Continuing our discussion from last week, until there was a Law, covenant, or agreement between God and man, there was no way to sin! Adam and he alone was in covenant with God for the eating of the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil. Eve was not. Had Eve eaten, she would have not sinned. This seems extremely difficult for some to understand. Eve was in the transgression, not the transgressor!! 1 Timothy 2:12-15 Both Adam and Eve passed on to mankind a curse.
Man was created by God. A part of life is death. Death at first carried no pain (as did childbirth for woman). When Adam sinned God changed the effect of death, it now would come with pain. Man would deteriorate, get old, and dissolve back into dust in or out of the grave. There are many examples in the Bible which show man DOES NOT HAVE TO DETEORIATE!! Enoch, Moses, and Caleb are examples that show man DOES NOT have to deteriorate. Animals were not affected nor ws any other creation, that all came with the Flood. No animal has EVER sinned and even though deterioration of their body comes, this was not a curse of sin! Quick death is often considered a blessing because the pain and anguish is not experienced. That man dies, then, is not punishment because of the sin, it is the natural law of cessation. That man dies in deterioration is not punishment, but that pain is associated with that death came from the penalty imposed on Adam and his seed. Eve had had children before she had sinned, with no pain of childbirth. As a part of her participation in the sin of Adam, Eve (and all the rest of the Eve’s until the end of time) women suffer pain in childbirth. Because some individual women do not have birth pains and some die without deterioration, does not change the Law of God. As has been stated many times in this series of studies; the ONLY things Adam of Eve could impose on their children would be PHYSICAL things, not spiritual. Neither Adam nor Eve could affect our spiritual make-up, association, or fellowship with God or the spiritual realm. Each human being born has an INDIVIDUAL responsibility, families, not a ancestors, nor genes answer to the “Judge of all the Earth” for them.
Adam sinned, the Holy Spirit through the apostle Paul writes; but his sin in NO WAY is equal to or the same as nor has the same magnitude as the death of Christ!! Paul’s first argument is that the kind or type of sin was not possible from Adam to Moses. The reason it could be possible after Moses is made clear; there was again a moral law (not the law of the conscience). The law of the conscience already existed before the moral law was given to Adam. The new moral law was the command to keep the Sabbath. This law was not binding on the Gentile or the Jewish women, only the circumcised Jewish male who lived under the Law of Moses!! (Even the circumcised Jewish male who lived and died BEFORE that day the Ten Commandments were given could not commit this type of sin!!) In Romans 5 the Jew was trying to make the faith of Abraham equal to the death of Jesus Christ. The whole passage is given to show the glory and power of the death of Christ-something even to which the sin of Adam could not be compared!! Death and Life are not equivalents!! GOD AND SATAN ARE NOT EQUALS. What the physical punishment given because of the sin of Adam and the participation in that sin by Eve was miniscule compared to the spiritual loss they suffered!! NO PHYSICAL DEATH WHICH WOULD ABOLISH SIN AND RESTORE FELLOWSHIP WITH GOD COULD BE COMPARED!! “For if through the offense of ONE (the) many be dead, much more the grace of God, and the gift by grace, which is by ONE man, Jesus Christ, faith abounded unto (the) many.” Romans 5:15 Who are “the many” you ask? Matthew 20:28 tells us: “ Even as the Son of Man came not to be ministered unto, but to minister, and so give His life a ransom for (the) many,” who Paul writes about in Galatians 3:26-27 when the Spirit leads him to write; “For ye are all the children of God by faith in Christ Jesus; For as many (there is your many!!) of you as have been baptized into Christ have put on Christ.”
There is NOTHING that can compare to the grace (plan) of God which included the death of Christ!! This is how Adam is a type of Christ. Because of the sin of Adam all mankind is affected physically so by the death of Christ all affected, spiritually, even to those who did not die on the tree as did Christ!! The SPIRITUAL affects the spiritual, the physical the physical. That is Law!!