Thank you for that excellent,
excellent song. Let's go to Romans 5 tonight. Romans 5. If I understand the scriptures
correctly. This earth and mankind has been
here about 6,000 years. 4,000 from Adam to our Lord Jesus
and then 2,000 years since our Lord Jesus was here and now. It's a lot of history. We have history teachers here,
school teachers here. You know, I'm sure, much more
about a history than I ever will. But I think I can, in just a
very few words, sum up all of the history of mankind. Kind of a big statement, isn't
it, for somebody that didn't know much. But I think I can
sum up 6,000 years of man's history by saying this. We can put it all together, sum
it up in terms of what happened because of Adam and what happened
because of Christ. I think that's a pretty good
summary of history. Everything that's happened, it
happened because of Adam. Everything that's happened to
our race happened because of our association with Adam. And everything that's happened
to God's people happened and will happen, things
will yet happen because of our association to Jesus Christ. I would have you consider the
state of our nation and our world right now at this present time.
Wars, rumors of wars. people fighting, people stealing, people being covetous, countries that can't get along. Nuclear warfare may be on the horizon. So many people in misery. Breakdown of morality, morals
of our country, the morals of the world. Drug issues. False religion. Multitudes deceived by false
gospels. What's going on? What's the reason
for all of these things? And I think I can give you the
answer. It's all tied to the action of
one man, Adam, and our association to that one man. But then there's another part
to the story. There are many people who love
God's Word. They believe on the Lord Jesus
to the salvation of their souls. They worship Him as God. Worship
Him as God over all, blessed forever. There's a people who, down through
the ages, people who've lived and many of them who've died,
a few of them still on the earth today, a few who still believe
him, but lots of people throughout these 6,000 years who love the only savior of sinners and
understand that the only way God can save anybody is through
the substitutionary sacrifice of Christ Jesus There's a people
who love his work of redemption, his work of reconciliation. There's a people who rejoice
in Christ Jesus. They know God. They just know
God. And they know God through Christ
Jesus. And they love God as he's revealed
in his word. And this is a people who love
each other. Oh, they're still in themselves
sinful people. But they have altogether different
aims and goals from most other people. They bow to the scriptures. They
don't bow to the writings of men. They don't seek to seek
the old writers and say, well, I'll believe spiritual things
based upon what these men who are dead and gone have said.
No, they believe spiritual things based upon one authority, God's
Word. And they love to meet around
the book of God. I'd love to hear the preaching
of the grace of God. The grace of God that centers
in, through, and by Christ Jesus the Lord. All throughout the
years, many of them have been martyred. Lots of them have gone through
awful persecution. All of them have been tempted,
tested, afflicted, troubled, and tried, and yet they still
have within them a joy that earthly circumstances can't
take away from them. It's a joy the world can't give,
and it's a joy the world can't take away. These people believe in divine
providence. They find peace in God's eternal
purpose. And they believe that whatever
God has ordained is going to happen and is happening. And
it is even now being fulfilled throughout his universe. What has happened to these people? How do you, how would you ever
explain their new goals, their new aims, their new attitudes,
their new beliefs? Well, it's all because of what one
man did. This one man did it 2,000 years
ago. But he was more than just a man. He was the God man. the God-man, and he did something
2,000 years ago that had a wonderful, wonderful effect upon everybody
he did it for. Now, that which Adam did, he
did about 6,000 years ago, and it had a devastating effect upon
everybody that he represented, and that's all of our race. And I'll tell you, whatever difficulties you're having tonight,
wrestling with your own wickedness and your own sinful thoughts, Whatever struggles you have in
the flesh pertaining to issues of godliness and worship and
the flesh fights against that. I can tell you why you've got
that. I'll tell you why you've got that problem. It's because
of what this one guy did 6,000 years ago. And it's still affecting
us right now. But what this other man did,
this God man did, which he did it 2,000 years ago, the amazing
thing about that is it had an effect even upon people who lived
before he did that. It had an effect upon people
who were born 4,000 years before he ever died. And yet, such was
the glory of what he did, and such was the majesty of what
he did, and such was the certainty of that which he would do. God, on account of what he would
do 2,000 years ago, justified all of his people even before
he ever died. I say then, I say then the whole
story of our race from the beginning to this present day, it can be
all summarized in this way. Something happened to the entire
human race. Something happened to everybody
Adam represented when that one man seen. when he disobeyed God. And I tell you, his disobedience,
here's a good word for you, was imputed, reckoned to, our account. And I can tell you why you are
a sinner. It's because your daddy Adam
and my daddy Adam put us in this mess we're in. One action by one man absolutely
ruined our race. That's the truth. Look here in
Romans 5, 12. Wherefore, as by one man, I don't
know how many billion people there are on the earth now, I
don't know how many billions of people have lived ever since
Adam and Eve started having kids, but it all goes back to one man. This is not complicated. I don't
want to make it complicated. Pretty simple, really. There was something entered into
this world that just ruined us, S-I-N. Wherefore is by one man sin entered
into the world, and here's what happens due to sin, death, death. I talked about the death of our
Lord Jesus this morning. Here's what happens. Where sin
is, there's going to be death. There's going to be death. Death
by sin. Death on account of sin. Because
the scripture says, sin when it is finished. When it's done
with you. It always brings forth death. And so, verse 12, death, death
passed upon all men, for that all have sinned, literally all
have sinned in Adam. In Adam. Something awful happened
to our human race. Look at verse 14. Nevertheless,
death reigned from Adam to Moses, even over them that had not sinned
after the simplitude of Adam's transgression, who is the figure,
Adam is the figure of him that was to come. There are a lot
of men in the scripture who picture and typify the Lord Jesus. And I could sit before you. several
of them tonight, and you would say, because I'm speaking to
people, most of you know quite a bit about the scriptures, and
you can say, yeah, that guy was a type of Christ, and this guy
was a type of Christ, but you know, as you look through the
word of God, there's only one time in all of the Bible that
we're specifically informed of a man who was a figure of that
one who was to come, and that man was Adam. Adam was a representative
man. And I want to be, I really want
to be understood on this. God deals with all men. He deals with all mankind through
representatives. Two of them. And that's all. That's all. Adam was our representative
in the garden, and as he dealt with God, so did we. Is that right? As he dealt with
God, so did we. As he was obedient to God, as
he walked before God in honesty, in truthfulness, In worship,
in fellowship, as he did that, all of us did as well. Because
he was our representative. Here's a term for you. He was
our federal head. That's good words to remember.
The federal headship of Adam. A representative man. We're very
familiar with representation. Somebody represents us in local
government, in state government, in federal government. We have people who represent
us. Our president represents us. We have representatives in
Washington. They represent us. We can't go. We're not there. We can't make
those decisions. Whatever decisions they make
affects us. Well, that's exactly the way
it was in the Garden of Eden. The decision Adam made, he made
not as a private individual, but he made on the behalf of
all of the race that he represented by God's appointment. Because
God ordained before he ever made the world. that he would bring
into existence, he would bring to life billions of people throughout
every how many millenniums he ordained that mankind would live
on the top face of his earth. And he ordained that one man
would represent them all. And he stood there before God
in the Garden of Eden. And God said, To that one man,
here are all these trees in the garden and they bear fruit. You may eat the fruit of every
tree that's in the garden except for one right out there in the
middle. Don't you eat the fruit of that. That, Adam, is a is always a
reminder to you, I'm God. I'm sovereign. I'm your creator. I'm the lawgiver. I gave you
life. I gave you life. And in the day
you eat thereof of that of the forbidden fruit, I'm gonna take
that life away from you. That's what God said. God didn't
say if you eat of it. He said, in the day thou eatest
thereof. This is all, God had already
worked all this out before he ever created time. And that one
man put into the garden, God put him to sleep, and from his
side he took a rib and made for him a wife, the mother of all
flesh. Later, Adam would give her her
name, Eve. She's Eve, the mother of all
flesh. And they dwelt with God in perfect
harmony, got along with God just fine. And then, then The serpent came, he who had
led about one third of the angels in rebellion against God, seeing
that crowning glory of God's creation, man, he said it in
his mind and in his heart, he had ruined God's creation by
taking that man to task and tempting him and causing him to fall. But he didn't understand. That man was pretty strong, and he wasn't deceived. His wife was the weaker vessel,
and Satan threw a serpent in Genesis chapter 3. He tempted
Eve, and she took of the fruit and she ate of it. And nothing
happened because she wasn't anybody's representative. She didn't represent anybody.
And she gave it to her husband. But we read in the New Testament,
while she was deceived, he was not. what he did when he took that
fruit and willed to eat of it, because that's literally what
it says. He willed to eat. Where does sin first take place? In the heart. And I don't mean
this muscle that pumps blood through the body. You know what
I'm talking about. In the mind, in the heart, the man. He wasn't
deceived. He decided he would side with
his wife against God. And he ate. And something happened. Something
happened. He died. He died spiritually. He immediately lost the life
of God. He immediately lost his innocence. He was gone. And if I may say
so, His was gone forever. And He would never get it back. And all of a sudden He is alienated
from God. He is cut off from God. That's
what I said this morning from Isaiah chapter 59. Your sins,
your sins, your iniquities have separated you from God. And all of a sudden there's this
issue between man and God. But not only between that one
man and God, between all men and God. That's you and me too,
see. That's the issue. He lost fellowship with the Lord, and he ran from God. He could no longer tolerate the
presence of God, and God couldn't tolerate his
presence either. But in the cool of the day, one
came after Adam and Eve, Remember this, God always deals with men through
a mediator. And he won't speak to, you can't
speak to God, and God's not gonna speak to you except through this
mediator. And that mediator sought out
Adam and Eve in the garden. That's right, the Son of God
sought them out. See, God's a consuming fire.
Pure God. God the Father. Why, He would
consume them. Sin's in the way. Bless God,
there's a mediator to deal with them. And He came looking for
them. In the cool of the day, not in
the heat of the day, not in the heat of of wrath and fury and
anger, vengeance, judgment? No, in the koodle of the day. Adam, where art thou? Lord, I hid from you amongst
the trees. What is this that you've done? And then the Lord God, our Savior,
pronounced a curse upon the earth. But in the midst of what he had
to say, pronouncing a curse upon the serpent, he said, the seed
of the woman is going to come someday and set things right. You know who he was talking about?
Himself. Himself. And then he illustrated
what he was going to do. What he was going to do when
he came into this world in a body of flesh. There was Adam and Eve naked.
Shivering, embarrassed, shamed. And listen, that's all of us
by nature. See, this guy was a representative
man. What he did affected all of us.
And when we entered into this world, we entered into this world
alienated from God, cut off from God. God can't have anything
to do with us and we don't want to have anything to do with Him. The Lord Jesus said, He's the
substitute. He came to them and he killed
animals that weren't guilty of their violation. The animals
didn't rebel against him. And you know, even today, all
of creation groans, waiting for the redemption, waiting for the
redemption, waiting for sin to be gotten rid of totally throughout
this world. The animals are not the problem.
We're the problem. We're the problem of everything. And I heard, Lord Jesus, He killed
those victims, those innocent animals. He killed them. And
then he covered the shame, the nakedness of Adam and Eve. That was a representative man,
Adam, who got us in this mess. 2,000 years ago, God sent another
representative man to this earth. The first one failed. He failed. And we're all failures. It was
significant that Adam was created out of the dust of the ground
on the sixth day. Man's number is six. Failure,
failure, failure. That's us. Whatever we have sought
to do, we fail at it. I'm talking about spiritual things
now, we fail. But God sent another man, another
representative man, the Lord from glory. Now he can't fail,
but I'll tell you this, he's going to be tested, he's going
to be tried, he's going to be put through, permit me to put
it this way, the proverbial wringer. Everybody's gonna test Him. Everybody. And as soon as He was baptized,
Satan's gonna test Him. According to the purpose of God,
because the Spirit of God led the Lord Jesus out into the wilderness. This One who has come from heaven
to be the Savior of sinners, this One whose name is Jesus,
for He shall save His people from their sins, is He really
up to the task? The first man was a failure.
There was the tempter in the garden. And though Adam wasn't
deceived by his temptation, Adam fell. He was a failure in the
garden. And now Satan has another representative
man and he's going to put him through the ringer. You're going
to be tested too. Let's see if you can stand up
to it. No problem. Because this is the
Lord from glory. That's who this is. And Satan
was defeated. He was defeated. And our Lord
Jesus, who had entered in this world through the virgin's womb,
born without sin, no taint of sin, He had no association with
Adam. No. He's the seed of the woman. You see, we're all sinful people. We trace our lineage You know,
Nancy and I did that thing through ancestry.com. Found out where our bloodline
comes from and so forth. I'm sure there are a lot of skeletons
in the bird closet. And my mother, she was a Ferguson. I'm sure we got a lot of skeletons
in the closet. Our Lord Jesus, He wasn't of
our bloodline. He doesn't trace his lineage
back to Adam the way you do and the way I do. No. No. He's not polluted with sin. He has no sin nature like we
do. And he who came into this world
lived in perfect obedience to God's law. And then, after having fully
set forth that he's the perfect savior, absolutely qualified
to be our substitute, to be God's sacrifice for sin, to be that
sin offering, he gave himself over to the hands of his enemies
to do with him according to God's eternal purpose. Scripture says
Luke 22 22 the son of man goeth forth as it was determined All
these gathered around him because God purposed it that way and
this representative man he went to the cross of Calvary and he
died and as the substitute for all those people that God gave
him in the covenant of grace before the world ever began.
He was, he has always been, the representative of his people. I say again, God always deals
with people on the basis of two representative men. Adam, the
first man, Christ Jesus, the last Adam, the second man. And our Lord Jesus, when he laid
down his life, when he satisfied God's justice, dying under the
wrath of God, bearing our sins in his own body on the tree, When he died to satisfy the justice
of God and pay the indebtedness that God rightfully demanded,
justice rightfully demanded, when he died, all of his people
were then and there debt free. Our sins were removed. Our sins
were put away according to God's eternal purpose. You see, God,
as I said a while ago, even those Old Testament saints, before
the Lord Jesus laid down His life, a ransom for them. They were justified on the basis
of who He is and what He would do and the certainty of His death. The Bible says He was the Lamb
who was slaughtered The Lamb who was slaughtered, who was
slain before the foundation of the world. And when He died, that act of obedience. You know what it says in Philippians
the second chapter? He was obedient all the way unto
death. Even the death of the cross. And when He did that, He redeemed
his people. He reconciled his people. Right
then and there. How did I become a sinner? I
know I'm personally guilty. I don't overlook that and I don't
ignore that and I don't deny that. I'm a sinner by personal
disobedience. Here's how I became a sinner,
and here's how you became a sinner, by representation. You didn't
become a sinner when you sinned. You sinned because you were born
a sinner. You were born wrong. Born wrong. The scripture puts it this way,
right here in Romans 5. I'll give it to you quickly.
Verse 19. Remember, Adam was a figure of
him who was to come. Look at Romans 5 and 19. For
by one man's disobedience, this is what I've been trying to drill
home tonight. And I know it's elementary to
many of you, but it's necessary to be repeated over and over
again. By one man's disobedience, one
action, Many were made or legally constituted to be sinners. That is the many he represented.
And you know how many he represented? Everybody. That's how many he
represented. Then there's the word so. By the obedience of one. Who is that? Christ Jesus. What
is his obedience? God gave him work to do. You know, throughout our Lord's ministry,
He would say, He referred to this work. And then finally,
in John chapter 17, He said, I finished the work that you
gave me to do. He said, I've come down to do
the work, and then I finished the work. What was the work? Not works. But one work, the
work of reconciliation, the work of salvation. He came down here
to do the Father's will and purpose of redemption. The Father gave
Him a job to do, a work to do. The work was to save His people
from their sins. How would he do that? By his
obedience unto death, he had to die a sacrificial death. And he did. And by that sacrificial death,
that's how we became righteous. Pretty simple. It really is,
isn't it, Joe? Pretty simple. How'd I get to
be a sinner? Through something somebody else
did? Okay, I don't have any problem with that, because I understand
representation. Well, how do I become righteous?
Oh, by, well, working and striving and, no, that's what the Jews
did. That's what Paul said in Romans
chapter 10. He said, I bear them record.
They got a zeal of God, but not according to knowledge because
they're going about to establish their own righteousness and they
won't submit themselves to the righteousness of God, which is
in Christ Jesus for Christ is the end of the law for righteousness
to everybody who believes. We're righteous through the action
of one man. Your belief doesn't make you
righteous. That's not how you're right. Your belief doesn't wash
your sins away. No, it doesn't do that. Your
belief doesn't reconcile you to God. Your belief and your
repentance, all of those things are the result of having been
reconciled to God. The result of. But you were reconciled
to God by the death of his son. And we know he did the job fully
to God's satisfaction, because he raised him from the dead.
He went home to glory 40 days later, and the father said, sit
here at my right hand. I'll make all your enemies your
footstool. So, have we become sinful? One man. His disobedience. Have we become righteous? One
man. The God-man. his obedience unto
death, even the death of the cross.