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Quick note for new subscribers: We're in the middle of Romans right now. If you just joined us, you might feel like you're walking into the middle of a movie. You are. Here's what I recommend:

Keep reading below if you want to start where we are (Romans 5:9-11)
Or go back to the beginning - [Here's the intro to Romans], and [here's the full archive] so you can start from Chapter 1.

Either way works. I just don't want you to feel lost.

Before diving into my notes, I encourage you to read Romans 5:12-14 first (or the whole chapter if you have time).

I include all the Scripture below, but there’s something about sitting with the whole chapter first — giving yourself room to be curious.

What catches you off guard?
What doesn't make sense?
Where is that?
Who's that?
Why?

Those questions will make the notes hit deeper.

"When disciples followed a rabbi, they followed him closely so they would never be out of his sight, never be someplace where they couldn’t hear him speak. They followed him so closely that his sandals often kicked up dust."

May you be covered in His dust.

Some weeks Scripture feels like a deer grazing in an open field with birds singing and a gentle breeze.

And some weeks it feels like I’m wrestling a bear and I honestly don’t know if I’ll make it through to the other side.

Romans 5:12-21 is one of those passages.

Many scholars consider it one of the most difficult paragraphs not only in Romans, but in the entire New Testament. Peter even wrote that some of Paul's writings are "hard to understand." He might have been thinking of this exact passage when he wrote that.

Don't do what so many people do with difficult passages. Don't skip it.

Slow down.
Read it again.

Because buried beneath the surface of these verses is one of the greatest explanations of the gospel ever written.

Today, we'll spend all of our time on just three of those verses.

Paul begins a comparison, "Just as...", and naturally, you're waiting for him to finish it.

"Just as Adam did this... so Christ did that."

It's how Paul writes.

Except... he doesn't do it here. At least not yet.

Instead, Paul interrupts himself, and starts talking about Adam, death, Moses, the Law, and a mystery that stretches all the way back to the Garden of Eden.

Paul begins verse 12 with the word therefore, a word Paul never wastes. He's connecting everything he's about to say with everything he's already told us.

We have peace with God.
We have access into grace.
We rejoice in the hope of the glory of God.

Christ died for us while we were still sinners, and we have been justified by His blood and reconciled to God through the death of His Son.

Paul is about to explain how any of that is possible. How can God treat guilty people as righteous? How can the obedience of Jesus be counted as ours? How can His death satisfy a judgment we deserved? How can one Man stand in the place of so many?

To answer those questions, Paul doesn't begin at the cross. He goes all the way back to the beginning. Back before Abraham. Before Moses. Before Israel. Back before there were nations and laws and temples and priests. Back before sacrifices, or kings.

He takes us back to a garden.

To one man.

One man did something, and because of what that one man did, something entered the world.

Sin.

And through sin, death.

You can almost finish Paul's sentence yourself. Just as sin entered through one man, so righteousness came through one Man. Just as death came through Adam, so life came through Christ.

But Paul doesn't say that.

He stops.

“...because all sinned."

Those three words are the reason this sentence suddenly changes direction. Paul knows exactly how they could be understood.

You could read them like this: Adam sinned and brought sin into the world. Then every person after Adam committed their own sins, and because each person sinned individually, death spread to everyone.

Romans 3:23 says, "For all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God."
And Romans 6:23 says, "For the wages of sin is death."

We sin, and therefore we die. Right?

Because if death comes to us simply because we commit our own individual sins, then the comparison Paul is building falls apart.

Adam would introduce sin, but we would earn death for ourselves?

Christ would introduce righteousness, but we would earn life for ourselves?

That isn't the gospel Paul's spent four chapters explaining.

We're not justified because Christ helps us become righteous enough. And we're not declared righteous because we finally perform enough good works. The righteousness that saves us belongs to Someone else.

So when Paul says, "...because all sinned," he stops to explain exactly what he means, because if we misunderstand our connection to Adam, we'll misunderstand our connection to Jesus.

That's why Paul doesn't return to finish his comparison until verse 18.

Verses 13 through 17 are a bridge. He’s explaining what he means in verse 12.

Before Paul can show us how one Man's obedience can become our righteousness, he first has to explain how one man's disobedience became our condemnation.

He's a lawyer, and he's building a case.

Every good lawyer knows an argument is only as strong as its evidence, and Paul knows what he's about to claim is going to need proof. So before he says another word about Adam, before he says another word about Christ, he opens with an exhibit nobody in the room can argue with.

The dead.

Go back to Genesis 5, to the genealogy most of us skip on our way to a story we'd rather read. Adam lived nine hundred and thirty years, and he died. Seth lived nine hundred and twelve years, and he died. Enosh. Kenan. Mahalalel. Jared. Every single name in that chapter ends the exact same way.

And he died.
And he died.
And he died.

It reads less like a family tree and more like a funeral bell tolling once for every name, and Paul wants you to hear it.

Here's the argument he's making. There was no written law yet. No Ten Commandments. No Sinai. No tablets of stone. Adam had one command, don't eat from that tree, but nobody after him had a command like that to break. Cain didn't have a law against murder written down anywhere. Noah's generation didn't have a law against violence carved in stone. There was nothing to point to and say, this is where you crossed the line.

Even those who never sinned the way Adam sinned. Which means infants. Which means the ones who never made a single choice, good or bad, in their entire short lives.

Adam. Abel. Noah. Abraham. Isaac. Jacob. Your grandparents. Your parents. The last funeral you sat through, the one where you couldn't stop staring at the flowers because it was easier than looking at the casket. Every obituary you've scrolled past in a newspaper, another name, another set of dates, another and he died.

Paul looks at every headstone in every one of those cemeteries and says, that's my evidence.

If death only came because people broke a written law, then people who lived before the law existed should have lived forever. They didn't. Which means the wages of death were already being paid out long before anyone had a law to sin against.

Something happened in a garden, to one man, and it reached forward through every single grave that has ever been dug since.

That's Paul's case.

Somewhere in the last two sections, a thought has probably crossed your mind, and I'd rather say it out loud than pretend you're not thinking it.

I never met Adam. I never stood in that garden. I never touched that tree, never heard that command, never made that choice. And yet Paul is telling me that his sin became my sentence, that a decision made thousands of years before I existed reached across every generation in between and landed, somehow, on me.

Go ahead. Say it. Because Paul isn't afraid of the question.

“How is that fair?”

I don't think Paul expects you to feel nothing when you read verse 12. I think he expects exactly this. A reader who stops, who pushes back, who wants to know how a just God could hold anyone responsible for a choice they never made.

He's not finished answering.

Paul's laying a foundation, and a foundation, on its own, always looks unfinished. You wouldn't stand in the middle of a job site, look at a slab of poured concrete with rebar sticking out of it, and call the house finished. You'd call it a beginning. Paul’s still pouring concrete. The fairness question, the real answer to it, comes later in this chapter, when he shows you the other side of the exact same principle, and you get to decide whether it feels like injustice or like the best news you've ever heard.

Because the same doctrine that feels unfair when it's Adam's sin credited to you is the only doctrine that can explain how Christ's righteousness gets credited to you too. You don't get to keep one and throw out the other. They stand or fall together.

Paul knows that.

He's counting on you to feel the weight of it before he shows you why the weight was worth carrying.

Here's the reveal Paul’s been building toward this entire time, and it's easy to miss if you're only watching Adam.

Paul wasn't writing a character study of the first man, weighing his failures, keeping score of his choices, asking you to sit in judgment over someone who lived and sinned before any of us were born.

Without Adam, you'll never understand justification, because justification only makes sense once you understand that someone else's record can legally become your own. Without representation, without one man standing in the place of many, you'll never understand why Christ's righteousness, His obedience, His perfect life, can become yours, credited to your account the way none of your own effort ever could.

That's why Paul spent this much time in a garden before he ever brought you to a cross. He needed you to see the pattern before he showed you its fulfillment.

And that's exactly what the final phrase of verse 14 is doing, quietly, almost easy to skip past if you're reading fast.

"...who is a type of Him who was to come."

“A type” is a real person, a real event, placed by God, deliberately, to foreshadow someone greater who was still to come.

Think of it as a shadow. A shadow isn't fake. It's real, it falls across the ground, you can see its shape and its edges. But a shadow was never meant to be the point. A shadow exists because something is standing in the light, and the shadow's whole purpose is to tell you a shape is coming that you haven't seen yet.

Adam is the shadow.

It was Christ standing in the light the entire time.

Every place Adam's sin reached, death, condemnation, guilt inherited by people who never chose it, is the outline of something. And what it outlines is a Man whose obedience would reach just as far, into just as many lives, credited to people…

That's why Paul says "much more" later in this chapter. Because Adam is the shadow, and Christ is so much more than the shadow. And once you finally see Him standing in the light, you'll wonder how the shadow ever looked large enough to be a problem at all.

But that's next time.

We've only met the first Adam.

We've stood in the Garden of Eden, walked through a cemetery, and sat with a question that still hasn't been fully answered.

Be patient with this passage.

Study it with your Bible open. Pray before you read, and pray again before you study. This isn't the kind of ground you rush across.

Next time, Paul introduces the second Adam.

When all ten verses are finally connected, I think you'll agree it was worth every slow step it took to get there.

I love you,

George

Covered in His Dust notes will always be free. If you’d like to support our ministry click here. Write Covered in His Dust in the memo.

George Sisneros is a full-time missionary in Guatemala and the founder of Ordinary Missionaries and the El Rosario Christian Academy for Boys.

He’s been married to his wife, Vonda, for 28 years. He’s a father to nine children, five adopted.

In 2024, George and his wife expanded to Cuba, joining forces with nine pastors committed to transforming lives through the gospel.