Sin & Law

QUESTION: Harmonize these verses, Rom. 5:13 and 14, "For until the law, sin was in the world; but sin is not imputed, when there is no law. Nevertheless death reigned from Adam to Moses even over them that had not sinned after the similitude of Adam's transgression."

ANSWER: Adam sinned against an express, revealed command. There was no other command like this till the giving of the Decalogue after 2,500 years. But men continued to sin, by transgressing their own inward moral sense. This kind of sinning is not against any revealed command, as Adam's was; and for this reason it was not so severely punished by God, as Paul said to the Athenians, "The times of ignorance God overlooked." (Acts 17:30.)

— From Steele's Answers p. 31.