28th September 2026

28th September 2026 


Pray (ACts) 


Read (Romans 5:12-21 –– focussing on vv.12-14) 


Message (Stuart McKimm)  


Many of us will know what it’s like to complete a probation period of around 6 months when we start a new job. My official title (I think) in the Church, as an assistant minister, is actually ‘Probationary Licentiate’. A big factor in whether probation is straightforward or tough is the working conditions. If they’re bad, failure becomes so much more likely! If they’re good –– if the induction training is good, the relationships in the workplace are good & encouraging, & so forth –– success should surely follow. 


In Romans 5:12, Paul is thinking back to the time when Adam was on probation in Eden. The job? The representative of all humanity before God. He was tasked with obeying God & leading Eve in the obedience of God’s commands (see Gen. 2:15-17), ensuring no evil worked its way into the Garden or into their hearts. And what about the working conditions? Outstanding! The Garden was, and Adam had been prepared for the role good, righteous and without sin. Yet Adam still failed. And failure didn’t just mean he was sacked –– it meant v.12: “Therefore, just as sin entered the world through one man, and death through sin, and in this way death came to all men, because all sinned—“  


Adam’s job was to represent all of us before God in this probationary period in Eden. Successfully remaining faithful to God would mean the bliss of Eden would be elevated to unimaginable levels of glory, & us with it. And our right-standing with God. But his failure resulted in not just the loss of that glorious future, but the bliss of Eden too: the friendship with God we were created for & with, the God-loving righteous nature we were originally created with, and freedom from death, which we never meant to experience.  
  
Understanding this was Adam’s role –– representative of all humanity before God, with his actions determining our standing before God –– helps us understand the rest of the Bible and the Gospel altogether. In a sense, after Adam’s failure during the probationary period, God ‘put up the job advertisement again’, & the rest of the Old Testament is an outline of the impossibly specific, unattainably high job description required for someone else to now be representative for all humanity before God. Adam, Enoch, Melchizedek, Isaac, Jospeh, Moses, Joshua, David, & so forth, are all giving us an outline of what our representative should and would look like, when he eventually came –– he’d succeed were they failed, & copy their successes but on a much greater scale. Noah’s ark, the manna in the wilderness, the bronze serpent on a pole, cities of refuge, the levitical laws, & so forth –– these all symbolised aspects of the ‘job description’ our new representative would have to somehow fulfil, miraculously.  


And the LORD made an in-house hire, so to speak; He appointed His own eternal Son to the role. And hence, when Christ shows up in the Gospels, we see this Man who’s capable of such astonishing feats, miraculously reversing the effects of sin and death wherever He goes. The miracles of Christ aren’t random. Modern people, and especially unchurched people like I was, often come to the Gospels and wonder, ‘what on earth is the relevance of all these miracles to me? They might mean Jesus is impressive, if they really happened. But how does it affect me & my life, 2000 years later?’ 


The answer is: they’re Jesus showing He’s the One, the only One, who could match that impossibly specific, unattainably high job criteria of representing sinful, dying humanity. His healing of the lepers, casting out demons, restoring sight to the blind, raising the dead, & so forth –– they all communicate to us that Jesus Christ is God’s newly given representative for humanity, who can reverse all the effects of Adam’s failure. Hence Romans 5:14 finishing with this initially confusing phrase: “Adam, who was a pattern of the one to come.” Just as Adam’s acts, success, or failure was counted as representing all the rest of mankind, & so we fell with him in his failure, Christ has been given to us so that, in His success, we rise with Him into a totally renewed Creation.  


What does this mean for us? 3 very simple things: 
•  Recognise this is how the Bible & the Gospel works: just as Adam was our representative, Jesus is now our representative. It isn’t a job-share between Him & us –– Jesus on His own represents us before God. And given His perfect righteousness, that’s good news for us. Our standing before God is as secure as Jesus Himself is secure with God.  
•  Praise God for Jesus, our new representative! 
•  When we or someone we know struggles with doubt that Jesus & his miracles seem irrelevant or even nonsensical, explain this verse to them: Adam failed in his to represent us, & so plunged us all into sin & death – but Christ’s miracles show He’s the One come to reverse the effects of Adam’s failure, & give us all a successful representative before God. 
  
Pray (acTS) 


Sing 


WSC 
Q.77 What is required in the ninth commandment?
A. The ninth commandment requireth the maintaining and promoting of truth between man and man, and of our own and our neighbor’s good name, especially in witness bearing.
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