What was Adam capable of in his created state in the garden? Dr. Sproul discusses the concept of realism versus federalism in Adam. The idea of "original sin" is investigated and defined.

Last Sunday, I bit off more than I could chew. I read the text and said that I did not know whether I would have the time to cover it, and I did not. So, I will back up a little bit tonight in Romans 5:8–17. There is no way that I am going to be able to cover this whole text today. We will do as much of it as we can. Let me ask the congregation to stand for the reading of the Word of God:

But God demonstrates His own love toward us, in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us. Much more then, having now been justified by His blood, we shall be saved from wrath through Him. For if when we were enemies we were reconciled to God through the death of His Son, much more, having been reconciled, we shall be saved by His life. And not only that, but we also rejoice in God through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom we have now received the reconciliation.

Therefore, just as through one man sin entered the world, and death through sin, and thus death spread to all men, because all sinned— (For until the law sin was in the world, but sin is not imputed when there is no law. Nevertheless death reigned from Adam to Moses, even over those who had not sinned according to the likeness of the transgression of Adam, who is a type of Him who was to come. . . .)

Thinking further on my task for tonight, I know I am not going to get any further than that. I will cease and desist at Romans 5:14 rather than create an unrealizable expectation that I would get through to verse 17. Please be seated. Let us pray.

Again, our Father, we look to You as those who once were helpless and hopeless, being under the burden of original sin by which we were born in that sin, conceived in that sin, enslaved by that sin, and under the power of that sin. By nature, we are children of wrath; by nature we are at enmity with You. But in our justification, we have the fruits that have accrued from it and the joy that we experience in the reconciliation provided for us by Christ. For we ask these things in His name. Amen.

God’s Holy Estrangement

Last week, we made it through verse 9, where we talked about the justification we enjoy as a result of Christ dying for us while we were yet sinners. We talked about how God had purposed this redemption for His people from the foundation of the world. We will pick up at verse 10, where we read: “For if when we were enemies we were reconciled to God through the death of His Son, much more, having been reconciled, we shall be saved by His life.”

In this text, we have a comparison that is not one of equality. It does not say, “On the one hand it was like this, and on the other hand it was like that.” Rather, Paul says, “On the one hand, we have been reconciled through the death of Christ; much more, then, have we been reconciled through His life.” The theme of this verse has to do with reconciliation. I mentioned earlier in our study of Romans that the one absolutely essential, necessary condition for reconciliation between parties to take place is estrangement because without estrangement, there is no need for reconciliation. Yet this is one of the central motifs of the entire New Testament: in Christ, we have been reconciled to God.

At a recent conference, Sinclair Ferguson talked about human beings’ natural enmity toward God and how there is an almost universal repudiation of that enmity. I mentioned to him in private, “I can’t think of anything that provokes more anger from unbelievers than when we say to them that they hate God.” They deny it emphatically. They say: “I don’t hate God. I’m indifferent toward God.” But if you are indifferent to the Lord God Almighty, who has created you and is the author of every blessing you have received, what is that except hatred?

We do not sense or feel the weight of the burden of our natural hostility towards God. The New Testament speaks about reconciliation because reconciliation to God is so greatly and earnestly needed since we are estranged from Him. But the thing that is even more difficult to get across, as we have labored already in this study of Romans, is that we are not only at enmity with God in this estrangement, but God is at enmity with us. God is the natural enemy of corrupt sinners.

Yes indeed, as we have explored in the past, there is a love, a benevolence, a beneficence that God displays to creatures indiscriminately. Yet, at the same time, Scripture is replete with descriptive terms that tell us how God’s face is set steadfastly against the wicked. He is too holy as to even look at us, so great is that gulf of estrangement between God and us.

But there is a big difference in the driving force of the estranged parties. What drives our opposition towards God, which we have innately, is evil. Our estrangement is based in a wicked opposition against God. His estrangement from us is founded in a holy opposition to sin. Let us understand that difference and not project onto God’s character the same unjust grounds for enmity that we are guilty of ourselves. It is not right for the creature to be estranged from the Creator, but once the creature is sinful, it is right and proper for the Creator to be estranged from the sinner. God is holy, and we are not. But what Paul is declaring in this text is the glorious work of redemption in which God takes the initiative for our reconciliation.

Reconciliation in Christ’s Life and Death

Verse 10: “For if when we were enemies we were reconciled to God through the death of His Son, much more, having been reconciled, we shall be saved by His life.” There are a couple of things that we need to pick up on in this text. At the cross, by the satisfaction of the atonement rendered by Christ to the Father by His work of propitiation, Jesus reconciles the Father to the Father’s people.

On Good Friday, Christ paid for my sin and for your sin, if indeed you are in Christ. When Christ made His atonement for His people, when He made the perfect sacrifice, when He satisfied God’s wrath completely for those for whom Christ died, that was the end of the estrangement on God’s part. We were reconciled in the sense that God, who is the injured party in all of this, was assuaged. He was satisfied and no longer in opposition to His people. Yet what Paul is saying is that God was reconciled toward us while we were still estranged from Him.

In this drama of reconciliation, Christ satisfies the righteousness and the holiness of His Father. He satisfies God’s opposition toward us while we are still opposed to Him. The day God was satisfied and no longer in opposition to His people, that did not automatically change us. We did not experience that reconciliation until the removal of our opposition and hostility toward Him when we were regenerated by the Holy Spirit. Our hardened hearts were broken, and we were brought joyfully into a loving relationship with the Father through the Son. It is one thing to experience the reconciliation through the death of Christ, but how much greater is the reconciliation that occurs through the life of Christ.

We can look at that in two ways. I have said often that our justification is not secured simply by the death of Christ but also acutely through the life of Christ because of His life of perfect obedience to the law, by which His righteousness was merited and is now given to those of us who have no righteousness of our own. We can say it is the life of Christ even more than the death of Christ that is the ground of our justification. That may be true, but I am not sure that is what Paul has in mind here when he talks about how much more are we reconciled through the life of Christ. Remember, he has already introduced the idea that we are justified not only by the death of Christ but also that Christ was raised for our justification.

We are reconciled because we have a Mediator who not only died for us but has been raised from the dead for us, who continues to make intercession. He is our Peacemaker. He is our peace. He lives forever continuing in that role representing us before the Father. As wonderful as His once-for-all death was on the cross, how much greater is the reconciliation that we realize and experience because He lives and ever intercedes for us.

The Joy of Reconciliation

There is one more point I want to cover here before we go into the next section, where Paul compares and contrasts the work of Christ as the new Adam and the work of the old Adam. Let us explore the meaning of the term “reconciliation” in this text a little more.

When we started this study of Romans, we talked about the revelation of the wrath of God, beginning in Romans 1:18. God has revealed Himself plainly to all people and the universal response of fallen humanity to the brilliant, manifest revelation of God Himself in nature is to refuse to honor Him as God. We were not grateful.

Later in the indictment, when Paul brings the whole world before God in that tribunal, he mentions that the substance of our universal guilt and corruption before God is this: our proclivity for idolatry, the sin of exchanging the truth of God for the lie, the sin of serving and worshiping the creature rather than the Creator.

You may remember that when I talked about that, I made mention of the word used there by the Apostle Paul, metallassō. That word indicates an exchange, a trade, or a swap where we trade the glory of the eternal, immortal, everlasting God for the glory of contemptible things, creeping things, bugs, snakes, and idols of other sorts. There was a metallassō, an exchange that took place. That word has that prefix meta, which means “with.” If you trade something for something or other, you carry it with you and trade it for something else. The same root word is the root for reconciliation. It is not metallassō, but katallassō is the verb, and then the noun form is katallagē.

That is the word Paul uses here when he says: “For if when we were enemies we were reconciled to God through the death of His Son, much more, having been reconciled”—again, the form of katallassō—“we shall be saved by His life. And not only that, but we also rejoice in God through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom now we have received the reconciliation”—the katallagē. As if it were a concrete noun, the reconciliation of which Paul speaks is a substantive reality. It is a gift that God has given to His people because of the death and resurrection of Christ.

What is the result? Unspeakable joy. Do you understand that the Christian life is to be, from beginning to end, a life of joy? We have much to be happy about. There is no room for the sourpuss in the kingdom of God. There is nothing dour about our redemption.

If I am the most miserable of people on the planet, suffering to the degree that no one else has ever been called to suffer—a modern day Job sitting on the dung heap—I would have no right to say anything different than when he declared, “Though He slay me, yet will I trust Him” (Job 13:15). There is no affliction so dire, no sorrow so deep, no pain so intense that is worthy to be compared to the glory of that katallagē, of that reconciliation we have received in the Beloved.

When we contemplate our state of affairs in this world, as long as we keep our eyes on this plane and see our bank account slipping away, our homes destroyed, our jobs lost, and our bodies torn by disease, we have every reason to complain, whine, and weep. But if we lift our eyes to the cross and the resurrection, we see that the Lord God omnipotent, who is too holy to even look at us in our sinfulness, now not only looks at us but embraces us and adopts us as His children because He has been reconciled to us.

Paul gives another benefit that flows from our justification: “And not only that, but we also rejoice in God through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom we now have received the reconciliation.” This is just an expansion of what he says at the very beginning of this chapter: Being justified, therefore, we have peace with God and access into His presence, and we can now glory in tribulation because it works perseverance, and perseverance, character, and character, hope, which is never ashamed. He is still talking about this same motif.

Sinned in Adam

Paul changes things up in verses 12–14, where he introduces a most difficult concept:

Therefore, just as through one man sin entered the world, and death through sin, and thus death spread to all men, because all sinned— (For until the law sin was in the world, but sin is not imputed when there is no law. Nevertheless death reigned from Adam to Moses, even over those who had not sinned according to the likeness of the transgression of Adam, who is a type of Him who was to come. . . .)

There is so much in that text I just read to you that it keeps the theologians busy studying and arguing. This is one of the most important texts in the Bible to talk about the fall of the entire human race through Adam. Let me briefly talk about the way in which the argument goes.

One man brought sin: Adam. With that sin came death, and death came on the whole human race because all have sinned, but not up to the similitude of Adam’s sin. What is Paul getting at when he says that everyone dies after Adam? Even babies are born and live a few hours, and they die, and death is the penalty for sin. Without sin there can be no death, and without the law there can be no sin.

Paul says, “Death reigned from Adam to Moses.” Death was in the world before God gave His law through Moses. Since Adam’s fall, all creatures have died because all sinned there, and they sinned before the law of Moses. But remember, Paul is saying that there can be no sin, no transgression unless there is law, because the definition of sin is a transgression of the law of God. If there is no law, there is no foul. But if there is a law, then the penalty is incurred when we break the law.

Since the penalty for sin is death, and since death reigned from Adam to Moses, there is a sense in which everyone in the world broke the law somehow in Adam. That is the point of Romans 5 here: Through one man, sin and death came into the whole world, and somehow, we are related to Adam.

This is the theological question that students struggle with all the time. They say: “How can God blame me for sinning? How can He hold me culpable for my transgressions when all I’m doing is what comes naturally? I was born in sin. In sin did my mother conceive me. When I sin, I’m just acting according to the nature I was born with. How can God hold me responsible for acting out a nature He gave me before I was even born?” We answer, “You sinned in Adam.” The student might say: “Sinned in Adam? I wasn’t there. How can God hold people responsible for what Adam did when they weren’t even there in the garden?”

That is the problem, is it not? There are several answers to this question theologically that have been given in the church through the ages. I will just mention two or three and go over them quickly.

The Doctrine of Realism

One of the common explanations for all of us sinning in Adam is the doctrine called realism. Realism operates on the premise that the only way God could justly and morally condemn us for what Adam did is if we were really there participating in the act, so we were really there in terms of our preexistent souls before we were actually born with bodies. Our souls existed with Adam, and together with Adam this was a joint effort, so that when he sinned, we sinned because we really were there.

The favorite text used to defend this kind of realism is the text in Hebrews where the author of Hebrews compares and contrasts Jesus with the people of the past—Moses, angels, and others along the way—and talks about the superiority of Christ’s high priesthood.

One of the complaints waged against the Christian confession of faith in Jesus in the first century was that the church confessed that Jesus was King, He was from the tribe of Judah, He was a descendant of David, and He was the King that was long awaited. But not only was Jesus King, but He was proclaimed as the Great High Priest, who made a perfect sacrifice on our behalf once and for all. The critics of Jesus say: “Jesus can’t be our High Priest because one of the necessary qualifications to be a high priest is be from the tribe of Levi. It was to Aaron and his family, the Levites, that the priesthood was given. Jesus was from the tribe of Judah. He can be King, but He can’t be High Priest, because only Levites can be priests.”

The author of Hebrews responds to that charge and reminds his readers of an episode recorded in the book of Genesis where the mysterious figure Melchizedek met Abraham. Abraham paid tithes to Melchizedek and received a blessing from Melchizedek. The author of Hebrews labors the point that the greater receives tithes from the lesser, and the greater then blesses the lesser.

The point the author of Hebrews makes is that the priesthood exercised by Melchizedek is a higher order of priesthood than the one found in Aaron and his descendents among the Levites. Therefore, though Jesus was not a Levite, His priesthood was of a higher order, because as the Scriptures say going back to Psalm 110, Christ is a priest after the order of Melchizedek.

What does that have to do with how we are related to Adam in the fall? Here is the answer: Those who argue for realism, who say that we were really there in preexistent souls in the garden, argue from this text in Hebrews that sets forth Christ as having a superior priesthood because in the argument, the author of Hebrews says Abraham pays tithes to Melchizedek. It shows that Abraham is subordinate to Melchizedek. Abraham is the father of Isaac, and the father is greater than the son. So, if Isaac is Abraham’s son, then Abraham is greater than Isaac. If Melchizedek is greater than Abraham, and Abraham is greater than Isaac, QED, Melchizedek is greater than Isaac. But then the plot thickens. Isaac has a son whose name is Jacob. Isaac is greater than Jacob. Abraham is greater than Isaac. Melchizedek is greater than Abraham. Therefore, Melchizedek is greater than Jacob. Then Jacob has sons, among whom is Levi. Jacob is greater than Levi. Isaac is greater than Jacob and therefore greater than Levi. Abraham is greater than Isaac, who is greater than Jacob, who is greater than Levi. Now we put it all together: Melchizedek is greater than Abraham, who is greater than Isaac, who is greater than Jacob, who is greater than Levi.

So, who is greater, Levi or Melchizedek? The author of Hebrews says that Levi, while he was still in the loins of Abraham, paid tithes to Melchizedek (Heb. 7:9–10). Some people jump on that passage and say, “In that moment when Abraham pays tithes to Melchizedek, Levi was there. He was there in the loins of his father. He preexisted his own birth, and he was there.” But that is really squeezing something out of the text that is not there. That is the supposed biblical basis for realism. The moral basis of it is because those who argue the case want to make sure that there are just grounds for God to visit the iniquity of Adam upon His progeny.

Adam the Federal Representative

Classic Reformed theology holds to what us called federalism, as distinguished from realism. Federalism says that Adam was the federal head of the entire universe and of the entire human race. The very name Adam means mankind. What Adam did in the garden was not to act simply for himself but for all of those whom he represented. God appointed him in his probation in Eden to act for himself and all his progeny.

People do not like that. They say, “No damnation without representation.” But indeed, there was representation, which is the whole point. But people squirm under this idea of federalism. They say, “I didn’t choose my representative.” Let us look at that for a minute.

In our legal system in America, if I hire somebody from Murder Incorporated to kill someone, and I establish an alibi for myself—at the time of the crime I am in another city, witnessed by all kinds of people—and my hired gunman kills my appointed victim, can I be charged with first degree murder? Yes, I can. My hired killer was carrying out my will, and I am held accountable for the conspiracy to commit murder. We see the clear justice of that.

In a similar fashion, Adam represents us in the garden. But people say: “Wait a minute. The analogy breaks down when you say that in the case of the conspiracy to commit murder, I personally, willfully hire somebody else to commit that heinous act of murder. I had nothing to do with selecting Adam as my representative.”

In a jocular fashion, I said that we as Americans complain, “No damnation without representation.” We go back to the American Revolution and the tax on tea. Do you not wish the only tax we had to pay today was one on tea? Go back to that environment where Parliament changed the rules of the game and imposed taxes on the colonists without giving them representation in Parliament. The colonists protested because it was a violation of British law. The colonists were not just rebelling against the crown, they were calling the crown to obey the law.

Can you imagine if King George had listened to the protests of the colonists who were saying, “No taxation without representation,” and he said: “You don’t feel like you’re adequately represented? I’ll tell you what I’ll do. I’ll give you a representative. It’s going to be my brother”? If he appointed his brother to represent us, we would be upset. We would say, “That’s no good.” We would have no confidence that our interests would be represented by a representative chosen for us by someone else. That is why we want to be able to elect our own representatives who govern over us.

In America, we go through the elective process. We listen to the candidates. We listen to their positions on the issues. We hear their campaign promises. We are persuaded that candidate X will be the one who will most accurately represent us if elected. We cast our vote for that candidate, and then we are annoyed when, once the candidate is elected, he does not do anything he said he was going to do. Regardless, we elect representatives.

You can see the complaint here. It is built into our American democratic heritage. How could it be just for God to appoint one man to represent all kinds of people when the people do not even have a voice in that election?

God Selects Infallibly

There is a big difference between King George, your congressman or your senator, and God. When God selects your representative, He makes that selection infallibly. He makes that selection impeccably. Nowhere in time and space have you ever been more perfectly represented than you were in the garden of Eden by the representative that God selected to act in your place.

If that be true, we can never curse God and say, “It’s not fair, because if I had been there, I would have done something different.” When we complain about being misrepresented by Adam, all we do is prove the perfection of that representation as we manifest our fallen nature, our Adamic nature when we complain against God in this way.

For the Christian who does not like that and objects to having a representative in the fall, saying that it is never appropriate for God to accept the representation of one person for another, if you want to hold to that principle consistently, then you must not only reject any identification between you and Adam, but you would have to reject equally any representation of you by Christ. The principle of representation is at the very heart and soul of our salvation. So be careful if you reject that principle or that idea in principle, because if you do, you have rejected your only hope of salvation.

One last point about this is that there is perhaps a deeper combination of realism and federalism expressed in the profound thinking of the Puritan divine Jonathan Edwards, who manifested his identity theory. You would need some idea of Platonic philosophy to really grab this, but the idea in simple terms is that in the garden you were present, not because your soul was there, but because your soul was in the mind of God, and what is present to the mind of God is present in reality. For Edwards, you were present not because your soul or body was there, but because in the mind of God you were perfectly present there in Adam.

The Universality of Sin

Let me say one last thing about it. I keep saying “one last thing” and giving you another thing. In Edwards’ great treatise on original sin, where he gave his monumental study of the biblical texts for the fall and original sin, he also gave an argument from reason. He essentially said: “If the Bible never taught a universal plunge into ruin of the human race at the beginning in Adam, if there was no such word of the fall in the Scripture, reason would require that we posit such an event. How else could we explain the universality of sin in the human race?”

Our culture is schizophrenic on this point. On the one hand, they do not want to acknowledge the reality of sin at all, only mistakes, and they want to say the origin of sin is environment. In other words, the reason people go bad and become corrupt is because they are reared in a culture or society that is flawed, fallen, and corrupt, going back to the noble savage idea of Jean Jacques Rousseau, who thought that man was born free and now is everywhere in chains. The idea is that we are all born neutral. We are all born innocent. But the reason we all sin is because we are overwhelmed by the corrupting influences all around us. So, we all, sooner or later, fall into sin.

Edwards said that if that were the case—if we were all born innocent and neutral—then you would expect that at least 50 percent of the population to stay in that state of innocence. Therefore, you have to look beyond the external influence of fallen society and cultural inducements to sin to explain the universality of it.

The question that goes begging is this: If we were all born innocent, how did society ever get so corrupt in the first place? Society is people. But it is not like 5 percent of the people are evil and they seduce the other 95 percent. No, the reason it is 100 percent is because we are born in a fallen state. In Adam come sin, death, and destruction into the whole world.

This is Paul’s premise when he turns our attention away from Adam and the destruction he brings to the world to the new Adam, the new representative who does not succumb to the enticements of the serpent but lives a life of perfect obedience. He lives that life not just for His own sake but for the sake of His people, whom He came to represent, to reconcile, and to save. God willing, we will explore more of this portion of the epistle next time. Let us pray.

Father, we thank You for the reconciliation that was effected on our behalf by Christ, who satisfied Your justice, satisfied Your righteousness, and not only that, but who stood in the gap for the radical effects of sin and death that has been the lot of the whole world, and has accomplished and achieved everything that Adam failed to accomplish and achieve. So, we look to Him, O God, the new Adam, who has represented us perfectly to You and given us the joy of our salvation. Amen.

This transcript has been lightly edited for readability.