In Chapter 4, Paul gives the example of Abraham, the man whom all Jews count as their forefather. His calling and favor with God was before his obedience. His faith in God’s favor is what brought him into compliance with the covenant God offered him. Abraham was the father of many nations, not just Israel, because it was a matter of faith, not DNA. And it wasn’t the code of the covenant that defines his heirs, but the faith that distinguished Abraham from the rest of humanity.
But that Abraham might be the anchor of faith’s testimony, God promised him a literal heir. Despite their far advanced age, Sarah bore him a natural heir, and Paul insists that it was solely because Abraham had faith to believe that promise. The covenant and the promises would have been dead without faith. The reason all of this is recorded in Scripture is so that everyone else could see his example and come to God on the same terms. Faith precedes and is the foundation of any covenant God offers to anyone. Faith is submission to God’s claim on our lives.
Jesus is the final covenant, who died so that we may live in faith and be accepted by His Father. He stands today as the living revelation of God.
Paul continues into the next chapter that, on the basis of that feudal commitment to Him as Lord, the Father calls us to stand in His Presence as family. This is our power to face tribulation, and to convert human sorrows into glory. It gives us hope. There was every justification for God to send us all to Hell, but instead He opened the path for us to redemption. Through His Son, we who were His enemies are now His children.
The reason Adam’s sin condemns us is that Creation itself is feudal. If our progenitor sinned and gained for himself the penalty of mortality, we can hardly escape, because that is our birthright. We are born mortal, which means we are born doomed. So it didn’t matter that there was no revealed law; we are born in sin. It’s our nature; we don’t choose it. This is what we inherited from Adam.
There is one common element: One man put us all under death, and one man brings us life. Unlike the curse, which we all could have easily gotten for ourselves without Adam’s help, the gift of redemption could have come through only the Son of God. That’s how the two are different. But we would not have even longed for redemption unless God had not given the Law of Moses to point out our sin nature. And the grace that God offers is more than sufficient to cover all our sins.
In the sixth chapter: Does that mean we should keep sinning so that grace may abound even more? What kind of silly logic is that? The whole point of redemption is to take sin out of our lives. The symbolism of baptism is that we die with Christ so that we can rise with Him to walk in a new life. We take the old dead man down to a water grave so he can stay there, while the new man walks away in grace. Live that new life in purity.
You can play all the word games you like regarding the symbolism and mysteries of faith, but it becomes an excuse to drag your old fleshly nature along, feeding and enabling the ongoing death that comes with it. The fruit of grace is holiness, not the filth of the flesh.
