In his sermon, Pastor Steve Hopkins explores Romans 5:20-21, focusing on the interplay between sin and grace. He emphasizes that while the law was introduced to increase awareness of sin and guilt, it ultimately serves to highlight humanity's need for divine grace. The sermon explains that the law exposes the depth of human depravity, but where sin increases, grace abounds even more, offering redemption through Jesus Christ. Pastor Hopkins discusses how the law was designed to reveal the sinful nature inherent in humanity, inherited from Adam, and to drive people towards Christ by demonstrating their inability to achieve righteousness on their own. He underscores the notion that grace, characterized as unmerited favor, surpasses the condemnation of sin, leading believers to eternal life through Christ's righteousness. The sermon concludes with reflections on the transformative power of grace and God's pardoning nature, drawing parallels with historical figures like John Bunyan and Samuel Davies, who celebrated God's amazing grace.

Welcome back to Barnet Bible Church. Join us this week as Pastor Hopkins continues his sermon series through the Book of Romans. Good morning again. Turn with me in your Bibles, if you would, once again, to the book of Romans, chapter five, where we will be, Lord willing, picking up with verses 20 and 21 and closing out Romans chapter five. Let's stand for the reading of the word of the Lord Romans chapter 5 verses 20 Through 21 If you would read aloud with me Moreover the law entered that the offense might abound, but where sin abounded, grace did much more abound, that as sin hath reigned unto death, even so might grace reign through righteousness unto eternal life by Jesus Christ our Lord.

Let's pray. Father, we do praise and thank you for your holy word. We thank you, God, that there were men who thought it such a great, needful thing for us to have the Word of God in our own languages, that they risked their lives. They risked their lives and many laid down their lives so we could have your Word in our hands today. So grateful God to have your Word.

It is truly a lamp for our feet, a light for our path. We would be wandering in darkness, oh God, without it. We thank you, God, for your Word. And we ask, Lord, once again this morning that you would give the Holy Spirit in a special way to open the understanding of our hearts to understand your Word as we seek your face Lord and and seek to be built up in the grace and the knowledge of your Son in whose name we pray these things amen. Let's be seated.

Our text this morning begins with the word moreover, you'll notice there in chapter 5 and verse 20. Moreover, what does he mean moreover? What's he talking about? Well, moreover, it's the same thing as saying Something additional here I want to add. There's something additional that you need to understand here.

In addition to everything that I've just told you, the apostle is saying, you need to understand something else. Before we move on from the doctrine of our justification through the imputed righteousness of Christ to the accounts of those who believe, before we move from the doctrine of justification and go to the doctrine of our sanctification, he's saying there's something additional you need to understand before we go there, which we will be going to Lord willing next week when we take up chapter 6. And it concerns, he says, the law of God. It concerns God's law. It concerns the law of God that was given through Moses.

And it concerns the purpose for which it entered. The law, he says, entered for a purpose. It was by design. The law entered with a purpose. God brought the law through Moses by design, and with regards to our justification, which is the context of the whole chapter, the design or purpose of bringing in the written law was this, That the offense might abound.

That is, that the knowledge of sin and the knowledge of guilt, our guilt, might increase. And we know that the offense the apostle speaks of here is the offense of all our actual sins flowing forth from the corruption of nature we all inherited from Adam because that's what the law of God which came through Moses deals with. Man was already under condemnation, you remember, on account of the sin of Adam. He was already under condemnation, proven by the fact that death, he was exposed to death. Death being the universal consequence of sin.

So man was already under condemnation on account of the sin of Adam. But as Paul will later say in Romans chapter 7, if you want to look at Romans chapter 7 and verse 13, as he will say later in Romans 7-13, sin by the commandment that is in light of the law of God so that it might appear as it is without any cover, being exposed as sin so the sin in us can be seen for what it is, exceeding sinful, the commandment came. The commandment comes, the written law comes, so that sin will appear in its true colors as exceeding sinful. In 1 John chapter 3 verse 4, sin is defined. It's defined for us.

Had a man once say, who gets to define what sin is? I quoted, the wicked shall be turned into hell and all the nations that forget God. Well, who are the wicked? So, well, the same word that says that the wicked shall be turned into hell and all the nations that forget God gets to define what wicked is and here sin is Defined first John chapter 3 and verse 4 Sin is the transgression of the law So sin is Sin is the transgression of the law. So sin is.

Sin is the transgression of the law. Transgression is breaking a law, breaking God's law. Sin by definition is the transgression of God's law. To transgress the law is to sin. Now Adam sinned, you remember from our last couple of sessions, and we and him, and so all were condemned in him, proven by the fact that death came upon all men, but a greater discovery of sin is needed for men to see their desperate state.

In the words of Calvin, It was needful that men's ruin should be more fully discovered to them. The ruinous state in which we exist, and the unregenerate state in which we are born, that it might, this is Calvin speaking, condemn again men already condemned. Then it might condemn again men already condemned. Bring a further awareness, a heightened awareness of our state of condemnation. Men need the perfect rule of God's law.

They need the yardstick of God's law. If they would accurately measure themselves and Ever come to see the the utterly corrupted sinful and hopeless state in which they exist You've heard me quote Scottish theologian of the 19th century Robert Haldane. He says Adam sin being the root and cause of all other sins, like a noxious plant, shot up and spread in all directions, so that as God had testified before the Flood, when he said the wickedness of man is great in the earth, this by the law was now fully discovered by the entrance of the law. Yes, the wickedness of man is great in the earth, this is now fully discovered by the entrance of the law. God's law comes in and it's proven, yes, the wickedness of man is great in the earth.

He had The law that was written on his heart, now comes the law written on the tables of stone, to without a doubt, add any excuse to find sin and to expose sin And to convict men as sinners, as offenders of the law, in order to stop every mouth and render all mankind guilty before God. We read back in our study of Romans chapter 3 verse 19, what things soever the law saith, whatever the law says, it says to them that are under the law, which everyone who is not under grace is, it says to them that are under the law that every mouth may be stopped and all the world become guilty before God. The written law which came in at Mount Sinai entered in order to heighten man's awareness of his sinful state and sinfulness. The written law ended at Mount Sinai to heighten our awareness of our sinful state and our sinfulness. When the law of God came in Sin abounded when the law of God entered sin abounded Through the knowledge of sin and the conviction of sin the depths of our depraved Condition and the sinful state in which every one of us has existed ever since the day we came into the world as revealed Charles Hodge Comments here the great design of the law in reference to justification Is to produce the knowledge and conviction of sin That's God's design Here is His purpose to produce the knowledge of sin and the conviction of sin.

The law is brought in. We are sinners, that's an end quote, we are sinners and rebels and traitors and the law exposes us as such. The law reveals the extent of the depths of the corruption of our nature and the hopeless state in which we exist by shining its holy light. The law's holy light, because remember the scripture says the law is holy, righteous, and good. By shining its holy light on our thoughts, on our words, in our deeds.

It reveals, the law reveals, the extent of the depths of the corruption that is us, that is our nature, and the hopeless state in which we exist in our great need. The law reflects God's holy nature. It reflects His holy nature. And only when we get a glimpse of just how completely and perfectly righteous and just and holy He is, can we begin to sense just how dreadfully and miserably sinful we are. The law of God casts us down from the pedestal of pride.

It destroys any and every notion of goodness or merit on our part. And it reveals that great impassable gulf between us and God, between us and our sinful state and God in His holiness. The law reveals our utter depravity and our inability to keep its requirements, and thus our inability to in any way help ourselves. It exposes us not only as sinners but as nothing but sin from the top of our heads to the bottom of our feet. By the written law, we come face to face, one minister said.

I believe that was Martin Lloyd Jones' sermon I was listening to. The written law, by it, we come face to face with the sad truth that everything we've ever done, even the best of our finest deeds are tainted and corrupted with sin. Isaiah 64 6, Eric quoted I think Paul's quotation of this passage in the New Testament. We are all as an unclean thing. We are all as an unclean thing.

Even all our righteousnesses are as filthy rags with regards to meriting acceptance with God. The apostle Paul will write later in Romans 7-18, for I know that in me, that is in my flesh, dwelleth no good thing. I know that in me, that is in my flesh, there's nothing good dwelling. Apart from the grace of God, Apart from the work of God, apart from the Spirit of God, no good thing. No good thing?

Really? Yes. The law renders us hopeless and helpless with regards to any righteousness or merit whereby we may commend ourselves to God. It teaches us that when we come to meet with God, all we have to bring to the table is our sin and our guilt. That's it.

But that's not all it does. It not only increases our guilt, and I want you to think about this, but it also increases our sin itself. It also increases our sin itself. The more unregenerate man knows of God's law, the more he transgresses them. Give them another one of God's laws and they'll break it.

Give men a law and they'll break it. We are by nature lawbreakers. Unless God intervenes by His grace, you ever notice men just grow worse and worse? Those who are saved, regenerated by Christ, they grow better and better. They're conformed more and more to the image of Christ.

And those who live in the state of sin, in the corruption of nature, apart from the grace of any intervention by the grace of God, grow worse and worse. That's why, you know, we see over time people who are not truly believers but are living the the facade, hanging out with the Christians and going to church, getting baptized, singing, praying corporately, even sharing in the Lord's table, we see them eventually go out because They can't take it anymore. They can't bear the preaching of the truth for long because they can't bear the increase of the guilt that comes with it, so eventually they go out. First John 2.19 talks about it, but they went out from us that it might be made manifest that they were never truly of us. So the law, back to my point here, the law also increases the sin itself.

Not only our guilt, but also our sin itself. The more we know of God's law, the more we resist against it. If we don't have the Spirit of God working in us, conforming us to the image of Christ after salvation. We're by nature lawbreakers. We see it clearly in the behavior of children.

Give them the law, they'll break it. Right? Later in chapter 7 of verse 5, Paul is going to emphasize this. He says, when we were in the flesh, the motions of sin, which were by the law, did work in our members. The motions of sin worked in our members.

He's saying our sinful passions were aroused by the law Don't do that Again, it doesn't mean the law is evil the law is holy righteous and good The defect is in us And the purpose is to show us that there's something wrong with us. My mother was ironing one day, and I was sitting there in the room. I don't remember how old I was, maybe four or five years old. I don't know how old I was, maybe three. But I was watching her iron shirts and she turned to me at one point.

She said, Stevie, she called me Stevie. Don't anybody call me Stevie. She says, Stevie, I'm going out of the room and I'm leaving the iron way up here on this bookshelf. On this top bookshelf. And I remember right where I was sitting, and I remember looking up there and going, wow, that really looks like something that would be fun to touch.

And she said, now don't touch it because it's hot. And as soon as she left the room, made my way over to the bookshelf, climbed up the bookcase, and put my right hand just flat on the face of that iron. I didn't just touch it. I just went, shh. Of course, I started screaming.

You know, I haven't touched an iron ever since. My wife probably wishes I would touch an iron once in a while. I don't get anywhere near irons. I'm afraid of them. Mr.

Stubblefield used to tell the story of the children in his neighborhood who were told by their father not to go out into the alley and Right after he tells them he goes in the house and a few minutes later, all of them, all these kids are right up there at the alley with their toes right on the line between the backyard and the alley. And as close to it as they can possibly get. I'm not going to the alley. They're getting right up to it. It'll give us a lot.

We'll break it. I've told some of the young couples about how we did some of the child training when the children are are very young. We try to teach them the word, you know, no, at a young age, so we'd set them down on the floor on a little blanket on their belly or sitting on their rear end, you know, and then we just set all these toys out in front of them. Then I'd say, of all the toys in the garden you may play with, but of this toy in the center, don't touch it. Not unless you die, but unless you get maybe a little thump on the back of the hand.

Don't touch it. And every single one of them, everyone that's in this room and everyone that's not in this room, every single one of them, go straight forth. They don't even, they're, all of a sudden, they're discontented with every other toy and they're just, they're just like, I put all these toys in and they're just going like this, not even looking at them, throwing them out of the way until they eat that one toy with their eyes back and forth with me. I taught this truth to my children about the law and we being lawbreakers once when I told them you know there's lots of bad words in the world that you shouldn't say, but there's one word I don't want you to ever say. Don't even think it.

I just made up a word, random word. It wasn't a bad word, I just made up a word. And every one of them, to the last one, come back one by one, I can't get the word out of my mind. Can't even get it out of my mind. Yeah, that's the extent of of sin in us that shows us that we have indwelling sin in us.

It's an illustration of the sin nature that's in every one of us. But we're by nature lawbreakers and we've all broken the laws of God. Again, Robert Haldane comments, the law didn't put sin into the heart, but it was an instrument to display the depravity already existing there. Everybody get that? So the law didn't put the sin in our heart.

We've got a sin nature from which comes all of our actual sins. The law didn't put the sin in our hearts, but it was an instrument of God to display the depravity that was already in our hearts. I told an unbeliever once, probably more than once, but once comes to mind that I could tell him several things to not do that he would not be perfectly able not to do, Even if he tried with all his might, of course, the law of God, you can't keep it. You can try, but you can't. God could have, you know, realized, you've got to realize this, God could have said anything.

God knows the sin that's in us and what we cannot keep perfectly. He could have said don't pick up sticks in Indonesia on Tuesday, but he didn't. He said don't steal, Don't covet, don't lust. Don't have any other gods before me. Don't make little idols in your life.

Don't talk about other people behind their backs, say things that aren't true. I say you can't keep these commands. Go try, go try for a week and come back and give me a report. You can't help yourself You can't keep the Ten Commandments We've all broken all those laws and some degree at some point in our life. And I said, you will continue to break those laws because everything acts according to its nature.

You have a sin nature. You inherited from your first parents, and you need a new nature, and only God can provide that. We can keep some of the law some of the time, but we can never keep all of the law all the time. Only Jesus could do that, and he did that in the place of his people, which brings us to the last use of the law to drive us to Christ. The law is used to drive us to Jesus, to drive us to Christ as our only hope.

The law shows us our utter helplessness to do anything whatsoever to save ourselves. Galatians 3.24, the law was our schoolmaster to bring us to Christ. And that it does when attended by the grace of God. God uses it by His grace to bring His people to Him, to bring us to Christ like a schoolmaster. The definition of grace, by the way, is free, unmerited love and favor of God.

Praise God when by God's grace, He uses the law that condemns to bring us to Christ. Praise God that He does that, It's a good thing. The same law that condemns others, God uses to bring His people to Him, to bring us to Christ. When the law comes in, it defines sin and then it convicts us sin and it condemns us, but praise God, God also uses it to bring His people to Him. When we're made to see how unrighteous we are in ourselves and how distant we are from the righteousness required of us by God, which is the perfect righteousness, that's a good thing.

When we see our helplessness and our hopelessness, that's a good thing. When we see that there is no righteousness in us, When the law shows us our ruinous state and the depths of our unrighteousness, and that we have no righteousness of our own, that's a good thing because then we are made to look outside of ourselves and to seek righteousness from, in the words of Calvin, some other quarter. It's not here. I've got to be able to be in God's presence. I've got to find a righteousness out there that's acceptable to God, I've got none of my own.

I have to seek it from some other quarter. And for the people of God, we find no place of rest until we rest our hopes on the righteousness of God's own Son. That's the only place of rest. No righteousness of veil save that which is of thee, the hymn says. We can't keep the laws God required, not in our thoughts, not in our words, not in our deeds.

We've broken God's law in every point, one time or another in our life, and many of them we transgress repeatedly. David said, my sins are over my head. They're over my head. In Psalm 38, 4, speaking of them as though he had been drowned by them as though he were drowning in them we don't have it in us to keep God's laws as he requires but Christ kept it perfectly in thought and word and indeed in every way and praise God where sin abounded, grace did much more abound. Grace did much more abound.

Where sin abounded, grace did much more abound. John 1.17 says, The law was given by Moses, but truth and grace came by Jesus Christ. Where sin abounded, the grace of God by Jesus Christ did much more abound. The grace of God pardons, praise God pardons, our innumerable and even our most enormous sins. Even our most enormous sins.

The grace of God overcomes and overwhelms and fully absorbs the flood of iniquity that has gone over our heads. We sang the hymn earlier, grace, grace, God's grace, grace that can pardon and cleanse within. Grace, grace, God's grace is free, unmerited, love, and favor, grace that is greater, it's greater than all our sin. When we think of John Bunyan, we tend to think of that allegory Pilgrim's Progress. But Bunyan also wrote another masterpiece.

It was his personal testimony, and it was entitled The Grace of God Abounding to the chief of sinners. And it's heavy reading. The grace of God abounding to the chief of sinners, and I've read it all, maybe more than once. But near the close of that writing, Bunyan says, Oh, the remembrance of my great sins, of my great temptations, and of my great fears of perishing forever. They bring afresh to my mind the remembrance of my great help, of my great support from heaven, and of the great grace that God extended to such a wretch as I.

Our text teaches us that sin reigned unto death eternal, and grace reigns through Christ's righteousness unto life eternal for all those whose trust is in Him." I'll end with this. Samuel Davies, does anyone remember Samuel Davies? He was one of the men that was chosen of God, ordained of God, to lead in the Great Awakening in the middle 1700s, middle of the 18th century, in that great revival in the colonies called the Great Awakening. Along with George Whitfield and Jonathan Edwards, he preached and he taught. And it's said that one out of ten people in the colonies were converted to Christ during that time in like ten years.

Ten percent of the entire population came to Christ. Davy's wife died giving birth to their stillborn child about two months before their first wedding anniversary. His life was just full of all kinds of suffering. He was brilliant, he was Godly, wonderful preacher. He himself died of pneumonia at the age of 37.

Before his death he wrote hymn number 71 in our hymnals. If you turn there we'll close with this. Great God of wonders, great God of wonders, All thy ways are worthy of thyself, divine, and the bright glories of thy grace among thine other wonders shine. Who is a pardoning God like thee, or who has grace so rich and free? Pardon from an offended God?

Pardon for sins of deepest die? Pardon bestowed through Jesus' blood? Pardon that brings the rebel nigh. Who is a pardoning God like thee, or who has grace so rich and free? O, may this glorious matchless love, this godlike miracle of grace, teach mortals tongues like those above to raise the song of lofty praise.

Amen? Who is a pardoning god like thee? Or who has grace so rich and free? Amen. Let's pray.

Father, we thank you that you are the great God of wonders, and we wonder and marvel, Lord, that you would look upon us with any favor at all, any of us, and that you would save any out of the mass of sinning humanity. We know what we deserve. God, we praise and thank you, Lord. We thank you for your grace, Lord. We thank you that though we offended you, O God, by our sins, that you've pardoned us.

Though we've sinned sins of deepest die, you've pardoned them. We thank you, Lord, that by Jesus' blood and His righteousness we are declared right in your sight, His righteousness being imputed to us by faith the moment that we believe. We thank you, God, that you brought these rebels nigh, brought us near. With Samuel Davies, Lord, we say, who is a pardoning God like you, God? Who has grace so rich and free?

We praise you for your grace. We thank you for your grace. And we thank you, Lord, that you have saved sinners like us. And Lord, we ask that you would help us now as we come to this table, which is a thank offering to praise and thank you for sending your Son and to thank you, Lord Jesus, for dying for us while we were yet sinners. Fill our hearts Lord with praise and wonder and love and thanksgiving for we do ask it In Jesus' name, Amen.