Romans 5:12 “Therefore just as sin entered the world through one man and death through sin …” (NIV).

Observation: Romans 5 is a robust passage uniquely used in the development and defense of the Christian faith. It opens with Paul’s declaration of justification by faith (Rom. 5:1), the truth of which so moved Martin Luther that the Protestant Reformation resulted. It contains another important theme as well: the reality that sin entered the world through the original, created man named Adam. Through Adam’s sin, death became part of creation’s DNA.

Application: From the beginning of Christendom this chapter has been foundational to an understanding of our problem. Like Uncle Remus’s tar baby, I find death clinging tenaciously to me. No amount of self-scrubbing can rid me of it. It began with the man Adam and now afflicts me. “Just as man is destined to die once, and after that to face judgment, so Christ was sacrificed once to take away the sins” (Heb. 9:27–28, NIV).

Since Adam, men have known that there was salvation in none but God. Christ’s blood was the acceptable atonement for sin, leading to life everlasting if appropriated through personal faith in His sacrifice. This has been unshakable doctrine since God first instituted death in the garden as the consequence for Adam’s sin.

This same cherished truth has gained fresh importance in combating the lie of evolution which, over man’s few-thousand-year history upon earth has had less than a two-hundred-year run. But it has been a destructive run indeed, persuading many, in direct and flagrant contradiction of Scripture, that Adam’s advent was the result of evolutionary improvements as uncountable billions of ancestors died for his benefit. Such perversion of Scripture, when embraced, profoundly undermines any need for a Savior. The lie says not that death resulted from Adam’s sin, but that Adam resulted from death.

For many years, I believed that lie. I was educated in it and taught to look at things from the lie’s worldview. But if the plain truth of Scripture were to mean anything, I ultimately had to confess to having no wiggle-room; there could have been no death before Adam. God’s love for me is great enough that He sacrificed His Son for my rescue from Adam-induced death. He did not make such sacrifice for an improved, higher form of ooze, but for one who was made in His image.

Prayer: Father, thank You for the unchangeable truth of Your Word, which is a He, written in the blood of Calvary. Forgive me for ever agreeing with the lie about who I am.