We're up in Romans 5 today, but I want to give us a little bit of background. I've been out a couple of weeks, so we're jumping back into Romans, and it's unhealthy to start in the middle. Romans, especially chapters 1 through 8, sets out Paul's theology of salvation, in a very broad sense of that term. And we're up in chapter 5 at a real critical pivot point in the book that I'll get to in a moment. And it's important for us to know because I think there's just a widespread general misunderstanding by Christians of exactly what the Christian life is supposed to be about. Somehow they've caught this notion that, you know, the Old Testament and those Pharisees, they were bad and they had all these rules. We've got a new set of rules. And if we keep them really well, God will approve of us. And you can pick up all kinds of books about how to be a spiritual Christian, and, well, you need to do this, this, this, this, this, and this. And when you get to Romans 7, Paul's going to say, if that's your plan, you're going to fail. That's a fact. But that's just how it's thought of. It turns out, you don't have the ability to do all that. Neither did Paul. And he'll say that. So, we want to understand this pivot point, but how do we get there? Paul, in Romans 1, makes the thematic statement of the Gospel. And I've said before, he uses the gospel in a broader sense than merely the death, burial, and resurrection of Jesus to deal with our sin in the sense that we're no longer seen by God as sinners, but we've been declared righteous. And that's here. But what he has for us is broader. And you see it in those opening verses. And that's why I've said it's really the overview of all those eight chapters right here in verses 16 and 17. For I'm not ashamed of the gospel of Christ. It's the power of God unto salvation. And he doesn't say salvation from what or to what at that moment. He has to get to it. But what happens is, in a lot of ways, not just on this issue, but Christians get an idea. Sometimes it's tied to an English word that we use a lot. And it might not even be a Bible word. It might be a Bible word, but a Bible word that's only sparingly used. And once you get an idea that that's what that means, when you find it in the Scripture, you're going to put it there. And that's a fallacy. It's an exegetical fallacy, and it's an easy one to do. So, for example, if you went to a church that had someone stand up and make an ecstatic utterance, some verbal a display, but you can't understand it. No one understands it. It's not a language that can be interpreted. But if you were told all the time, that's called tongues. Now, the word tongues is unique to the King James. A newer translation, this wouldn't work, but the King James has been so influential, people will say that's called tongues. Well, what are you going to think when you see the word tongues in Acts 2? That's what I saw at church. That's a fallacy. You're not interpreting Acts 2. You're putting it in. Well, a lot of Baptists do the same thing with the word salvation, with the word confession. That's the reason most Baptists teach that you say a, quote, sinner's prayer, if you want to call it that. They teach it out of Romans, right, primarily. There's only like one other place that a few people will go other than Romans 10 to teach that. But how does that happen? It's sort of a theology that gets built around a word and then put back into the text. It's not the other way around. So we want to be cautious of that. And so I'm just saying here at the outset, gospel's broader than what we might always think. Gospel doesn't always mean the same thing. And Paul's gospel is very clear. It's Romans 1 through 8. He's going to set it all out. Great detail. It's the power of God unto salvation. I'm going to suggest to you it's deliverance. That's all salvation means, deliverance. It can be deliverance from sleep. as in when someone wakes you up in the New Testament. It can be deliverance from drowning, as will happen when Paul is shipwrecked. It can be deliverance from an illness, which is how it gets translated when Jesus heals people. It's this word, but it's deliverance in different contexts. You're saying it's also got to be deliverance to something. over half the time, it has nothing to do with justification from being a sinner. So, it's important that we always grasp hold of what exactly we're being delivered from, and then for today's purposes in Romans 5, what are we being delivered to? See, it's both. So, he says, it's the power of God unto salvation to everyone that believeth. And he'll come back to this point in Romans 5 today, that that's the basis for it. And if I understand the notes I clipped through in the bulletin real quick, what we're going to hear preached on later, it's going to be something along these lines, that the only prerequisite for justification is believing. And that's not widely held. Certainly if you include within the the array of theological thinking, and you include the Catholics, then what I'm saying, and what we say at this church, is a very small minority of believers, of those who would identify as Christians, who think that you actually get saved in the sense of justifying God declaring you righteous, in that limited sense. just because you've believed. Nothing else. No strings attached. It's actually 110%, to use high school football math, free. People don't believe that widespread. Most Baptist preachers don't believe that, and they don't preach it. In the New Testament, what they preach is called Phariseeism. It's a fact. I'm good enough. Yeah, I had to believe, but I'm really, really good. Paul doesn't say that. He's going to get to Romans 7, and he's going to say, I tried that being good thing, and I fell flat on my face. I'm ashamed of it. But, oh death, where's your sting? Because God's dealt with what Paul couldn't fix. So it's the power of God unto salvation to everyone that believeth. And this was the time in his thematic statement to say, plus whatever you want to add in there, and he just doesn't say it because it didn't show, to the Jew first and also the Greek, for therein, that is, in this gospel, is the righteousness of God revealed. And that will be what will get shown in chapter 5. It's not merely that He has declared us righteous, those who have trusted Christ. He's delivering us to something, and the to part should be a righteous condition. That is, that we actually live out a life that conforms to our position as being declared righteous legally, so that God's righteousness is revealed in our lives. He says, as it's written, Habakkuk 2.4, the just shall live by faith." He wants us to live out a life that begins by faith, and it continues by faith. A faith always has to have content. So, as we continue in faith, we're living out God's words, the commands of Christ, and that's what He wants to see. So, just have that in mind. that we're being delivered from and to something and the from is from the wrath of God and he talks about that in the balance of chapter one that everybody in and of themselves engages in behavior and thinking and words that draws upon them the wrath of God and rightly so and he's setting up what our problem is our problem is is he culminates in in chapter three In verse 9, he says in 3, 3, 9, we've proved, we have before proved, he means if you look back in the first two chapters, we have before proved both Jew and Gentiles are all under sin. Under meaning in servitude to sin, to what he'll explain later is more the sin principle, or some might say the sin nature. We have a propensity to sin, and we can't stop ourselves, as it were. I mean, we're going to do it. And that sin is the reason God's wrath is just, and so we need a solution. And the solution can't be that I'll be better. And just as I can't be better in order to earn my justification, I can't be better to prove it. But I can be better, and he's going to talk about that. Romans 3.23, all have sinned and come short of the glory of God. That kind of sums up those first three chapters in a way when it gets to this wrath. We've all done it. It's not just that Paul's going to talk about this idea of, you know, in our relationship to Adam, we're sinners, but we engage in this sinful behavior, deserve this wrath of God. We've come short of the glory of God. This dismisses the possibility of two things. One, that I can be good enough to earn justification. And two, because this is where the real rubber hits the road in modern theology, I have to be good enough to prove I was justified. Because if I'm not good enough to prove I was justified, I probably just thought I was, and I was sincerely mistaken. And so what people will say is, no, no, no, you don't have to be saved by works. You can't do that. But you get your assurance of salvation. You get your certainty that you have, in fact, been saved by works. That's a mainstream teaching. It was taught at the summer camp my daughter went to. That's what's taught. And it's taught all the time. But aren't those really the same thing? If you think about it, no, you don't have to be good enough to get into heaven. You've got to be good enough to prove that you were ever saved to get into heaven. I mean, what's the difference? We're just doing semantics at this point. Paul's very clear. Everyone's fallen short of the glory of God. That includes the Pharisees, and that includes those who now say, yeah, I was saved by grace, but I have proven my salvation by my works. No, you haven't. Whatever standard you say, I'll find a moment in time if I could see what God does see about you, where you disproved what you said. Whatever standard you say, I was this high, I met this standard, and that proves I was really justified, I guarantee you God sees right into your heart, and He knows that time when you proved you weren't. It's just a fact. If you don't read that, read Matthew 5 and 6, when Jesus starts talking about, you know, to people who thought they'd never committed adultery. Yeah, you looked at her, and you thought about something, and you committed adultery in your heart and forgot it's the same thing. So just understand this. It's a dangerous doctrine, because we don't want to be Pharisees. We do want to be better, by the grace of God. We do not want to be in the business of comparing ourselves to people, of saying, I have to be good enough to prove I was saved, or someone else has to be good enough to prove they were really saved. The assurance you have of salvation is something as simple as John 3.16. Everyone that believes will not perish, but have eternal life. See, if God says it to you, You do not need to do like Gideon and say, well, God, I hear what you're saying. Remember Gideon in the book of Judges? I'll really believe you, though, if you let me put out a fleece and it's wet in the morning. Now, God accommodated his lack of faith, but his lack of faith was sin. God says in John 3.16, if you believe, you won't perish but have everlasting life. We're supposed to say, God, I believe what you've said. And that is my assurance, because you told me. I don't need anything more than you, God, told me, the one who never lies. So, think about that. We don't need this works concept to come in, even as a way of knowing assurance of salvation. And if it does, and you're honest with yourself, if your assurance is based on works, you will live in doubt. You will. because all have sin and come short of the glory of God. And that doesn't just go away when you become a Christian. But he says in verse 24, being justified freely. I don't know what's so hard about this idea of something being free. Absolutely, 100% free. You've given gifts to people. If you give someone a new car, But then a few months later you say, now you've got to go haul stuff for me because I gave you that new car. It's no longer a gift. You know what I'm saying? It's either a gift or it's not. If it's a gift, I can do whatever I want with it. And it's absolutely 100% free. It doesn't have any strings attached. But as soon as you start saying, well, it's a gift, but I want you to pay me. See, sometimes I win things. Y'all have done this. You win things, especially if you get a lot of emails like I do. But I need to send some money in so they can ship me what I won. That's not a gift. Or I'm going to call it a gift, but down the road, you're going to call in some favors from you. That ain't a gift either. He doesn't say anything about the strings. There's no fine print. Right? There's no fine print. Justified, that's the being declared righteous, freely by His grace. Now, Paul anticipates that this is contrary to our sin nature, contrary to the flesh. We want to have added to our justification. We want it to be at least some bit, because we're just that good. We brought something that God needed at the table, whatever we think, or we think that we're pious. And so He uses the word grace, which means free. It's a gift. And He uses the word freely. I mean, He's trying to eliminate. And yet people come, even to Romans, and teach exactly the opposite of what He's saying from these verses. freely by His grace. You say, and those who say it's free are accused of saying, or teaching what we call cheap grace. The price is right here in this verse. What's the price? Through the redemption that's in Christ Jesus. He paid. It's our benefit, our victory at Christ's expense. Very simple. Now, he uses in Romans 4, Abraham as the supreme example of someone who long before the law came into being, because this was a hang-up for Jewish people, the idea of the law, and surely the law has some role in my salvation. And Paul talks about the role of the law, and we don't want to discount that. But he says, you know, Abraham was saved before the law ever came along. That is, Abraham was justified. He was declared righteous back in Genesis 15, 6. And he becomes, in that sense, the father of us all, who will also follow after his example and just believe. And Abraham in 4.18, he, against hope, believed in hope that he might become the father of many nations. He believed what God said to him, particularly about having a child. Verse 20, he staggered not at the promise of God. See, this is an emphasis over and over. Believe plus nothing. Believe plus nothing. Being fully persuaded that what he, God, had promised. See, we need to be fully persuaded when we read John 3.16. That is our assurance of salvation. He was fully persuaded that what God had promised, he was able also to perform. And therefore, it was imputed to him for righteousness. Now, think about it. God's imputing righteousness to him in Genesis 15-6, long before a lot of other things happened that he was ashamed of. As he grew in faith, he had gotten off track, like we all do. That didn't change this. This was a one-time event, a one-time declaration of his righteousness. Well, in chapter 5, the first 10 verses, a few weeks ago, we talked about some benefits of being justified. Because what Paul wants to now do is move from the declaration that a sinner is righteous, and it's a legal declaration. It's based on what Jesus did, not based on their merit. All they've done is trusted God for this And he wants to move now to a practical side where in real time and in real life we change and we live differently. The nuts and bolts of that come in chapters 6-8. The theological backing for that, it gets summarized in the balance of what we'll see in chapter 5 today. So he gives some benefits in verses 1-10. For example, verse 2 says, verse 1 says, we have peace with God. Verse 2 says, we have access by faith into the grace when we stand. The idea is we permanently stand there. We are now in the spear of grace, and all the powers of darkness and all the powers of this world cannot remove us from the spear of grace. Now, whether or not we are going to receive that grace and employ it in our daily life will be our choice. but we stand in a new spear and have access to God. This especially has to do with prayer, but not only prayer, but certainly prayer, much like Hebrews 4, when it says we can come boldly to the throne of grace and pray to God for help in time of need, mercy, that sort of thing. Another benefit is access. Number three, we glory in tribulations. We now have a new mindset about tribulations. Everybody has trials and they have bad things happen. We've experienced that as a church. We see that in the funeral yesterday and stuff in the memorial service. We have a new perspective on it. That's what he talks about in this part of chapter five, this new perspective on it and how God can use even the trials to grow us in our faith, producing endurance, producing character. James talks about this. It's something talked about elsewhere in the scriptures. I think it's a powerful statement in verse 6, while we were without strength to fix all our problems, in due time Christ died for the ungodly. This whole idea that someone made a commitment that they are going to move forward in obedience to the Lordship of Christ so that they can become a Christian. One, they're not capable. people he died for, for ungodly. You go back in the Gospels, Jesus says the people that are whole don't need a physician, but those that are sick. Those are the ones he came to help. Well, God commended his love toward us that while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us. Now, sinners is a reality of what we will do That is, as Christians, we're not perfect. And Christians have too often gotten themselves in trouble by giving people the idea that maybe they're better than them, and they're not. But I will tell you this, the Scripture does not generally refer to Christians as sinners. He says you were sinners. He refers to Christians as saints. And the reason is because God now looks at us through the eyes of Jesus. When God declared us righteous, that means something. And so there's some thought out there where folks are always talking about how bad we are. I bet we can't go two minutes without sinning. We're so unworthy. God made you worthy. not because of your merit, but because you're in Christ. You're in this grace wherein you stand. So, have a healthy view of that. Yes, we do things that are sin, but God doesn't, in general in the New Testament, refer to believers as sinners anymore. He calls them saints in other terms, children of righteousness, things like that, children of the light. if you look in Ephesians and Colossians. So there's lots of expressions for it. And then the question is, will we live like children of the light? Will we live like children of righteousness and that stuff? Or will we do the acts of darkness like children of wrath? Well, verse 11, which we did not cover a couple weeks ago, Not only so, but we also joy in God through our Lord Jesus Christ, by whom we now have received the atonement. That's another benefit, a reason to have rejoicing. We've received the benefits of the atonement, His substitutionary death. But what Paul wants to say now is, let's talk about the substitutionary life. And that's the part where I think a lot of times people's theology ends with the death of Christ for our sins, when what Paul is interested in much more, frankly, for the believer, is the life of Christ for our life. That's a whole different thing. Because if rules don't work, And Paul says that, and he'll say more about it here in Romans. That is, rules have their place, and one thing rules do, like the law, is make us keenly aware where we have fallen short of God's standard. What rules don't do is bring in compliance. Now, I've run some stop signs in my life, and I've gotten a ton of tickets. I don't care about them other than they're expensive. I deserve most of them. Some of them I do not deserve. I've been pulled over and told I've got a quota, and right in my neighborhood, very embarrassing, I'm driving a 74 Beetle, but he had a quota and had to write me a ticket for running a stop sign, even though I hadn't run it. I'll tell you one thing that's never happened to me, because I have run some stop signs, the stop sign never jumped out in the middle of the street and made me stop. Rules don't make you stop. See? Rules are rules. They delineate the standard and they make you aware that you violated the standard, but they don't actually make you stop. That's just how it works. So we need more. None of us are going to learn a new set of rules and let good Pharisees become better. There has to be more so that I can now experience a life that doesn't look like it looked before I was a believer. And God's very clear that you need to do that. And if you don't, there's consequences. And we'll, in time, get to those consequences. Look at what Paul says, verse 12. Wherefore, that wherefore is looking back, as by one man sin entered into the world, and death by sin. And so death passed upon all men, for all have sinned." And if you look at verse 13, there's a parenthesis that starts there. And everyone sort of recognizes that verses 13 through 17 It's like Paul's talking in verse 12 and then 13 through 17 are sort of a parenthetical. And so your King James puts them in parentheses. Some translations will put a big dash to make clear that Paul kind of sidelines for a moment and then comes back in verse 18 to build on the thought of verse 12. And it can kind of throw you off. But the parentheses are there for a reason. But what he says in verse 12, wherefore as by one man, who he'll identify in a moment as Adam, Going back to Genesis, he's affirming the reality of what happened in Genesis 3, that it's not a myth or an allegory as most Christians believe. These things have been relegated primarily because of views about how old the world must be and different things. So people think, well, what happened in Genesis 3 is not really real, it's just some kind of myth. Paul thinks it's real, and if it's not real, then you frankly don't need Jesus dying on a cross, right? If Adam doesn't bring sin into the world, we don't need a Savior. It's just really that simple. So he says here, by one man, that's Adam, sin entered into the world. Now, this isn't just a sin. This is really the sin principle or the sin nature enters the world. And it brought with it death, its friend. Sin and death come together. What sin brought into the world was servitude to sin, which we experience in our lives. And our servitude to sin brings us death. Death means separation. It doesn't always mean physical termination of life. which doesn't are English language. But in the Bible, there's two things that happened back in Genesis 3. You know, Adam and Eve didn't die in Genesis 3. God said they would die. But if you mean physical death in the sense of no heartbeat, that didn't happen in Genesis 3. What happened in Genesis 3 is two things. One, their whole capacity changed, their whole thinking. They became aware of feelings they hadn't had before. Fear was the first one. Guilt shame. Adam says, you know, I was naked, I was fearful, I was ashamed, all these things. He hides from God. They've been separated from God. And that gets shown to us when they get expelled from the Garden of Eden and God leaves a couple of cherubim outside with flaming swords so they can't get back in. Death is separation. And our body now separates from our spirit prematurely. It was not designed for that. Our bodies were originally designed back in Genesis to be permanent. Now they separate from the Spirit. We call that death in the usual sense of it. And Paul will say to be absent from the body, just be present with the Lord. We're also separated from God. It's more than a physical separation, although that happened in Genesis 3. They were kicked out. But they feared God. That was new. So there is a separation from God. That death has plagued humanity ever since then. So he says, death passed upon all men, for that all have sinned. It's sort of a universal, timeless truth. Everyone sins. We have an inherited condition here, which is really death. There's not a person born today, and there hasn't been a person born ever, that wasn't scheduled to die, right? And there have been exceptions where people didn't die, but they would have. And those exceptions, you remember they are? Two of them. Elijah and Enoch, right? But had God let things take their course, those guys would have died. So, I mean, it's just a fact. So it's kind of readily apparent. That doesn't mean that everybody will in fact sin. We see people die in the womb. They haven't done anything yet. But that death condition and that propensity towards sin, so that we will, as we develop, actually engage in our own personal sin, is brought to us. He says, parenthetically then, for until the law, sin was in the world, that is in verse 13, what Paul is trying to go back, and he wants to relate what he's saying in verse 12 and what he'll continue with in verse 18, to the law of Moses. because people, especially a Jewish audience, would tie sin with a violation of the law. But he says, you know, there was sin before the law came into the world. So before the law of Moses, we already had sin problems. Where might I look to find that? Well, Genesis 3 for one, right? Eve was told not to eat of that tree. So was Adam. She did it anyway. Adam tried to hide it from God by hiding. Eve was deceived, the New Testament says. Adam went in eyes wide open. He made a decision. They reaped the crop of that decision. That was one of those victimless crimes. What happened in chapter 4 from that victimless crime? Cain killed Abel. You know, we're very high and mighty and quite arrogant when we think that a certain issue or a certain sin is a victimless thing. Things have a way of connecting that we don't see that God does. I wonder if they could have saw in that moment in Genesis 3 the pain they would have experienced in Genesis 4, because Satan didn't tell them about that part of the price tag, would they have made a different decision? And after that time, sin gets more and more rampant, so God floods the earth. Well, there's no law yet, so people are sinning pretty well without a law. But sin's not imputed, and that's a bad translation. That word is used twice in the New Testament, imputed. Imputed makes it sound like, this is why it's a bad translation for us. We think the way we do when it says that righteousness was imputed to Abraham back in Genesis 15, like it was just declared on him, It's used here and it's used in Philemon verse 18. It's the only places that it's used. And what it means is to itemize the charges. Philemon's a personal letter that goes to Philemon about a runaway slave named Onesimus. And it seems like, reading between the lines, Onesimus may have stolen some stuff. And certainly Onesimus legally owes his slave owner, a Christian, a debt. We don't have time to get into all of that. But Paul writes a letter that says to Philemon, who has a house, church, church meaning his home. He says, I'd like you to forgive your servant, who's now your brother in Christ. I'd like you to charge it all to my account. That's this word. You figure out how much he owes, put it on my ledger, and I'll pay it. And then he says, and I trust, even though I'm not commanding you to forgive him, I trust you will. And by the by, make lodgings available in your home, and I'll come visit. Which is a way of saying, I'm going to come check on you, make sure you do the right thing. I won't make you do it, but you're going to explain to me when I get there what you've done. So here, sin is not itemized, if you want to use maybe an idea of how to think of it, when there's no law. Why? You know, they engaged in sin, like Cain killing Abel. But now God, through, you know, in the time of Moses, He writes down over 600 commands and prohibitions, things like, Thou shalt not steal, Thou shalt not murder, Thou shalt not covet your neighbor's wife, and these things. Now, He's put it in black and white, so we can look at your conduct, and look at the list of laws, and say, yep, you violated that one, that one, that one, now I'm itemizing the charges. See, and that makes us more keenly aware of the sin. Sin is not itemized when there's not a law. Very simple. There's nothing on the books. I can't, I can't really, you know, we just had this general sense of writing wrong, which he talked about a little earlier in Romans, because he says even Gentiles who don't have a law have a conscience. and their conscience will excuse them or not excuse them when they do things. You can take people from any culture, and they don't have no Bible, they don't have any Old Testament, never had a missionary come, and they will have some things they think are right and wrong. And it's all marred. I'm not saying it all makes good sense or equates to the Bible, but there's this imprint upon us about right and wrong. But the law comes, and God spells out holiness in black and white in very simple ordinances, and we can itemize it. Nevertheless, that is, before the law was there, death reigned from Adam to Moses. So this whole period from Genesis 1 to Moses, 1400s, 1500s BC, death reigned. It's not just that people died. That's different. Death reigned. It's the tyranny of death. The word reign is a verb, right? But it is the verb form of the noun. Actually, I wrote it down. I can't believe I forgot it. But it's the noun that means a king. Basilius, yeah, Basilius. It's the verb basilo, which is essentially king in a sense, right? It's reigning as a king. It's a reign of tyranny. And what does it look like? Well, it looks like Genesis 4. It looks like all the stuff after that where people, I mean, the killing of one another is just sort of the climax of what we do. but all the other sin that goes along with it. So, it's a picture, through all this time, of the reign of death and the sin that brings death. And that's what Paul's saying here. So, death reigned from Adam to Moses, even when there wasn't the law of Moses yet, to tell you, don't drive over 55 miles an hour, or whatever else it's going to tell you, right? Even over them that had not sinned after the similitude of Adam's transgression. No one sinned after Adam's transgression, right? That is, Adam specifically did something you and I cannot repeat. We can do more. You put it in perspective. He ate a piece of fruit off a tree he was told not to eat off of. I mean, which of us, hopefully, hopefully you've all done this. Mama told you you couldn't have a certain sweet that was in there, not one more cookie, and you did it. The whole world fell into calamity because of that. We've done a lot worse. But we didn't do exactly Adam's sin, because we're not in the garden, and there's no tree of knowledge in front of us. So we can't repeat his transgression. But Paul's point is, sin reigns, death reigns, all that time, without a law, but not after the similitude of Adam's, not the same exact sin he did. Who is the figure that is, and that word, by the way, is the Greek word typos. We get the English word type. type. He's a type. Adam is a type of him that was to come, which is, of course, Jesus. Now, it's not because they're similar. He's merely a picture, and Paul will explain how he's a type. Adam engaged in conduct that brought the tyranny of death upon us. Jesus engages in conduct that will bring the righteousness of life upon us. And it's available to everybody, just like death came on everybody. So he explains now, but not as the offense. In other words, what Jesus does is not like the offense of Adam. His conduct was sinful conduct, contrary to the standard of God. So while Adam's a type for Jesus, not meaning that they're the same. He wants us to understand that. Not like the offense. So also is the free gift. It's a weird way of saying it, but what he's saying is, we can contrast the free gift Jesus got to us through what he did with the death sanction that we got from Adam. A declaration of death, read Genesis 3, I mean, God said, if you do it, you'll die. But an experience of death, as death reigned in tyranny for these many centuries, and he contrasts the two. Jesus brings us the free gift, there it is, free gift again. Just don't put a price tag on it. Don't put a price tag on it and you'll keep your theology straight about this. For if through the offense, the one of Adam, many be dead, many means everybody, it's an expression, if many be dead, much more the grace of God and the gift by grace, which is by one man, Jesus Christ, hath abounded unto many. He's very clearly stating that this gift Jesus has brought, which is a free gift, is available to 100% of people. Not that everyone will receive it, which he'll say in a moment. So, this isn't teaching universalism, but he is teaching that just as Adam's conduct abounded to the death of everyone, Jesus' conduct abounds to the life of everyone, who we'll say in a moment, who will receive that gift. Verse 16, not as it was by one that sinned. In other words, not like. This gift from Christ isn't like Adam's, but the gift is different. So is the gift. It's different. For the judgment was by one to condemnation. Now, let's be real clear on this. This is real important. The judgment brings condemnation. And in these words, and they're old words, but we may miss the point, this is a word in Greek, krina, and this word, katakrina. And they're very similar. This word means the penalty, right? I mean, the judge can look at you and say the jury has found you guilty. But then in the federal court, the judge has sentencing guidelines that says you're going to spend the next 50 years as a minimum sentence for whatever it is you did. And then you actually have to have the sentence and you're actually in the pokey for 50 years or some part of that. That's the penalty. The condemnation isn't you're a sinner. That's the judgment. The condemnation is you're in jail. You're actually experiencing it. So, when he says, the krina was by one, Adam, to the penalty. The verdict, the judgment, judgment is a good word there for krina, but it's the declaration, was by one to the penalty, the condemnation, but the free gift is of many offenses unto justification." Now, this justification is a very fluid word, and earlier it had the idea of God looking at us and declaring us righteous. Here, what we should read is not a declaration of righteousness, but here, and it's in verse 16, and again in verse 18. 16 and 18. Look at 18 for a second. See how it says, Adam. Judgment came upon all men, that's everybody, to condemnation, that's the penalty. Even so, by the righteousness of one, that word righteousness is the word justification in 16, and it shouldn't be translated different. It's righteousness in both places. It's not conceptually righteous, it's the actual righteousness of Christ, the One who lived a sinless life. And the power of His life is going to empower ours. So, reading verse 16, and we'll tie this up, because I know we're out of time. Verse 16, not as it was by the one that sinned, so he's again just wanting to make a clear contrast. He said that, you know, Adam was kind of a type for Jesus, but let's contrast what they did and what the result was. The gift's different than what Adam did. For what Adam, you know, Adam did was a judgment by one to condemnation, a penalty. But the free gift that Jesus provided is of many offenses, not just Adam's offense, everybody's offense, all of our sins. unto righteousness. We're being delivered unto righteousness. He doesn't mean just conceptually, but he wants, God's plan is that we will, as a part of this salvation, actually experience righteousness. Now, what we'll get to in chapter 6-8 is how do you do that? But we need to understand the Christian life is such that, you understand that death still reigns today? Death has reigned from Adam to Moses and continued to reign. We live in a world where death reigns. Watch the news and you'll see it. Death reigns in tyranny, and every politician has a solution, and the Bible has a solution. How do you live in a world where death reigns in tyranny? And yet Christ says, in that world you can reign in life. That's what he's getting to. So, for if by one man's offense death reigned by one, much more they which receive That's the key. Not everybody has this, but those who receive abundance of grace, you say, how bad can death be? Doesn't matter. Grace will always be superior to the reign of death. It's abundance of grace. In the Greek, it actually has the prefix, I think it's hyper or huper, but it's essentially like super grace. Super grace will overcome that sin and of the gift of righteousness, experiential righteousness, not just you've been declared it, experiential righteousness shall reign in life. It's those who receive the abundance of grace who will reign in life. And if you don't receive the abundance of grace because you won't have any part of it or because you prefer to be a rule keeper, you will not reign in Christ. So we'll stop here, but what he wants to get us to and what we'll look at next time, how do I reign in life? I'm going to have to have some super grace. We have to talk about that. It cannot be any other way.