Because All Sinned

“Therefore, just as through one man sin entered into the world, and death through sin, and so death spread to all men, because all sinned.”  Romans 5:12 NAS

 Many have used this verse as a justification for the man-made doctrine of so-called original sin.  I don’t know about you, but I wasn’t born a sinner.  I made myself one in short order, but I wasn’t born one. 

Dallas Meserve, my Romans professor at San Jose Bible College, made it very clear that Romans 5:12 does not teach original sin.  It in fact denies that doctrine.  We did not inherit sin from Adam.  We were not born sinners.  What is passed on to us from Adam is death, not sin.  If you don’t believe me, take the verse and diagram it as you used to have to do in grammar school.  It never says that sin passed to men, but that death did.  A very clear reading of this verse just by itself establishes this fact. 

Still, at the end of the verse you have the phrase, “because all sinned”.  I have had to wrestle with that at times because it seems to give an inch to the idea of original sin.  Today, though, I saw it in light of the rest of the verse.  It seems to sound as though we are responsible for the initial judgment of death.   That, however, is not what it says.  What we (i.e. every human being who has ever lived other than Adam) are and were responsible for is not stopping the spread of sin. 

We don’t get death because we sin.  That’s the judicial punishment on the human race consequent to the sin of Adam.  But, we don’t get out from under the sentence of death because we sin.  We’re already in death.  We’re born into death, not into sin.  But, we stay in death because of our own sin. 

Death spread because no one who was sinless stopped it.  Our sins didn’t procure the judicial sentence of physical death.  They were like a lack of good behavior which kept us from a pardon. 

This just brings us to Jesus.  He was the sinless sacrifice who stopped the spread of sin and death in the universe.  Only He could do that.  We can get the benefit of it when we are in Him.