One Signature Changed Everything

In 2008, a single mortgage broker in a Southern California office falsified income documents on a subprime loan application. He never met the families who would lose their homes. He never saw the retirement accounts that would evaporate across three continents. But that one act of fraud, multiplied across an industry, triggered a financial collapse that swept through nations like a contagion no one could outrun. Millions who had never set foot in that broker's office inherited his consequences.

That is the world Paul describes in Romans 5. Through one man, Adam, sin entered like a virus into the bloodstream of humanity. Death spread to all, not because each person independently invented rebellion, but because we were all bound up in Adam's choice. The contagion was total. No one could quarantine themselves from it.

But Paul refuses to leave us in the wreckage. He insists the parallel runs in reverse — and the remedy is far more powerful than the disease. If one man's trespass could drag the whole human race into ruin, how much more could one Man's obedience flood the world with grace? Jesus Christ did not simply patch the damage. His righteousness overflowed, spilling far beyond the boundaries of what Adam broke.

The broker's fraud spread destruction he never intended. But the gift of Christ spreads life beyond anything we could ever deserve. Where sin increased, grace increased all the more.