(Genesis 2:15-17, Genesis 3:1-8; Romans 5:12-21)
Death looms large for me this weekend. In a few hours, we will celebrate a service of witness to the resurrection in honor of the life of Virginia Zuck; of course, hers was not exactly a life cut short, but even so. Last week, Anna Johnston’s grandmother died. This week, someone else for whom we’ve been praying got the news: stage 4 liver cancer. And David Chastain spent a fair bit of this week sitting in a hospital room in Elkhart with his foster father, who was frighteningly close to death before taking a turn for the better. Sometimes we may forget, but we live in a world that is born toward dying, and we cannot escape that fact very long before reality forces us to face it.
Death is our inheritance, because sin is our heritage. When Adam rebelled against God, the whole human race died with him—spiritually first, as sin alienated us from God, with physical death following close behind as a consequence. That was the legacy Adam left to all his descendants, and the kind of life he passed on to us—a life poisoned by sin and broken by death.
This disaster was so great and so complete that God chose to make it better by first making it worse: by giving his people his law. Sin isn’t counted when there is no law, but its power is at work nevertheless, and so death reigns regardless—it’s just that nobody knows why, and so they come up with all kinds of ideas to explain it, and to try to make it better, somehow. The law identifies the problem, and seems to offer a solution; but that doesn’t make it any better, because even once we have the law, we continue to sin. It’s just that now our sin is even worse than before, because now when we sin we’re knowingly breaking a direct commandment from God—which means that the law doesn’t reduce sin, it only increases it. The law shows us how we’re messed up, and how badly we’re messed up, and then it leaves us there, helpless to fix it.
The law is bad news, but it’s a blessing anyway because we need the bad news if we’re going to understand the good news. In forcing us to face the terrible situation into which we’re born, the law shows us that we need Jesus and his sacrifice. We do not naturally understand this. We don’t naturally think we’re that bad—we may realize the world is that bad, we may know that other people are that bad, but we don’t think we are that bad. We can’t buy the idea that God would do anything that drastic and extreme to save us because we don’t think he’d have to. Our understanding of our sin and our need for salvation is too small for us to understand the gospel of Jesus Christ as good news.
Let me give you an example. When Dr. Delores Williams of Union Seminary in New York said, “I don’t think we need folks hanging on crosses, and blood dripping, and weird stuff,” she also declared, “I think Jesus came for life and how to live together, what life was all about. . . . Jesus’ mandate is that we pass on tough love, love that’s whipping the thieves out of the temple.” She thought that was enough. She couldn’t understand the need for the atonement because she thought “tough love”—done by us who are the good people to them who are bad—she thought that combined with the power of a good example, that was enough to do what Jesus came to do. The law tells us, no, no, no—what is wrong with us is much worse, and much deeper, than that. The rot goes much deeper, and much farther. We can’t be satisfied with Jesus whipping the thieves out of the temple unless we realize, all the way down, that we are the thieves.
And then we realize that the same week he drove them out of the temple, he died for them—he died for us. We realize that God came down to be one of us, to live the life of perfect obedience that Adam abandoned, and then to take the weight of all our sin and all our death on himself and to die for a guilt that was not his—and yes, hanging on a cross, and blood dripping, and exactly all that stuff, to know the ugliest and cruelest part of this world in his own body—and take all of it all the way down to Hell where it belongs; and then to rip open the gates of Hell and blow out the power of sin from the inside, that he might lead us all out of that slavery and into freedom. God reached out and took our alienation from him into himself that it might no longer stand between us and him. He took our death, and he gave us life in return.
Because of this, through Jesus Christ, we have been delivered from the domination of sin and death and brought into a state of grace. We have a new life in which the grace of God reigns in righteousness; we have been cleansed of the guilt of sin by the sacrifice of Christ, and we have been freed from the control of sin in our lives, such that we are able to live in a righteous way, in a way that is pleasing to God. Though we were born toward dying—and though we still know that reality as we live in this world, as we do still sin, and sicken, and die—yet now we live toward resurrection, as God has given us his life through Jesus Christ, and his life has overcome death and will overcome it.
This is the only way of salvation—Jesus is the only way. I think that’s why Paul uses the word “all” in verse 18; he’s not saying that all people will be saved—that’s clear from the rest of the passage—but that all those who find life, all those who find justification before God, find it through Christ. Or rather, are found by him, for the initiative is his. But there is no other way, there is no other option, because only Jesus had the power to deliver us from sin and reconcile us to God, and only his sacrifice was big enough to accomplish that. No merely human work can ever save.
At the same time, no merely human work can undo or overpower the saving work of God in Jesus Christ. If the purpose of the law was to make sin worse, yet the grace of God is still greater, and his faithfulness to his people and his purpose is still unshakeable. Even if you could dig so deep as to lay out your sleeping bag in Hell’s sub-basement, the grace of God would still find you, with plenty to spare; and if you could flee to the farthest and most desolate corner of reality, you would still turn around to see God waiting there for you, reaching out to you in love. No matter how much sin may increase, yet the grace of God is still infinitely greater. No matter how great your sin may be, or mine, no matter what hold it might have over your life, no matter what power death might have over you, the grace of God is still infinitely greater for you, so that in your life grace might reign through righteousness, which is the eternal life of God in us, through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen. Let’s pray.