Last week we looked at how sin entered the world through Adam; this week it was time to look at the parallels between Adam and Christ (Romans 5:13-21).

Adam is a type of Christ. A type is a pattern, a shadow pointing to a greater truth, a symbol, if you like. Whilst it is dangerous to build doctrine on types and whilst all types have their limitations, they are like stained glass windows, illuminating and highlighting aspects of truth which might otherwise remain hidden. Adam is like Christ in that he was a representative of man; he had free choice; his choice affected all manking and he knew what it was to walk with God and to know Him intimately. So too Christ chose to obey His Father (a choice which affects us all, since we partake in His righteousness) and knew His Father; He became the representative for man, freely choosing to live as man was designed to live, showing us to how to be human without sinning. Christ became the provision for sin; Adam, on the other hand, showed us the penalty and power of sin.

In comparing Adam’s trespaass with Christ’s gift of eternal life, we see a number of differences, however. In Adam, sin and death reigned and condemnation was the consequence (see John 3:17-19). In Christ, we are given the gift of ‘reigning in life’ and are justified, given right standing before God: ‘no condemnation now I dread’. Adam’s sin brought condemnation for all; Christ’s right living and sacrificial death brought justification for all.

God’s wonderful gift of grace is described as ‘overflowing grace’ (vs 15). God hasn’t just given grace; He has given an ‘abundant provision of grace’ (vs 17) and we are told that ‘where sin increased, grace increased all the more’ (Rom 5:20). May we know that grace more and more in our lives!

Tony Brown preached from Mark 12:28-31 last night on the greatest commandment. ‘ “The most important one,” answered Jesus, “is this: ‘Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is one. Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength.’The second is this: ‘Love your neighbour as yourself.’ There is no commandment greater than these.” ‘

Loving God with all we have is the most important thing we can do with our lives. Love has to be outward, not inward-looking and selfish. God, who is love, demonstrates this to us, since His love reaches out to us (Rom 5:6-8 demonstrates the unselfishness of God’s love for us.) We need to make God the centre of our lives, which we accomplish through obedience, since Jesus told us that if we loved Him, we would obey His commands.

Loving our neighbour as ourselves is only possible when we know who we are and are secure in our own identity in Christ. The Fall of man, narrated in Genesis 3, is more than a mere fable; it was an attack on the God-given identity and destiny of mankind. If we are unsure of our identity in God, we often struggle with insecurity and become focussed on comparing ourselves with others instead of being free to be who we are in God. Inferiority and envy often grow within us as believe other people’s evaluations of us rather than what God says about us. The truth of God’s Word, however, has the power to set us free. We need to meditate on His truth: we are made in His image (Gen 1:27), created by God and unique (Ps 139:13-14), the apple of God’s eye (Deut 32:10), loved and precious to God (John 3:16).

Loving our neighbour with God’s love, as we are commanded to do, transforms our society. Jesus told us to ‘love one another’ (John 15:12-13). Our purpose in life is to become more like Christ so we may reflect the love of God to a dying world. Matthew 7:12, often called the ‘Golden Rule’, teaches us to treat others in the way we would like them to treat us, to spend time with people, to respect others, to accept them and love them (just as Sue Ryder did when caring for the Polish refugees). We reap what we sow: if we sow love, then we will reap love.

Jesus clearly taught us (especially in the Parable of the Good Samaritan) that everyone is our neighbour. We are to love our family, our friends, our colleagues, our literal neighbours. Lev 19:18 tells us “Do not seek revenge or bear a grudge against anyone among your people, but love your neighbour as yourself.” Unforgiveness will hinder our walk with God and will result in action. It is an obstacle to God’s love, against God’s will and blocks His forgiveness to us, as Matt 6:14-15 makes clear. We insult God when we refuse to forgive, for the Cross shows us the measure of God’s forgiveness and helps us also to see that there is no sin too big for us to forgive.

Forgiveness and gratitude go hand in hand. We have been forgiven so much that we have much to be grateful for. Let’s understand that our relationship with God, with ourselves and with others are all connected and let’s walk in forgiveness and gratitude so that we may love as God loves.

March is obviously a busy month for birthdays! We even celebrated long distance with Pat, who is recovering from a broken leg at the moment and so can’t be at meetings.

Joan & Julie also have birthdays this week:

Dave preached from Psalm 8 this morning, one of the most well known psalms of David, which looks at the majesty of God. The psalm starts and finishes by declaring “how majestic is Your name in all the earth!” – majesty which David first experienced through the wonder of creation. Yet, despite the grandeur of nature, it is God’s simplicity which impresses David, the way that the transcendent glory of God can still be grasped and expressed by children and infants. Jesus quotes from this psalm in Matthew 21:14-16 and we are reminded that there is a need for us to become ‘as little children’ if we are to enter into the kingdom of God (Matth 18:3), experiencing and believing God with child-like faith.

David is also amazed that, given the majesty of the creation all around him, God cares for humanity. Those important questions about the meaning and purpose of life can be answered in one of two ways: we can either, like Bertrand Russell, the father of humanism, decide that there is nothing beyond the whirling stars, that ‘the life of man is a long march through the night surrounded by invisible foes, tortured by weariness and pain, toward a goal that few can hope to reach and where none may tarry long’ facing ‘omnipotent death’ (a bleak, pessimistic view of life which surely leads to despair), or we can assert, as the Bible does, that God’s purposes for man are profound and that we have a two-fold relationship, with God and with His creation. We may not yet see everything subject to Christ (Heb 2), but we know that Jesus has been crowned with the glory and honour that God had intended for man at the beginning and that despite the Fall of man, there is redemption and hope available for us. The whole creation is eagerly looking forward to the day of the manifestation of the sons of God (Romans 8) and our present troubles are not worth comparing to the glory that will be revealed (2 Cor 4.)

Truly, “Lord, our Lord, how majestic is Your name in all the earth!”

Our Bible studies through Romans sometimes hurtle through chapters, sometimes linger on verses. Last night, we looked at Romans 5:12: “Therefore, just as sin entered the world through one man, and death through sin, and in this way death came to all people, because all sinned…”

The Christian doctrine of original sin is fundamental to the Gospel – if there is no sin, there is no need for a Saviour, no need for salvation. The doctrine of original sin, including the theological term ‘the total depravity of man’ (meaning that sin has tainted every aspect of humanity, rather than all people being horribly wicked in every action they do), is expounded clearly in Romans 5 but is rooted in the Genesis 3 narrative of the Fall of man.

2009 saw the bicentenary of Darwin’s birth and 150 years since his ‘Origin of Species’ was published, which heralded a change in belief away from creationism (the belief that God created the heavens and earth as narrated in Genesis) towards evolution. Evolution teaches that life ‘evolved’ from nothing (there are various theories as to how this happened, including the ‘Big Bang’ theory) and that God was not involved; in fact, many evolutionists don’t believe in God at all.

Does this matter? Do you have to believe in creation to be a Christian? There are so many theories out there, even amongst Christians… surely you just go with the theory you think is the most suitable?

It’s obvious that there are many, many views on this topic and Christians definitely disagree on the subject, but it does matter what we believe, since the whole of Paul’s argument in this section of Romans is dependent on the comparison between Adam, the first man, and Christ: how the one brought sin and death into the world through his disobedience and how Christ brought salvation and redemption to the world through His obedience. If we simply evolved from nothing and Adam did not really exist, but is simply an allegory, we are in trouble when we come to Romans 5.

At the risk of stirring controversy, let me say that I believe in creationism and am deeply concerned about the way evolution is taught as fact in schools and is portrayed as fact in society, often with a corresponding denigration of Christianity. I may not have all the scientific answers (if you are interested in the topic, I would commend the ministry of Creation Ministries International to you and advise you to read widely from the material they produce at http://creation.com/), but I do believe that if you take away the doctrine of God’s creation of mankind through the one man, Adam, you are running the risk of removing so much truth that you are left with a watered down Gospel that has little impact on the world at all.

Paul teaches in Romans 5:12 that sin came into the world through one man. Adam sinned primarily because he disobeyed a direct command of God, not to eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. Sin always involves a choice: we choose to obey God’s direct command or we choose to go our own way, seeking our own pleasure, believing that we know best.

The consequence of Adam’s sin was that mankind is now infected with sin. Sin is like pollution – often unseen, far-reaching, contaminating, damaging. The penalty of sin, Paul teaches, is death – the separation of the body from the spirit (James 2:26), a death that encompasses physical decay but also spiritual separation and alienation from God (Eph 2:1-2, Is 59:2). Adam’s actions mean that not one aspect of humanity is unaffected; sin is now in our DNA, so to speak. The harmony and pefection of the Garden of Eden have been lost.

Sin, therefore, is serious. It’s so serious that it took God’s rescue plan to sort out this problem – we were unable to sort it ourselves, since sin is part of our nature now. It’s very easy to be blind to our own sins (clearly seeing other people’s!) and we need to heed the warnings of Scripture about the deceptive and pervasive nature of sin and not tolerate it in our lives. We must always be aware, however, that it’s not just a case of the specific sins we commit, but of the sinful nature itself. The battle is far deeper than we often like to admit.

Thankfully, that’s not the end of the story! More to follow!

Jesus came to earth to complete a mission: Luke 19:10 tells us that “the Son of Man has come to seek and save that which was lost.”

Mark took us through various superheroes, starting with the film ‘Mission Impossible’ and how Tom Cruise has shown us a hero who saved people against amazing odds. We looked at Superman, and how he saved both people and the planets before moving on to Flash Gordon, who was dubbed ‘the Saviour of the Universe’.

Superheroes often do supernatural things and we love to believe in heroes. Nonetheless, we need to remember that the mission of salvation which God planned long ago was impossible for any human to complete. God chose us (Eph 1:3-5) and has been seeking us out; just as Superman rescued Lois Lane because of his love for her, it is God’s love which has prompted His great rescue plan. John 3:16-17 reminds us that it is God’s love which has motivated Him and that all can come and be saved. Jesus makes the impossible mission possible; we are rescued from the penalty of sin and death and can be part of God’s family. What a Saviour!