Romans 5:12-13 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— 13 for sin indeed was in the world before the law was given, but sin is not counted where there is no law.
Paul gets to the deep problem for humanity. He moves beyond the rebellious acts of chapters 1-3 which lead to the verdict of guilt before God’s righteous judgment. No one can avoid this verdict by human means but only through trusting in God’s gracious provision in Jesus Christ. What has brought about this guilty verdict? It is the deeper condition of sin. Every human is depraved and corrupt deep within from sin as a power. Theologians have used different words for this, including original sin, carnality, depravity. Paul now explores the origins of this problem and will show its affects. Sin came about through “one man,” Adam, who represents the human race. What he did affected every human sin. There is a weakness in each of us. It reveals itself in physical ways because the outcome of sin is death. Just about everything we do fights the affects of sin: eating, sleeping, working, medicines, and many other things. If we stopped any of these, eventually we would die. Our tiredness is from death. We cannot imagine our existence without death. This physical weakness affects our spiritual weakness, which Paul will explore later in ch. 6. The condition of sin brings death which opens the door to temptations. Because we are weak physically and spiritually, we give into doing the acts of sin. Our sinful condition reacts in rebellion against God’s laws because we have been deceived into thinking that autonomy and self-preservation are the best options. As we do this, we exert our will above God’s will. Our desires from our living as fleshly creatures are distorted by pride and human thinking like the Jews of ch. 2. We set ourselves up against God and create our own religions, like the Gentiles of ch. 1.
One of the purposes of the law is to reveal this problem. It shows the problem by setting a boundary defined by God’s holiness. Without the law, we would not know that we have a problem. We would not know a certain action or thought is sinful. God gave us his laws so that we know what holiness is. His light pointed the way in all the darkness. We would not know the right path to take without the light of the law. But in doing this, we as sinful creators who are full of pride, self, and our own thinking rebel because we think we are better than God, thus we end up in idolatry. We can see how Paul’s theology comes around and how his thoughts here in ch. 5 connect to chs. 1-2.
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