The evidence of sin and its death ruling in the world is clear. Paul describes the situation vividly in the opening section of his letter to the Romans. No matter who you are, Jew or Gentile, you have the same problem: you are “under sin” (Romans 3:9). Being under sin means that you live in the kingdom that was set up in the disobedience of Adam.
Adam was intended to lead the world from glory to glory. The movement would involve Adam and the rest of creation moving through some form of death so that they could be raised to a new, transformed life. This would be the process of maturity and fruitfulness. There is evidence of this before the fall of man. God takes Adam into a “deep sleep,” a sleep that Jim Jordan describes correctly as “death sleep,” rips him in half, and he awakens glorified; the one becomes two and is beautified (cf. 1 Corinthians 11:7).
This did not continue long. When Adam submitted to the serpent and sinned, sin latched on to this death-and-resurrection-into-glory process and perverted it. Instead of moving from glory to glory, man became trapped in death and began to rot. This rot continued for thousands of years and is what Paul is describing in the opening of his letter to the Roman church. Sin causes man to “fall short of the glory of God” (Romans 3:23).
However, God in his grace has not left man to the dominion of sin-reigning-in-death. At the end of Romans 3, Paul explains how God has been faithful to his promises in and through Christ Jesus so that both Jews and Gentiles are delivered from the dominion of sin-and-death. The promises of God for both Jews and Gentiles come through Abraham. God made a covenant with Abraham so as to remedy the problem of sin and its reign.
This covenant that God made with Abraham, particularly as it is revealed in Genesis 15, teaches us that Abraham is the father of both Jew and Gentile believers. All who share the faith of Abraham, a faith that has as its object Abraham’s resurrected seed, are Abraham’s children and heirs of the covenant.
But what does it mean to be heirs of the covenant of Abraham? In Genesis 15 God promised Abraham a seed and a land. The land promise, we learn in Romans 4:13, concerns the inheritance of the entire world, the world originally given to Adam. The glory that God intended for man, the dominion he commanded man to take over the world, would be realized in Abraham’s seed. The dominion of sin would be overcome so that man would no longer fall short of the glory of God.
The promise to Abraham would not be realized quickly or easily. Within the covenant ceremony to which Paul alludes in Romans 4, God tells Abraham that his children will suffer oppression. God will bring them out into their promised inheritance, but it will be through suffering that they will inherit (Genesis 15:12-16). To be an heir of Abraham you must suffer with Abraham’s seed. That is the path to glory.
This hope of glory and its path become a focus of Paul in the next section of his letter. The opening sentences of chapter 5 are concerned about suffering and its effects. We “hope in the glory of God” (Romans 5:2). This hope means that we can “rejoice in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces perseverance, and perseverance, character; and character, hope” (Romans 5:3-4). The end of this section in Romans, chapter 8, will parallel and conclude with discussions of suffering and the hope of glory (cf. Romans 8:18-39).
In Romans 5:12-21 Paul gives the controlling narrative to all that he has been saying, giving an even deeper context to the Abrahamic story. Sin and its death entered the world through the sin of Adam, but the grace of God in Christ Jesus overcame sin-and-death ushering in righteousness and life. A major focus in this section is on the power of God’s grace-gift in comparison to the trespass of Adam. God’s grace is his powerful action in Christ that overwhelming defeats sin at every turn, using sin’s greatest weapon against it to defeat it. Sin-and-death cannot stand up to the might of God’s grace.
God demonstrated the power of his grace not by merely holding sin at bay with an equal-and-opposite force, but by reversing its effects, restoring what sin had devoured, setting man back on the right course, and bringing man to the place God intended in the beginning. Sin-death does not have a chance against the grace-gift.
Because grace has overwhelmed sin, there is no way we can continue to abide under the reign of sin (Romans 6:1). Through baptism into Christ our position has changed. We have died and risen with Christ in baptism. Our bodies are now joined to his body that has been freed from sin through resurrection (Romans 6:3-4). We are living in the kingdom of righteousness-and-life.
Lest anyone believe that Paul has an over-realized eschatology, he makes sure that we know that our bodies continue to live with the effects of the Adamic creation. In Romans 6:12 he we are told that our bodies are “mortal;” that is, we still live on in death-bodies.
However, the exhortation that Paul gives while describing our bodies in this way is telling: “Therefore do not let sin reign in your mortal body, that you should obey it in its lusts.” In other words, the grace of God in Jesus has stripped us from all excuses for sin even though we still live in death-bodies. There is no denial of the continuing struggle with sin-and-death in our bodies. But all that has been said previously about Christ’s victory over Adam’s sin-and-death comes to bear upon us in this exhortation.
How can we claim to be helpless before sin when we are in Christ? Yes, we suffer because of our present condition in our bodies, but God has demonstrated his power over death. That power is promised to us. While our suffering is real and the temptation to sin in our suffering is real, we need not submit to the power of sin, nor can we use our mortality as some excuse to sin. The death that continues to plague us can be overwhelmed by grace. Churches, marriages, and friendships need not be in slavery, and should not be in slavery, to the rot of death.
Grace willingly dies to itself so that relationships can be transformed into relationships of peace. Sins that seek to enslave our bodies through our minds, eyes, ears, hands, feet, or any other part of our bodies, need not be our masters. We must learn to avail ourselves of the grace of God within his church to be strengthened to overcome this sin-in-death-rot.
Death is still present with us, but the slavery to death-rot that was introduced through Adam’s sin no longer controls us. Death is transformed so that we are moving from glory to glory. We can be assured that even if our death is due to our own sin, that death will not ultimately overcome us. God can transform even that sin-death into glory. We still die, but those deaths will not result in decay but glory. God will move us through our suffering, all of our suffering, with the seed of Abraham to the hope of glory (Romans 8:18).
Rev. Bill Smith is Pastor of Community Presbyterian Church in Louisville, Kentucky.