Christ Our Provision (continued)
In Adam - the Ruin of the Race (continued)
Adam the Federal Head of the Race
As the federal head of the human race, Adam acted for the human family contained in him: so that when he sinned, all men sinned, when he fell, all men fell; when he became a sinner, he dragged mankind with him into sinnerhood. Adam's one sin produced a race of sinners (Romans 5:12; Romans 5:19).
Adam's one sin took the whole human race in him into condemnation and judgment (Romans 5:18).
Thus Romans 5 clearly reveals that the whole race is brought into utter ruin through union with Adam. "In Adam" mankind was taken into sin, death, condemnation and judgment. The ruin wrought within every human personality could not be stated more tersely or more tragically than in the two statements "sin abounded" (Romans 5:20) and "sin reigned" (Romans 5:21).
The whole being of the sinner became sinful. Sin permeated every nook and cranny of the human personality until the mind, the heart, the will, and even the body and its every member was tainted with and polluted by sin. It is God's picture of the leprosy of sin; a state of utter depravity. Because of man's sinfulness, God sees the sinner as sin.
But the work sin wrought in the human personality has not yet been fully stated. In order to keep all the ground gained, sin, backed up by satan its founder and director, took over undivided control. "Sin reigned." Sin dethroned God and enthroned itself as absolute dictator. Sin made the sinner its bondslave. Adam was no longer a free man. He had been promised by the archdeceiver and archliar a freedom beyond anything he had enjoyed. But he was bound as by chains of iron by the sinful nature now in control. Sin was lord over his sinful being and he was its object bondslave.
As it was with him, so was it with the race contained in him. "All history of sin is only an expression of an already ever more real original sinfulness. All sinful becoming only occurs on the ground of an original sinful being. Our being, doing, is grounded in an original nature." Do we need any proof of this? If so, just look upon any baby unable as yet to walk or even to talk, in a display of most evident temper when its will is crossed. Once on an ocean steamer I witnessed what was truly one of the most awful manifestations of temper I have ever seen, in a baby less than a year old The child screamed, howled and kicked in such an uncontrollable fashion that its mother, an officer of the ship, and some of us who offered assistance, stood helpless before this infant in whom "sin reigned."
The regency of sin expands. Death came by sin. When sin entered, death entered. Sin and death are twins. In Scripture and in human history they are always seen coupled together. Where "sin reigned" "death reigned." Even the infant, who has committed no act of transgression for which it is accountable, dies. Every human being is born into this world "dead in trespasses and sins" (Ephesians 2:1). This grip of spiritual death holds every sinner even up to the hour of physical death, and on to eternal death, which is hell, unless he is born again and receives eternal life through Jesus Christ the Saviour.
"In Adam" the whole human race is in utter ruin - "made sinners"; "sin reigned"; "death reigned." It is left both helpless and hopeless, for the sinner can do nothing to save himself from the devastation and destruction wrought by sin. The old creation "in Adam" called in Scripture "the old man" (Romans 6:6) came under satan's domination and jurisdiction. Adam's sin had given satan victory over God in the battle of Eden.
There is nothing new under the sun." New words or phrases may be coined to express ideas as old as antiquity. One such expression is a "cold war" which we hear daily to describe acknowledged warfare between nations which is most real, but which s not yet been declared militarily. satan is the initiator of the idea. The practice of "cold war" began in Eden. The archenemy of God was in Eden to wage a "cold war" against God; to gain by cunning, by subtlety, by intrigue, by lying propaganda, the victory in and over Adam and Eve and thus over God. When by their own choice they acted in self-will against God's will, they ignorantly gave their allegiance to satan rather than to God. On the battlefield of humanity satan won a signal victory in this first battle of the "cold war" through he strategy and tactics of the underground.
But in Eden, in the very place of defeat and in the very moment of defeat, God openly declares war against satan the proclaims the victory to be won, which would be a full and a final victory through a double bruising (Genesis 3:15).
~Ruth Paxson~
(continued with # 56)
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