Greg and Amy explain how Romans 5 contrasts Adam and Jesus, clarifying that while all are affected by Adam’s sin, only those who are in Christ benefit from his righteousness.
Transcript
Greg: Let me just read the passage, so we know what we’re working with, starting in verse 17: “For if by the transgression of the one”–that would be Adam—”death reigned through the one, much more those who receive the abundance of grace”—notice the qualifier—”and the gift of righteousness will reign in life through the one, Jesus Christ.”
So, we haven’t even gotten to the verses in question, but notice how there’s a qualifier there. “Those who receive the abundance of grace.” There is a parallel, but we have to be careful and make the same parallels that the author himself is making.
Verses 18–19 continue: “So, then, as through one transgression there resulted condemnation to all men, even so, through one act of righteousness there resulted justification of life to all men. For as through the one man’s disobedience the many were made sinners, even so, through the obedience of the one, the many were made righteous.”
So, the question, then, is, who are the “many” and the “all” that are in view here? Certainly, the “many” and the “all” regarding Adam are all who are sons of Adam—that’s everybody. But the “many” and the “all” referring to Jesus can’t be those that are sons of Adam, because that would result in universalism, and that reading is inconsistent with the rest of the teaching of the Bible. In fact, the book of Romans is explaining how salvation works as a means of extending the invitation of grace to people who need it, because if they don’t respond to it, then they’re not going to have it. The whole book of Romans presumes that universalism is false. So, reading universalism into a sentence is just a misreading, given the larger context.
How do we solve the problem? The answer is, all those who are sons of Adam bear the consequences of the sons of Adam. All who are in Christ—sons of God through Christ—bear all the things that Christ gives them. In the first case, “sons of Adam” includes every human being. In the second case, the “all” and the “many” are all those who are in Christ, those who received the benefits that Christ offers.
I’m not making this up. It’s right there in the prior verse. “For if by the transgression of the one, death reigned through the one, much more those who receive the abundance of grace and of the gift of righteousness will reign in life through the one, Jesus Christ.” The qualification that makes it crystal clear is in the verse prior to the one cited. And, once again, the rule “Never read a Bible verse” is in play here to give us information in the larger context that completely removes the confusion.
Amy: We have to keep the symmetry where it belongs. So, the question asked about the symmetry between Adam and Jesus, and that symmetry is, when we are in the one, we bear the image of that one. We have the guilt of the one or the righteousness of the one. I think that’s as far as it’s meant to go. Luckily, this passage is in Romans. Romans is abundantly clear about this. We all start off in Adam. We’re automatically in Adam. It doesn’t follow that we’ll automatically be in Christ. In fact, if you just keep reading in Romans, in the next two chapters, the idea is that we have to die with Christ and be united to Christ in order to be raised with him. And chapter 7 talks about how we died to the law so that we could be raised, so that we could be joined to another—to him who was raised from the dead. So, something has to happen in order for us to be in Christ, and there’s no reason to think it happens to everybody, because nothing else indicates that it does.
Greg: Again, when you see an apparently conflicting passage, you can’t just camp on one verse and say, “Here’s the whole thing.” You have to look at all the passages that relate to that issue. it’s not unusual, then, to come up with what appear to be contradictions. Now, if we are committed to the idea that the Bible is inspired by God, and there’s a unity there, and it does not contradict, then we have to figure out whether there is a reasonable way that we can make these verses work together. Sometimes, by reading the larger context, we understand that we have been misreading some passage, and it gives us an explanation that then creates harmony, and that’s what we’re looking to do. We’re looking to harmonize the passages.
By the way, this is not a trick so Christians can avoid apparent contradictions. This is called a charitable reading. If you read any book that I write, I’m sure you’re going to find something that you read that sounds like I’m contradicting something else that I’ve said. But if you read it charitably—under the presumption that, well, Greg’s not an idiot, probably, and maybe there’s an explanation—and then you read wider, you may be able to find a way to harmonize these concepts. So, this is a very common way of reading texts—trying to find a harmony between them, reading them charitably, and making sense of the passages, which is much more important, by the way, with Scripture than with anything I wrote because we want to know what God actually means. And on this issue, we’re talking about something really core, foundational, and central, and that is—back to the Philippian jailer—what must I do to be saved?
Amy: Like I said before, luckily, this is part of Romans. Chapter 5 leads directly into chapter 6. And a verse just came to mind here. This is at the beginning of chapter 6, in verse 3: “Or do you not know that all of us who have been baptized into Christ Jesus have been baptized into his death? Therefore, we have been buried with him through baptism into death, so that, as Christ was raised from the dead through the glory of the Father, so we too might walk in newness of life.” Then, a little bit further down, “If we have died with Christ, we believe that we shall also live with him.” So, he’s definitely making a distinction here that not everyone dies with Christ. Everyone is born in Adam, but only those who die with Christ will be raised with him.