Therefore, just as through one man sin entered the world, and death through sin, and this death spread to all men, because all sinned – (13) (For until the law sin was in the world, but sin is not imputed when there is no law. (14) Nevertheless death reigned from Adam to Moses, even over those who had not sinned according to likeness of the transgression of Adam, who is a type of Him who was to come. (15)But the free gift is not like the offense. For if by the one man’s offense many died, much more the grace of God and the gift by the grace of one Man, Jesus Christ, abounded to many.

The letter to the Romans was written by the apostle Paul. Today’s verses are difficult text but the idea is fairly clear; Paul is teaching the doctrine of imputed righteousness in Christ Jesus as opposed to imputed physical and spiritual death through the one act of Adam. God withdrew from us as He did from Adam. As the representative head of the human race, in Adam’s sin we are condemned through no fault of our own individually but ALSO we are justified/accepted by God individually in Jesus Christ through no merit of our own. Death is a necessary consequence of sin; death passes through/reaches to all because in Adam all sinned. Death is universal because sin is universal. The only way to escape the effects of the fall of the human race is through Christ’s righteous act, imputed to us by grace through faith.

We have a sin nature that is given to us when we are born and Paul is drawing an analogy between justification and condemnation. Paul contrasts our old identity in Adam with our new identity in Christ. God’s gracious gift of righteousness in Christ is far greater than the devastation of sin that resulted from Adam’s disobedience. The tree was a test of man’s dependence on God and sin is ultimately unbelief. Through Adam sin entered the human race – it had existed previously as the serpent came in to the garden with sin so what Adam did was not the origin of sin but just sin in man. It had also existed in the angelic sphere evidently long before the sin in the garden. The spiritual death Adam died the moment he took the fruit is lived out ultimately in physical death. The remedy for spiritual death is eternal life in faith in Christ. The remedy for physical death is the resurrection of the body. But there is no there is no remedy for eternal death when there is no response to the revelation of God.

C.S. Lewis writes in Mere Christianity “The moment you have a self at all, there is a possibility of putting yourself first – wanting to be at the center – wanting to be God, in fact. That was the sin of Satan: and that was the sin he taught the human race……..what Satan put into the heads of our remote ancestors was the idea that they ‘could be like Gods’ – could set up on their own as if they had created themselves – be their own masters – invent some sort of happiness for themselves outside God, apart from God.”