Before we get further into that, let's open in prayer. This morning, Lord, we thank you for this day, this beautiful day that you've given us, this day that has been set apart and made different than all the others. For it is in this day that we have been called together, that your Word and your Spirit have called us into your presence. It is this day that, from the very beginning, you set apart, and it was a day of rest. Lord, we thank you that We have this day that we can gather and we can learn and grow in understanding and grow in knowledge. Lord, we thank you that you've given us this time set apart to that purpose. Lord, we ask that you would be glorified, that you would be magnified and lifted up as we set our minds to understand the truthfulness of your word. In Jesus' name I pray. Amen. I've got a question on the board, if you can read it from the back. If you can't, it says, why do I see? I want us to ask that question of ourselves. Well, that's our nature. Thanks to Adam. I suppose we should throw Eve under the bus. She had a part in it. It's universal. It's Adam and Eve. We universally blame it on Adam. It's not like he was sinless. It's not like Adam set forth on a path of sin and Eve was good, right? Both sinners. And here we are. Together they sinned. Why is that important? I'm not Adam, I'm not Eve. Why is it that I get hung up in their stuff? They're our representative. They're representative of us? Are they more than representative of us? Parents. Parents. Just like I have characteristics and traits from my parents, and my parents have characteristics and traits from their parents, there's this idea of inheritance. We're going to look at the passage, and this passage personally was like a big strobe light in my life. When it come full circle on me, I couldn't think the same way I thought before. The passage we're going to look at is hugely foundational to how we are called to understand our relation to sin as well as our relationship to the redemption from that. Unfortunately, it's not the foundation that a lot of our Christian brothers have. Because when we talk about sin, they want to look at why I sin, As if I'm in a vacuum. As if I don't have the things that, like Ron said, I've inherited from my parents. The nature of sin. We've talked about this whole idea in prayer and in dealing with these issues that it's a heart issue that's very much central in prayer. It's a condition of my heart, it's the direction of my heart, it's the relationship my heart is to my God. When I come to God in prayer, it's all about my will, and my direction, and my understandings of what God is doing in the circumstances. Last week we spent some time in James, and James asked that question in the fourth chapter. He said, what is the source of quarrels and conflicts among you? Last week I introduced James, and I'll kind of reintroduce that because we've got some new faces here, but James often is more difficult to understand because he assumes so much. The context that James is writing in is to a bunch of people that have a lot of history. with God's redemptive purposes and plans. Now they didn't understand them very clearly, or at all, but he relies upon a lot of their context and their history. Whereas Paul, when he writes to the people that he wrote to, and in particular here we're in Romans, he writes to a bunch of people that really are outside of the context. They don't have any history with God. That Israel's God, that's their God. Their history was the pantheon of God. And their friendliness to that God didn't have a friendliness. He's not our God. So Paul is bringing us along a lot more thoroughly so that he explains to us the context in which we as Gentiles, you as Jews, how we are related to God through the one person, Jesus Christ. But the two books don't say different things. James is not saying anything different than Paul is saying. He assumes a whole lot that we, hopefully after we get done with this, filling in all the gaps, can see. He references these things. And in particular, today we're going to be introduced, and we've looked at it in the past, this whole model of being an adult and being in Christ. Last week I interjected that in fact we've got in Paul the very more definitely spelled out insertion of what Christ did to relate these two things together, how we get from Adam to Christ. We're going to see in our passage this morning that this in fact is how Paul presents and understands because he's been given these things from the Spirit, and he ties together all of history in this chapter. He gives us this perspective about history that helps us to organize our thoughts around what God's grand and sweeping plan of redemption, how it came to be that this thing impacts us. And it ultimately gets to this question, why do I sin? Or as James put it, why is there quarrels among us? So we'll answer that in a little more expanded way, but let's start by reading chapter 5. We'll read the first 11 verses and then we'll go into the second part of this passage. Beginning in verse 1, Therefore, having been justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ. through whom also we have obtained our introduction by faith into this grace in which we stand, and we exult in the hope of the glory of God. And not only this, but we exult in our tribulations, knowing that the tribulations bring about perseverance, and perseverance, proven character, and proven character, hope, and hope does not disappoint. But the love of God has been poured out within our hearts through the Holy Spirit who has been given to us. Last week, I just want to kind of weave these two passages we looked at last week. In James, he talked about the Spirit that's been given to us, that God jealously desires that Spirit, that the work that Spirit has been sent to do, that's what God desires. He jealously wants that to occur. That's why he sent the Spirit. Well here, Paul is saying that very same thing, that this Spirit has been sent into our hearts. It's been poured out. That Spirit gives us hope. It ties us to the realities in Christ. Again and again, I said over and over in our previous session, that the role of the Holy Spirit in our lives is to apply the finished work of Christ to us. That's the work of the Spirit. It's not to be fantastic and super exciting, although all this stuff is very exciting when you realize this is the things that have been created in me. But the role of the Spirit is to apply the things that Christ has finished for us. He takes the things that Christ has accomplished and He works them in our life. That's the heart and soul of what this Spirit's work is. That's why He's been given to us. Verse 6, For while we were still helpless, at the right time Christ died for the ungodly. For one will hardly die for a righteous man, though perhaps for the good man someone would dare even to die. But God demonstrates His own love towards us in that while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us. Now this is different when you're telling this to a Gentile. This would be horrific, if you were a Jew, to be told this. Although Paul would turn around and tell them this. Because the Jew understood himself to be not the enemy of God, but what? A friend. The family of God. Now it turns out that Paul later ends his writing talks about how Israel is in fact the enemy of God. Because by faith, which they don't have, They don't accept the things that God has done to them. But here, Paul is addressing the Gentiles, who knows they're the enemy of God. They know they're outside. This God is foreign to them. But he's telling them, but when you were enemies, even now, if you're an enemy of God, Christ died to reconcile the enemy of God. God demonstrated his own love towards us that while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us. Much more then, having now been justified by his blood, we shall be saved from the wrath of God through him." We're saved from the wrath of God through Christ. If while 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. We've talked about this in the past, that there's two aspects to what Christ did redemptively. Christ was called to die on the cross, but the extent of redemption is not simply that Christ died for us. And here Paul's alluding to this fact. It's not sufficient that we just focus on the cross of Christ and that he died in our place. Because that gets rid of one part of the problem, And that problem goes back to the beginning when Adam and Eve did sin. They sinned under the understanding of what was the penalty if they did what was forbidden. What was the penalty? To die. So Christ dying in our place is only half the problem solved. He's accomplishing for us that death. But beyond that death, we have to have the life of Christ. And it's the life of Christ and the merit of Christ and the things that He did in obedience that He does in the role of Adam, the second Adam. He does those things having at the end of that perfectly lived life, what was the result? What was Adam and Eve's promise if they lived according to the one law? Do not eat of this tree. What was the promise? Eternal life was the promise if they obeyed and lived by the command. And so Christ has got two aspects to what he does in redemption. He comes to pay for a penalty for the breaking of the covenant, but he also comes to merit and to earn eternal life. He earns eternal life for us. He lives according to the covenant, the very first covenant. Now the grace comes in that that completed and finished and full first covenant is then given to us, granted to us. Our lives come from the very first covenant being complete and fulfilled. Just to kind of rephrase what you're saying, kind of like a question, it seems like we have two problems because of sin. One is the penalty of sin, as you've already said, but it seems that the other problem we have is that we still have the nature of sin, the fleshly nature. It seems to me that that the result of Christ dying for us is not only that you pay the penalty or sins, but he also has given us his new nature through the Spirit, and it's because of that new nature that we then have eternal life. So it wasn't If we didn't have the new nature of Christ, we still wouldn't be able to have eternal life. It's because we have been changed with a new nature that we now are able to have eternal life. And let's have the confession, because the confession is amazing. If you don't read it, on occasion pick it up and read sections that maybe you're studying in. The one section that deals with what we're talking about today is section six of the fall of man, of sin, and of the punishments thereof. Let me read one paragraph out of this confession, talking about the nature of sin. The corruption of nature during this life does remain in those that are regenerate. No, we're not airlifted out of Adam and made perfect. Now, we're being made whole and complete, and we're going to be finished, but we're not removed out of Adam as if we cease now to sin. The corrupted nature still follows us. And then it goes on, it says, and although it be through Christ pardoned and mortified. We're going to talk about pardoning as we get into this next passage, next section. The imputation of guilt. Just because we haven't been convicted of something doesn't mean that we're not guilty of it. The guilt hasn't been judged against us yet. We're going to see that delineated here. But Christ, although through Christ our fallenness is pardoned and mortified, yet both itself and all the motions thereof are truly and properly sinned. The Reformers had a way of talking about our conditions as regenerate individuals in this world, and they often referred to us as both saints and sinners. We're simultaneously saints and sinners. To reach sainthood doesn't mean that we're without sin. Now, there's a Catholic notion about sainthood that really gets you way off in the weeds. But every one of us that are in Christ are saints. That word holy lies behind that designation. We are made holy. We're set apart. We're given this new nature that isn't from us. It's from Christ. He merited it. He earned it as he fulfilled the very first covenant that Adam and Eve both failed to keep. So as we go through this, we're going to be thinking in these two categories of what Adam and Eve gave us, a nature that was death and dying. We're both dead as well as dying. When we're pronounced dead in Adam, it doesn't mean that we're not going to putrefy more. We will. We do. We can be worse than what we were to begin with. I work in prisons and that's a day-to-day proving of that. That things can be worse. That our sin can get worse. But the second thing is that Christ accomplishes two things for us. One, he remedies the sin issue that leads to death, as well as gives us the life that he himself inherited. It's an irony, we say we're not saved by works, but we are saved by works. They're just not our works, they're his works. We are saved by His perfect work that none other could do. Let's finish up. I think we did finish that first passage. Verses 12 and following are where we're going to spend most of our time this morning because this is going to give us some perspective as to history and to our place within it. Verse 12 begins, Just as through one man sin entered into the world, and death through sin, and so death spread to all men because all sinned. Now let's stop and appreciate what that says. The Confession, let me read another passage of that, introduces two things that we should keep related but distinct in our mind about sin. Because here we get introduced to this sin called in the confession and what we're going to put in our minds as the original sin. We talk about original sin. We were born into sin. This original sin is the fountainhead of sin. It lies at this question, why do I sin? And Ron said, because we have sin nature. It's because we have been the children of Adam. It's from Adam that we inherit that sinfulness. Paragraph 6 of Chapter 6 of the Confession says, Every sin, both original and actual. There's the distinction. Original being this fountainhead of sin. Actual being my take on it. Did Adam smack my neighbor? No, I did that. But was that heart in Adam? Yes it was, because it's in me. And I got it from him. When we're dealing with sin, we want to go back and get past the instance of it to the core of it. Last week we talked about a church up in the Springs that had an advertisement that said that they're wanting everybody to understand that God's died for their mistakes. Except he didn't die for your mistakes. Because that trivializes what was the issue as well as the sacrifice. Why would God send his son to die for such fiddly things like mistakes? Dropping the butter knife off the table, that's a mistake. He didn't die for that. When I picked the knife up and stabbed my neighbor in the chest and kill him, that's sin. He didn't die for mistakes, he died for sin. He died for something that was horrific. And when we minimize sin, we minimize God. Because what ultimately is sin? The confession tells us it's any want or conformity to what God has told us He would have us to do. It's the law. What's behind that? When God gave us His law, what was He given us? He's basically given us a mirror so that we can recognize the fact that we have a sin nature. If it wasn't for the law, we wouldn't recognize the fact that we are sinners. And you reminded me just a moment ago, you know, the phrase, you've probably heard it, maybe you've said it before, that we don't sin because... See, we're not sinners because we sin. We sin because we're sinners, in other words, our sin nature. It's kind of like we've got the disease of sin. We've been infected with this disease of sin. And just as an aside, Sometimes you hear Christians imply by what they say that, oh, the devil made me do it. And as if if you could get the devil out of the way, then you'd no longer be sinners. Well, that's not true. We've been infected through Adam with this disease of sin. And even if Satan ceased to exist for some reason, we'd still be sinners because we've been infected by that disease of sin. Yeah, it's a universal problem. It's universal within us. We haven't talked yet about the extensiveness of sin. The extensiveness, how thoroughly we've been corrupted. But it's also universal in humanity. You have a question? Yeah, I was just going to say about the law being a mirror. It's kind of weird because in the very next chapter in verse 7 there's a statement that says that. We're going to, in the next couple verses, we're going to talk about before the law and after the law. And we'll flesh a little bit of that out. But back to the whole idea of where God gave us His law. Were these things arbitrary? Did He just dream these things up? A reflection of who God is. So when we have the law, Thou shalt not murder. We're saying much more than what God would have us to do, but we're also saying something about the very nature of God. We don't often think, maybe we have, that what Satan did in deceiving Adam and Eve, what was that? What sin was that? Was it murder? delivering somebody to death. He did, in fact, murder us. He delivered us unto death. He took us from where we were and He introduced us to death. Thou shalt not murder. As we go through the law, each instance reveals something about the very character and nature of God. That's why it's so serious. That's why when we trivialize it, what are we in essence doing? We're saying something accidentally and unintentional, I'm sure, I hope, about God. That's why it's horrendous that we say that Christ died for mistakes, because he did not die for mistakes. He died for something that was contrary and against and in violation of the very nature of God. Mistakes imply that we didn't have to sin. We don't have the ability not to sin. It's not just that he died for us. He really died for our sin nature. For our whole being. For what we are. Our very base level. And in fact, you know, sometimes people ask the question, can you be good without God? No, you can't. Because to be good, you know, I should define it in terms of, a Christian would define it, has to be that We are good for the right reasons, and the right reasons only come out of our regenerated nature. If our quote-unquote good comes out of our human nature, it's not good, because it's not in reference to God. It doesn't please Him, because it's not like Him. I had a professor in New Geneva, Dr. Powell, and he would always, at least once a session, come up with something that was just so simple, but so profound. Hopefully it didn't happen early, because then you kind of got really sidetracked and your mind was off in the middle of something else. Hopefully it was at the end when he said something like that. But he said about God. That He is the only good being. The only good being. That all that is Him is good. Any good thing that comes, comes from Him. And all good things come to us through Christ. There isn't anything good that we have that is not because He's given it to us. To reinforce what Phil said. If we're going to do what God has called us to do, and those things are good, they will flow from what nature? Not this one. No good comes out of this. This was marked by rebellion, pride, dishonesty. All the things that were called in the Scriptures to flee from, it's all right here. The things that are done here, come as an act of God in and through us. All good things come to us through Christ and by the nature that He has given us through the work of the Holy Spirit. Now let's go back here and let's step back into history and talk about what preceded the law. Verses 13 it says, For until the law, sin was in the world, but sin is not imputed when there is no law." Okay, so sin is in the world. And we know from verse 12 that everybody that is infected by sin, what's the result? Death. So when we have little children dying at childbirth, what is the implication? What can we say about that child? Does sin touch them? Why? Because they're dying. If you're dying, you're part of the sinful problem. It's a universal issue. Death would not have occurred if sin had not entered, and it's very interesting, it says that sin entered into the world. What world? What are we talking about there? Because we're actually talking about the introduction of sin into humanity. Because what predated our sin? There was rebellion in the heavenlies, wasn't there? Satan? But here we're being very specific. Because when Christ came to die, He didn't die for angels. He didn't die for the rebellion of those that was pre-art history, pre-humanity. Christ was not dying for them. He wasn't redeeming any angelic being that was in rebellion against God. He was coming to die for us. That's important as to the nature of what Christ was. We come down into the early centuries, 2nd, 3rd, and 4th centuries, and we're talking about, well, what is Christ? Well, I think He's just a spirit being. Here, Paul is very specific. He came to die to fix a problem in a certain nature of individuals. It's important that he come to die with a nature that is just like ours. Early in the book of Hebrews, in the last several weeks, Mark's been talking about the distinction between the Son of God and the angelic host. That He's supreme above them. He's above them. That He came to take upon Himself our nature. Because it's important that what the penalty of the curse was, you shall die, was given to humanity. that he coming has to be of the same nature as that which he dies for. This helps us clarify why the blood of bulls and goats could never accomplish the work. What nature does your dog have? Dogness, Dr. Powell would say. Dogs have dogness. They don't have humanness. They are not human. When we're talking about humanity and I cut my arm off, am I less of a human? Lose both arms and I'm... What am I? Our humanity is not our physicality. Our humanity is our spiritual connection, our spirituality. Our soul, our very core. And we work out our humanity. in this world through our physicality, just as a dog works out his dogness through his physicality. But when we're talking about sin, we're dealing with issues that are much more base and central to our very nature than we are about the extremities and our externals. I smacked somebody. Is that a sin? Maybe. Depends on a lot of things, doesn't it? When I worked in the prisons, I would routinely be introduced with opportunities to smack people. If they're coming at me, I'm going to smack them. I'm going to smack them in a very deliberate and trained way. Is that a sin? No. When we're talking about sin, we have to get way past all these externals. We have to get down to motives, intentions, a lot of things that are inside of our very being. When we have to get down into that, now we're in this area in verse 13 of imputation, of trial, of conviction. What do you have to have to convict somebody of something? You have to have a standard and you have to have the evidence. But before that, is sin nature having its effect? Before God gave the law and he said, thou shalt not murder? When did it happen? First instance of it. Cain and Abel. All God had said at this point was, don't eat of that tree. He didn't say, do not murder. Well, look what happened. They ate of the tree and then what's happening? Murder of my brother. The effects of sin prior to the law do not negate. We can't say, well, I didn't know. The king said, I didn't know, I shouldn't have done that. The sin has its consequence regardless of our understanding. We often are presented with this mythical case of aborigines that don't know anything about anything, out in the middle of wherever. Is God going to send them to hell for not knowing Christ? It's not an issue of knowing or not knowing Christ. It's an issue of sin. Are they sinners? I'm sure there's been a few Aborigines murder one another. And they didn't know. And live in a society of law. Sin itself is an enemy. It's an enemy to humanity. It's one of the enemies, the chief enemy, that Christ came to overcome. That Christ came to overcome our enemies. That one being our chief one. It's chief because it's at the very base core of our being. Now when we talk about coming to faith in Christ, and as we talk about the gifts that lead us to understand and to have those things given to us, We've got a remedy problem already. The sin issue. The transfer of certain ones from here to there. That's what we see next here in our passage. Verse 15. The free gift is not like the transgression. For if by the transgression of the one, the many died, Much more did the grace of God and the gift by grace of the one man Jesus Christ abound to the many. You're going to see this in Paul later in this passage about the aboundingness of grace. At one point we've got one sin. that, in essence, blossoms out into a multitude of more sins. We've got the original sin, and then we've got, here as the Confession turns it, actual. We've got an explosion of actual sin. But then we've got Christ, and He's elaborating that the expanse of this was phenomenal. You look at the Old Testament, those first few chapters, and it's fairly clear that, man, everything just went way south after Adam and Eve. People were doing all kinds of things. Horrific things. Profoundly evil things. We look down in history and he says, but grace is balanced more, that Christ would come in and take the some whole of this explosion of depravity, the sum whole of it, and through one act of obedience, pay for it. What Christ did upon the cross so far transcends this world. This was part of the objections that many had to the passion of the Christ because it is so focused on this earthly pain, the physical pain, the physicality of it. But when we're dealing with the sin and the horrendous and horrific evil, and when we come to Christ, He's dealing with that one, in that one instance, with an eternity of sin. The whole of the affront against God, His Father, whom He loved, loved more than this life itself. All of that comes to that one point. And then from that point, grace abounds. Paul's going to talk about the grace abounding because he knows our minds. He says, well, if that's the case, why don't we give more opportunity for grace to abound. In the next chapter, he's going to deal with that. If we end up being so good, maybe we didn't need Christ. That's how our minds think. That's the contorted twisting of our minds. And Paul addresses that in the next chapter. But the free gift is not like the transgression. For if by the transgression of the one, the many die, much more did the grace of God and the gift by grace of the one man Jesus Christ abound to the many. The whole of what Christ has accomplished, the whole of it, comes through that cross. Because we can't have what Christ merited in His life, leading up to it, the perfect life. We can't get to that, except through the death. This becomes more important in chapter 6 as we talk about death. As it severs us from this role of Adam. It severs us. We are taken from here and we are put into here. We are no longer here. How God deals with us now is all and only through Christ. We are not His enemies anymore. The category of enemy belongs only to this group. Here we are now sisters or brothers. We are family. The whole of our life in Christ flows from Christ. There's not a single thing in our life that doesn't come to us through Him. Let's go on to verse 16. The gift is not like that which came through the one who sinned. On the one hand, the judgment arose from one transgression resulting in condemnation, but on the other hand, the free gift arose from many transgressions resulting in justification. Justification and imputation are the same sorts of things. They're about this process, this judicial declaration. Prior to the law, we don't have the imputation of sin, or more properly, guilt of sin. a judgment or a ruling saying, Thou hast done this and now are convicted of this. But when the law comes in, it does that very thing. It says, Thou shalt not murder. There's the standard. I've committed murder. I've got evidence. Blood on my hands. I used the rock. I hit my brother in the head and I killed him. Now I've got evidence that says that I met this standard. I murdered. And now guilt is applied to me. But if I did this and nobody knew about it, am I still Without sin? No. God created us so that our very own minds, unless seared, we talked about last week, the searing and the callousing of our minds, our very own minds will convict us to some degree. We sear them, we cover over them, we callous them. I didn't sin. Surely I didn't do that. We make excuses and we cover it over When we go to prayer, that's where we find ourselves. I surely didn't do that. The gift is not like that which comes through the One. Verse 17, If by the transgression of the One, death reigns through the One, much more those who receive the abundance of grace and the gift of Christ will reign in life through the One, Jesus Christ. If death reigns in the One, If death reigns here, life reigns here. Anything that we can term as life comes from where? Christ. All the early signs of life come from Christ. When we finally get the full picture of what condition we are in, it rules out the Arminian position. It rules it out. Because what hope do we have there? What remnant is there left here to be able to get us across the gap? Is it my faith? Is it my will? Is it my understanding? This is where we talk about the extensiveness of sin. The faculties that we have here, when I talk about a faculty, I'm talking about those conceptual things that we talk about, like my intellect, my understanding, and my ability to have faith. All of them are corrupted. Because where do they come from? Where do they flow out of? They flow out of my nature. There's nothing that I do that I am not doing as a human being. That's why when we have bears attack people in the wilderness, we don't take them to court. Because they're bears and they're doing their bearness out there. But when we have people kill people out in the forest, then we take them to court and we sentence them when they send them to us. We keep them. Because everything that we do, our thinking, our activity, our actions, our decisions, everything flows out of our nature, what we are. It's nature that is corrupted and everything that flows from it is consequently corrupt. There's nothing useful within us to permit God to use it to bring it over. If it were, it would introduce corruption into Christ. Now, Christ came as a perfect human without sin. That's why it's so important that we hold to the virgin birth, to the miraculous virgin birth. Christ's Father was God, not Joseph. Because that strikes at the very heart of the nature of our Redeemer. If Christ was just man, as the church is down the street here, not all of them, but two of them, Jehovah's Witnesses and the Mormons, Christ is not God. Or he's not man. We have to understand that Christ is man so that he can sufficiently die for us, his brother. And that he's God in order that he can sufficiently provide for us life. We're way out of time. We're going to finish the rest of this chapter next week and get into chapter 6. If you haven't read it, read it. Read the rest of 5 and into 6. You'll see some of those things we've been talking about, the aboundingness of God's grace. Let's close in prayer. Gracious God, we're thankful that you have done so wonderfully the work of redemption, that you have given us your Son, where we understand the desperate nature of our condition before you, that there is nothing that is within us that is useful to you, that can be used by you. in redeeming us, that we are dead, that we've been cut off. But Lord, you are gracious and you are mighty. You have sent your Son. You sent him with a nature just like ours. A nature in which he perfectly lived out the demands that you had given our forefather Adam. And that he married for us eternal life. Where we celebrate and in the next several weeks we are focused upon that day of resurrection, that day of triumph. Wherein you sacrificed your son, sacrificing him for us, for our rebellion and for our defilement of your very nature. Where we thank you that you have triumphed over our enemy death. We thank you that you have brought us to life and that you are continuing to work in and through us. Lord, we pray as we gather to worship you and as we set our hearts and minds to focus upon you fully, that you would be glorified and magnified, that you would be lifted up. For in you all good things come. For in you is our life. In Jesus' name I pray. Amen.