Grace Abounds (Rom. 5:15-17)
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Last time, we looked at Romans 5:12-21 as a whole, and in particular how it teaches us that Adam’s fall into sin has affected all mankind. We argued, especially from the parallel between Adam and Christ in verses 12-14 and 18-19, that Adam was constituted by God as the covenant head of humanity, and that all who are united to him by creation and covenant are in lieu of their union with him affected by his sin. His sin is imputed to his posterity in the sense that by virtue of our union with him, we are held liable to the consequences of his sin. As a result, we are born into this world separated from God, condemned, and under the sentence of death.
But that is not Paul’s main point here. His main point is that Adam is a figure of Christ (14). As Adam is the covenant head of all who are united to him by physical descent, even so Christ is the covenant head of all who are united to him by spiritual rebirth. And just as Adam’s sin affects his descendants, even so Christ’s obedience affects all who belong to him.
However, it is important to see exactly where the parallel lies. The parallel is that just as the sin of the one man Adam is the ultimate explanation to the problem of sin and death, even so it is the righteousness of Christ that is the ultimate solution to the problem of sin and death. His point is that it is in virtue of our union with Adam and Christ, not in terms of what we have done or not done, that we die or are made to live forever. In Adam we die; in Christ we are made alive (1 Cor. 15:20-22).
Paul is not of course saying that we don’t sin nor is he saying that we aren’t condemned for our sin. But he is saying that it was Adam’s sin rather than our own that is the ultimate explanation for sin and death. And in the same way Paul is not arguing that the believer isn’t pursuing personal holiness or that there aren’t blessings that come to us because of our obedience, but he is saying that it is not our righteousness but Christ’s that is the ultimate explanation of our being in a saved state. We don’t become saved by imitating Christ’s obedience; we are saved because his righteousness is imputed to those who believe in him, just as Adam’s sin is imputed to his posterity. This is what it means to be justified by faith in Christ: his righteousness is imputed to us and on the basis of that reality the believer is declared to be legally righteous before God.
You see this reinforced in the verses we want to look at this morning. Note the emphasis here is upon “the offence of one” (15, 16), and “one man’s offence” (17), by which Paul means Adam. What has the sin, the transgression, the offence of Adam done? It is through his offence that “many be dead” (15), that “the judgment was by one to condemnation” not just for Adam but for all of us (16), and that death reigned (17). Adam’s sin has brought death and judgment and condemnation for all of us. The emphasis here is not on what we have done but on what Adam has done.
What is the contrast? It is on the grace of God “which is by one man Jesus Christ” (15) which brings righteousness and life (16-17) to those who receive it by faith (1). Again, the emphasis is not on our doing but receiving, not on anything we have achieved but on the merit of Christ. It is in virtue of our union with him that we are saved.
The point Paul has been trying to make is that we are justified by faith in Christ, by grace, on the basis of the merits of his blood. And then that this reality is the basis of the hope of the believer, for the assurance of our salvation. We can have assurance because our salvation doesn’t depend ultimately upon our dependability but upon our being united to Christ. It is not our righteousness but his which saves us.
Some theologians have a problem with affirming the imputation of Christ’s righteousness to the believer. They will say that the expression doesn’t appear in the NT. And it is true that the statement, “The righteousness of Christ is imputed to the believer” doesn’t explicitly appear in the pages of the NT. But in verse 17 you have something that is virtually equivalent. Notice what Paul says: “For if by one man's offence death reigned by one; much more they which receive abundance of grace and of the gift of righteousness shall reign in life by one, Jesus Christ.” The apostle describes the saved as those who “receive . . . the gift of righteousness.” The question is, whose righteousness is it that we receive as a gift? The fact that Paul is contrasting the disobedience of Adam with the obedience of Christ consistently throughout verses 15-19 indicates that Paul is thinking of the righteousness of Christ here. Indeed, in verse 18 he calls it “the righteousness of one” and in verse 19 “the obedience of one,” the “one” being Christ. This is righteousness that justifies. The gift of righteousness is the righteousness of Christ that “is of many offences unto justification” (16).
It is true that the phrase Paul has used previously is “the righteousness of God imputed.” But this is no surprise, for the one whose death saves us and whose righteousness justifies us is the Son of God. In any case, the righteousness that justifies us is a gift, a gift of free grace. It is not something we can point to as the cumulative product of our work for God. We are justified by the righteousness of God in Christ given freely as a gift to those who receive it, not on the basis of works, but through the instrumentality of faith alone in Christ alone.
So we must not forget this mighty parallel between Adam and Christ. However, in verses 15-17, Paul is anxious to establish the fact that not only are Adam and Christ parallel in certain important ways, but that they are also different. There is a contrast as well as a parallel, and it is the contrast that is underlined in these verses. This is what we want to focus on this morning.
Grace Greater than all our Sin
There are multiple contrasts that we could pursue in these verses. There is the contrast between what Adam did (sin) and what Christ has done (righteousness). There is the contrast in the effect their actions had others: Adam’s sin brought condemnation, judgment, and death, whereas Christ’s obedience brings righteousness, justification, and life. There is the contrast between the justice we receive in Adam and the grace we receive in Christ. However, the contrast that I want to focus on this morning is the contrast between the power of death and the power of grace. And the point is this: as powerful as death is, grace is much more powerful.
Do you see it in the text? You see it in verse 15, when Paul says that “the grace of God and the gift by grace which is by one man, Jesus Christ, hath abounded unto many.” Actually, the way the apostle puts this is almost unexpected, for Paul sets up the contrast with, “But not as the offence, so also is the free gift. For if through the offence of one many be dead,” and then you would expect death to be contrasted with life. In other words, you expect it to go like this: “For if through the offence of one (Adam) many be dead, much more will the grace of God and the gift by grace by one man (Jesus) bring life to many.” But Paul doesn’t say it that way. Instead, he puts it like this: “much more the grace of God, and the gift by grace, which is by one man, Jesus Christ, hath abounded unto many.” The contrast is not between death and life, but between the death of many, and the grace of God that abounds to many. Now Paul does talk about the gift by grace, which he goes on to define in terms of justification and life (16-17). But the focus here is not on life per se but on the abundance of grace.
By “hath abounded,” Paul is using a word that carries the connotation of “more than enough.” When our Lord fed the multitudes, the same word (perissueo) is used to describe the bread that was left over, that was more than was needed (Mt. 14:20). In other words, if you can imagine death like a tidal wave coming in to destroy all that is in the path, grace is a wall so high and so think that death breaks upon it like ripples in a puddle. Grace doesn’t just match the need created by sin; it overcomes it, it overwhelms it. Grace is not just sufficient, though it is that (2 Cor. 12:9), but Paul here is saying that it is more than just sufficient. Grace abounds for us in Christ. The point here is not just that Christ untangles the mess Adam made. The point is that Christ has done more than that. His grace doesn’t just extract the poison of sin; it infuses into those united to him glory that goes beyond what Adam lost.
You see this contrast also in verse 16: “And not as it was by one that sinned, so is the gift: for the judgment was by one to condemnation, but the free gift is of many offences unto justification.” Here the condemnation that Adam brought into the world was brought in by a single sin, the eating of the forbidden fruit. But when Christ came into the world, he had to do more than to just undo that sin. He also had to deal with the trillions of other sins that have and will be added to Adam’s sin. And yet the apostle says that the Lord has done just that. “The free gift is of many offences (not just one) unto justification.” Here you see grace abounding over the sin of Adam along with all the other sins it spawned.
And then in verse 17, he sums up the content of the previous two verses in the words “they which receive abundance of grace [verse 15] and of the gift of righteousness [verse 16] shall reign in life by one, Jesus Christ.” But you will notice what precedes those words, It is “much more.” Yes, “by one man’s offence death reigned by one,” but “much more they which receive abundance of grace and of the gift of righteousness shall reign in life by one, Jesus Christ.” In every verse Paul is underlining the fact that the power of grace is greater than all our sin. Grace gives us much more than death and sin gave us.
And note that the parallelism of verse 17 doesn’t quite go the way we expect it here either. Paul tells us that death reigns, and you would expect that to be contrasted with life reigns. But this is not what Paul says. Instead, he says something even more glorious: he says that it is the believer who reigns in life over death through Jesus Christ. In other words, it’s not just that in Christ we live under the kindlier rule of life, but that we ourselves have been made kings and priests unto God and reign in life through the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ. As John Stott put it in his commentary on this passage, “What Christ has done for us is not just to exchange death’s kingdom for the much more gentle kingdom of life, while leaving us in the position of subjects. Instead, he delivers us from the rule of death so radically as to enable us to change places with it and rule over it, or reign in life.”[1] Or, as the author of Hebrews puts it, “Forasmuch then as the children are partakers of flesh and blood, he also himself likewise took part of the same; that through death he might destroy him that had the power of death, that is, the devil; and deliver them who through fear of death were all their lifetime subject to bondage” (Heb. 2:14-15). So we see how Paul is trying in so many different ways to get the point across about the superabounding power of grace over sin and death.
How Grace Abounds
Now the question I want to raise this morning is: what difference does this make for the believer now? The main difference that it should make is that it should make us absolutely confident in the hope that we have in Christ. Christ has come to save us from our sins. And he has come to save us from sin and all its sickening and killing effects upon the world. But he did not come to barely scrape out a meager salvation as if he is just going to barely get us across the finish line. He’s not like the cavalry who come riding up at just the last minute. No! Jesus Christ has thoroughly and finally and superabundantly defeated sin and death through his obedient life and obedient death. We can have every confidence that, as Paul himself puts it, no one who puts their trust in him will ever be ashamed. That’s the main point. We can have a firm and sure hope in Christ.
But we must not think that this superabounding grace is just for when we die. This is grace now. Adam’s sin affects us now in a myriad of ways, and we must not think that the power of grace doesn’t kick in until we get to heaven. No, grace is past grace, it is present grace, and it is future grace. Grace surrounds the believer like the ocean does a diver. And since persevering in the faith is necessary for final salvation, we can be sure that all the grace we need to do so is available to us in Jesus Christ and that there is no need we can have for which grace is not more than sufficient to meet it.
Let us consider some ways in which the grace we have received in Christ abounds for us now.
Grace abounds to enable us to receive cleansing from our own sins and failures with hope in God.
All of us sin. As I heard another pastor put it recently, conversion to Christ doesn’t make you perfect; it means you’re playing on a different team. You will still have plays where you lose yards, when you have a penalty called against you, and sometimes when it even seems like you are losing the game. But conversion means that we are wearing a different uniform. We are no longer on the team of the devil and the world; we are playing for Christ. We belong to him. We live for him. He calls the plays, even if we don’t execute them well.
And we often don’t. Sometimes we mess up really badly. And it can make you want to quit. You can begin to think that you’re just not good enough to be in the Lord’s army. Our sins rise against us and testify against us. The guilt weighs heavy on our souls.
What do you do when that happens? Well, you do what you did at the beginning: you repent of your sins, and you believe the good news that Jesus Christ justifies the ungodly. You lean into his superabounding grace which is freely offered to us in the gospel.
King David is such a great illustration of this. After he had committed that constellation of awful sins against Uriah and Bathsheba, when he finally came to understand just how terribly he had sinned, David threw himself upon the mercy of the Lord in faith and repentance. Here is how he speaks to the Lord: “Have mercy upon me, O God, according to thy lovingkindness: according unto the multitude of thy tender mercies blot out my transgressions. Wash me thoroughly from mine iniquity, and cleanse me from my sin” (Ps. 51:1-2). That’s gospel faith and gospel repentance. And you know what? As bad as David’s sin was, God’s grace was greater. As the hymn puts it,
Dear friend, do not let your sins keep you from Christ. Repent of them and embrace the mercy of Christ. His grace is abounds to change us and to cleanse us.
Grace abounds to enable us to endure uncertainty with hope in God.
We certainly live in a time of uncertainty. Actually, there is always uncertainty in the world, but our day is no different and in some ways it seems more chaotic than ever. It should not surprise us given the fact that Adam fell from union and communion with God and introduced sin and death into it. The troubled times in which we live are symptoms of the universal realities of sin and death. How does a Christian deal with it? What if the economy crashes? What if there is another lab-created virus to infect the world? What if the world goes to war again? What if a test comes back from the doctor with bad news? What if our dreams fall to the ground? How do we deal with that in a way that is consistent with faith in Christ?
Habakkuk is a good illustration of how abounding grace can help us to endure uncertainty with hope. This is a prophet who was probably a contemporary of the prophet Jeremiah, and those times were terrifyingly tumultuous. On the world scene, it was a clash of titans – like the mountains heaving rocks at each other in The Lord of the Rings – when the empires of Assyria, Egypt, Persia, and Babylonia were all vying for supremacy, and they were fighting it out all around little Judea. Closer to home, in 609 B.C., King Josiah was killed in battle and thus ended all the good reforms he instituted, and the nation went right back to the blood-letting paganism it had become accustomed to under previous kings. Habakkuk’s people were unjust and wicked, and he complains to the Lord about it. But God’s answer to the prophet was not one he wanted to hear, for God tells him that he is sending Babylon to punish Judah – a nation that is even more wicked (cf. Hab 1:13). To the prophet, the world just seemed as vulnerable as the fish in the sea to the predators there (14).
What God calls the prophet to, and what he calls us to, is faith (2:4). And by the end of this little book, the prophet is able to respond to all the uncertainty around him with faith. Here is how he put it: “Although the fig tree shall not blossom, neither shall fruit be in the vines; the labour of the olive shall fail, and the fields shall yield no meat; the flock shall be cut off from the fold, and there shall be no herd in the stalls: Yet I will rejoice in the Lord, I will joy in the God of my salvation. The Lord God is my strength, and he will make my feet like hinds' feet, and he will make me to walk upon mine high places” (Hab. 3:17-19).
We too can embrace the life of faith like Habakkuk and rejoice in the Lord, the God of our salvation, because Jesus has decisively conquered the sin and death Adam brought into the world. He has broken the back of death, and though it continuous to work in the world, we know sin and all its effects will have an end because of what our Lord has done. Grace abounds, and there is nothing in this uncertain world that can undo it.
Grace abounds to enable us endure sickness and sadness with hope in God.
Paul who wrote the words in Romans 5 knew something about both sickness and sadness. When it came to sadness, Paul was no stranger. He wrote to the Corinthians that “out of much affliction and anguish of heart I wrote unto you with many tears” (2 Cor. 2:4), and about the heaviness of his previous visit to the church (1). You can almost see the tears running down his face when he told Timothy that Demas had forsaken him (2 Tim. 4:10) and that “all they which be in Asia be turned away from me” (1:15). He will say to the Romans that “I have great heaviness and continual sorrow in my heart” (Rom. 9:2) because of the lostness of his brethren. He talks about being “troubled on every side, yet not distressed . . . perplexed, but not in despair; persecuted, but not forsaken; cast down, but not destroyed; always bearing about in the body the dying of the Lord Jesus, that the life also of Jesus might be made manifest in our body” (2 Cor. 4:8-10). Paul was like his Savior of whom we must not forget that it was said that he was “a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief” (Isa. 53:3).
And then there is physical sickness, and sometimes the distress of the soul goes along with the brokenness of the body. Paul again knew about this. He wrote that “lest I should be exalted above measure through the abundance of the revelations, there was given to me a thorn in the flesh, the messenger of Satan to buffet me, lest I should be exalted above measure. For this thing I besought the Lord thrice, that it might depart from me. And he said unto me, My grace is sufficient for thee: for my strength is made perfect in weakness. Most gladly therefore will I rather glory in my infirmities, that the power of Christ may rest upon me. Therefore I take pleasure in infirmities, in reproaches, in necessities, in persecutions, in distresses for Christ's sake: for when I am weak, then am I strong” (2 Cor. 12:7-10).
But Paul did not despair, he did not faint. Why? Because Paul knew about this grace that is sufficient because it is grace that abounds. There is no difficulty for which there is no grace to endure. And the reason is that we are united to Christ. We are united to him who has all power in heaven and in earth, and nothing can sever that connection. He will give us all grace to help in time of need (Heb. 4:16).
Sometimes, it is too easy for us to measure our ability to cope with our struggles in terms of our own resources. And of course God has given us resources in us and around us, and we should use them. But our greatest resource, we must never forget, is never in ourselves. God will put you in situations where you do not in yourself have the resources to cope, because he wants you to be shut up to the infinite resources that you have in him. As the apostle Paul put it to the Corinthians, “For we would not, brethren, have you ignorant of our trouble which came to us in Asia, that we were pressed out of measure, above strength, insomuch that we despaired even of life: but we had the sentence of death in ourselves, that we should not trust in ourselves, but in God which raiseth the dead: who delivered us from so great a death, and doth deliver: in whom we trust that he will yet deliver us” (2 Cor. 1:8-10). I am so thankful for this confession of Paul, because here we have the great apostle admitting that he was “pressed out of measure, above strength,” meaning that he was “so utterly burdened beyond our strength” (ESV). He talks about “the sentence of death” that they had in themselves. Why did God allow Paul to be put there? He tells us: “that we should not trust in ourselves, but in God which raiseth the dead.” My friend, if you are in a situation that you feel is out of your control, if you feel you have the sentence of death in yourself, you should do what Paul did – put your trust in God, for he is the one who “will deliver us” (ESV, ver. 10). On him let us set our hope.
King David experienced something similar. In Psalm 18, as he reflects on how God delivered him from Saul and all his enemies, David writes, “He delivered me from my strong enemy, and from them which hated me: for they were too strong for me” (17). “They were too strong for me”! My friend, do you feel like you are facing something too strong for you? Well, do what Paul did, and do what David did: “They prevented [confronted, ESV] me in the day of my calamity: but the Lord was my stay” (18). Let the Lord be your stay and support.
Why can we do this? We can do it because the grace that is there for our help, the grace that comes in to undo all that Adam undid, is grace that abounds. “Where sin abounded, grace did much more abound” (Rom. 5:20). Where sin abounded, wherever the curse is found, there is where you will find grace, not only there, not only existing in a corner, but grace abounding. Grace sufficient and grace more than sufficient. We are not lacking in resources, brothers and sisters.
So be encouraged. Not with the expectation that if we pray enough we won’t have any more problems in life. But with the expectation that God will be with you and will enable to you persevere through the trial with grace abundant.
But what if you are not a believer? My friend, grace is only given to those who embrace Jesus Christ. You are either in Christ or in Adam. In Adam, there is only sin, condemnation, and death. In Christ, there is righteousness, justification, and life. And it is all a gift of grace. We don’t earn it, we don’t merit it, we don’t buy it. It is offered to us without money and without price. I encourage you to take it and your soul will not only live but find life and life abundant and grace abounding.
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