chapter of the book of Romans,
Romans chapter 5. I want to talk to you here this
morning about the subject I believe that this chapter teaches from
verse to last, which I think is the federal headship of the first Adam and the federal
headship of the second Adam. It is a truth, a doctrine, that all need to know. Not many
know much about the federal headship of the first Adam and the second
Adam. That's what we want to talk about.
a little bit about here this morning. It's a strange thing to me that men, women, boys and girls, human
race, are the only creatures upon the
face of the earth that knows they're going to die But even a minute before they
do, they don't believe it. All the creatures that God made,
we're the only ones that know we're going to die. Horses, cows, chickens, cats, fish of
the sea, All the creatures that God made,
they don't know anything about dying. But we all know that we're going
to die, but none of us believe it, even to the point of death. Give a man two minutes, or a
minute before he dies, and he doesn't believe he's going to
die. But we're all going to die. God
has given us a rational understanding of that. It's a sort of imparted knowledge
that all men have. They know they're going to die,
but nobody believes them. I believe it. I believe I'm going
to die. Let me read something here in
the Bible to you. I believe that will maybe be
of some help to us. Chapter 5, he begins in that
first verse talking about justification, being justified by faith. Faith doesn't justify us. Faith
is the means that brings us to Christ who is our justification. But faith is that God-given quality,
principle that he gives to his people, enables them to receive,
to believe, to trust in him whom God has sent, the Lord Jesus
Christ. Therefore, being justified by
faith or through faith, the channel, the means, we have peace with God, peace
with God, all men in their natural state are at war with God. And through faith in the Lord
Jesus Christ, we are brought about in the state of Tranquility,
peace with God. He talks about this justification
business, which is the opposite of condemnation, by the way.
Justification, whatever that means. Acquittal is just the
reverse of condemnation. And he says here in some of these
verses, verse 12, Wherefore, as by one man, sin entered into
the world." That one man was Adam. "...and death by sin. So death passed upon all men,
for that all have sinned. Nevertheless, death reigned from
Adam to Moses." Verse 14. Verse 15, "...but not as the
offense, so also as the free gift." For if through the offense
of one, many be dead, the offense of Adam, many be dead, much more
the grace of God, and the gift by grace, which is by one man,
that's the second Adam, the Lord Jesus Christ, hath abounded unto
many, 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 offenses
unto justification." Now, that's what I want to talk about. So
is the gift. For the judgment was by one to
condemnation. Judgment was by one to condemnation. The opposite of condemnation
is justification. But the free gift is of many
offenses under justification, and justification is the opposite
of condemnation. Now, the doctrine, this is what
this chapter is teaching here, the doctrine of the federal headship
of the first Adam and of the second Adam. Now, I think all
of us know this to a degree. If we don't know it, we need
to learn it. If we'll learn this, we'll understand a whole lot
of other things. Other things will fall into place
if we learn something about the federal headship of Adam, that
we were all represented by Adam in the Garden of Eden. If we
can learn that, that we're represented by one man in the Garden of Eden, He's the first man. All other
men, all other members of the human race did not exist at that
time. But in the infinite knowledge
of God, they were going to exist. He's going to bring about a race
of men, and he begins with Adam. And
he made Adam out of the dust of the earth and breathed into
his nostrils and he became a living soul. A living soul. He became a living soul. And
he acted there as our representative. What he did is going to be communicated
to us. Whatever he did, good or bad,
is going to relate to us. Now, we're represented by Adam. We know about Adam. All we have
to do is look over to the third chapter of the book of Genesis,
and it will give us the history of Adam, who Adam was, where
he came from, and what he did. And that's what we're talking
about. We're talking about, For the
judgment was by one to condemnation. That's Adam. He acted in our
stead. He represented us. in the Garden of Eden. And that
when he sinned, he transgressed the Word of Almighty God. God
told him not to do such and such, and he didn't pay any attention. He went ahead and did it. And
that when he sinned, he so sinned representatively that we fell
by virtue of his disobedience. We fell in our representative.
When he transgressed, he so represented us that when he fell, we fell
with him. All of the human race, for all
of sin comes short of the glory of God. We fell in him. We are born sinners. We are born
ruined. We are born lost. We are born
guilty. We don't have to wait until we
become ten years old and find out about sex life or this or
that in order to become sinners. We're born that way. He so represented us that by
virtue of his fall, we fell when he fell. The human race. All of us, I'm
talking about men, women, and children, boys and girls, the
whole human race. The human race was a unit represented
by the one head whose name was Adam and thought to us when he
fell, the fall now means to us a terrible thing. And to us it
is an unhappy thing that we have fallen by virtue of our representative
Adam. And we're considered now, just
like Adam was then, fallen, fell from that place to the lowest. Yet there's mercy in that ball. There's mercy there for this
reason. For if we fell by one atom, there
remains then a possibility of our rising in another atom. So if the disobedience of one
was the first cause, of our being regarded as a sinner, then there
is the possibility that by the obedience of another, even one
greater than Adam, one who might be our representative, it is
the possibility that through the fall of one Adam we fell
in him, then We can hope that through another Adam we might
rise from that fall, through him as our representative. Adam represents the whole human
race in the garden. He represents everybody. Let's
hope that we can understand something about the second Adam who represents
all of His. Well, I think that I can see
how it's possible through the second Adam, and I think those
of you who are saved and know anything at all about the Lord
Jesus Christ, you too can see how it could be possible
to be saved now and to be saved forever through this second Adam. I'll talk about that later on.
Let's just talk about this first, that the judgment was by one
to condemnation. And talk about this poison, this
venom of sin. This is what we're confronted
with and what we're faced with is the poison of this sin. See, the Bible says the judgment
was by one. That's Adam, the first Adam. By one man. by one act of transgression. All this came upon us by one
man and by one act of that one man. The Lord told him, He said,
Here is the tree in the midst of the garden. Don't eat of the
fruit of that tree. This one man, by his one act
of transgression, eating of that fruit, he fell, and when he fell,
we fell with him. We are regarded as sinners by
God by virtue of the falling of our representative, the first
Adam. Now, the judgment here, it says, was to condemnation. You see, Adam's offense was one. But it's also true that there
was a great number of sins wrapped up in that one act. Yet it was
by one offense. One offense ruined every one
of us. Here's one. I won't insist upon
that. I want you to see it and think
about it. Here's one act of transgression
ruined every one of us. Every one of us is lost and guilty
and condemned before God right now. because our representative
disobeyed and transgressed the Word of God by one offense. As he was the parent, Adam was
the parent of us all, he communicated then to us, his offspring, the
tendency to sin. All his descendants every single
solitary one of them, every sweet baby that's ever born, I'm talking
about. All his descendants became subject
to all the weary woes of this life and the sure penalty of
death. The wages of sin is what? Death. Now, that One offense
of Adam, who was our representative, brought with him condemnation. That was the result. Condemnation. Such is the law of God. It does not need to be broken
many times to bring condemnation. It just needs to be broken one
time. One breakage of the law of God
and the sentence is passed, which is condemnation, which is death. Break it in one point and you've
broken all of it. It's like a chain. Break one
link in the chain and the whole chain is broken. So it was by
this man's one offense, our representative. He represented us before God,
and what he did was communicated to us. That evil principle of
sin flows in our bloodstream right now, that principle of
evil. And we are guilty and lost and
ruined before God. Maybe not so before men. Men maybe do not think that we're
all that bad, but before God, He regards us as sinners and
condemned, lost, ruined, and guilty. I've said this before,
but let me say it again. There's six or seven or eight
million or billion people upon the face of the earth. right
now, yet there is not one of them, of the seven or eight billion
people, there is not one who bears the countenance of a man
upon whom the shadow of the curse of God has not fallen. Every one of the eight or seven
billion people on the face of the earth at any given time,
wherever, in Asia, or in the Orient, or in the East, or in
the West, or the North, or the South, every one of them, bears
in his countenance the curse of condemnation. Each man of the eight million
must toil for his bread. with sweat on his brow. Isn't
that right? Does not the Word of God say,
Dust thou art, and dust thou shalt return? What is the cause
of all of this? That's what I want to know. It is the one, the one offense
which has brought about judgment under condemnation. One offense
brought this all about. All of the wars over there in Saudi Arabia sent
500,000 soldiers of the United States of America over there,
sent thousands of soldiers from 20-some countries over there,
plus all those Iraqis and all of the hell on earth that was
over there. All the mistreatment of prisoners
and mistreatment of soldiers and the dying of babies and the
poison gas, all of that is because of one man's offense. That's what I'm saying. It's
all because Adam, who represented us in the Garden of Eden, transgressed. It's by the one man's one transgression
that has brought all this about. All of us! Them over there, us
over here. Anywhere you find a man, you
find him with the curse Ichabod, the curse of God written upon
his brow. He's lost, he's ruined, he's
guilty. He's blind and he cannot see.
The curse of God's A man goeth to his long home, and the mourners
go about on the streets. We just fail, brethren, to understand
or to lay hold of or to comprehend the many of this race of Adam
whose bodies lie buried beneath the earth, whose bodies cover
bottom of the sea, huh? Who slew all these people? Think
about all the people that have died since Adam up to right now. All of the people, billions and
billions and billions of people that have died, some of them
violently, some of them natural death, some of them in the war,
some of them died at birth. Why? Why did this all come about? Who killed all these people?
Sin. One man who represented us in
the Garden of Eden, one man, by his one transaction, brought
about this venom, this poison that killed us all. You see how
important it is to understand something about the federal headship
of Adam and how we relate to our federal head, Adam? You're
not a sinner because you cuss. You cuss because you're a sinner. You're not a sinner because you
stole something when you was a little boy or a little girl,
or sassed your mother, or took God's name in vain. You did all
that because of this one man's offense. It was unto condemnation. The poison of sin entered into
our bloodstream. And that's the way we are. We're
lost. And I'm trying to tell people,
and have been trying to for the last 35 or 40 years, to free
all that! To free us! And come to Jesus
Christ, who's alone able to save you. And men don't believe what
I'm saying. They don't believe it. Huh? Oh, listen. sin which brought
death unto all of these. It was through a woman's finger. A woman's finger lifted the latch
and sin came in. God permitted the devil to speak
to Eve and tempted Eve. And Eve reached up there with
that hand and got the fruit and ate it and gave it to her husband.
But she wasn't a representative of the human race. Adam was a
representative. And it's by his disobedience,
it's by his fall that plunged us into destruction. But it started
with her and the devil. It was her finger that lifted
the latch that opened the door. And the floodgate of sin come
rushing in. Huh? Oh, yeah. Well, that's what happened. And that's the way we are. But
he says the judgment was by one to condemnation. We're all condemned. I don't have to go over that.
I don't have to talk about your personal sins. You've done this
and you've done that. You know what you are. You know
what you are. You're a sinner. My God, you're
a sinner. You're not good. You're bad.
It all comes. It all comes from Adam. This principle to do wrong and
to offend God comes from the devil through Adam. And you can't do anything. That's
right. You just can't do it because
everything you do doesn't make any difference how good it appears
to be. It's got the pollution and the condemnation of sin in
it and behind it. And you do it selfishly. You
don't do it for the glory of God. You haven't done anything
in your life for the glory of God. You haven't done anything
that can please God. Everything you've done, everything
you've said, everything you've touched is contaminated with
the principle and the virus of sin that's in you. You're all
sin. You're a mass of human sin, every
one of us. That's the reason we've got the
hospitals. That's the reason we've got the penitentiaries.
That's the reason people are sick. That's the reason you and
I are so full of deceivableness and deceiving because of what
we are. But, listen, salvation now is
a free gift. It's a free gift given to man. The amazing thing about this
story of salvation by and through the Lord Jesus Christ. Salvation
which is full and complete is given to men without anything
on their part to deserve it. They don't deserve anything.
God is not obligated to do anything for anybody. When God saves a sinner, it is
simply as a sinner he is saved. The gospel applies itself to
the ground of a man's sinnerhood and nowhere else. And when God
saves a sinner, it is simply as a sinner he is saved, not
as one. who has something in himself
or about himself to commend himself to God. He doesn't have it. We
don't have a thing ruined by one man and his transgression,
all of us, guilty and undone, hopeless and helpless. He's just a lost, ruined, undone,
condemned soul apart from the mercy of Almighty God. Listen,
when God deals with us as sinners, it is not upon conditions or
upon terms that he deals with us as sinners. He saves us like
we are, lost and guilty, and ruined and hopeless and helpless
to do anything about it. We are to come unto God as we
are, and he saves us completely and unconditionally. We come
to him empty-handed. We don't bring anything. We receive
what he has to give. And he gives us an eternal, complete
salvation now to be enjoyed, now and the eternity to come. And he gives it to us freely
in the Lord Jesus Christ. He does not ask you or me to
give anything in return for his free gifts. What judgment is going to fall
upon men who will not hear, who will not make response to God's
free gift? When this is all over with and
there is a judgment appointed unto man once to die, and then
there is going to be a judgment, and man's conscience is going
to be probed and quickened, and he is going to say to himself,
Why in the name of God did I commit suicide? Why did I listen? Why didn't I seek God in Jesus
Christ when all of this is not conditioned upon anything I can
do or don't do? All I've got to do is to come
clean with God, come empty-handed and receive everything that God
has to give. But I wouldn't do it. He ought
to go to hell. Huh? A man that won't receive
what God's given in his free gift of salvation, if he won't
do it, he ought to go to hell. The sooner the better. Huh? Well, you don't ask him to... He doesn't ask you to give him
anything in return. for His free gift. I know what
a lot of people say. They say, well, I've got to be
holy. I must be holy. Yeah? And you shall be holy. Yeah,
that's right. You say, I must be holy? Yes,
you must be holy. And I say, you shall be holy. And the very holiness that you
have will be God's gift to you. I don't know what else you'll
say, but I must repent. I must repent, that's right.
You must repent, and you will repent, but your repentance will
be God's gift to you. Is that right? You say, but I must live up to
this profession I make, and you will live up to that profession
you make, and that will be a gift. that God gives to you, won't
it? You say, but I must leave my
sin. Yeah, that's right. And you will
leave your sin and be glad to leave it. And that also is God's
gift to you. You see, here's what I'm trying
to say. I'm trying to say that we're
just receivers. We just take We don't have to give nothing,
we just take it, we just receive it. God is the giver and the
poor, poor, desperate sinner is the taker. And that's the
way it is from the start to the finish, from the first to the
last. It's all God's given in our receiving. You're a receiver
all the way. And God can, don't misunderstand
me now, God can justly do this. Why? Because he's both just and
justifier of him that believeth in Jesus. God doesn't save anybody
at the expense of his justice. His justice is satisfied in the
second Adam. The second Adam satisfies every
claim, every charge that justice makes against you. The second
Adam, the Lord Jesus Christ, he satisfies justice. Justice
is well pleased with the doing and the dying of Jesus Christ. He observed and obeyed every
jot and every tittle of the law of God. He rendered unto God
perfect obedience and He magnified the law and made it honorable
and holy. He satisfied in His body the
penalty which is death against sin for every one of his. So God can do this and do it
justly. See what I'm talking about? He
doesn't do it at the expense of his justice. He does it because
his justice is satisfied. Well, I'll tell you again, there's
nothing in you and I And there's nothing that you and I can do
in order to merit this so great free gift of eternal salvation. Well, all you've got to do is
leave off your doing and rest in Him. That's all a man's got
to do is just to quit his doing and start resting in Him who
finished the doing, the Lord Jesus. Well, you see, that's
pretty plain. I think it's awful plain. I think
it is. But I can't make it so plain
that a blind man can see it. I can't do it. I can't make it
that plain. God must open the blind man's
eyes that he'll see. All men are dead in trespasses
and in sins. All men are blind. God's got
to open the blind man's eyes and he can see what I'm talking
about. Hasn't God opened your eyes? You can see what I'm talking
about here this morning. You can see about the first Adam,
that he's your representative. He transgressed the law of God
by his one act, one transgression, one sin. He plunged you into destruction.
And by the second Adam, who stood in your place, you see, do you
believe he stood in your place? Born in his own body, what was
due you? Satisfied the justice of God, made the law honorable,
and the Lord Jesus Christ on the basis, or I mean God on the
basis of Jesus Christ freely now can be just and justifier
to him that was believeth in Jesus?" Oh, listen, it's all a grace, isn't it? From
first to last. All who are ever saved, from
right now until the last one, it will be by free grace. And
all who was ever saved in the past, multiplied millions upon
millions upon millions of people have responded to God's free
gift in Jesus Christ and were saved completely throughout time
and throughout eternity. And every one of the glorified
saints that have received the Lord Jesus Christ and His free
gift from the past, the present, and those to come, and those
that are dead, and with God yonder there in glory, every one of
them, saved the same way by the free gift, the free grace of
God. And not a one of them ever had
anything in themselves or about themselves to commend themselves
to God's love. They all came empty-handed. They all came ruined and lost
and guilty before God and believed the gospel that Christ bore in
his own body, the penalty was due them and provided them freely
with his righteousness. All who are ever saved will be
saved by the grace of God himself. The Bible says the free gift
is of many unto justification. And I said, What is justification?
It is just the reverse of condemnation. Just the reverse. Whatever condemnation
is, that's what justification is. Justification is the reverse
or the opposite of it. Salvation is God's blessed, pre-gifted condemnation. Every man is condemned,
condemned, condemned by sin. Sin condemns him. He's got no
hope, no help. But it says here, and I read
to you there in that first verse, therefore being justified, that
means being acquitted before God. Guilty before God, but God
acquits you on the grounds of the second Adam, the Lord Jesus
Christ. He bears your penalty freely,
gladly, cheerfully. He does it. Listen, the Lord
Jesus Christ, He didn't come to make God love us. He came
because God did love us! That's right! He came because
God is love! God so, so loved the love of
God in Himself! And He so loved the poor, hopeless,
helpless, doomed, damned sinner! Those that He wrote their names
in the Lamb's Book of Life. He so loved them that he sent
his son to die for them. And the doing and the dying and
the suffering of the Lord Jesus Christ is not to enable God to
love us, but he does it because God did love us. God loves us. He loves his people. He loves them to the extent that
he justifies them. And the Bible says he makes us
accepted in the Beloved. He makes us accepted
before his throne of justice in the Beloved, in the Lord Jesus
Christ. God loves us in Christ, not out
of Christ, but in Christ. That's the reason it says that
we were written in the Lamb's Book of Life before the foundation
of the world. And that's the reason it says
that the Lamb of God was slain. He was, as a Lamb, slain before
the foundation of the world. And all of those whose names
are written in that eternal covenant, God loved them in Christ before
the world ever was. Christ is willing to die for
them. this free gift. So is the gift
for the judgment was by one to condemnation. But the free gift
is of many offenses unto justification, acceptance. It is going to be
like He, as God accepts us on the basis of His Son and treats
us the same way He treats His Son. He couldn't treat us any
other way because we've been acquitted. We've been acquitted. The law has been satisfied. So
He treats us now as He treats His Son. He looks upon us now
as He looks upon His Son. He's not angry with us. Why would
God be angry with us? Our relationship to God is based,
is hinged, is connected in the Lord Jesus Christ. We are in
Him just as we were in Adam when Adam fell. Now we are in the
second Adam, the risen, glorified Son of God who God raised from
the dead and whoever lives on God's right hand. We are in Him
and God is not angry with us. God loves us. He loves us to
the same measure and the same manner that He loves His Son.
We are in Him. And I said, my soul, why don't a man believe
that? Why don't a fellow just lay his guns down, surrender,
and say, this is my hope? My hope is built on nothing less
than Jesus' blood and righteousness. Huh? Let's stand. We'll be dismissed. We'll meet again this evening.