“The law came along to multiply the trespass. But where sin multiplied, grace multiplied even more so that, just as sin reigned in death, so also grace will reign through righteousness, resulting in eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord.” (CSB – Read the chapter)

Every relationship has boundaries. Those boundaries exist whether we are aware of them or not. If we violate those boundaries ignorantly, we may not necessarily be intentionally at fault of anything, but we still have departed from the relationship. Knowing exactly where the boundaries are is helpful, but it also makes our transgressing them all the more problematic because now we know what we are doing. When God gave the Law He made the problem of sin even worse than it already was. But He also set the stage for even more powerfully making things right. Let’s explore this together as we finish off chapter five today.

G.K. Chesterton was one of those writers who had a knack for quotable lines. Several of those lines have to do with the topic of sin. For instance, talking about the universality of sin, he said, “We’re all in the same boat, and we’re all seasick.” Talking about removing boundaries to sin that God put in place, he said, “Whenever you remove any fence, always pause long enough to ask why it was put there in the first place.” One more just for fun. When writing in his classic book, Orthodoxy, Chesterton made a humorous observation about the unavoidably obvious existence of sin: “Original sin is the only doctrine that’s been empirically validated by 2,000 years of human history.”

Our culture professes to not like the idea of sin at all, but that’s not true. The truth is that a culture that used to broadly accept a basic Christian theological framework for understanding sin, but which has left that behind for a new definition, simply doesn’t like the Christian theological framework any longer. That doesn’t mean that the culture doesn’t accept the notion of sin. That’s silly. Everybody has some notion of sin. Every single worldview holds that some things are good and right to do, and some things are wrong to do. Those wrong things are sinful whether that word gets used or not. If you prefer not to use the word “sin” to describe those wrong things because you don’t like the religious overtones it has, that’s fine, but at least be honest enough to acknowledge we’re still talking about the same basic problem from two different directions. The right question to ask is not whether sin exists in the first place. The question is what falls on the list, what doesn’t, and how do you justify calling which thing what? And when something falls on the list, we tend to define it and punish it so that people don’t do it.

Before the giving of the Law of Moses, sin existed in the world. It was plenty prevalent. At one point it got so bad that in describing the moment Moses wrote that, “every inclination of the human mind was nothing but evil all the time.” God acted to do something to save us from destroying ourselves then, but while His actions in the Flood functioned as a kind of hard reset, they also served to demonstrate conclusively that the problem of sin wasn’t an environmental one. It was an internal one. We see this in the fact that one of the very first stories from after the floodwaters had cleared shows that sin was still alive and well. It was rooted deeply in the human heart – even in the human heart of a man God Himself had declared to be righteous.

Dealing with sin was going to require changing our hearts from the inside out. Getting to the point at which doing that didn’t require a total subversion of human will and an abrogation of the ability to make meaningful and consequential decisions He had given us was going to take time to reach properly. God was plenty patient for the task, but He also knew we were going to need some guardrails to help keep us from veering quite so wildly off the road as we did before. He did this in the small with the Noahic Covenant. He did it far more comprehensively with the Law of Moses.

The Law was about helping us to see where the boundaries were for a relationship with Him. The specific boundaries He gave to Israel weren’t necessarily about defining every single thing the Law touched on as sinful for all time. That doesn’t mean God changed His mind on certain things, though. It means that some of the Laws were about setting Israel apart as a people so that they thought about themselves as different; as holy. Still, by drawing boundaries for the people to live in, the Law in a sense caused sin to multiply. By further defining the problem of sin for the people, it also served to make the problem much, much worse.

Paul makes this point here in v. 20. “The law came along to multiply the trespass.” It took sin and made it appear to be a far more substantial problem than it had looked before. Now, all kinds of things the people had perhaps been accustomed to doing were to be considered sinful. And, because of the way our sin-broken hearts work, it also perhaps inclined them in the direction of some behaviors now defined as sinful that they hadn’t considered before. That is, by telling the people not to do certain things, it likely made them want to do some of them more. In accomplishing all of this, though, the Law wasn’t creating a problem that hadn’t existed before. Instead, it served to merely pull back the curtain on a problem that already existed.

Thankfully, God was prepared for this. His goal was and still is to be in a right relationship with us. He was willing to be gracious with us during those long years when the Law was necessary and in place. He was willing to treat us not like our sin deserved, but rather better than that. Yes, He would still occasionally have to hold us accountable when we strayed far from the boundaries, and sometimes vigorously accountable, but as often as we kept returning, He kept taking us back. Everything He did toward us was with the end goal of a relationship in mind. In this, His grace toward us – His treating us better than we deserved – multiplied many times over. The more we sinned, the more grace He gave. “But where sin multiplied, grace multiplied even more.”

This grace hit its absolute climax in Christ. Sin may have been reigning in death in that as long as it held (and holds) sway, death will only ever be the outcome, but once Jesus opened the doors to life, grace took the throne and won’t ever relinquish it. “Just as sin reigned in death, so also grace will reign through righteousness.” The end result of grace in Christ is life. Grace is our receiving what He earned even though we don’t deserve it. And He earned eternal life. So, where grace reigns through righteousness, the result is “eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord.”

Sin – or you pick whatever other word for wrongdoing you prefer – may be a big problem, but we serve a bigger God. When we place our trust in Him through Christ, we can receive the hope and help we need to walk in the newness of life; eternal life. Do that and live.