“Therefore, just as sin entered the world through one man, and death through sin, in this way death spread to all people, because all sinned. In fact, sin was in the world before the law, but sin is not charged to a person’s account when there is no law. Nevertheless, death reigned from Adam to Moses, even over those who did not sin in the likeness of Adam’s transgression. He is a type of the Coming One.” (CSB – Read the chapter)

How did sin get here? And how does it work? Does everyone sin individually, or is there such a thing as corporate guilt? An orthodox doctrine of sin is an important thing to have, but also a difficult one to clarify. It’s difficult because it involves asking some hard questions. It’s difficult because it involves answering them as well. As Paul keeps rolling forward in his exploration of the Gospel, he is next offering some important insight on an historically orthodox understanding of sin. Let’s take a look at what he has to say.

If you want to be a follower of Jesus, a foundational starting point on that journey is accepting the idea that there exists a supernatural God who presides over life in this world. Fortunately, the vast majority of people, including a great majority of those who aren’t Christians, already believe that. This means that if God happens to call you to engage with the minority of folks who don’t already believe that, your first task is helping them to see that naturalism is not able to offer a sufficient explanation of how the world got here and why it is the way it is today. Personally, I find the fine-tuning argument to be the most difficult for naturalists to answer. The numbers are what they are, and trying to explain them without reference to mere chance is not something I’ve ever heard any naturalist come anywhere in the universe of close to successfully doing.

Well, accepting the idea that there exists a supernatural God who presides over life in this world necessarily means that miracles are possible. That a supernatural God presiding over life in the world could occasionally operate in that world in ways that temporarily suspend its normal, physical operation is really only a matter of course. That being said, the idea of the miraculous is tough for some folks to get their heads around even if they are willing to accept the idea of God in the first place thanks to the narrative of secularism that holds sway in so much of our public discourse.

As a result, when we set out to invite someone to consider embracing an inherently supernatural worldview, it’s okay to let them merely dip their toes in the water at first. If you want to follow Jesus, there are really just two miracles you need to accept. There’s good reason to accept all the rest of the miracles presented in the Scriptures, and once you start following Jesus, you’re pretty likely to eventually come around to seeing why accepting all the rest is an entirely reasonably proposition, but on the front end, just two are necessary. These are Jesus’ resurrection from the dead (this is the most important one) and God’s creation of the world from out of nothing in the beginning.

One of the second-tier special acts of God is the creation of humanity. This is one of those thorny flash points where “science” (which doesn’t really exist as an institution like many naturalists like to speak about it, but we’ll adopt that language for the moment for the purposes of argument) and the Christian worldview have clashed in major ways over the last century and a half or so. One of the reasons for this is that naturalists, driven by the foundational dogma of Darwinism, insist that the creation of people couldn’t possibly have unfolded like Moses describes in the Genesis account of creation. Meanwhile, on the Christian side of the confrontation we have things like Paul’s statement here that “sin entered the world through one man,” which would seem to necessitate a belief in the creation of humanity beginning with…well…one man like Moses described.

On the naturalist’s side of the debate, they’ll point to things like the Human Genome Project (which was originally headed up by a confessionally evangelical Christian in Francis Collins) and its declaration that it is genetically impossible that humanity as we know it began from a single genetic pair. Therefore, the Genesis account must either be wrong or else a kind of metaphor that is introduced for the purposes of advancing a narrative and then extended through the rest of the Scriptures (or, I guess, technically both).

Here’s the problem with this. (And know well that those five words will serve as a major trigger for many naturalists who will immediately start up a chorus of, “BUT SCIENCE!!…”) Assuming on a basically Darwinian account of the gradual evolution of humanity. New species require new genetic information. A lot of new genetic information. Yes, some geneticists will argue that we are only about 3% genetically different from apes – our evolutionary forebears – but that 3% contains a vast amount of genetic information including quite a few unique proteins. And while it would be nice to hand wave away the significance of that, modern, peer-reviewed research into the formation of proteins reveals that the odds of even a fairly simple protein developing entirely by chance are fantastically small. Calling the odds infinitesimally small would not be too much of a rhetorical stretch.

If humanity really developed in a variety of places at functionally the same time and in similar enough ways to call all of these different origin points the same species, this means that a significant number of proteins and a significant amount of mostly identical genetic information all developed in these different places at basically the same time. The odds against that happening are almost impossible to quantify they are so small. In other words, in insisting that there was not an original pair who marked the beginning of humanity as we know it, naturalists are asking us to accept an idea that is vastly more unlikely from a statistical standpoint than not. To put that in different terms, they are asking us to accept something wildly more miraculous (minus, you know, the existence of a supernatural God who is in the business of the miraculous) than what first Jews and then Christians have believed for thousands of years. From strictly the standpoint of logical simplicity, the Genesis account is far easier to swallow than what naturalists would have us believe.

Can you hear the chorus building up to a fever pitch yet? BUT SCIENCE!?!

Look, Scientists once believed that things burned because of the ubiquitous presence of a fire-like element known as phlogiston that was liberated when they were burned. This phlogiston was absorbed out of the air by plants which was why the air we breathe doesn’t spontaneously combust. Everyone “knew” this was the case. Until they didn’t. When Darwin first proposed his theory of evolution, scientists “knew” that cells were fairly simplistic blobs of goo with a nucleus in the middle of them. They all “knew” this until they didn’t.

Until several decades into the 20th century, scientists “knew” the universe had always existed. Einstein even fudged equations that showed mathematically that the universe did begin at some point in the finite past so they didn’t show that. Then Hubble observed the “red shift” proving that it did have a beginning in the finite past. The theological implications of the universe’s having a beginning in the finite past were so patently obvious that many atheists in the scientific community at the time refused to accept it until the evidence was so overwhelming they couldn’t do so and maintain their intellectual credibility any longer. The very name given to this creational event – “the Big Bang” – was an attempt to mockingly deride the notion on the part of atheist astronomer, Fred Hoyle.

Yes, the Human Genome Project currently shows that humanity doesn’t go back to a single pair, but even the very smartest scientists in history have been wrong in the past. And in the last hundred years, when more evidence has come in demonstrating previously held theories to be in error, the corrections have fairly uniformly pointed back toward conclusions that the Christian worldview already supported. I’m comfortable assuming that will yet happen here. And, yes, naturalists will mock that faith-rooted position, but that’s okay. Even if what Paul is arguing here is based on a metaphor and not a precise understanding of human history, God still created the world, and Jesus still rose from the dead.

I say all of that by way of setup. Let’s turn our attention to what Paul actually says here. Sin entered the world through one man. There was a point in ancient human history when the world was without sin. Then the decision was made to rebel against God’s sovereign authority, and sin has been on the loose ever since. The first man’s decision to sin, to use his God-given ability to make meaningful and consequential choices to choose to submit to his own authority rather than God’s, introduced a stain into the very nature of humanity that’s been with us ever since.

His decision resulted in our separation from God. When we rejected His sovereignty and authority, we created relational distance between us and Him. The problem with this move (well, one of the many problems with this move) is that God is the source of all life and goodness. There is no source of life other than Him. There is no source of goodness other than Him. Well, when you disconnect from the only source of life, you are left with nothing but death. When you disconnect from the only source of goodness, you are left with nothing but evil. And, because the introduction of sin fundamentally corrupted our nature in a way that has been passed on generationally ever since (theologians have long debated how this works, but that’s not something we’re going to get into in this post that is already too long), this death-causing separation has always existed as well. It exists because of the nature we are given, and it also exists because we fall in line with our nature and continue the pattern that keeps us separated. It’s a both-and.

Now, in Paul’s original audience, all of this would have been taken as a matter of course. What would have popped up as an item for debate was the impact of the Law on sin. Didn’t the Law serve to define what is sin and what isn’t? Yes and no. The Law did clarify which kinds of behaviors were sinful and which weren’t, but sin was here before the Law. It wasn’t like the Law introduced sin. By helping to define sin, though, what the Law did accomplish was to reveal just how big the problem of sin really was (and is). In a sense, it made the problem of sin even worse.

The Law was a gift of grace, but as Paul will talk about more soon, it also brought condemnation into the picture in a way it hadn’t existed before. Yet while this made things harder for us in one way, it also made it easier for us to know when we were out of sync with God’s expressed will and character. It made us more accountable, but also more able to live within the lines. It also exposed just how profound our inability to remain on the path of righteousness really is.

Still, though, “death reigned from Adam to Moses, even over those who did not sin in the likeness of Adam’s transgression.” Once we were separated from God, that separation could only be bridged by our returning to Him what we took from Him in the beginning, namely, our lives. Returning our lives would mean accepting death, though, so death held the floor either way. We were dead in our sins, but death was the only was to atone for them. Things were in a decidedly sorry state. God’s solution to this mess is something we’ll start talking more about tomorrow. Stay tuned.