Romans 5:20-21

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"20 The law was added so that the trespass might increase. But where sin increased, grace increased all the more, 21 so that, just as sin reigned in death, so also grace might reign through righteousness to bring eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord."

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Paul begins v.20 by banking off of vv.13-14, which said "for before the law was given, sin was in the world. But sin is not taken into account when there is no law. Nevertheless, death reigned from the time of Adam to the time of Moses, even over those who did not sin by breaking a command, as did Adam, who was a pattern of the one to come."

People died between the times of Adam and Moses, but they didn't know why. They didn't understand sin and its consequences. So God gave the Law so that people could recognize sin for what it is - a spiritual murderer. Now they had an objective standard by which to measure their holiness and righteousness.

This was stated more succinctly in Romans 3:20 - "through the law we become people conscious of sin."

The upshot of this was that sin increased (through awareness of it). In other words, people not only sinned, they were now also guilty. This will be explained in more detail in chapter 7. That's what 7:13-14 are all about.

It reminds me of decades ago when I was driving through Alabama. I had never been there. I turned right at a red light and a siren started whirling behind me. As it turned out, unlike every other state I'd driven in, at that time Alabama did not permit right turns on red.

Did I break the law? Yes.

Was I guilty? No.

My action was innocent (though I couldn't convince the cop to see it that way ).

God, however, did not hold people accountable for sins they were unaware of.

When Adam brought sin and death into the world, God's initial response was to lay down the Law that the sin offended.
But in vv. 20-21 we learn the rest of the story. If God had only given the Law that condemns sin, He would have had to destroy the entire human race! But the law also enabled grace to increase, because grace requires guilt (re-read that. Again. And now again).

So as sin increased, God increased His grace "all the more" - making us righteous through His own righteousness, which results in eternal life through Jesus Christ.

But he didn't stop at removing my guilt. He wanted my eternal fellowship, so He began transforming me so that I would live with Him forever.

God's grace exceeds my guilt! His grace reigns in righteousness the same way that sin reigns in death. There are now two concurrent systems in place:

1. The reign of sin, which came through law and resulted in death, and
2. The reign of grace, which came through God's righteousness and resulted in life.
   

Though I will die because of sin, I will live because of grace.

I can't wait to get to chapter 7. When we get there Paul will reconcile so many of the tensions we feel reading through his words here. I'm resisting the temptation to refer to that text right now simply because I think it's important for us to to experience this weight, just the way Paul wrote it and the Holy Spirit inspired it.

Paul could have just given us the bottom line answers - which is what many Christians want. But instead, he develops one insight into another into another, etc.

If you are about my age, it reminds me of watching Bob Ross paint on PBS. Remember the TV show “The Joy Of Painting” and the soft spoken white guy with the big afro? He would make strokes here and there as he talked, splotch a little paint in seemingly random areas of the canvas. At best, it looked like a little child’s painting. But then, while he talked and taught, he kept adding paint until – in 20 minutes or less he had magically created a brilliant masterpiece. You could never see it happening from the start, but in the end it all fit together, and it was beautiful!

Paul has been doing that for 5 chapters now. The picture's starting to take shape!

The tension we're feeling between sin, grace, faith, law, righteousness, etc. here is necessary so that we can fully appreciate the masterpiece later.

We can start by looking backward at Romans 3:20 where it says that the law made us conscious of sin. It's interesting that nowhere does it say "the law made us conscious of righteousness," or that "the law was given so that righteousness would increase."

That doesn't mean God was trying to trick us or trap us by giving us rules we could never live up to. It simply means that we needed to see ourselves the way we really are in order to recognize our sinfulness in order to realize our need for Him.

We are many generations from Adam. We tend to look back at Genesis 3 and think "it’s terrible that Adam did that." But God wants us here to understand that we are no different - we can't keep His laws any more than Adam could keep the single law he was given (don't touch that fruit!).

The Law God gave was definitely a revelation of God's will, but in no way could words in a human language adequately represent God’s righteousness.

Neither is the Law eternal. Verse 20 says Law was "added" (NIV) or that it "came" (NASB).

Law didn't always exist. Law is unnecessary when every living thing is holy.

Moreover, in a different letter Paul wrote that the Law had an expiration date. He said It was added "because of transgressions, until the seed should come to whom the promise was made" (Galatians 3:19).

Now look back at our current text in Romans 5:13. In the first first phrase Paul wrote that the law "was added because of transgressions." That is a direct parallel to Galatians3:19 above.

In other words, the law was given to prepare the way for Christ. God was planning salvation through Christ all along!

Jewish theology has never recognized the purpose of the Law as being to increase sin. They have missed it. But think of how Jesus used the Law in the Sermon on the Mount. The Law awakened an awareness of sins enough that Jesus could take it even further by showing that the seed of sin wasn't in actions but in the heart Don't kill... don't even hate! Don't commit adultery... don't even lust!).

With the Law, if you didn't do it you weren't guilty. Free from the Law in grace, we see that even our thoughts and intentions are unholy whether we act upon them or not.

If God had stopped there, He would have been a very bad God indeed – vindictive and dastardly, I'd say. Increase our awareness of sin and then stop?

Fortunately, while the Law increased our guilt, "Grace increased all the more" (Romans 5:20).

I can feel Paul's relief when he finally got to write those final words! He no doubt wanted to say them all along, but first he had to adequately lay the foundation.

Now in ecstatic praise he gets to write about the solution. Yes sin increased, but then God increased His grace "all the more!!!!!" I know there must have been a zillion exclamation marks in Paul's mind as those words flowed through his pen.

The Law served sin, but sin served grace, and in that way the Law served grace! YEAH! What man could have ever devised such a system?

That will be the focus of chapter 7 when we get there.

Incidentally, Paul used a very rare Greek word in Romans 5:20, hyperperisseuo. The NASB translates it as a phrase. Grace "increased all the more."

The prefix "hyper" means what we recognize it to mean in English - extreme, abundant.

The suffix "perisseuo" means "exceeding, overflowing, more than enough."

So very literally, Paul is calling it "extremely overflowing grace."

Before Christ, Adam stood between us and the Father. That meant we die.

Now Jesus stands between us and the Father. That means we live.

And someday, no one will stand between us and the Father. We'll have eternal, direct fellowship with the Him because we will, finally, be perfected.


Romans 6:1
1 What shall we say, then? Shall we go on sinning so that grace may increase?

In chapters 6 and 7, Paul anticipated and answered three objections that his readers might raise to this radical grace:

• OBJECTION 1 - Grace encourages people to sin more so they can have more grace (Romans 6:1-14)
• OBJECTION 2 - Righteousness through Grace makes sin acceptable (Romans 6:15-7:6)
• OBJECTION 3 - The law must be sinful if it increases our guilt (Romans 7:7-25)
  

Each of these objections stems from a basic misunderstanding of the nature of either faith or grace.

Our current study answers OBJECTION 1: Grace encourages people to sin more so they can have more grace (Romans 6:2-4)
2 By no means! We died to sin; how can we live in it any longer? 3 Or don't you know that all of us who were baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death? 4 We were therefore buried with him through baptism into death in order that, just as Christ was raised from the dead through the glory of the Father, we too may live a new life.

To properly understand Paul's reasoning here, we just need to remember that:

• We die physically because sin reigns in this world through death.
• Even Jesus died physically though He never sinned because He lived a world where sin and death reign. 
• In order to conquer death's power, Jesus had to die and then live again. He did that.
• We can't do that by ourselves because we can't be righteous by ourselves. If we just died on our own, we would never live again.
• So the offer is now for us to join Jesus in His death and life!
  

When we are baptized into Christ we are baptize into His death. We are buried with Him, and the new life we have is His life. We participate in that supernatural event that happened Easter weekend two thousand or so years ago.

When the Bible calls us Christ's body, this is exactly what is meant - we are one with Christ. We are His second incarnation.

And that is the reason we are justified and considered righteous.

People have an opportunity now to be judged by God's righteousness rather than by their own sinfulness.

I created the following simple graphic to try to demonstrate how I believe here regarding acquiring  union with God.