God makes it quite clear in His Word that He has only one answer to every human need; His Son Jesus Christ. In all His dealings with us, He works by taking us out of the way and substituting Christ in our place. The Son of God died for our forgiveness, He lives for our deliverance. It will help us greatly and save us much confusion, if we keep constantly before us this fact, that God will answer all our questions in one way and one way only, namely, by showing us more of His Son.

Our problem is twofold: sins and sin. To better understand this let us look at the first eight chapters of the Epistle to the Romans. It will be helpful first to point out a natural division of this section of Romans into two and note certain striking differences in the subject matter of the two parts.

The first eight chapters of Romans form a self-contained unit. The four-and-one-half chapters from 1:1 to 5:11 form the first half of this unit and the three-and-one-half chapters from 5:12 to 8:39 the second half. A careful reading will show that the subject matter of the two halves is different. In the first section, we find the word “sins” given prominence. In the second half, the word “sins” hardly occurs once, however, the singular word “sin” occurs repeatedly and is the subject mainly dealt with. Why is this?

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