[74] Ἐλάβομεν: but the English perfect best represents the idea.
ROMANS v. 12-21
We approach a paragraph of the Epistle pregnant with mystery. It leads us back to Primal Man, to the Adam of the first brief pages of the Scripture record, to his encounter with the suggestion to follow himself rather than his Maker, to his sin, and then to the results of that sin in his race. We shall find those results given in terms which certainly we should not have devised _a priori_. We shall find the Apostle teaching, or rather stating, for he writes as to those who know, that mankind inherits from primal Man, tried and fallen, not only taint but guilt, not only moral hurt but legal fault.
This is "a thing heard in the darkness." It has been said that Holy Scripture "is not a sun, but a lamp." The words may be grievously misused, by undue emphasis on the negative clause; but they convey a sure truth, used aright. Nowhere does the divine Book undertake to tell us all about everything it contains. It undertakes to tell us truth, and to tell it from God. It undertakes to give us pure light, yea, "to bring life and immortality out into the light," (2 Tim. i. 10). But it reminds us that we know "in part," and that even prophecy, even the inspired message, is "in part" (1 Cor. xiii. 9). It illuminates immensely much, but it leaves yet more to be seen hereafter. It does not yet kindle the whole firmament and the whole landscape like an oriental sun. It sheds its glory upon our Guide, and upon our path.
A passage like this calls for such recollections. It tells us, with the voice of the Apostle's Lord, great facts about our own race, and its relations to its primeval Head, such that every individual man has a profound moral and also judicial _nexus_ with the first Man. It does not tell us how those inscrutable but solid facts fit into the whole plan of God's creative wisdom and moral government. The lamp shines _there_, upon the edges of a deep ravine beside the road; it does not shine sunlike over the whole mountain-land.
As with other mysteries which will meet us later, so with this; we approach it as those who "know in part," and who know that the apostolic Prophet, by no defect of inspiration, but by the limits of the case, "prophesies in part." Thus with awful reverence, with godly fear, and free from the wish to explain away, yet without anxiety lest God should be proved unrighteous, we listen as Paul dictates, and receive his witness about our fall and our guilt in that mysterious "First Father."
We remember also another fact of this case. This paragraph deals only incidentally with Adam; its main theme is Christ. Adam is the illustration; Christ is the subject. We are to be shewn in Adam, by contrast, some of "the unsearchable riches of Christ." So that our main attention is called not to the brief outline of the mystery of the Fall, but to the assertions of the related splendour of the Redemption.
St Paul is drawing again to a close, a cadence. He is about to conclude his exposition of the Way of Acceptance, and to pass to its junction with the Way of Holiness. And he shews us here last, in the matter of Justification, this fragment from "the bottoms of the mountains"--the union of the justified with their redeeming Lord as race with Head; the _nexus_ in that respect between them and Him which makes His "righteous act" of such infinite value to them. In the previous paragraph, as we have seen, he has gravitated toward the deeper regions of the blessed subject; he has indicated our connexion with the Lord's Life as well as with His Merit. Now, recurring to the thought of the Merit, he still tends to the depths of truth, and Christ our Righteousness is lifted before our eyes from those pure depths as not the Propitiation only, but the Propitiation who is also our Covenant-Head, our Second Adam, holding His mighty merits for a new race, bound up with Himself in the bond of a real unity.