The Two Humanities

Contrasting Legacies of Sin and Salvation
(Romans 5:12-21)

In a famous parallelism in his letter to the Romans, Paul contrasts the legacy of the first man, Adam, who introduced sin and death into the world, with the legacy of Jesus Christ, the ‘second Adam’, who overcomes Adam’s tragic legacy and introduces life and holiness for human beings. Affirming the biblical understanding of the historicity of Adam which is presupposed in this parallel, Rob Yule preached this message at Greyfriars’ Classical Service on 20 May 2007.

Our family tree

All of us are interested in our family tree. I can trace mine back to Douglas Castle in southwest Scotland in the late eighteenth century — to a groomsman, not the lord of the manor! It’s fascinating to discover where various family or personal characteristics come from — for example, the Yule family humour (the American comedian Mickey Rooney is apparently part of the clan), or my wife’s freckles (she is a one-sixteenth descendant of a Maori princess).

Paul here traces the ancestry of the human race, right back to our common ancestor Adam. He shows where sin — that fateful, widespread, destructive characteristic of the human family — comes from. Then he compares what Christ has done to restore the human race and inaugurate a new humanity by overcoming this tragic legacy of sin.

Martyn Lloyd-Jones observes that ‘God has always dealt with mankind through a head and representative. The whole story of the human race can be summed up in terms of what has happened because of Adam, and what has happened and will yet happen because of Christ.’ (Romans, Vol. 4, p. 178).

Many people today view the biblical story of Adam and Eve as mythological rather than historical, assuming that evolution disproves the Genesis story. They don’t realise that modern science supports the Genesis story. All human beings share the same physiology, anatomy, biochemistry, and genetic makeup — which supports the unity of the human race. Humans comprise a single species, able to intermarry and interbreed — which points to descent from a common ancestor. These facts are confirmed by research into mitochondrial DNA, which indicates descent from a common female. DNA research recently showed that humans are not descended from Neanderthals. Genesis 2-4 points to Adam as having been a Neolithic or New Stone Age farmer, whose appearance is linked with the beginnings of agriculture in Eastern Turkey, near the headwaters of the Euphrates and Tigris Rivers (Genesis 2:10, 14).

The Bible teaches the historicity of Adam and Eve as the original human pair. Biblical genealogies trace the human race back to Adam (Genesis 5:3, 1 Chronicles 1:1ff, Luke 3:38). Jesus taught that ‘at the beginning the Creator “made them male and female”� ’ (Matthew 19:4ff, quoting Genesis 1:27). Paul told the philosophers of Athens that God had made every nation ‘from one man’ (Acts 17:26). And Paul’s analogy here in Romans 5 depends for its validity on the historicity of both Jesus Christ and Adam.

The legacy of Adam

Adam was the first human being. He was the prototype or pattern from which the entire human race receives its inherited characteristics. The Hebrew word adam is the generic term for ‘humankind’ (from adamah, the ‘ground’, from which man was formed, Genesis 2:7).

Though created in the image and likeness of God (Genesis 1:26-27), Adam by nature was mortal or ‘perishable’ (1 Corinthians 15:42, 53f). When Adam disobeyed God and turned from that relationship to God which was the source of his life, death entered his human constitution and thus affected him and all subsequent members of the human race. ‘Sin came into the world through one man, and death came through sin, and so death spread to all’ (5:12). ‘One man’s trespass led to condemnation for all’ (5:18). Adam’s sin involved all subsequent human beings in condemnation and death.

Sin is a terrible tragedy, for in essence it is separation from God. This is profoundly expressed in the grief and anguish on Adam and Eve’s faces in Masaccio’s Renaissance painting The Expulsion from Paradise (1425).

Individual sin and inherited sin

This raises the thorny question: why should all subsequent human beings suffer condemnation and death, because our first ancestor sinned? Isn’t this unfair?

O the contrary, this is actually an illustration of the law of cause and effect. Actions have consequences. Sin has consequences, which affect posterity.

Imagine an airtight room, a room with no handle on the inside of the door. In such a room life is possible only so long as the door is left open. If someone stupidly slams the door shut, everyone else in the room would suffer the consequences and gradually suffocate. If fighting and recrimination broke out in the room as a result, personal sin would be added to the original sin. Trapped in the room with no way of escape, the occupants would now need a rescuer to come from outside and save them.

This illustration enables us to distinguish two kinds of sin: inherited sin and individual sin. Inherited sin (sometimes called ‘original sin’) is the state of sin and the bias towards sin that all human beings are born into as a result of being descended from Adam, the first human being to sin. Adam’s original sin leaves a legacy that all subsequent generations suffer the consequences of. Individual sin is the sin we each commit, and are personally responsible for. Both kinds of sin are referred to in verse 12.

Adam’s sin introduced sin and death into the human race. We don’t even start life with the possibility of living sinlessly. We begin it with a sinful nature, a sinful bias; and in a state of mortality, which is the result of sin, as a number of biblical passages explain:

• Psalm 51:5 — ‘Surely I have been a sinner from birth / sinful from the time my mother conceived me.’

• Psalm 58:3 — ‘Even from birth the wicked go astray / from the womb they are wayward and speak lies.’

• Genesis 8:21 — ‘Every inclination of [a person’s] heart is evil from childhood.’

The legacy of Christ

With all humanity trapped in sin and death, what was needed was a ‘Second Adam’ who would come and rescue the human race, and start a ‘new humanity’ characterised by life and holiness. This, says Paul, is precisely what Christ has done.

Where Adam failed, Christ prevailed. Where Adam disobeyed and brought sin into the world, Christ obeyed and brought righteousness into the world. Where Adam introduced condemnation and death, Christ brings justification and life. Adam by his disobedience turned the tree of life into a place of death. Christ by his obedience turned the tree of death (the cross) into a place of life. In Adam, paradise was lost. In Christ, paradise was regained.

This is well-expressed in John Henry Newman’s great hymn ‘Praise to the Holiest in the height’:

O loving wisdom of our God!
When all was sin and shame,
A second Adam to the fight
And to the rescue came.
O wisest love! that flesh and blood,
Which did in Adam fail,
Should strive afresh against the foe,
Should strive and should prevail.

There are two special things to note about the legacy of Christ:

1. Humanity receives much greater blessing through Christthan what it lost in Adam (note Paul’s repeated ‘how much more’, 5:15, 17). Through Adam, ‘death reigned’ over us. Through Christ, ‘we reign in life’ (5:17). In the Middle Ages this abundance was described as the felix culpa: the ‘happy fault’ of Adam, which occasioned a much greater blessing through Christ. Through the fall we forfeited our creaturely life; through redemption, we are raised to eternal life — the very life of God himself. Christ exalts his people to a far higher state than human beings, unfallen, could ever have attained. This passage emphasises the sheer triumph of God’s abundant grace over the destructive effects of sin.

2. Our entry into this new humanity brought by Christ is voluntary. We are involved in Adam’s humanity by necessity: we are born into it, we have no say in it. But we must choose to become members of the new humanity redeemed by Christ: we must enter it voluntarily. We share Adam’s humanity by virtue of our physical birth. We share Christ’s new humanity by a spiritual newbirth — which involves believing, trusting, or accepting what Christ has done for us. Romans 3 and 4 have emphasised that it is by faith that we are justified and made right with God. Romans 5:17 emphasises that it is those who ‘receive’ God’s grace and righteousness who will ‘reign in life’.

Exercise your free choice: the ‘happy faith’, through which, today, you can enter this new humanity redeemed by Jesus Christ.

Rob Yule, 20 May 2007
© 2007, Greyfriars Presbyterian Church