Romans 5:21

Unto death (ἐν τῷ θανάτῳ) Wrong. In death, as Rev. As the sphere or dominion of death's tyranny. Compare Romans 5:14, "death reigned." Some, however, explain the preposition as instrumental, by death. How much is lost by the inaccurate rendering of the prepositions. Ellicott remarks that there are few points more characteristic of the apostle's style than his varied but accurate use of prepositions, especially of two or more in the same or in immediately contiguous clauses. See Romans 3:22; Ephesians 4:6; Colossians 1:16. Through Jesus Christ our Lord "And now - so this last word seems to say - Adam has passed away; Christ alone remains" (Godet).

Before he ascribed dominion and reign to death, now to sin; the reason is evident, because death indeed reigneth by sin. Before also he had made the comparison between Adam and Christ, here it is between sin and grace, the power of one and of the other. The sum is, that as sin hath prevailed over all mankind to bring death upon man, not only a temporal but eternal death, so the grace of Christ prevails, and becomes effectual, to confer upon us eternal life. Righteousness; i.e. imputed or imparted. By Jesus Christ our Lord: see how sweetly the end answers the beginning of this chapter, and how Jesus Christ is both the Author and Finisher of all.

(21) Unto death. —Rather, in death; death being, as it were, the domain in which its sovereignty was exercised. In this last section we seem still to trace the influence of the school of Gamaliel. It appears that the Jewish doctors also attributed universal mortality to the fall of Adam, and regarded his sin as including that of the rest of mankind. (On the whole section, see Excursus F: On St. Paul’s View of the Religious History of Mankind.)

Romans THE WARRING QUEENSRomans 5:21 . I am afraid this text will sound to some of you rather unpromising. It is full of well-worn terms, ‘sin,’ ‘death,’ ‘grace,’ ‘righteousness,’ ‘eternal life,’ which suggest dry theology, if they suggest anything. When they welled up from the Apostle’s glowing heart they were like a fiery lava-stream. But the stream has cooled, and, to a good many of us, they seem as barren and sterile as the long ago cast out coils of lava on the sides of a quiescent volcano. They are so well-worn and familiar to our ears that they create but vague conceptions in our minds, and they seem to many of us to be far away from a bearing upon our daily lives. But you much mistake Paul if you take him to be a mere theological writer. He is an earnest evangelist, trying to draw men to love and trust in Jesus Christ. And his writings, however old-fashioned and doctrinally hard they may seem to you, are all throbbing with life-instinct with truths that belong to all ages and places, and which fit close to every one of us. I do not know if I can give any kind of freshness to these words, but I wish to try. To begin with, I notice the highly-imaginative and picturesque form into which the Apostle casts his thoughts here. He, as it were, draws back a curtain, and lets us see two royal figures, which are eternally opposed and dividing the dominion between them.

Then he shows us the issues to which these two rulers respectively conduct their subjects; and the question that is trembling on his lips is ‘Under which of them do you stand?’ Surely that is not fossil theology, but truths that are of the highest importance, and ought to be of the deepest interest, to every one of us. They are to you the former, whether they are the latter or not. I. So, first, look at the two Queens who rule over human life. Sin and Grace are both personified; and they are both conceived of as female figures, and both as exercising dominion. They stand face to face, and each recognises as her enemy the other. The one has established her dominion: ‘Sin hath reigned.’ The other is fighting to establish hers: ‘That Grace might reign.’ And the struggle is going on between them, not only on the wide field of the world; but in the narrow lists of the heart of each of us. Sin reigns. The truths that underlie that solemn picture are plain enough, however unwelcome they may be to some of us, and however remote from the construction of the universe which many of us are disposed to take. Now, let us understand our terms. Suppose a man commits a theft. You may describe it from three different points of view. He has thereby broken the law of the land; and when we are thinking about that we call it crime. He has also broken the law of ‘morality,’ as we call it; and when we are looking at his deed from that point of view, we call it vice. Is that all?