Seeing the Whole Story (Romans Week 12) by Michael Williams

This message zooms out to tell the big story of humanity—showing how sin entered the world through Adam, shaping every part of our broken reality, and why our efforts or progress can’t fix it. But against that backdrop, it reveals the overwhelming good news of Jesus, whose obedience, grace, and gift of life are far greater than the problem of sin.

Romans 5:12-21

Transcript

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I actually want to begin by talking about somebody a few of you might be familiar with, probably not, but in the 1960s there was a sociologist named Margaret Mead. And Margaret Mead was really famous at the time and was a sort of a big name. And she wrote about something that I was reading about this week, and it kind of fit in with what we're talking about today, but just a fascinating stuff about culture and commitment. And she's really writing about generation gaps. And she writes about this idea, she called it prefigurative and postfigurative cultures. And a postfigurative culture is a culture in which the elders teach the youth. And throughout human history, this has defined most cultures. And it kind of makes sense if you think about it. The elders would say things like, We've lived life, we've been where you're going, but you have not. So listen to us. Some of you, as parents, have probably used those lines. You had no idea you're pulling out the post-figurative culture narrative, like, this is how it should be. But in the 1960s, people like Margaret Mead and others began to write about how culture was changing, and for the first time it was becoming a pre-figurative culture, which is where the youth actually teach the elders. And the reason for this was the advancement of technology. As technology exploded, the narratives started to change. Parents would say things like, I've lived life and you haven't. And kids would reply back, the world you grew up in isn't the world anymore. And what's fascinating is if you read Margaret Mead now, she wrote with incredible optimism. She actually encouraged older people, like, just accept this change from postfigurative to pre-figurative. Elders, just listen and let the youth lead us. There was all this optimism that technology would overcome all of our divides. Clearly, in the 1960s, they were not anticipating social media, right? They were thinking technology was going to heal the world. Around the time of the millennium, 2000, there was a number of writers that wrote in a similar vein. They wrote with this optimism. The 20th century, if you're not familiar, is one of the deadliest centuries in human history, if not the deadliest, but there was all this optimism that the 21st century was going to be different. I think most of us, a quarter of the way through the 21st century now, would say it might not be different in quite such an optimistic way. And I also want to say, just this as an aside, nothing to do with the message, but as somebody that used to be a young adult pastor, what I found is that young adults actually crave adult guidance that's non-coercive. That they actually look for and love when somebody comes into their life and helps them and leads them. Because the truth of the matter is, is these narratives, this optimism, it didn't pan out. It seems like no matter what the technology is, no matter what we put our hope in, whether every generation comes along and thinks for us it's going to be different, it's like humanity keeps getting dragged back down into this old, old story. I looked at it, I saw a photo this week. I think I actually have a picture of here. I saw this in an article this week. It fascinated me, but it was a picture of people going to the moon and back, and then a picture of our uh like uh unreached people. And I know it's not the best visual for people sitting far from the TVs, but you can kind of see it. We have the photo of people going around the moon, and then on the right, there are people in the Amazon. And the the subtitle was, Isn't it crazy that at this moment both societies exist? But what actually caught my attention about this article, despite the cool opposites of the picture, was this this question that the author had in the article, and he he asked this, what if there's a third photo and somebody's looking at us, like we look at this photo? And it kind of blew my mind a little bit and it made me think about perspective. What if there's a different way of looking at the story? We we zoom in on where we are, and we zoom in on where we think other people are, but but what if we zoom out and we look at the human story and we we see over and over that that we're living in the same story we've always been in. That for all of our progress and all of our technology, things fundamentally haven't changed that much. This morning in Romans, Paul is, he's gonna take us in Romans, but back to Genesis, and he's he's gonna try to tell this big story of human history. And the reason he's telling the big story is he's he's trying to get us to see something. He's trying to get us to see the world in a different way. And so that's where we're gonna be this morning. Let's pray, and then we'll get right into the text. Lord, I thank you that you tell the story, that you are zoomed all the way out, that you see all of human history, that you see the narratives we craft, the optimism or the cynicism we hold. But nonetheless, you are in control. You are above it all. And you tell us the true story of who we are and where we are going. We ask that you would speak to us this morning. Reveal your word to us. It's in the name of Jesus we pray. Amen. Amen. So we're gonna be in Romans 5, and we're gonna be in verse 12. But before we get there, Romans 5, verse 12, it starts with a therefore. And anytime you come to a therefore in your Bible, you should read the few verses uh before it, so you know what it's there for. Um and so we're gonna read the few verses before, verse 12, and this will be review. We talked about this a couple weeks ago. I'm just gonna pick up in verse 8. But God proves his love for us that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us. Much more surely, then, now that we've been justified by his blood, will we be saved through him from the wrath of God? For if while we were enemies we were reconciled to God through the death of his son, how much more surely, having been reconciled, will we be saved by his life? But more than that, we even boast in God through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom we have now received reconciliation. Therefore. And so if you remember a couple weeks ago, we were looking at this passage in Romans 5, it begins this turn where he starts to talk about the love of God. And we ask the question, how do we know that God loves us? And it's right here, it says that God demonstrates his love. In verse 5, he talks about we can experience the love of God, but but God also demonstrates his love. It's not just a feeling, it's a fact. It's something that's happened. Love is proven by actions. God demonstrates his love, and how does he do it? He demonstrates his love by dying on our behalf. And he dies on our behalf while we are still sinners, Paul says. He does it before we're good people. He does it before we're friends with God. He does it when we are not in church, when we're not raising our hands in worship, when we're not giving or serving, while we were far from God, while we were enemies with God, he died on our behalf and he proved his love. How can I know that God loves me in a world with cancer, in a world with pain and premature death, in a world with loss, in a world with depression, when things don't go my way, how can I know that God loves me? I can know because of what God has done. God has proven his love, he's demonstrated it, says that he's justified and reconciled us. To be justified means to be proven right, to be made right, declared righteous. To be reconciled means to be put back together. Paul is talking about the work of Christ, but but to understand that work, we have to go way back and see what went wrong. God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, made man and woman in his image. It says that he crafted them. All the other creatures, he spoke and they existed, but with us, he got his hands dirty. He crafted us. He looked at us face to face and he breathed into us the breath of life. You and I, we, whether you believe it or not, you are made for relationship with Almighty God. The reason why you can't sleep at night, the reason why even on your best day you want more, the reason why we have these longings for significance, these aches in our heart, the reason why beauty just captures us at certain moments in life and we feel like there's more is because you were made for more. But this relationship with God, it was broken through human sin. And when it was broken, we got separated from God. There was a distance between us and God, and so the work of Jesus is to bring it all back together, to restore us to God, to restore us to each other, to restore us to creation itself. And this is the work of love. See, if you just read Romans 1 through 4, you might think that the scene of salvation is just all in the courtroom. But Romans 5, it shows that salvation's, yes, got legal aspects to it, but it's not a formula. It's not like God had a 10-year plan for salvation or a 10,000-year plan for salvation, and it's this formula that's carefully worked out. It's a work of love, according to Paul. And so that's what we have in mind. That all of this salvation comes from this love of God that's been demonstrated, therefore. Now that we've seen that God loves us, what does it mean therefore? And now Paul's gonna go in a kind of different direction. He's gonna zoom out about as far as you can go. He's gonna take this big picture of history, and he's gonna use a technique. Paul's an artist, and his skill is with words, and he's gonna use this technique to help us see the gospel story differently. And what he's gonna use is he's gonna use this technique called contrasts. He's gonna be contrasting things, and the purpose of contrast is to help us see clearly. And so he's gonna show us a number of contrasts, and and like I said, it's a it's a bit dense, so I'm gonna do my best to break it down so we can see what I think Paul wants us to see in Romans 5. So this is what he says. He says, in verses 12, Romans 5, he says this therefore, just the sin came into the world through one man, and death came through sin, and so death spread to all because all have sinned. Then there's a dash. Now, if you're not familiar with the text, you might think what follows next doesn't really seem to flow. And that's because he's not gonna pick up what he says next until verse 18. And so verse 12, then there's like a suspension where he's gonna have like a parenthetical conversation where he tries not to be misunderstood, and then verse 18. But for clarity, we're just gonna read them all together. So he says in verse 12, therefore, just as sin came into the world through one man and death came through sin, so death spread to all, because all have sinned, and then he picks it up in 18. In verse 18, he says, Therefore, just as one man's trespasses led to the condemnation of all, so one man's act of righteousness leads to the justification and life for all. For just as by one man's disobedience the many were made sinners, so by one man's obedience the many were made righteous. And so he's, in verse 12 and 13, he's given us this first contract. And if you're following along in the notes, the first the first piece we see, he wants us to see the source of the problem. He wants us to see the source of the problem. He's gonna be contrasting in this passage Jesus and Adam, the two sort of figurative heads of humanity, and he's gonna be contrasting them, and and the first thing he wants us to see is the source of the problem. And if you read in verse 5, he says, Therefore, just as sin came into the world. Some translations say, sin entered the world. Therefore, all this talk about the love of God, therefore, sin has entered the world. And this contrast is going to be crucial to understanding the gospel, to understanding the love of God. Sin entered. Now, when we hear that word sin, most of us we think of bad things. We're kind of a religious crowd, and so we have some categories for sin, and sin is the wrong things that I do. Sin is the mistakes, the oops, the times were defiant, and we, as a culture, don't have much of a category for sin anymore. Like I said, it's kind of a religious word, and if we use it at all, we would say things like, What's a sin to you is not a sin to me. We've completely relativized the term. But for Paul, he's gonna look at sin completely different. In fact, in the next couple chapters of Romans, Paul's gonna talk about sin entering, sin seizing opportunities, sin reigning, sin deceiving, sin killing. He's gonna personify sin as this reigning authority or power. He's gonna talk about it not just as like the mistake I made on Tuesday when I didn't turn my blinkers on and almost got in that accident. He's not gonna talk about like the lie you told your parents to get out of something over Easter weekend. He's talking about something different, something that seizes us. See, when we think of sin, we usually think of what we might call the fruits of sin. But we rarely track it back to like the roots of sin. We think the fruit is I I told that lie. But if we're honest, if we examine it, we could start to trace that fruit back down the tree. We could say, well, I I told that lie at work because I really wanted that person to think of me a certain way. See, there's something inside of me when we start talking about sin that's wrong. We might think of like, why did we laugh at that racist joke at work? And we trace the roots and we start to get to like, well, I really want those people in the cubicle to like me. Which is kind of funny because they're not that important in my life, but I really want them to like me. And as we trace the roots, we we again and again see that the fruits of sin trace back to the human heart. That if we follow them back, they they come back to what's inside of us. That human beings, we have this unique capacity to sin. It's as some writers call it, it's like we have a factory in our heart, and we just produce sin. Like no matter what we do, we're just insecure, we're angry, we're bitter, we're jealous. It flows back to the human heart. John Piper has a kind of famous definition of sin. I want to read it to you. He says, What is sin? It is the glory of God, not honored, the holiness of God, not reverenced, the greatness of God, not admired, the power of God, not praised, the truth of God not sought, the wisdom of God, not esteemed, the beauty of God, not treasured, the goodness of God, not savored, the faithfulness of God, not trusted, the commandments of God, not obeyed, the justice of God, not respected, the wrath of God, not feared, the grace of God, not cherished, the presence of God, not prized, the person of God, not loved. That is sin. And sin, it enters the story and it's in the human heart, but but Paul he he zooms out even further, and now he's he's asking the question, how did it get there? How did it get in you, in me? How did we find ourselves in this condition? And and the way he explains the story is he begins to talk about how sin entered through this man named Adam. And if you're familiar with the Bible, you know that Adam is actually the first character, the first human in the story. You can find him in the book of Genesis. And he begins to allude to this mistake, sin, disobedience that this guy named Adam committed. And we can read about it in Genesis. We're not going to go there today because of time, but but essentially, if I were to summarize the story, there's Adam and there's Eve, and they're in the garden, and they've been told to not eat from this tree. That the temptation for them is that if they eat, they'll know good and evil and they'll become like God. And there's an adversary in the garden that tempts them, the devil tempts them to become like God, and they choose to sin, they choose to disobey. Adam and Eve, they they make the wrong choice. They do not trust God. And if you were to follow Paul's progression in verse 12, it's it's sin entered through this one act, and death followed. Death went to everybody, and all have sinned. And the point Paul is making is that in this moment, sin entered the human story. We were made. We were made for intimacy with God. We were made for this face-to-face relationship. We were made for God to be the center of our lives. And we have decentered him. One author says that the root of sin we read in Genesis is the degoding of God. The degoding of God. And I realize that poor Miguel is trying to translate this into Spanish. And so maybe another phrase we can say is the dethroning of God. But the degoding of God is we take the place of God. We take the center place. We take the throne. We want to supplant and be like God. Now God knew what good and evil were, but God knew about good and evil without becoming evil. Where we chose to learn about good and evil by becoming evil ourselves. We took the place of God. We degoded God. We took the center. And we've been in conflict. Death came in ever since. How? Well, if I'm the center, and you, Yabozo, think you're the center, we're gonna have conflict, right? We're gonna have fences and fights. We're gonna introduce war, rape, anger, maliciousness, jealousy, anger. Through one man. We all have sinned. Some of us, especially in an individualistic culture, we we struggle with this idea, and different scholars of the Bible have talked about like the mechanics of this. How is it fair that we all suffer because of one man's sin? There's different views on this, and we're not going to do an extensive breakdown this morning, but but some really emphasize this what's called the realist view, this idea that we were all in Adam, that his DNA, his makeup, is actually, we were all there, and so we're all connected in a real way. We're all connected in a social way. We know that that trauma and sin has passed down genetically, and we're all connected to this man Adam. Others have emphasized a more representative view that God chose Adam as the representative for this humanity, and that what would happen to Adam would either bless all of his descendants or curse all of his descendants. You might think of, I don't know, a president taking us to war. And if the president takes our country to war and we end up in a war, then guess what? It doesn't matter if you picked the war. You're involved in a war now. He represents and he stands for all of us, and this means that Adam's sin, it affects all of us. Unless you want to blame Adam too heavily, though, I don't think you and I would have done differently. He chose to de- God God, to take the center, and it says that that death ensued. This means that this state of sin is almost like imputed to us. It's it's we're we're born with it. Hannah and I are in a month or two gonna have our first child, and I can imagine our baby boy, if he's healthy, going to sports camps someday, maybe even math club or something like that. But but I've never thought about, I've never thought about our baby boy going to a camp where he learns how to be selfish. He won't have to, right? He's gonna inherit all that from his mom, of course. Course, right? No, I'm just kidding. He's gonna inherit it because he's human, because we come out that way. We come out like you know, the seagulls and finding Nebo, saying, mine, mine, mine. And if I'm really honest, if we're really honest, one of the major challenges of parenthood is not gonna be that he just comes out selfish. It's that his selfishness is gonna clash with my selfishness. I don't want him to be the center because I still want to be the center that even on my good days when I mute it, my heart still says, mine, mine, mine. We have this bent towards brokenness and selfishness. We dethrone God. Sin has entered the story through this one man. And what is followed is death. The reason why we are in no different place now than back when Paul wrote this. Building things that we know will not last, towers that will crumble, civilizations that will come and go, is because the truth of the human story is that sin has entered it. It has touched each of us. The second contrast we see is, like I said, a parenthetic pause. He sort of goes a little bit to the side. We can see it in verse 13 and 14, but basically he's gonna contrast the purpose of the law, and he's gonna contrast death and the law before and after Moses. So if you read in verse 13, sin was indeed in the world before the law, but sin is not reckoned when there is no law. Yet death exercised dominion from Adam to Moses, even over those whose sins were not like the transgressions of Adam, who is a type of the one who is to come. So he's contrasting what was it like before Moses and after Moses? And the reason he's doing this is because there's Jews in the audience and there's good religious people, and they believe something. They believed that the Torah, the Bible, the first five books, the rules, that these were the way to God, and that this is what would save them. They believed that that this was like a roadmap to salvation. If everybody would just obey these rules, if we all just followed the Ten Commandments, we would we would get out from under this reign of sin. And so they thought that, you know, you're right. Sin entered the world through Adam, but but at Moses, that's when the kingdom of God broke in. That's when salvation could follow. And Paul's point is really simple. He's saying, look, the law comes in. The law comes in, and it is like a map. It is like a roadmap, or it is like an x-ray. But you don't have the power to obey it. It exposes, it doesn't empower you. Look, we know that from Adam to Moses there was no law, yet death reigned. Everybody from Adam died. So clearly, death entered before we had the rules, but then we added the rules. And now it's worse. Not only has death entered, but we also break all the rules. Because we've de-goded God. And there's no way out of this mess. I went to college in Tennessee and I met in Tennessee a whole bunch of people that were very different than me. Um they kind of remind you, they reminded me of like the cast of Ducks Dynasty, and they like to hunt, they like to be in nature, they were very outdoorsy, and I remember, I didn't go personally, but I remember some of my roommates inviting me to go duck hunting. Um hunting has never appealed to me, so I said, I'm good, thanks. Um but they went duck hunting and they came back with this wild story. They had gone duck hunting and they had taken this poor boy from, I think, Pennsylvania with them who had never been hunting before, and they're in this marsh and they're hunting, and he came across like this super muddy swamp, and and he got completely stuck, and he started to sink in this marsh. He's not an outdoors kid. I think his name was actually Doobie, which is a really funny name, but he's doobie's stuck in the marsh, and and he's doing everything he can think of. He even stepped out of his boots to think like maybe if I step out of my shoes, my shoes will sink and I won't. And of course, he started to sink right next to his shoes. And so his shoes are sinking, he's sinking, and and they ended up having to rescue him. They had to get ropes, they had to time to trees, and they they like rescued this poor boy from the marsh. I was glad I didn't go. They didn't catch any birds, and but it was a great picture of what we are like. We are stuck in the mud. Humanity is stuck in the mud. You're not gonna pull yourself out. You're not gonna rescue yourself. You are sinking. If you are a member of the human race, if you are a son or a daughter of Adam, you are sinking. Sin is not the oops, it's not the mistake. It's that we have dethroned God, we have come under the power and the reign of sin, and we are sinking in the mud. You might push back, you might think that's not me, I don't make myself the center, I'm a nice person, but but we all do. If I were to show you a photo of your class yearbook, do you know the first person everybody looks for? Themselves. Themselves. There have been lots of psychological tests to prove it. We look for ourselves, we are the center. And in lots of arguments in my life, I've won some and I've lost some. But you know what I've never lost? I've never lost the rerun of the argument in my head afterwards. I've never lost that one. Why? Because I'm right. Because I'm the center. Because I have supplanted God. And Paul is helping us to see, he wants us to see the contrast, the law, it's it's like an x-ray machine. It's going to show you all the places that are broken. It's not going to fix the problem. It actually is going to name the problem. And in naming the problem, he says sins can start to be accredited, they can be counted. See, before Cain killed Abel because he had dethroned God. Sin was crouching at the door. He killed Abel. And so death entered. But now, if he had killed Abel, all of that would still be true. Death would have still entered, and he would have broken one of the Ten Commandments. The Ten Commandments wouldn't have saved him, they would have condemned him. They would have helped him to see that what he was doing was sin. Some have called the law like a mirror. It holds itself up to you, and you see yourself in it, and you see that there is no rescue in and of ourselves. This leads to the third and the main contrast, the fundamental contrast, which we see in verses 15 through 19. And this is the contrast that Paul wants us to make between Adam in the reign of sin and death and Jesus in the reign of life. And so the purpose of this contrast, he wants us to see the gift of salvation. The first one was he's seeing the source of the problem, seeing the purpose of the law, and now seeing the gift of salvation. And I think just to make it simpler, you can break this contrast down into four comparisons that he makes. Four comparisons. And so the first one we can read in verse 15. He says, But the free gift is not like the trespass. For if the many died through one man's trespass, much more surely have the grace of God and the free gift and the grace of the one man Jesus Christ abounded for the many. He's comparing the effects of the gift and Adam's sin, the trespass. And he's saying, this is kind of his argument. He's saying, look, Adam sinned, and death followed. Jesus, the gift, obeyed, and not only did he fix Adam's sin, but he fixed everything that came after Adam's sin. And so the gift is greater than the trespass. See, the disobedience, it opened the door to all the bad things, all the sin, all the brokenness, all the hurt, all the genocide, all the war, all the hungry people today. Sin, it opened the door to all of that. But the gift, the gift of grace, it's greater than Adam's sin. He's holding them up and he's saying, Can you see the difference? This is crucial. We live in a world where we tend to make everything about us. And so we're tempted to have a gospel that goes something like this I made a mess, Jesus forgave me, so I'm okay. And we're tempted to think that if I just do enough good things, but but when you see what Paul's holding up, you realize how ridiculous that sounds. The gift of Jesus was that everything that followed from Adam's disobedience, all sin, all death, all evil, everything ever done, his gift covered all of it. You imagine that being nice to your neighbor could fix all of the problems? You imagine that your efforts could compare to his gift? There is no comparison. You could be Mr. Rogers and Mother Teresa, and your greatest acts of kindness, there's no comparison. It could not wipe out the stain of sin that has gone to every nook and cranny in human history. There is only one thing that could cleanse the world of its sin, and that's this gift, Jesus Christ. The second thing he compares is the judgment and condemnation versus the justification. In verse 14, death exercised dominion from Adam to verse 16. And the free gift is not like the effect of the one man's sin. For the judgment following one trespass brought condemnation, but the free gift following many trespasses brings justification. So he's talking about now contrasting the effects of the two acts. The act of sin brought condemnation. Sin brought death into this world. That was the effect. That was the consequence. The consequence of sin is that every person you know and every person I know will die. A hundred percent. Death is the consequence of sin. It's the consequence that we live with, and we know it's not right. We know it shouldn't be that way. Something inside of us rebels against it. And so he says there's death, but but he compares it to this beautiful word that he's been unpacking for the last several chapters. He says, but the free gift brings justification. Justification is the declaration that you are righteous. It's the picture we looked at of the person who is failing in school, getting put on the honor roll. It's the dishonorable discharge being switched to the Medal of Honor winner. But he didn't deserve it. It was somebody else's bravery. It is the final verdict of your life being declared righteous, innocent. Hear what Paul is saying? He's saying, we've de-goded God. We've taken the place of the sinner, and because of that we will die. That's the effect of sin. But compare this to justification. You've done all that, but justification says it is all covered through one man. And that all of the evil spoken over your life, all of the evil impacting your life, all of the evil caused by our sins, fell on one man. And because of that, you are declared righteous. The gift is greater than the trespass. That no matter what you have done, no matter what shame you have carried, all of it fell upon him that you might be justified before God, that you might be declared righteous. The third comparison he makes is the comparison of death to life. He says, If the one man's trespass, death exercise dominion through that one, much more surely will those who receive the abundance of grace and the free gift of righteousness exercise dominion in life through the one man, Jesus Christ. And then in verse 18, therefore, just as one man's trespass led to the condemnation of all, so one man's act of righteousness leads to the justification and the life for all. He's saying, look, the one sin, it led to death, it led to condemnation, but but compare it to what the act of Jesus led to. Compare it to what the cross purchased. It's not just purchasing justification, it's giving you life. The gift brings you life, life here and now, life in the Spirit of God, life with God as the center, life of blessing, life of hope, life that will consummate in resurrection, in the restoration of all things. Life that we read about in Revelation, the last two chapters, where there's no sickness, no sorrow, no death. He's saying the gift of Christ, it brings you life. And that you have this life now, and that you can reign in life here and now by the power of his Spirit. He's going to pick up this theme in full force in Romans chapter 8. But the gift of Jesus' obedience is greater than the trespass, because the trespass brought you death, but his gift brings you life, and life gets the last word. Life gets the last word, he's saying. The gift is greater than the trespass. And the fourth thing he compares is the disobedience of Adam and the obedience of Christ. Verse 19, for just as by one man's disobedience the many were made sinners, so by one man's obedience the many will be made righteous. He compares Adam's disobedience with Jesus' obedience. I know we've we've harped on Adam's disobedience already, but I want to take a moment and talk about Christ's obedience. It's a theme we often neglect. It's a major theme in the Gospel of John and in Hebrews, but Jesus, he came and he obeyed. He learned through the things he suffered, he obeyed, it says, and it was obedient even unto death. He gave God his yes and he obeyed. Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane was tempted to not drink the cup, but he chose to say yes, even at the cost of his own life. Jesus at the start of his ministry was tempted by the devil with the with the major temptations of life. And he chose to obey. And his obedience, undid, is greater than the disobedience of Adam. This is beautifully portrayed in the scriptures. It's almost like there had to have been an editor or something. I mean, think of the poetry. Adam and Eve. What was their disobedience? They were told, take and eat from this tree. What was Jesus' obedience? What did it lead to? On the night before he died, where he was going to hang on a tree. The words of salvation were take and eat. The undoing. Sin entered the story because we took and eat, and Jesus' obedience flipped it upside down. And now take and eat became the words of salvation. One preacher said, Oh, how easily we took and eat from that first tree. And oh how hard the undoing. But Christ obeyed, and his obedience flipped everything upside down. So now we take and eat from the tree. And the tree is the cross. His body is the fruit that brings life. The fourth and final contrast we see, we see the source of the problem, the purpose of the law, the gift of salvation. And then the final thing that I think Paul really wants us to see is the abundance of grace. He's contrasting here the exceeding the spread, the exceeding sin versus the abundant grace. And these are the last two verses. The law came in, and with the result was that trespasses multiplied. But where sin increased, grace abounded all the more. So that just as sin exercised domain in death, so grace might also exercise domain through justification, leading to eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord. He wants us to see this last contrast between how many sins there were because of the law and how much grace covered. We've talked about this already, but he wants people to get the idea, he's going to keep coming back, that the law, following the rules, it wasn't going to get people to heaven. But instead it exposed, or here he even says it multiplied sin. Before we were de-godding God, putting ourselves at the center, now we're doing that and we're breaking the rules. It's like a kid, he snuck out of the house before there was technically a rule that said he couldn't sneak out of the house. And he knew it was wrong, it was wrong. And he got punished. Then the rule came, and then he did it again. And now it was wrong and he was breaking a rule. It multiplied the problems. What was coming out of the human heart was sin. It was flowing out. Death had entered. The law came and it multiplied it. Now the death, it had a bunch of sins listed and transgressions broken. And Paul's saying, look at how the whole world is covered in sin. I mean, imagine for a moment everything that will go wrong just today. All the sins, all the lies. It's spread everywhere. It's like a beach vacation, and sand gets everywhere, right? It's in your luggage, and that's what sin is like. It's everywhere. And he compares it, though, with what he calls the abundance of grace. Grace is greater. It's like your favorite food on Thanksgiving. For me, it's mashed potatoes. And when there's just an abundance of mashed potatoes, extra helpings, it covers the great hunger. It's lavished upon us. It's like a bubble bath with too many bubbles. It's lavished upon us. It's greater than the mess. It's like the story of the prodigal son, where the prodigal son comes home and he's not just welcomed, but he's robed and the ring is put on his finger. It's lavish, it's extra, it's more than. Paul is saying, Do you see the depth of the problem? Sin is everywhere. It's in you and me. It's entered our story. It's why our utopias don't work. It's why our optimism fails. It's why our naivety does not work. We again and again come crashing down. It's the source of our problems. And when you see how bad it is, then what Christ has done will shine all the more. See, there's this temptation to make the gospel small, to make it narrow, to just forgive me for the worst things I've done. And he's saying, no, you're part of a cosmic story. You're part of something way, way bigger. What Christ has done, it's way, way bigger than you. But you get to be a part. He is healing the whole world. He is making everything right again. He is restoring it all. His grace is bigger than the mess we've made. And this morning, his grace is bigger than the mess you've made. When you see this picture, the cosmic story, it puts us in perspective. How could you ever say, My sin is too great for God? When he's cleaning up the sins of the entire world. World. How could we ever think that it's about me? When his salvation is about all the world, when his grace covers all. Paul here, he wants us to see something. He wants us to see the true story. If we spend our lives ignoring the real problem, the foundation will stay broken in our lives. Everything we build will eventually come down. But when we see the true story, we have the ability to see the true cure, to put our hope in the right place. Let's pray.