From this verse to the end of chapter 8, we have not so much a distinct portion of the Epistle as a needed and most weighty appendix to that which precedes. Hitherto the great truth of the remission of the believer's sins has been fully set forth, closing with the blessed privileges which belong to the justified man, but still in that connection—the expiatory efficacy of the blood of Jesus, and this displayed in His resurrection. Precious as it all is, it is not everything the believer wants. He may be miserable in the discovery of what he finds within himself; and if he know not the truth that applies to his difficulties on this score, he is in danger of yielding to hardness on one side, or of bearing a burdened spirit of bondage on the other. How many saints have never learned the extent of their deliverance, and go mourning from day to day under efforts which they would be the first to confess unavailing against their inward corruption! How many settle down callously balancing their faith in the forgiveness of their sins by the blood of Christ as a set-off against a plague which they suppose must needs be, and of course with no more power over it than those who are honestly but in vain struggling to get better. Neither the one nor the other understands the value to them of the sentence already executed on the old man in the cross, nor their own new place before God in Christ risen from the dead. This it is the Spirit's object to unfold in what follows.
“On this account, as by one man sin entered into the world, and by sin death, and so death passed unto all men for that all sinned.” (Ver. 12.)
There is no need to reduce the apostle's language to a formal regularity. The utterance of the Spirit's mind, through a heart and understanding which felt its value as none ever did, clothed itself in a form more akin to that which was enunciated than man's rhetoric ever conceived. A broken sentence, with a long interruption following before the answer was given, suits the subject here, no less than the most parenthetic chapter in the scripture falls in with the task the apostle had in hand in Eph. 3. This coincidence of the remarkable form with the great facts and doctrines under discussion cannot be questioned even by those who see nothing beyond the fortuitous even in the Bible. Verses 13-17 form a digression that ends in meeting objections and helping on the argument; and then verse 18 resumes the matter of verse 12 under a more compact shape and furnishes the consequent of what was there introduced but left unfinished.
Nor does there seem to be any great difficulty in apprehending the propriety and bearing of particular phrases in this verse. The opening words have given rise to much needless and unintelligent questioning. The connection is as evident as it is important. God's love being the source, and Christ—the death and resurrection of Christ especially—the channel of redemption with such wondrous results to the believer, “on this account” (διὰ τοῦτο), we are free to approach another side of this mighty and fruitful theme—the two heads with their respective families and the two natures of the believer, derived from Adam and Christ, with the relation of the Holy Ghost to all.
The last words have also been much debated. Undoubtedly the new subject is sin, the fallen estate of man, marked and closed by death, but there is no right reason to exclude from this and other expressions of the section the actual sinning of mankind. Ἐφ’ ᾦ does not mean “in whom;” nor is there warrant, while translating these words rightly, to add to the sentence that all died in the person of Adam. The point beyond all prominence is the way in which one man may affect the world. However preoccupied the Jew might be by the individual dealing of the law with each soul under it, it was impossible even for him to deny that such is the plain fact standing in the written word at the beginning of the world's sad moral history. Undoubtedly by one man sin, the thing sin, entered; and this at once broke up the ground on which all was then ordered. As it was rebellion against God, so was it fatal to man. Thereby death, the enemy so dreaded of man, came.
Thus the change most solemnly affecting the world came in long before the Jew existed or consequently before their boasted law was given. The Jew must look somewhere more largely, and accurately too, into the scriptures. He must not flatter his national vanity or religious pride with the delusion that all hinges either on Israel or their law. Adam was before them both and affects all mankind (the Jews not excepted). True, the momentous history that shows us how sin and death entered, is humbling indeed; but what will not the heart turn into a vaunt? At any rate, that incalculably grave event was outside the Jew in itself and in consequences far beyond them. It was not outside man, but contrariwise “by one man;” yet its effect, death, permeated the world.
But the apostle takes care to add to this one man's sin those of all others— “and so death passed unto all men, for that all sinned.” Thus the last clause is expressly to guard against the exclusion of the sins of men generally. We must therefore beware of enfeebling either side of the case. In the very scripture which opens the discussion of the universal bearing of Adam's sin on the human race (for it is no question here of Israel in particular), the connection of men's own sins with their death is carefully added. No one doubts that infants and idiots die, and this through Adam's sin; but the Spirit does not exclude the consequence where personal guilt can apply. The position of ruin to which the fall consigned the race is not severed from the evil workings of the nature now fallen in all men. Adam's sin is the cause but not the sole account and whole case of the bitter lot of man.
Now if one man according to God's word and consistently with His character and ways could plunge the world in death by sin, was it inconsistent with the true God by one man to bring in justification of life which addresses itself to all men. This the apostle proceeds to show elaborately and with divine precision in the verses that follow, which I will not further anticipate.