While I’ve fallen behind in posting on my reading from Tom Schreiner’s book, Paul, Apostle of God’s Glory in Christ, I’ve not really been behind in reading it. I’ll try to catch my posts up:
Sin is a Power: Sin is . . . a tyrannical power that exercises its dominion over those in Adam. It enters the world through Adam’s sin and exercises its sway over all people (Rom 5:12-19). Sin manifests its reign in the domonion of death (Rom 5:21). Apart from Christ people are ‘slaves’ to sin (Rom 6:6), whereas believers have been freed from the sin that enslaved them and are now enslaved to righteousness (Rom 6:16-18, 20, 22). The image of slaver is not overstated since unbelievers cannot liberate themselves from sin’s grip. Sin exercises control over them so that they are in bondage to it (127-128).
Under the rule of the pedagogue (Gal 3:24). The law as our tutor: Paul uses the illustration of the pedagogue for its temporal significance. That is, he does not appeal to the pedagogues because they functioned as teachers or curbed unsuitable behavior. He introduces the pedagogue for one reason only: pedagogues had charge over people during their minority years. Pedagogues are assigned to children, and when one becomes an adult a pedagogue is unnecessary. Thus, Paul uses the pedagogue as a metaphor for the law to make the point that the law was in force for only a certain period of salvation history. . . . Paul uses the illustration to describe the era in salvation history before the coming of Christ, when believers did not yet have access to their inheritance (129-130).
Enslaved to the elements: The Mosaic covenant, contrary to the Judaizers, was not the climax of redemptive history; it was an interim arrangement that pointed forward to the coming seed of Abraham (131).
Blindness of human beings: Paul consistently maintains both that people cannot respond to the gospel and that they do not respond to it. No logical contradiction exists between these passages [1 Cor 2:14 and 2 Thess 2:9-12] (137).
Ephesians 2:1-3: Paul does not depict unbelievers as merely disinclined to the gospel. He says that they have no capacity at all to respond to the gospel, for they are engulfed in trespasses and sins and find their delight in the realm of sin and death rather than in doing the will of God (138).
Unbelievers live by carrying out the desires of the flesh and the mind. They do- insofar as it is physically possible – precisely what they want to do. We should not conceive of bondage to sin as if unbelievers are forced or compelled to sin against their will. People manifest their captivity to sin when they do precisely what they wish to do (139).
Romans 5:12-14: I understand Romans 5;12 to say that ‘on the basis of death’ all people sinned individually and personally. That is, the reason all people sin individually is that they enter the world spiritually dead, and they enter the world spiritually dead because they are descendants of Adam (148).
Paul remarks that sin committed before the Mosaic law was established is not technically, reckoned as sin. There was not a technical register of sin; sin was present, just like heat and cold are present whether we have a thermometer or not. But one could not, in a sense, measure sin before the giving of the law.
