Jesus only died, what does that signify? Only that death and our sin defeated Him! And Satan wins. As amazing as His sin-canceling death was, the much more in v. 10 points to his resurrection, that Jesus defeated death, and therefore so do believers! Baptism signifies this connection between God being just (payment required for sin is death) and the justifier (raised to life to show Jesus defeated death).
• Verse 11
  • Another result of being reconciled is JOY. James 1:2, through Christ we can count our trials as joy. This is the third “much more” (more than that) in Ch. 5, that even more than being raised to life, Christ in us gives us joy. As we are sanctified, as we heal from our injury of sin, it is now that we must work to remember, to connect to Christ daily, to remember we are no longer weak, that we can handle anything the world throws at us through Christ. The peace, access and hope Paul described at the start of Ch. 5 are all part of this one word, joy. With Christ in us, Paul reveals in his letter how we can walk this “Romans road” from suffering to perseverance to character building to hope (5:3-4).
• Verses 12-14
• Death through Adam
  • The “therefore” to start v. 12 leads into another topic of original sin and its consequences throughout history. This section continues to at least the classic gospel passage of Romans 6:23.
  • Sproul says this is one of the most important passages in the Bible (he says that a lot haha) because it talks about the fall of the entire human race through Adam. Jacob Pierce, my current pastor, teaches Adam’s sin was imputed on the rest of humanity, which is another way of describing the beginning of verse 12 and how death spread to all men.
  • This is also a difficult passage, a massive test of trusting God, not man, with interpreting history. No myths, no legends, no gods reproducing more gods eternally like the Mormons teach, or jellyfish evolving into humans over billions of years like secular religion teaches. This is about Paul trusting and believing the Genesis account, that God created, the serpent deceived, Adam and Eve sinned, death is the penalty, and God imputed sin along with its penalty on the rest of mankind. 
  • Note how Paul writes in v. 12 that sin came into the world through one man, Adam. But Eve was the one who took the fruit from the serpent first and ate it, right? (Genesis 3:1-6). Why isn’t she blamed? Because God put Adam in charge! The leader bears the responsibility. These are things the world screams about, when they side with the ungodly and unrighteous of Romans 1-2. Verses like this show God puts a hierarchy on things, with the husband-Adam in this case-bearing the responsibility. But the truth suppressors hide the fact that the “federal head” is responsible for the transgressions too.
    • This idea, which Sproul calls federalism, is twisted by the ungodly into this unbiblical “man domineering over everything, especially white men” false narrative. Of course, this can and does happen, so the ungodly take the exceptions and try to make a rule that male leadership is bad and that we need to “smash the patriarchy.” But the biblical idea is that the man, the father, the husband, is responsible for the way the family goes, and that there are consequences for being irresponsible.   
  • This is how the Bible describes federalism: God put Adam in charge, so ultimately, Adam was responsible for Eve’s sin, and this had consequences for the rest of us. Some cry that this is like “taxation without representation,” while others latch onto a twisted form of federalism in “reparations,” where the sin of former American slave owners is imputed (by men) onto this generation, and the current population can somehow pay the debt of this past sin with cash. Jesus, not cash, is the only way to satisfy anyone’s sin debt.
    • Federalism is a hard teaching, but it is what the Bible says, that somehow, through Adam’s sin, human souls and physical bodies too were transformed from righteous to sinner.
      • In comparing this to “taxation without representation,” one BIG difference is that when God selects our representative, He makes that selection infallibly and impeccably. (Sproul)
      • Sproul says if you don’t like that God imputed one man, Adam’s sin to us, and you complain you are being unfairly represented, then to be consistent you also need to dislike that your sin was imputed to one man, Christ. You have to reject Scripture and history, in other words. It can’t be either/or, Adam or Christ, but both/and.
  • The following are some other ideas about sin:
    • Realism
      • We were really there in terms of our preexistent souls when Adam sinned, so that when he sinned, we sinned, because we were really there. People use an argument from Hebrews 7:9-10 to justify this reasoning, but the verse is about who the high priest Melchizedek is, not about original sin. We didn’t need to “be there” to inherit a sin nature.
    • Edwards’s Identity Theory
      • Jonathan Edwards, the American Puritan theologian, wrote a book on original sin, where he argued that we were present in the garden, not because our souls were present, but because we were eternally present in the mind of God, and what is present in the mind of God is present in reality. Edwards believed that if the Bible said nothing about the Fall, reason would require that we posit such an event.
        • While we can’t know perfectly how Adam’s sin was imputed to us, Edward’s argument seems fair.
    • Jean-Jaques Rousseau
      • Born neutral and innocent, and we sin because of our environment. But then, where did the “environmental sin” come from and why is it everywhere?
        • Edwards said if this were the case, then we would expect at least 50% of people would remain in a state of innocence.
  • A type of the one who was to come(v. 14): This comparison of Adam and Jesus makes the most sense in light of the idea of federalism. Adam, the federal head of sin, responsible alone for the sin nature all humans now possess. Jesus, the federal head of salvation, responsible alone as the final sacrifice for all sins. This is why “no one comes to the father except through me”(John 14:6). It is Christ alone!
  • Sproul concludes that Paul’s premise here is that in Christ, we have a better federal head than Adam. This “new Adam” rejected the serpent’s efforts at tempting him (Matthew 4:1-11) and instead lived a life of perfect obedience, not just for His own sake, but for ours who he came to represent, reconcile and save. 
• In the next study, we will do another “overlap,” covering verses 12-17. You might have questions about how to think through things like “sin indeed was in the world before the law was given, but sin is not counted where there is no law.” I know I do!
• Up next, Romans 5:12-17.