Romans 5:12-21

How many of you have seen the Steven Spielberg movie, Amistad? These days I see very few movies at the cinema, but during my first week living in Sydney [in 1998] I went and saw Amistad at Miranda Fair. Set in 1839, and starring Morgan Freeman and Anthony Hopkins, it’s the moving story of 53 Africans aboard a Spanish slave ship called La Amistad who break free from their chains, take over the ship, and attempt to sail home to Africa. Instead, they’re captured by Americans and put on trial for murder.

Amistad graphically portrays the horror and injustice of slavery, and the powerless position in which the slave finds himself in relation to the free. You may think slavery is a thing of the past, but it’s alive and well in various forms all over the world, from advanced Western countries to totalitarian dictatorships, from the high-tech computer industry to subsistence farming.

While slavery might not be publicly condoned today, and not widely experienced, it’s far from eradicated. But there’s another kind of slavery that everyone experiences: slavery to sin. Just as those 53 Africans were captured and thrown onto the Spanish slave ship to spend the rest of their lives in powerless and purposeless existence in a foreign land, so each of us is condemned to a life of slavery by our relationship to Adam and by our own thoughts and actions.

What is amazing is that most of us don’t know it! We might live for many years without realising the truth about ourselves. One day Jesus said to some of his compatriots who had claimed to believe in him, “If you hold to my teaching . . . you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free” (John 8:31-32).

They answered, “We are Abraham’s descendants and have never been slaves of anyone. How can you say that we shall be set free?” (verse 33). Jesus replied, “I tell you the truth, everyone who sins is a slave to sin” (verse 34).

Have you reached a point like that, where the spotlight of objective reality shines on your life, and you discover you’re trapped in a dead-end existence, powerless to change for good, spiritually bankrupt, and enslaved to sin? It’s people like that for whom Jesus came to die.

In another place he said: “I have not come to call the righteous, but sinners” (Matthew 9:13). Until we recognise that sin is our natural master, and that sinning is our natural characteristic, we won’t understand ourselves, and we won’t be able to relate meaningfully to God.

Slavery is not exactly a hot topic today, although as I said, everyone experiences it. But there’s something that’s universal and inescapable, yet few people seek it – and that is death. Whether it’s old age, or a car accident, or a tidal wave, or an indiscriminate bomb blast, death catches up with us all. Indirectly, death is the result of sin. Each of us is enslaved to sin and sentenced to death – spiritual death, leading inevitably to physical death. But just as Jesus came to help sinners to practise righteousness, he also came to give life to the dead.

An old gravestone in an Indiana cemetery bears this epitaph:

Pause, Stranger, when you pass me by,

As you are now, so once was I.

As I am now, so you will be,

So prepare for death and follow me.

Below it, someone had scratched this reply:

To follow you I’m not content

Until I know which way you went.

Which way are you headed? “I tell you the truth,” Jesus said on one occasion, “whoever hears my word and believes him who sent me has eternal life and will not be condemned; he has crossed over from death to life” (John 5:24). All it takes is hearing the message Jesus brings, and believing in the God whom Jesus perfectly and completely reveals, and your existence is transformed, and your destiny is reversed! That’s Good News!

Why did Jesus have to die? Why did such a good and wise man have to forfeit his life? The Bible says that Jesus died for our sins, and he died our death, in order to share the life of God with us. In Romans 5:12-14, Paul sketches the stark reality of our lives:

Therefore, just as sin entered the world through one man, and death through sin, and in this way death came to all men, because all sinned – for before the law was given, sin was in the world. But sin is not taken into account where there is no law. Nevertheless, death reigned from the time of Adam to the time of Moses, even over those who did not sin by breaking a commandment, as did Adam, who was a pattern of the one to come.

Romans is a letter of introduction from Paul to the Christians at Rome, but it’s also a brilliant theological summary of the Good News – the Gospel. In chapters 1-3 Paul demonstrates the nature and character of our spiritual plight, and argues that we can only gain the righteousness of God – which will save us from both sin and death – through faith in Jesus Christ. In chapters 5-8 Paul expounds some of the benefits of saving faith, and in the first 11 verses of chapter 5 he speaks about peace with God, joy, hope and love.

In verses 12-21 Paul contrasts Adam with Christ, showing the difference between the condition of sinful humanity and that of humanity reconciled to God. Living apart from Christ, he says, is powerless and futile; living in relationship with Christ replaces sin and death with righteousness and eternal life.

The verses we read (12-14) echo the testimony of the Old Testament, reminding us of how sin entered our physical and moral universe when Adam disobeyed the one rule God had given him (see Genesis 2:16-17; 3:1-6). We have no clue here about the origin of sin, but its consequences were both immediate and catastrophic. Although created in God’s image, Adam and Eve were cut off from fellowship with him and expelled from their garden paradise.

But worse was to follow. Paul personifies both sin and death in verses 12 and 14. If sin entered the world through Adam’s disobedience, it left the door ajar for its twin brother death to appear, and death’s arrival showed the true nature of sin. Death is the universal reward of sin; you and I are always culpable for sinful attitudes and actions, whether or not we enjoy the privilege of access to God’s written word.

“Death came to all men, because all sinned,” says Paul in verse 12b: spiritual and physical death. It is true that Adam’s sin is imputed to us (that’s the doctrine of ‘original sin’); before Moses received the Law from God, death was the punishment for people’s involvement in Adam’s sin (see verse 13).

But in verse 12 there is no textual justification for a metaphorical interpretation emphasising that we are guilty because Adam sinned. God counts us guilty because each of us sins against him – sins of omission and commission, sins of ignorance and wilful disobedience.

Life without Christ is powerless and futile, leading only to death. That’s the essence of the human condition, and the reason why there is so much war and violence, injustice and misery. We’re slaves to sin, and subject to death. The Good News is that although God abhors sin, he loves lost people. Just as all people descended from Adam share his sinful nature, all those who are reconciled to God participate in the life of Christ and enjoy its blessings: peace, joy, hope, love, and “ten thousand beside,” as the hymn puts it.

As you recognise your ‘lostness,’ and acknowledge your powerlessness to God, he saves you, frees you from your chains, gives you eternal life, and introduces you to its glorious benefits.

Speaking to Christians, Paul says in Romans 6:22-23, “Now that you have been set free from sin and have become slaves to God, the benefit you reap leads to holiness, and the result is eternal life. For the wages of sin is death, but the gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord.”

Why did Jesus have to die? He died for our sins, and he died our death. His death was voluntary, and it was altruistic – it was for our good. Jesus was the Good Shepherd who “lays down his life for the sheep” (John 10:11).

His death was in our place. Our sins were a barrier preventing us from relating to God, and we could never rise to God’s standards or atone for our own sins. But Jesus “bore our sins in his body on the tree” (1 Peter 2:24a).

What led him to the cross? What held him to the tree? It was more than iron spikes. Our sin, and his love for us, are what led Jesus to the cross. In his book The Cross of Christ, John Stott notes that “ultimately what sent Christ (to the cross) was neither the greed of Judas, nor the envy of the priests, nor the vacillating cowardice of Pilate, but our own greed, envy, cowardice and other sins.”

During World War 2, a Polish Franciscan monk named Maximilian Kolbe was held in the infamous Auschwitz concentration camp. When the place grew overcrowded, a number of men were selected for execution by firing squad. One of those selected shouted that he was a married man with a large family, but the soldiers took no notice.

Father Kolbe stepped forward and asked if he could take the condemned man’s place. His offer was accepted, but instead of being led away to the firing squad, he was placed in a tiny underground cell where he suffered the horrible death of starvation. Father Kolbe died a noble death for one man; Jesus Christ died an agonising death on the cross not for one person but for all – and that includes you.

Finally, Jesus died our death. The sinless Son of God endured the penalty our sins deserved because of God’s justice and holiness. He “suffered death . . . (he tasted) death for everyone” (Hebrews 2:9). God could have turned his back on us forever, abandoning us to our fate, without compromising one atom of his justice and integrity. But he did not. At great cost to himself, he gave his Son for us.

Amazing love, O what sacrifice,

The Son of God giv’n for me

My debt he pays, and my death he dies

That I might live.

That’s how much lost people matter to God. You may be a slave to sin, and subject to death, but God regards you as a person of inestimable value. And in the same way, what God has done for us gives us an idea of how much other lost people should matter to us.

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E137 Copyright (c) 2003 Rod Benson. Unless otherwise noted, Scripture quotations are from The Holy Bible: New International Version (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1980). To talk with Rod about this message, email or write to P.O. Box 1790, MACQUARIE CENTRE 2113 AUSTRALIA. To subscribe, email with “subscribe-river” in the subject. To unsubscribe, type “unsubscribe-river” in the subject.