NOTES for Rom 5:12-21
Continuing his reflections on the Torah, righteousness, and grace, Paul considers what the sin of the first human being became for humanity. For the apostle, as we can see, sin is not simply a violation of moral norms. For him it is defilement in the sense in which the Torah and the Bible as a whole speak of it, that is, something that destroys a person's relationship with God and deprives him of the fullness of communion with God, and together with that of life, making fallen humanity mortal. That is precisely why Paul speaks of the sin of one person spreading to all humanity (v. 12): the consequences of sin, which affected the quality of spiritual life and the dynamic of humanity's relationship with God, touched everyone, as is usually the case with sin, whose consequences practically always affect not only the sinner himself but also his surroundings to one degree or another. The scale of the catastrophe was universal for humanity, but there is nothing unusual in the mechanism by which the consequences of sin spread: as always, it turned out to resemble purely natural processes, such as atmospheric pollution or the spread of pathogens during an epidemic. This is not surprising: having lost the fullness of spiritual life, humanity thereby gives itself over to some extent to the power of purely natural, elemental processes; therefore the consequences of the fall come crashing down on people like natural disasters. In this case the Torah is by no means a panacea, since it only allows one to distinguish sin from righteousness, but does not free a person from the power of sin and death.
Still, with the appearance of the Torah in the world, the situation changes radically. Before its appearance, death, which had become the consequence of the fall, reigned without division in the world; the apostle defines this time as the period "from Adam to Moses" (v. 14). But to speak of sin in the sense in which the Torah speaks of it, that is, as the violation of a commandment given by God, was of course not possible then (v. 13). A person lived in a world defiled by sin, but did not understand what sin was or how the path of righteousness differed from the path of wickedness. Obviously, with the appearance of the Torah the situation changes; death is no longer all-powerful, for the Torah points out the path of righteousness to everyone who wants to walk it. But the Torah enters a world already stricken by sin, and it reveals, as the apostle has said more than once, not human righteousness but human sin and transgression (v. 20). The Torah points the way into the Kingdom, but it does not replace the Kingdom. The One had to come into the world who could radically change the state of things by bringing the Kingdom where no one was ready to receive it (v. 15).
This appearing of the Kingdom in the world changed the situation in principle and objectively, just as in its own time the fall had changed it no less fundamentally and no less objectively (vv. 17-19). The point was not to punish someone or, conversely, to reward someone, but to solve a task of extraordinary importance to God, changing at once the balance of forces in the world in favor of the Kingdom (v. 17). The Torah pointed out the path to the righteous; the Messiah-Christ sent by God became the One who first walked this path to the end, revealing to the world not only the fullness of righteousness available to a human being, but also the fullness of the Kingdom available only to God.