Please open your Bibles to Paul's glorious epistle to the church in Rome as we continue our study of this magnificent treatise. Turning to chapter 5 in the letter to the Romans, we'll be reading verses 12 to 21. Our pew Bibles have this on page 942. Hear now the public reading of God's unfailing word. Therefore, just as sin came into the world through one man and death through sin, and so death spread to all men because all sinned. For sin indeed was in the world before the law was given, but sin is not counted where there is no law. Yet death reigned from Adam to Moses, even over those whose sinning was not like the transgression of Adam, who was a type of the one who was to come. But the free gift is not like the trespass. For if many died through one man's trespass, much more have the grace of God and the free gift by the grace of that one man, Jesus Christ, abounded for many. And the free gift is not like the result of that one man's sin. For the judgment following one trespass brought condemnation, but the free gift following many trespasses brought justification. For if by one man's trespass death reigned through that one man, much more will those who receive the abundance of grace and the free gift of righteousness reign in life through the one man, Jesus Christ. Therefore, as one trespass led to condemnation for all men, so one act of righteousness leads to justification and life for all men. For as by one man's disobedience the many were made sinners, so by the one man's obedience the many will be made righteous." Now, the law came in to increase the trespass, but where sin increased, Grace abounded all the more, so that as sin reigned in death, grace also might reign through righteousness leading to eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord. Let us pray. Our Lord Jesus Christ, we remember your words when you said that no one knows the Father except the Son. and anyone to whom the Son chooses to reveal him. And so, Lord, we pray that you would choose to reveal the Father to us tonight, that we would know him and love him and love the great plan of redemption that he has accomplished for us through you. We ask this in your name. Amen. The owl of the north, the enormous great gray owl glides in an eerie silence just a yard or so over the deep snowpack. Suddenly it plunges into the white powder. and all of a sudden, in a moment, comes up with a mouse which has been hiding deep under the snow in a chamber of winter grass. How did the magnificent raptor know that the little mouse was under those feet of fallen snow? Well, it could hear its heartbeat. Our God is the rapture of our human hearts. 1 Thessalonians 4.17 says that God will catch us up. He will, to use the King James Version, rapture us. He will take us to himself, the English word comes from the same root word as rapture, rapture, rapture, to be caught up, to be snatched. He will suddenly catch us up to himself on the great day of the Lord because he too knows our hearts and he knows if the beat of Christ's love is there or not, he knows it invalidly. He knows. And when he catches us up, it is not to consume us, but to save us forever and bring us home with himself to the new heavens and the new earth under the princely rule of his beloved son. And as Luther said in his catechism, this is all most certainly true. Just to think of it. that he hears the spiritual heartbeats of every person now. He numbers the hairs of our head. He knows when we lie down and when we rise up. He provides for our daily bread and sustenance. He calls us by our very names, the names our parents gave us, the names that were used in our baptisms, the particular personal love of the Lord for each one of his people is indeed a wonder. It's a joy. It's a consolation. And we often speak of it and assume it from this pulpit. But that is not the only perspective on human salvation. Sometimes it is helpful, I think, to step back. And I mean way back. and consider salvation not just in the micro, but in the macro. Not just for individuals, but for the whole covenant community of the church. Seeing the forest of salvation, frankly, can be just as soul satisfying and stirring to our renewed minds as the individual trees of redemption are, so to speak. And in this evening's reading from Romans, I think that's exactly what the Apostle Paul is doing. Now, whenever I prepare a sermon, the very first thing I do is I print out the text and then I take that sheet of paper and I take my pencil and I draw lines between the words that are connected together. the thematic connections that are in the text. It's a way of seeing the connections that are in the passage. And when I did that for this passage tonight, it looked like this. There's an incredible number of concepts and phrases compared and contrasted as a theological kind of fact work, you might say. James Montgomery Boyce, the beloved Presbyterian pastor, now with the Lord, he devoted 90 pages in his Romans commentary to these 10 verses. 90 pages. And so, to avoid you having to be here for 90 minutes, I'm going to show you just the overall structure and purpose of this really important passage, and then we'll highlight at least some of these connections in the text. And my goal is that at the end of this time, you're going to be able to stand back and say about this big picture, this macro view of salvation, what you may have only said so far in your life about your own personal redemption, that is glory, glory to God. What a glorious redemption this is. So, up to now, Paul has been describing the outworking of Abrahamic faith in the life of a believer in Jesus. But now the apostle opens the wide-angle lens a bit more, and he moves from Abraham all the way back to Adam. In fact, really, this whole passage is but an extended comparison and contrasting of Adam and Christ. And one way you can see that, I think, is by recognizing that the main fault really does begin in verse 12, the first verse of our reading, but it doesn't really resume until verse 18. And everything between it, verses 13 through 17, are a kind of an aside, a discursive discussion. I mean, like all of us, Paul's thoughts, one leads to another. And what he does here after that first verse is he takes a detour or we might say a deep dive into redemptive history before resuming the main fault in verse 18. And then he finds a way to end the passage in the last few verses with a glorious theological bang. We'll see that too. One way to get a handle on what's happening in this comparison and contrast between Adam and Jesus is to consider the words in the passage that are repeated many times. Jesus and Adam, you see, are representative figures. They are the singular heads of two vast covenant communities. So the word one, O-N-E, one, appears in this passage 11 times. referring to each one of them, Jesus or Adam. Likewise, the word all or many appears seven times. And you see, that by itself should tell you that what we're talking about here is the effect that what we term federal headship of a singular person, a one, can have. and does have over a vast number of other people, the many or the all that are in this passage. Confused? I hope not. Let's talk about federal headship a bit, okay? Because that's what this passage is full of. The word federal comes from a Latin word that means covenant. or more explicitly, a government involving trust in a covenant or a solemn agreement. And of course, we understand, don't we, that God governs us and all people only through covenants. I mean, God never acts in relation to the human race outside of a covenant. In other words, God is never casual about people. He's never careless. He doesn't make it up as he goes. He isn't arbitrary. From the very first man and woman to walk this earth, to each man and each woman and each boy and girl in this room, with no exceptions, God has made a covenant. In doing so, he doesn't make a separate covenant with each one of us, a billion little separate covenants, you know, with Mary and a covenant with Josh and a covenant with Tom. That's not what he does. Instead, he makes covenant with a representative head of the community to which we belong. It's like a government making a treaty with the head of state of another government. And then every person in that country is now, in a sense, in a treaty relationship with the other nation, the treaty alliance. The Lord made one great covenant of works, as we call it, with Adam. a gracious covenant which reasonably required that sinless Adam would continue in obedience to God and thereby live forever in the lush and holy paradise that was Eden. But there was a but. Adam would forfeit all of that if he violated that covenant with God. And so everyone in Adam's community That is, everyone of his race, that is the human race, would be in the same covenant of obedience and blessing. And so every person still is born into that covenant today apart from saving grace. And it still applies to every person and any person. who obeys God, without any person who obeys God, without any sin, any such person who obeys God without any sin will, in fact, live forever. And one who does not keep that covenant and breaks it in any way will most assuredly die. And you know, every time we drive by a graveyard or read the obituaries, which the older you get, the more you will do, and every time we take out a life insurance policy that includes burial expenditures, we are assenting that we comprehend the effects of that broken covenant. The wages of sin is death and a whole lot of misery until you finally get to death. Someone once said, the covenant of works and the consequences of our breaking it can be verified simply by reading the newspaper, or I guess we would say today, the internet. Now at this point, people often begin to protest our theology. They're saying it's just not fair. It's not even reasonable to think that one person can represent another person in this manner, much less represent all people or many, many people. And yet that is clearly what God teaches us from Genesis to Revelation. The word covenant is used in the Bible over 300 times. And God is always using either mediators of the covenant or representatives, federal heads of the covenant, to bless his whole people. He blessed every human being through Noah when he promised to restrain his judgment by never bringing world-destroying wrath again as he had in the great flood. He blessed all of Israel with land and descendants and a great name in the world and a worldwide blessing heritage that would unfold in history through his covenanting with one man, Abraham. He gave the law to Israel and to the new Israel, the church, through the ministry of Moses. And he gave a great kingdom that would continue forever through David and his royal descendants, even upon the messianic throne of David. This is simply how the Trinitarian God does things, one and many, one and all. But Adam is not just a covenant mediator, but a federal head of the whole race of man with direct impact on every single person who has ever lived. This is why it was not Eve's sin that doomed us, though she sinned first. Adam is the head of the race. As Paul makes clear in this passage, starting in verse 12, death came into the world through Adam because covenant-breaking sin came into the world through him. And in him, our head, our representative, covenantally speaking, we all sinned, we were all judged, and we will all die, as this same verse says here. And Paul makes this point in the next verse, that even before the law was given to Moses, even before Mount Sinai, this sin and death dynamic was already spreading to every person. Yes, Genesis, you see, and anybody who's read the book of Genesis knows this, is not only the story of the creation of life, but of the relentless spread of death due to human sin. Again and again, it says, and he died, and he died, and he died. So you see, even before it was technically and formally designated as, we might say, an indictable crime before the holy God through the Mosaic law, sin was already having its death-dealing effect upon the human race. The connection between sin and death is indissoluble. It was, as Paul says in verse 14, raining from the beginning. My friends, from Stonehenge to the Mayan pyramids, from the pharaohs of ancient Egypt to the Native American burial grounds, to the Chinese emperor who buried an army of terracotta soldiers, to protect him in the afterlife. Every society, everywhere fought against this reign of death, and yet no one conquered it, ever. No one, until the new Adam, the second Adam. As the New England primer used to teach American schoolchildren in order to learn the letter A, in Adam's fall, we send all. And then to learn the letter X, Xerxes the Great did die and so must you and I. That was a more honest approach to death and to education than we see today. One scholar named Franz Borkenau believes that cultures can be analyzed through their response to death. He says in ancient Greece, there was a death-accepting attitude. They were just resigned to the fact. In our modern post-Christian era, there is what we might call a death-denying attitude. You know, age is just a state of mind, right? Really? Is it? But in Orthodox Christianity, There is a death-defying attitude. O death, where is thy victory? O death, where is thy sting? Yet people still protest the very premise of all this, don't they? They protest the idea that their fate is tied to Adam's fate, that his sin has doomed them to death apart from saving grace. And yet, you know, every single one of those people who complains about this connection sins themselves, and every one of them will die. Just a great coincidence. Perhaps when people protest original sin coming from Adam through the covenant of works, they should ask themselves, would I still sin apart from Adam? I mean, what does the record show? As for the Bible, while it recognizes Adam's role as federal head of the human race, it also makes it clear that we are judged for our own sins. Look at verse 12, where it says, death spread to all men because all sinned. Most importantly, most importantly, please pay attention to this, if nothing else in this message, What if the federal headship of Adam was doing something beyond just serving, though it did this, as a sin bond and a death bond between us and him? What if Adam's role as federal head was establishing a kind of template, a pattern, a type is what the Bible would call it and does call it, You can think of it as covenantal architecture, which would ultimately serve to save us from both his sin and ours. And isn't that exactly what the end of verse 14 says? Yet death reigned from Adam to Moses, even over those whose sinning was not like the transgression of Adam, Adam who was a type of the one who was to come. This is important. Adam has a lot to do, in a way, with Jesus. I think we're getting close to the glory of this thing now. The federal headship of Adam becomes the role, the channel, the covenantal architecture which Jesus of Nazareth steps into to become the second Adam, the redeeming Adam, the saving Adam. fateful Adam who should have been and now is forever. And Jesus, who lived an immaculate and holy life, entirely fulfills the covenant of works for us as our federal head now so that we are counted as righteous for his sake. His dying paid the whole penalty incurred by our sins and removed the curse of eternal death forever, while His faithful living became our very righteousness and our belovedness before His Father. His resurrection has become a picture of our own future glory in Him and with Him and with each other. This is what it means to say that we reign in life through the one man, Jesus Christ. Verse 10. And that grace is now reigning. Verse 21. It's not verse 10. I'm sorry. Got the verse wrong there. This is in contrast to the reign of death in Adam, which Paul references in verses 14, 17, and 20. So you see, our reigning in life is really the main theme of this whole passage about Adam and Jesus. And you understand, one or the other is reigning in everyone's life. Either death is reigning or life is reigning in everyone's life. Christ's new federal headship of the chosen race of his elect people has changed everything. For now, we're not under a cloud of death due to Adam's sin and ours. Now, through Jesus, despite sin, we reign in life. The literal wording in verse 17 is that we reign in his life, speaking of the ongoing life of Christ. As Martin Lloyd-Jones pointed out, That word in implies in the sphere of his life, in the realm of his life, in connection to his life. Our union with Christ, our federal head in the new covenant, is everything. John Murray said it was the central truth of the whole doctrine of salvation. Did you hear that? The central truth of the whole doctrine of salvation is our union with Christ. In union with Him, we reign in this life. We reign in life. It's what the scriptures mean when it says we have in Christ the power of an indestructible life. It's His indestructible life that is now ours as well. And we reign in life through that life, you see. I was so moved. when Dr. Barkley prayed this morning for the Schilling Laws, our grandchildren, and of course for Nancy and myself as we approach the one-year anniversary this next Friday of our dear Brad's death, his home going. I'm the last person to say that it wasn't grievous. It still is grievous. That it wasn't hard. It still is hard. But I will tell you this, and I spoke to Rebecca and she entirely agrees, we want you to know that we have never, ever, not even in that hospital room at Duke University Hospital as he slipped away, we have never doubted that he reigns in the life of Christ. that he shares the eternal, indestructible life of Christ. In this life, for all his troubles, he did. And in his death, he still does. So this is the theme of our passage, and in many ways of our faith. Jesus said, we thrive as we are united to the vine, which is himself. And Paul said to the Corinthians, if anyone is in Christ, he's a new creation. The old has passed away. Behold, the new has come. Adam was the provisional Lord over the original creation, but Jesus is the eternal Lord over the new creation. And I'll tell you, this never gets old to teach. It never gets wearisome to preach. It always is enlivening to believe. Because the truth is, we always need this transformational newness in our lives. The Bible says he's making all things new. We need to be made new. First of all, of course, in our conversion. But then we need to be renewed continually in the Christian life after that, as our permanent union with Christ is strengthened and renewed day by day, Sabbath by Sabbath. For you see, this is unlike the covenant of works in Adam, which you can't really help being a part of, you and I We're in Adam simply by being born. Every person is. But you don't have to stay in Adam. That's the point. You can experience another birth, a second birth, through the second Adam, Jesus Christ. This is why he said, you must be born again, Nicodemus. And this is all by faith, of course. Paul has stressed that in the chapters right before this. While you can't give yourself faith, I'll tell you one thing, you can ask for it, and then ask again, and then ask again, and again, believing that he who asks for something in Jesus' name, that is according to his will, will receive it. You'll keep on asking until you know you have it. Because God loves to give faith to those who ask. Moreover, we not only reign in Jesus's life, but also by his wonderful grace. And this precious grace is where the words much more come from. And that's repeated too in this passage. Three times, much more or all the more appears in our passage. And you know what it deals with each and every time? Grace, grace to sinners. As Paul says in verse 20, now the law came in to increase the trespass, but where sin increased, grace abounded all the more. Isn't that a wonderful word association? Grace abounding all the more. So while Adam and Jesus do share similar offices in the economy of salvation, they're both federal heads. But as Paul says in verse 15, the free gift is not like the trespass. What Jesus has done, what he has given us, is really quite incomparable to anything else. For Adam, you understand, was formed of the earth itself. But Jesus created the earth and came from heaven to it. Adam was tested in a garden, surrounded by beauty and love. Jesus was tempted in a howling wilderness when he was near to starvation and he died on a cruel cross surrounded by hatred and scorn. Adam was a thief who stole what was not his to take and thereby was cast out of paradise. But Jesus turned to a thief and said, today you will be with me in paradise. Adam squandered his birthright and impoverished us all by doing so. Jesus, who was infinitely rich and the Prince of Heaven, became willingly poor for our sakes to thereby make us rich in him. Adam said in his garden that he would be like God, knowing good and evil. Jesus prayed in his Gethsemane garden, Father, not my will, but thine be done. Adam allowed his bride to lead him into sin. Jesus bore the sins of his bride and leads her home to God. Adam sinned through a tree. Jesus saved through one. The Old Testament is the book of the generations of Adam, Genesis 5, 1. And it ends with a curse, Malachi 4, 6. The New Testament, the book of the generation of Jesus Christ, Matthew 1, 1, ends with no more curse anywhere in creation, Revelation 22, verse 3. And so now you understand grace is abounding to us. because of this second Adam. We believe the promises in a most favorable environment to believe them. For when the saving grace comes to us, it doesn't just barely, barely cover our sins like the water in my Dutch oven barely covered the turkey carcass when I made some awesome turkey broth a few days ago. No, it's not like that. God's grace is not barely enough. For while law increased the trespass, and sin therefore increased, grace abounded all the more. And where sin reigned in death, now grace reigns through righteousness, which leads to eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord. There's the bang for this text. Our God is super abundantly gracious to us. The Bible says he lavishes love and favor upon us. And so we reign with his son in his life, in Christ's life now and forevermore. Indeed, the great rapture of our souls knew our heartbeats. And through Jesus Christ and our life in him, he's already catching us up. and bringing us home to himself. Come soon, Lord Jesus Christ. Jesus Christ isn't just the second Adam. He is by far the better Adam, because he has made all his people, the entire community of believers in every age, the very sons of God. Hallelujah. Glory to God for such a great salvation. Amen. Let's pray together. Our Father, what a glorious promise that we reign in life through the indestructible life of our Lord Jesus Christ. We bless you for the beauty and power of this text. Lord, we're thankful that while you love us individually and you love our families, you love the gates of Zion more than all the tents of Jacob. You love the whole church. the transnational, transracial, transcultural, transhistorical church, holy community of all those who are united to our federal head, our Lord Jesus Christ. We bless you for him who blesses us in this way. In his name we pray together. Amen. If you would stand, we'll have our benediction. And now may the God of peace, who brought again from the dead our Lord Jesus, that great shepherd of the sheep, by the blood of the eternal covenant, equip you with everything good that you may do his will, working that in you which is pleasing in his sight, through Jesus Christ, to whom be praise and adoration in all the ages. Amen.