Lent 24 post 15

 Romans 5.12-21

We go back full circle to where we began our week, with Ecclesiastes lamenting the crippling, life-blighting enigma of death. It’s all very well, you see, for Dylan Thomas to write his moving poem (much-loved at funerals) ‘And death shall have no dominion (borrowing the words from the Apostle Paul, of course, who was referring to Jesus, Romans 6.9). For the fact is, it does. Death reigns. Genesis 3 proves its truth for approximately two people every second on this planet.

Sin entered, death reigns

And that’s where Paul starts in our passage today, in the Garden of Eden. And with the ‘one man' through whom sin entered the world, bringing death to all because all sinned. Now Paul starts in verse 12 with ‘Just as', but never quite finishes his sentence. He'll do that when he gets to verses 18-21. But his immediate point is that because sin is the universal state of humankind, death is our universal destiny, at whatever point in history you may have lived. Now, by ‘death’, Paul (and God in Genesis 3) means more than merely physical death. It is the spiritual death of expulsion from God’s presence, ‘dead in sins', condemned. It is in that sense that Paul repeats himself, ‘death reigned' (.14, 17), ‘sin reigned in death' (.21).

Kingdom language 

That’s kingdom language, isn’t it? Paul portrays sin and death as twin tyrants, and doubtless he would include Satan as well, over a kingdom that enslaved humanity. But what was it Jesus said? ‘If I by the finger of God cast out demons, then the kingdom of God has come upon you.’ And, for Paul, that is the kingdom of grace, God’s grace (.21). And so, as we have seen all week, the battle is joined, two kingdoms in mortal combat, one, the reign inaugurated by the ‘one man' whose disobedience brought sin and death, the other, the victorious reign of the ‘One’ whose obedience brings righteousness and eternal life. 

And where was this victory won?

Our whole week has focused on the death of death through the death of Christ, so you must know the answer! But you might wonder why Paul does not mention the cross in our passage. Well, of course, it is prominent in 5.6-11 and again in chapter 6. But Paul clearly has the cross in mind in the last part of verse 19, ‘So also through the obedience of the one man the many will be made righteous.’ Paul is echoing Isaiah 53.11, where the Servant of the Lord, in obedience to the will of his God, would by his vicarious death ‘justify many'. Likewise, Jesus, as the Servant, became ‘obedient to death, even death on a cross!’ (Philippians 2.7-8). Christ’s obedience here, then, means his willing acceptance of his Father’s will, even though the agonizing struggle of Gethsemane. Where Adam rebelled and disobeyed, Jesus the Son and Servant submitted and obeyed.

And where is this reign to be lived out?

Verse 17 is astonishing. We would expect the opposite to the reign of death in the first half of the verse to be that Christ would reign, and of course that is true. But Paul says that those who have received God’s gifts of grace and righteousness, we believers, are the ones who will ‘reign in life through. . . Jesus Christ'.