Summary: Man's unrighteousness brought death, but God's righteousness brings life
To follow Paul’s line of thought here, it’s useful to take a look at the structure of verses 12 to 21. The dominant feature of this whole section is a major comparison Paul sets up using the comparison words “just as . . . so.” The complicating feature is that the comparison, begun with “just as” in verse 12, gets interrupted. Note the NIV translators’ dash at the end of verse 12. The comparison will be picked up again and completed at verse 18. There we see that what Paul had in mind already in verse 12 was a statement like this: Just as Adam’s disobedience brought sin and death to all mankind, so Christ’s obedience brings righteousness and life for all mankind.
Fitted between verses 12 and 18 are two asides, or digressions. The first one, verses 13 and 14, speaks of a similarity, or parallel, between what Adam and Christ did. The second digression, verses 15 to 17, points out the great contrast between what the two did, with Christ’s gracious gift far overshadowing and offsetting the damage father Adam did to the human race.
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—13 for before the law was given, sin was in the world. But sin is not taken into account when there is no law. 14 Nevertheless, death reigned from the time of Adam to the time of Moses, even over those who did not sin by breaking a command, as did Adam, who was a pattern of the one to come.
Paul asserts that through one man (Adam) sin entered into the world. Death, which is the wages of sin, necessarily followed, because “all sinned.” At this point, however, Paul is sidetracked by an objection he anticipates. Someone is going to say, Did everybody really sin like Adam? What about those people who lived “from the time of Adam to the time of Moses”? At that time there was not yet a Mosaic Law given from Mount Sinai. Wasn’t there a difference between Adam, who had a specific command from God, and those who came after? Could one say of them that “all sinned”? Paul answers in the affirmative: “Before the law was given, sin was in the world.”
He then follows with, “But sin is not taken into account when there is no law.” To be sure, the record-keeping is different when there are no specific laws to measure people’s disobedience. Recall Paul’s similar evaluation at 4:15: “Where there is no law there is no transgression.” But quite apart from the individual infractions of specific rules, there was something else at work after the fall. That something is what has come to be called inherited sin, or original sin. With his sin Adam gave sinfulness to all people, so that all people are born in a sinful condition. King David finds it necessary to confess, “Surely I was sinful at birth, sinful from the time my mother conceived me” (Psalm 51:5).*
* See also Genesis 8:21; Psalm 48:3; John 3:6.
True, before the Mosaic Law was given, the record of individual sins may have looked different, but even so, all people were sinners. We can be sure of that, Paul argues, because all died—the penalty for sin. “Nevertheless, death reigned from the time of Adam to the time of Moses, even over those who did not sin by breaking a command, as did Adam, who was a pattern of the one to come.”