NOTES for Rom 5:12-21
Speaking about salvation and deliverance from sin, Paul also considers this process on a cosmic scale. The damaged state of human nature, which in particular made death inevitable, is an obvious fact for everyone. In every age this fact has been known not only to Yahwists, or Jews, or Christians.
All the religious and philosophical schools and teachings of antiquity say in one way or another that human nature is either seriously damaged or at least distorted by some unknown evil force. And this is connected with the sin committed by the first human beings. The consequences of the sin committed by the first human beings are transmitted to every person born into the world, like an incurable hereditary disease that weakens a person spiritually and physically and makes him inclined toward evil and sin.
This has always been so; the whole history of fallen humanity passes under the sign of this hereditary illness, spiritual and physical. And the Torah by itself cannot change anything here. More precisely, it can, but this does not make things easier: by itself it does not help a person be freed from sin and from the corruption that became characteristic of human nature after the fall. On the contrary, the Torah only emphasizes human sinfulness, setting it in sharper relief.
Sin becomes more noticeable when there is Torah, just as a deviation from a chosen direction becomes more noticeable when there is a compass. But just as a compass by itself cannot change the direction of movement, so the Torah by itself cannot free a person from sin. What is needed here is the action of God's power and God's love. This power and love enter the world through the Messiah, through Christ, who brought the Kingdom into the world. The Kingdom is the manifestation of God's power and God's love in all the fullness available to the world; it can change the situation radically.
With Christ's coming and the manifestation of the Kingdom, the process begins of freeing humanity and the world from the consequences of the fall. That is why the coming of Christ can be compared with the sin of the first human being: in both cases there are consequences on a universal scale, but their spiritual vectors are opposite. If the sin of the first human being destroys both humanity and creation, the coming of Christ and the manifestation of the Kingdom restore them, healing them from the illness that resulted from the fall. This is the only way to overcome the consequences of the fall both in the life of an individual person and in the history of humanity. There is no other.