Death Stopped with Moses and Other Strange Interpretations

Romans 5 is a fine example of the importance of following a writer’s thought flow when interpreting the Bible.

Say you do your morning reading like most people, a chapter at a time. So you drag yourself out of bed, sleep in your eyes, coffee cooling on the table beside your comfy reading chair, and open the scripture where you finished yesterday, at the end of chapter 4. You read on.

Do you even remember chapter 4? Not too likely. Maybe only in the vaguest way. That was a whole 24 hours ago. Chapters 1-3? You’ve got to be kidding. They were last week.

Strange Statements

So here you are, in the middle of one of the book’s multi-chapter arguments, and you read a couple of statements that make you go “Say what?” I’m thinking particularly of verses 13 and 14:

“Sin indeed was in the world before the law was given, but sin is not counted where there is no law. Yet death reigned from Adam to Moses.”

Really? How is sin is not counted where there is no law? What does that even mean? Surely all sin will be judged. Doesn’t Solomon say that way back in Ecclesiastes? “God will bring every deed into judgment, with every secret thing, whether good or evil.”

Then there’s this line about how death reigned from Adam to Moses. Why does he stop at Moses? Surely death continued to reign after Moses as well. It’s only with the resurrection of Christ that death lost its ability to rule over humanity.

In isolation, such statements can be confusing. I know these kinds of questions arise because they happen to me regularly, and the answer is almost always the same: go back and re-read what the apostle wrote earlier on. Very few single texts self-interpret. But these statements in chapter 5 are not actually isolated. We just isolate them by the way most of us read the Bible.

Sin is Not Counted

The answer to the first question is quite simple. Paul has been talking about the Law of Moses and what that law means for those who put their trust in it, which is to say the Jews who were under it. He’s mentioned law 39 times prior to chapter 5. As early as chapter 2, he tells us:

“For all who have sinned without the law will also perish without the law, and all who have sinned under the law will be judged by the law. For it is not the hearers of the law who are righteous before God, but the doers of the law who will be justified. For when Gentiles, who do not have the law, by nature do what the law requires, they are a law to themselves, even though they do not have the law. They show that the work of the law is written on their hearts, while their conscience also bears witness, and their conflicting thoughts accuse or even excuse them on that day when, according to my gospel, God judges the secrets of men by Christ Jesus.”

Again, in chapter 4, he writes:

“For the law brings wrath, but where there is no law there is no transgression.”

You need that bit of information in the back of your mind to set up the statement in chapter 5, where Paul is talking about a specific subset of sins called transgressions. All transgressions are sins, but not all sins are transgressions. In order to transgress, you have to have a rule to break. No rule, no transgression. Sin outside of law is not “counted” in that sense.

Now, it’s still sinful. Sin still may have terrible consequences if you unleash it on the world. It will still blacken your soul and separate you from God. It will still bring death on you in the long run, and it will still eventually be judged by Jesus Christ, as Paul says right in chapter 2. But without the law, which identifies sin and keeps track of how many times and in how many ways you fail, it’s not charged against you in the present moment. You will certainly not end up in jail for it. As Paul said to the men in Athens, “The times of ignorance God overlooked.” That is the sense in which sin is not counted.

From Adam to Moses

The second question may be solved the same way: go back. Why stop at Moses? Because Paul has already dealt with everything after Moses in earlier chapters. Chapter 3 is where Paul establishes that having the Law of Moses was no protection for the Jew. He was just as guilty as the Gentile sinner, and more so. He writes:

“Now we know that whatever the law says it speaks to those who are under the law, so that every mouth may be stopped, and the whole world may be held accountable to God. For by works of the law no human being will be justified in his sight, since through the law comes knowledge of sin.”

So Paul’s point in chapter 5 is not that death ceased to reign after Moses, but that death reigned even before the Law of Moses existed to identify it and call it out. Sin was having its deadly consequences on human beings whether or not law existed to tally up their errors. “Death spread to all men because all sinned.” The words “from Adam to Moses” expand the period during which death reigned backwards for centuries rather than reducing it.

Context, Context, Context

This is how we come to an accurate and mature understanding of the teaching of scripture: by following the thought flow of the writer, tracing his argument chapter by chapter and keeping in mind the points he has established whenever we come to something we don’t understand. If we haven’t kept them in mind, we simply need to go backward through what he has written until we find the answers we are looking for.

There’s almost no way to overstress that point. Keeping that principle in mind would solve just about every error of interpretation Christians ever make.