Romans 6-23 — Romans 5-6

0:00 Sorry, I'm not wearing a tie. I knew I was speaking, but slipped my mind. So turn in your Bibles to Romans chapter six and verse 23, It's right there, but you can have it up close and personal. So Romans six twenty three, my goal is learn of God's design for mankind, of God's view of sin, and then finally His grace towards mankind. And I've chosen Romans six twenty three as kind of the base of where I'm going go from there.

0:44 So Romans chapter six and verse 23 says, For the wages of sin is death, but the gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord. Wasn't till this week that I really took a deeper look at this verse, I've always realized the meaning of it, but I was teaching at a Good News Club where there are little children who need to understand what this verse means. And I noticed that there was a couple important contrasts in this verse, so contrasts to things that are very separate, there's no middle ground and there's also a conjunction or a word before and then the word but and then after, something very different. So the first contrast I'd like to talk about is the contrast of wages and gift. Now many here have a job job and they work and they receive wages.

1:53 So I think we have a good understanding of what wages are, wages are earned. I'd to contrast that with gift which cannot be earned, if it is earned it is not a gift. Next contrast I'd like to look at is in bold, it's death and life. And I'll be looking at Genesis to look at what death and life are in more detail, but for now death is separation and I'm not sure how exactly to coin life, but I view life as something that is together, I don't know how to describe it yet, but maybe I'll understand as I study more. But death and life are very clear contrasts.

2:38 If someone, if you're driving down the road and there's a squirrel taking a nap, it's clearly dead, it's not moving. Whereas if it's running through your yard, it's alive, it's very easy to tell if something is dead or alive. So lastly, I'd like to talk about the word but. And the word but there separates for the wages of sin is death with the gift of God's eternal life. The very very different, they too as a whole contrast.

3:14 And then lastly this is only because of Christ Jesus our Lord. So that's a very very important detail not to point out. So I was teaching this to elementary school students and I'm not sure how much they got, but I enjoyed it. So hopefully they got something out of it. So let's look at the book of Genesis, the very beginning and look about trying to understand these words death and life.

3:45 Death and life. Genesis one:one In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. The last verse of chapter one says, Then God saw everything that He had made and indeed it was very good. So the evening and the morning were the sixth day. So we see God created life out of nothing and he saw that it was very good.

4:22 When a perfect God says that something is very good that's exceptional, that's beyond our grasp of what that is. So we see that the life that God created was perfect. So skip ahead a little bit, we see that Adam was perfect creation made in the image of God and he lived in a perfect garden, a garden without thorns, a garden that grew, a garden that was very very very beautiful, and importantly God gave him a perfect wife. So a perfect man, perfect wife living in a perfect garden and last and probably most importantly, they had perfect communion with God. We read how God would walk in the garden with them.

5:09 So we see a picture of how God created this intense perfection of life and He gave man in Genesis two sixteen, we see that the Lord God commanded the man saying, Of every tree the garden you may freely eat but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat for the day that you eat of it you will surely die. So God created all this perfection and then He gave a command. See man was different from, animals in that he had free will, he had the choice, God gave him the ability to choose to obey God or not. And so God gave him a choice, man's choice was to choose or trust God's wisdom and to obey him or his own desire. Like to draw attention real quick that not only did God put the tree of the knowledge of good and evil in the garden, He also put the tree of life.

6:25 Life giving God made the tree of life. In Genesis chapter two, I believe, is the last reference to the tree of life until you get to Revelation. Alright, so there's quite a gap here. So we see what God created, what He desired and then we see the rest of the Bible of what happened after man sinned. So man, Adam and Eve, they ate of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.

7:39 After the fall, after they sinned, there was shame. So sin brings shame. We see in chapter three, in verse eight, it says, And they heard the sound of the Lord God walking in the garden in the cool of the day and Adam and his wife hid themselves from the presence of the Lord God among the trees of the garden. I think that that verse is a pretty good representation of what death is. Before then, they were perfect and they could be with God.

8:20 After they had sinned, they hid themselves from the presence of God. I know that, when I sin, against my parents, I don't want to be around them as much. There's a separation, right? So death in this context, the wages of sin is death, there's that separation because of that. We see also that they blamed others for their sin, there was pain and sickness.

8:51 So we can see here how much God hates sin and the disastrous consequences from it. Not only could there not be just that close relationship between God and man, they hid themselves, but also God had to kick them out of the garden. This is very serious. Not only that, but an animal had to be killed to make clothes for them. Right away we see the first death in, in the world was because of sin.

9:23 So God views sin very seriously. Turn to Romans chapter five, probably keep a finger in Romans chapter five or Romans chapter six. Romans chapter five and verse 12 says this, as through one man sin entered the world and death through sin, thus death spread to all men because all sinned. So we see the consequences that came on Adam because of his sin and we see also that we have all sinned and we also incur those consequences. First John one:eight, let me just turn to quickly, first John one:eight says that if we say that we have no sin, we deceive ourselves and the truth is not in us.

10:23 I've talked to people who said that they haven't sinned. Well, they're just deceiving themselves because, as I talked to them, they didn't want to talk about God and they were wearing clothes, they knew of their shame. I'd to talk about the word but. This is the contrast between this verse. So we've seen the wages of sin is death.

11:09 In Genesis even, God made a promise to the serpent that their seed or their children, their generations would crush, Satan's head that God would send a deliverer over their sin. Romans chapter five, if you're still there, in verse 15 it says this, this is talking about the second part of Romans six twenty three, it says, But the free gift is not like the offense, for if by the one man's offense many died, much more the grace of God and the gift by the grace of the one man, Jesus Christ, abounded to many. And the gift is not like that which came through the one who sinned, for the judgment which came from one offense resulted in condemnation, but the free gift which came from the many offenses resulted in justification. For if by the one man's offense death reign through the one, much more those who receive abundance of grace and of the gift of righteousness will reign in life through the one Christ Jesus. So see from this verses the the indication of the looking forward of the one who would redeem or the one who would take the place of those who deserved, death because of their sin.

13:03 And we see that He gives the gift of righteousness in life. God is the one who desires and He gives life. We see, that God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son that whoever believes in Him should not perish but have everlasting life. So you can receive this life by believing that Jesus is God's Son that he died on the cross for your sins. My time is evaporating.

13:36 Alright, I made reference to Revelation where the last, where there's another tree of life, something that God, delights in. God is preparing a place to those trust His Son for their salvation, that believe that He took their place in His Son on the tree. He wants to have communion with them. The place is called Heaven and coincidentally, as I've said earlier, it has a tree of life. God wants us to have a close relationship with Him.

14:14 One John chapter four verse 10 says, And this is love, not we love God, but that He loved us. So that God is the one that initiates love, He desires to have this relationship with Him. My hope today is to give a reminder of how God sins, and how He has done everything possible to reconcile our relationship with Him. All He wants from us is He wants us to, not do what Adam did, He wanted Adam to trust him, to trust that God in his wisdom knew what was best for him. And we see that Adam decided to trust his own thinking, own desires.

15:57 Romans six twenty-twenty three says, For when you were slaves of sin, you were free in regard to righteousness. What fruit did you have then of the things which you are now ashamed? For the end of those things is death. Now having set free from sin and having become slaves of God, you have your fruit unto holiness and in the end, everlasting life. For the wages of sin is death, but the gift of God is eternal life through Christ Jesus our Lord.

16:45 God desires to have that eternal life. He desires us to have that eternal life. It's what he designed, for Adam. Adam sinned, but he desires each and every one of us to receive his son and to spend eternity with him. So if you haven't done that, I'd encourage you to do that because God desires it and the wages of sin is death.

17:10 So that's separation from God eternally in a place called hell.