Chapter 6
6:1-3- Paul now begins to address a natural question that might come up from an objector. That is, having made much about how we aren’t saved by the Law and that the greater the sin, the greater God’s grace is, does this therefore mean that we should make sinning a goal so that God’s grace gets even more glory? The answer, as was in chapter 3, is an emphatic “May it never be!” As has been noted, Paul was far from an antinomian and the New Testament is packed full of prohibitions against sin and exhortations for holy living as believers (see 1 Cor. 6:9-11, Titus 3, 1 Thess. 4:1-8, Col. 3:1-17, Eph. 4:17-32, 5:1-21, Gal. 5:19-21, Rom. 12, Rom. 13:8-14).
Jesus Christ died for our sin so that we could die to our sin, not continue to be a slave to it. As commentators astutely point out, the text does not say that sin is dead to the believer, but rather, we have died to sin. Origen, an early church father is quoted as saying: “To live to sin therefore, means to obey the desires of sin… To die to sin is the opposite of this; it means refusing to obey the desires of sin.” Douglas Moo writes: “In baptism, we are joined to Christ and to His death and resurrection. Christ’s own death was a death ‘to sin,’ and His resurrection meant living ‘to God’ (v.10). Therefore, those who participate in Christ’s death and resurrection also have died to sin and now live to God.”
6:4-7-Paul emphasizes the “new birth” in this text. As he states in 2 Cor. 5:17, “Therefore if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creature; the old things passed away; behold, new things have come.” Just as going under the water in baptism represents dying to our “old self,” coming out of the water represents coming out of the grave as a new creation. Christ being raised from the dead not only gives us assurance of eternal life (Rom. 8:11), but by His Spirit living in us, we have the power to currently “walk in the newness of life.” As we read on in this chapter and in Romans in general, it becomes clear what is meant by this.
This newness of life is living by the Spirit in us to serve Christ. This involves yielding ourselves to righteousness instead of yielding to wickedness as we did when we were slaves to sin in our “old selves”. We are no longer “in Adam.” We have crucified our old selves to the cross and are united with Christ in His death. If this isn’t our state, then we are still “in Adam” and what Jesus said in John 8:34 is true of us; “Truly, truly, I say to you, everyone who commits sin is the slave of sin.” But as Paul labors to show in this chapter, just as Jesus says in John 8:36, “So if the Son makes you free, you will be free indeed.” As we will see in chapter 7, Paul at no point argues that the believer will experience sinless perfection (see 1 John 1:8). Instead, as Thomas Schreiner notes, “The tyranny, domination, and rule of sin have been defeated for them. This means that the normal pattern of life for Christians should be progressive growth in sanctification, resulting in the ever greater maturity and conformity to God’s moral law in thought and action.” Or, as Grant Osborne states, “Sin has now become a force tempting us rather than a power controlling us.”
6:8-11- Our death with Christ is one side of the coin, the other is that we will live with Him as Christ has been raised from the dead never to die again (see also Heb. 9:27-10:13). This not only speaks to eternal life, but our new life in Christ on this earth. Much in the same way, Paul teaches that we should also consider ourselves to not just share in His death, but in His life unto God. This means no longer living to fulfill selfish desires or satisfy the lusts of the flesh, but to hunger and thirst for righteousness (Matt. 5:6), to be holy as He is holy (1 Peter 1:16). As Paul exhorts in Gal. 5:16-26, deny the flesh with its desires and instead walk in the fruit of the Spirit within us. The believer should always be seeking to walk in love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control, for this is living unto God. This is walking in “newness of life” (see also: Col. 3, Eph. 4:17-5:21). Matthew Henry states: “He rose to live to God. Thus must we rise to live to God; this is what he calls newness of life (v.4), to live by other rules, with other aims, than we have done. A life devoted to God is a new life; before, self was the chief and highest end, but now God.”
6:12-14- Paul exhorts his readers to recognize who we are in Christ and then gives an imperative in verse 12. Very simply put, don’t let sin reign in our bodies so that we obey its lusts instead of God’s will. This implies that we have a responsibility as children of God and that sanctification is a process. This is not a process or idea unique to Paul, as Peter speaks of similar exhortations to believers in 2 Peter 1:2-12, and John writes of in 1 John 1-3 and even James’ epistle is one big rebuke of sinfulness and similar exhortations to holy living. But if we have “turned to God from idols to serve the living and true God” like the Thessalonians in 1 Thess. 1:9, there will be fruit. I like what Robert Mounce says of verse 12: “The imperative challenges us to become who we are. In Christ we have died to sin and are alive to God. So we should base our daily lives on that truth and live out our days from that perspective. It follows, then, that we are no longer to allow sin to reign in our mortal bodies (v. 12). Sin is personified as a sovereign ruler who would make us obey the cravings of our bodies that are destined for death. But in Christ we have died to sin. Sin no longer has the authority to enforce its demands. Death has severed the relationship.”
But Paul says in 2 Cor. 5:14-15 (NIV), “For Christ’s love compels us, because we are convinced that one died for all, and therefore all died. And he died for all, that those who live should no longer live for themselves but for him who died for them and was raised again.” So, the love of Christ should motivate us and what’s more, we have the power of the Holy Spirit within us to accomplish these things. The main point of verse 13 sums up our goal as those who have placed their faith in Jesus. In so doing, we are committing to living a life serving Him. We cannot serve our Lord when we yield our body to sin and unrighteousness. Instead, because of our love for God and because we now live to serve Him, we seek to present our bodies to Him for righteousness. Paul says in 1 Cor. 6:19-20, “Or do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit who is in you, whom you have from God, and that you are not your own? For you have been bought with a price: therefore glorify God in your body.” To paraphrase William Barclay, we have been given the choice to make ourselves weapons in the hands of God or weapons in the hands of sin.
Sin, therefore, shall not be our master. If we are in Christ, we live under grace and not under the Law (which serves only to condemn us by being a standard to which we can never attain). As Paul also says in Titus 2:11-12, “For the grace of God has appeared, bringing salvation to all men, instructing us to deny ungodliness and worldly desires and to live sensibly, righteously and godly in the present age,” Grace does what the Law could not do. Grace trains us. We now live under a covenant that guides us in righteousness, not a covenant that leaves us powerless.
6:15-18- Paul anticipates the question (similar to 6:1), “Shall we sin because we are not under law but under grace?” To which he gives what we should come to expect by this point, “May it never be!” Robert Mounce provides a succinct response to such a question, “Grace does not free us to do anything we want… It means to be set free from the bondage of sin in order to live in a way that reflects the nature and character of God.” F.F. Bruce articulates it well when he writes: “You now live under a regime of grace, and grace does not stimulate sin, as the law does; grace liberates from sin and enables you to triumph over it. How then can you think of going on in sin, just because you now live under a regime of grace and not of law? Anyone who talks like that has not the remotest inkling of what divine grace means.”
In verses 16-17, Paul is in lockstep with His Lord’s teaching in John 8:34, “Jesus answered them, “Truly, truly, I say to you, everyone who commits sin is the slave of sin.” The NLT translation does a good job of conveying the meaning of the text for these two verses: “Don’t you realize that you become the slave of whatever you choose to obey? You can be a slave to sin, which leads to death, or you can choose to obey God, which leads to righteous living. Thank God! Once you were slaves of sin, but now you wholeheartedly obey this teaching we have given you.” -Rom. 6:16-17 (NLT). No one is independent of serving someone or something. The atheist might be forgiven for thinking that they would relinquish their “freedom,” as it were, if they follow Christ. This is not the case though. They are servants of sin and worship something (whether money, power, a politician, self, etc). Coming to Christ simply means exchanging one master for another. As Jesus teaches in Matt. 6:24, “No one can serve two masters, for either he will hate the one and love the other, or he will be devoted to the one and despise the other.” This is what we have done as Christians. We have forsaken our godless idols to turn and serve the true and living God (1 Thess. 1:9). In so doing, we present ourselves to Christ for service at the exclusion of presenting ourselves to sin. In 1 Peter 2:24, the Apostle Peter says that Christ “bore our sins in His body on the cross, so that we might die to sin and live to righteousness.” The purpose of Christ’s death was not only to provide forgiveness of sins, but as Schreiner points out, “to empower his people to ‘live for righteousness’.”
Paul states in verse 17, that even though his readers were once slaves of sin, they became obedient to the apostolic teaching they had received. Bruce writes that this doctrine or teaching “is probably the summary of Christian ethics, based on the teaching of Christ, which was regularly given to converts in the primitive Church to show them the way of life which they ought thenceforth to follow. It is the body of teaching which Paul elsewhere calls ‘the tradition’ or ‘the traditions’ ” Paul sums up again in verse 18 that we have been set free from sin and are slaves to righteousness. By now this point which he is hammering home by repetition should inform the reader of the seriousness of the subject. As the Psalmist says in Psalm 116:16 (NIV), “Truly I am your servant, Lord; I serve you just as my mother did; you have freed me from my chains.”
6:19- “I am speaking in human terms” or in other words, Paul is using human analogies (slave/master relationship) to illustrate a complex spiritual truth. Evidently, this is due to his audience being “weak” or “limited” in either human understanding or moral fiber (the text isn’t clear). Either way, Paul felt the need for language his audience could relate to or understand better to illustrate his point. Prior to Christ, the Christians in Rome had sold their lives to the master of sin, living lives of lawlessness and impurity. This only leads to more and more lawlessness. It’s a downward spiral. Instead, now that they are in Christ, the goal is to live righteously according to God’s ways. The inverse of the downward spiral of sin is the upward trajectory of holiness and sanctification. As the text implies, neither position is stationary. Meaning, as being a slave to sin results in more and more sin (the NIV translates it as “ever-increasing wickedness”) so is the movement towards holiness. It’s not something we “achieve” as if we ascend to the top of the mountain and can go no further, but the text suggests a progression of sanctification. Similar to how wickedness begets even more wickedness, righteousness begets more righteousness.
6:20-22- Paul says in verse 20 that to be a slave to sin means to be “free in regard to righteousness.” And this makes sense as we’ve already noted, “No one can serve two masters…” -Matt. 6:24. The “fruit” of such a state only resulted in death and destruction. “A freedom from righteousness is the worst kind of slavery.” -Matthew Henry
The result of their former lives was nothing to brag about. In fact, their former lives resulted in shame and death. The end result of their freedom from sin and “enslavement” to Christ is not shame and death, but holiness, sanctification and eternal life. David Brown comments on the meaning of having eternal life in Christ (which stands in stark contrast to the “death” experienced for those who remain “in sin”): “As the final state of the justified believer; the beatific experience not only of complete exemption from the fall with all its effects, but of the perfect life of acceptance with God, and conformity to His likeness, of unveiled access to Him, and ineffable fellowship with Him through all duration.”
6:23- In this last verse of the chapter, we get what is essentially the gospel summed up in its most basic form in one sentence. It is worth pointing out the intentionality of Paul’s words. That is, that the “wages” of sin is death, but the “free gift” of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord. We “earn” wages. The greek word Paul used is opsōnion, which most often denotes a soldier’s pay or allowance for his service. We earn the payout of death and destruction for our sin, just as a murderer “gets what they deserve” when sentenced under a guilty verdict. Those in Christ have not earned eternal life, they’ve been given it as a gift. As Robert Mounce puts it: “By yielding to the impulses of righteousness, believers do not earn anything. They do, however, receive a gift–the gift of eternal life, which comes by faith through Jesus Christ their Lord.” It is by grace that God has made a way for us to be justified, to be made righteous before Him. Christ took the initiative to fulfill the Law on our behalf, impute that righteousness on to us (2 Cor. 5:21) and die as a propitiatory and expiatory sacrifice for our sins (Rom 3:25, 1 John 2:2, 4:10, Heb. 9:5). Throwing ourselves upon the mercy seat of Christ means we receive a gift, something we don’t deserve. That is, to be made righteous and share in eternal life with Him.
“Death and life are before all men who hear the Gospel: the one, the natural issue and proper reward of sin; the other, the absolutely free "GIFT OF GOD" to sinners, "in Jesus Christ our Lord." And as the one is the conscious sense of the hopeless loss of all blissful existence, so the other is the conscious possession and enjoyment of all that constitutes a rational creature's highest "life" forevermore (Rom. 6:23). Ye that read or hear these words, "I call heaven and earth to record this day against you, that I have set before you life and death, blessing and cursing, therefore choose life, that both thou and thy seed may live!" (Deu 30:19).” -David Brown
Bibliography (Works Cited):
-Origen: Ancient Christian Commentary on Scripture, New Testament Vol. 6 (Romans)
-Douglas J. Moo: NIV Application Commentary, One-Vol. Edition (Romans)
-Thomas Schreiner: ESV Study Bible, Romans
-Grant R. Osborne: Romans, IVPNTC, 2004
-Matthew Henry: Matthew Henry’s Commentary on the Whole Bible
-Robert H. Mounce: Romans, NAC, 1995
-William Barclay: The Letter To The Romans, Revised Edition
-F.F. Bruce: The Epistle of Paul to the Romans, TNTC, 1983
-Thomas Schreiner: 1, 2 Peter, Jude, NAC, 2003
-David Brown: Jamieson, Fausset & Brown Bible Commentary, Romans