Sin and Death Through Adam

…creation is what is in Christ (2 Corinthians 5:17), because a new root has been set in place; and he has become the second Adam (1 Corinthians 15:45–47). He is not, like the first, the cause of wrath and of heaven's turning away for those born of him; rather, he procures and gives closeness to God, through sanctification, incorruption, and the righteousness that is by faith. The wise Paul explains this to us in the passage before us. So he says: “As through one man sin entered the world, and death through sin, and so death spread to all men, because all sinned” (Romans 5:12). For, as I said, death slipped in through sin in the first-formed man, at the beginning of the race; then it overran the whole race in turn. Moreover the dragon, the inventor of sin, having prevailed in Adam by the ways of wickedness, made the human mind a road he could tread: “For all have turned aside, together they have become worthless” (Psalm 14:3; Romans 3:12). So, having gone out from the presence of the all-holy God, because the human mind is intently set “on evil from youth” (Genesis 8:21), we lived a life more like that of brute beasts. And “death, having grown strong, swallowed up,” as the prophet says (Isaiah 25:8), and “Hades enlarged its appetite and opened its mouth without ceasing” (Isaiah 5:14). For since we became imitators of the transgression in Adam, in that all sinned, we came under the same penalties as he did. But the world under heaven has not been left without help: sin has been pulled down, Satan has fallen, and death too has been abolished.

“For until the law sin was in the world” (Romans 5:13). The law given through Moses was, as I said, an exposure of the weakness of those who stumble, not a release from sin; rather, it brought about wrath (Romans 4:15). For those who transgressed had to come under the penalties set down in the law; and wherever there is any form of transgression at all, there sin surely is too. And if sin brings about death, we must surely say that the death which sprang from it shares its strength, and that when sin is pulled down death is shaken down with it and perishes together with it, as with its own mother. So, he says, sin was in the world until the law: for while the law still stood, the charges of transgression held firm against those who stumbled; but now that it has become inactive, the indictment for transgressing has ceased along with it. And once sin has ceased, as I said, death too will cease with it.

“Yet death reigned from Adam to Moses,” and so on (Romans 5:14). But if so, someone might ask, how did death gain the mastery over those on earth even before the law? For even if some were not liable for transgressions of the law, since the law had not yet been given, they too still came under corruption after the likeness of Adam's transgression. It is as if he were saying: death overran the whole race that came from Adam, in the likeness of Adam; just as, when a plant has been harmed at its root, the shoots that grew from it must all wither. Yet he says that Adam is a type of the one who was to come (Romans 5:14), that is, of Christ, although he had already come and had brought to completion the…