Dan Herold | Romans 5:12-15 | 7/13/2017
In Romans 5:11, the verse just before where our second lesson began this morning, Paul says,
“We also rejoice in God through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom we have now received reconciliation.”
In other words, our lives should be full of rejoicing. As we await our time for God to call us home to the heavenly mansion he has ready for us we are to spend our time rejoicing!
Now, that doesn’t sound too hard. In fact it sounds like a pretty good deal! There’s nothing we need to do to earn our place in heaven because we have received the righteousness of Jesus which he gave to us. There’s nothing we need to do to make up for our sins because full atonement has already been made. So all that’s left for us to do is to trust in God and rejoice! But we all know it’s not that easy. Every single day Satan is still attacking us trying to get us to doubt what God tells us. He tries to make us believe that God doesn’t love us or that Jesus didn’t quite pay for all of our sins.
And, it can be hard to find things to rejoice about sometimes. If you read the newspaper or watch the news you hear about so many terrible things that are happening. You hear about wars in all parts of the world. You hear about rumors of wars and speculation about where the next one will break out. You hear about diseases that ravage cities and countries. You hear about just how awful people can be toward each other and the kinds of crimes that are committed everyday throughout the world and even in our own cities. You hear about Christians being persecuted, about governments taking away the rights of people to gather and worship, and you hear the bold claims of unbelief that flow from the mouths of so many who have rejected their Savior. After all that it sure can be hard to find something about which you can rejoice.
In Romans 5:12-15 Paul explains to us why we can still rejoice even though we live in a world where all those bad things happen. There’s one little word that is cause for rejoicing—that word is “reversal.” God reversed the sentence we deserve and the sentence we receive and it is because of that reversal that we can rejoice. We can rejoice because all of the ugliness of this world that comes from sin doesn’t have any lasting power, but Jesus accomplished something for us that will last forever.
Now, it can seem like the world just keeps getting worse and worse and there’s nothing left to rejoice about, but Ecclesiastes 1:9 tells us that there’s nothing new under the sun—everything that’s happening now has happened before and will probably happen again. Wars have happened before and will happen again. Unbelief has run rampant in the past and Christians will continue to be persecuted in the future. The point is that everything we see today Paul saw in his day. Paul saw wars and disease and poverty. He saw Christians being persecuted for their faith. He saw governments that were hostile to Christianity and locked people up in prison just for talking about Jesus. So if you could travel back 2000 years I’d have to warn you, don’t expect that you would find an ideal world free of the evil you see around you today. Paul saw the same sorts of evil, maybe even worse, in his day, but he still told us that we could rejoice.
Now why, in a world so full of sin and evil and unbelief, would the apostle Paul tell us to rejoice? Well, he explains that we can rejoice because of this reversal that Jesus accomplished for us. Basically Paul is going to explain to us that we can rejoice because as Christians we have a different outlook on life. Through the eyes of faith we see things differently. In a world full of hate and sin followers of Jesus can still see peace and love because of what our Lord has done for us.
Paul talks about sin and its effects very bluntly. In verse 12 Paul says,
“Sin entered the world through one man, and death through sin, and in this way death came to all men, because all sinned—for before the law was given, sin was in the world.”
It’s no secret that the cause of all the evil, all the trouble, and all the ugliness in the world is the result of sin.
Everything goes back to the one man through whom sin and death entered the world—to Adam, our common ancestor. Paul makes the point that you know it’s all caused by sin, even though God hadn’t given his Law to Moses yet, because the results are the same. Before the Law was passed down at Mt. Sinai people died just like they did afterwards. So, sin has been in the world ever since the fall of mankind in Genesis 3 and along with sin come death, and sickness, and crime, and war. Since Adam’s sin is passed down to each and every person who has ever walked this earth, then sin is what we naturally expect to encounter—and sin gives us no reason to rejoice.
But in verse 15 Paul talks about this reversal, this change in the way things are which gives us cause to rejoice. Paul writes,
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“But the gift is not like the trespass.”
The gift Paul is talking about is the greatest gift we could ever receive and the same one he has been talking about in the previous chapters of Romans—he’s talking about the gift that we receive through faith which Jesus died on a cross to win for us. He’s talking about the forgiveness of sins and the righteousness we have through Christ. And he says that this gift isn’t anything like sin—it’s a complete reversal.
The two have some similarities, both sin and this gift entered the world through one man and were passed on, but the results couldn’t be more different. We’ve already talked about the results of Adam’s sin and we see them in the world around us every day. The results of the gift that Jesus gives us, though, are the polar opposite. Paul writes in verse 15,
“For if the many died by the trespass of the one man, how much more did God’s grace and the gift that came by the grace of the one man, Jesus Christ, overflow to the many!”
What Paul is saying is, if through one man all of these evil things; sin, death, sickness, war, and so on entered the world and spread to every person when it happened through one human being—then how much more widespread, how much more prevalent is this gift given by Christ going to be? Paul is reminding us that Christ turned the tables on Satan.
By nature we are utterly sinful and have no hope of salvation on our own. By nature we have no reason to rejoice—all we have is sin, death, and evil. But that changed…that was all reversed when Jesus died on the cross and after three short days rose again from the dead. Jesus conquered death, which was the biggest threat Satan had, and Jesus took its power away.
So, we really truly do have a reason to rejoice! We can rejoice because things aren’t as they always seem. As long as we are living in this world we need to take sin seriously, we need to guard our hearts and minds against the attacks of Satan and be reminded of the truths of God’s word, but at the same time, as Christians, we know that this world isn’t permanent. We know that there’s something after this life and we know that it’s so much better than anything we have ever seen in this life.
In football one of the standard plays is called a reverse. The point of that play is to get everyone who is watching—the defense, the people in the stands, everybody—to think the player with the ball is running one way when in fact he had quickly given the ball to a player running the other direction. And it’s amazing how well it can work. That play can leave the defense looking confused, it can create confusion among the fans watching, and it can even fool the camera operator filming the game for TV.
Jesus ran a flawless reverse…he ran straight down the sideline and scored a game winning touchdown. Satan, though, wants us to be confused. He wants us to be like the defenders who got fooled…like the ones who went with the crowd and got all caught up in everything and totally missed what was going on. Now that Satan has been defeated—since Jesus won the victory over sin and death and gives that victory to us as a free gift—the only hope that Satan has is to try to get us to look the other way—to try to distract us from the truth so we miss out on the victory celebration.
And there are many ways he tries to do that, but one of them is by trying to convince us that we don’t have anything to rejoice and be happy about. Satan wants us to get so wrapped up in how evil the world is so that eventually evil is all we see and we lose sight of Christ. Thankfully, though, we have reminders like this one in Romans and in numerous places throughout Scripture that remind us that we really do have something to rejoice about—we have the gift! We have Jesus who reversed the outcome we deserve and the one we will experience.
And we need those reminders! We need our Christian friends and families, we need our fellow members in our congregation, we need all the tools God has given us to keep our eyes and ears fixed on God and his Word and to resist the temptation to fall into Satan’s trap and think there’s nothing for which we can rejoice. God has blessed us beyond all measure, he has given us a Savior, he loves us dearly, and he has blessed us with friends, families, and a congregation of believers here who all help to remind us of the love of God—love which he showed through his Son Jesus, our gift, and love which he shows to us his precious children.
God has provided atonement for our sins, blessed us with Christ’s righteousness, reconciled us to himself, and buried our sinful nature through our baptism. He provides us with these little words, words like reversal, that give us tools to use in our battle against sin and remind us of all the reasons we have to rejoice.
In his name,
Amen.