The Tale of Two Adams
Passage: Romans 5:12-17
Paul has been speaking at great length about our being reconciled to God through faith in Christ whereby we receive His imputed righteousness and are saved by His life.
All this talk of justification, reconciliation, and salvation leads Paul to bring up what makes all that necessary, namely our fall, our sin, death and ruin by Adam. Last week we said the very word reconciliation implies a previous alienation and hostility, we were once enemies.
In vss. 12-14 Paul shows the depths of this alienation and in vss. 15ff beauty of the reconciliation. Paul leads us through a series of comparisons and contrasts between the two great heads of humanity, the first Adam and the Second Adam, and their two actions and the two destinies that follow those actions. By the first man sin entered the world and with it death, and by the second Man righteousness came into the world, and with it eternal life.
There are two ways to be human. Adam and Eve were Humanity 1.0. God downloaded Humanity 1.0 on earth in the Garden of Eden and it was glorious. But that system crashed.
God could have written the whole thing off, but He didn’t. In Genesis 3:15 God announced that He had a new version ready to download. Jesus is Humanity 2.0, in the new covenant we are the new creation.