📜WEB · Romans 5:14
What does Romans 5:14 mean?
"Nevertheless death reigned from Adam until Moses, even over those whose sins weren’t like Adam’s disobedience, who is a foreshadowing of him who was to come."
— Romans 5:14 (World English Bible)
Surrounding context
Not only so, but we also rejoice in God through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom we have now received the reconciliation.
Therefore as sin entered into the world through one man, and death through sin; and so death passed to all men, because all sinned.
For until the law, sin was in the world; but sin is not charged when there is no law.
Nevertheless death reigned from Adam until Moses, even over those whose sins weren’t like Adam’s disobedience, who is a foreshadowing of him who was to come.
But the free gift isn’t like the trespass. For if by the trespass of the one the many died, much more did the grace of God, and the gift by the grace of the one man, Jesus Christ, abound to the many.
The gift is not as through one who sinned: for the judgment came by one to condemnation, but the free gift came of many trespasses to justification.
For if by the trespass of the one, death reigned through the one; so much more will those who receive the abundance of grace and of the gift of righteousness reign in life through the one, Jesus Christ.
Explanation
Romans 5:14 sits in the middle of Paul's extended comparison between Adam and Christ, and its basic point is this: death held sway over every human being from the time of Adam until the time of Moses, even though the people living in that span had not committed the exact kind of sin Adam did. Adam sinned by directly disobeying a specific command God gave him — don't eat from that tree. The generations between Adam and Moses had no such explicit law to violate, since the Mosaic Law hadn't been given yet. Yet they still died. Paul's point is that
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