Romans 6:20-23

20 When you were slaves to sin, you were free from the control of righteousness. 21 What benefit did you reap at that time from the things you are now ashamed of? Those things result in death! 22 But now that you have been set free from sin and have become slaves of God, the benefit you reap leads to holiness, and the result is eternal life. 23 For the wages of sin is death, but the gift of God is eternal life in [b] Christ Jesus our Lord.


Dig Deeper
When I began college, I didn’t exactly take it seriously. I was far more concerned with playing basketball, having fun, and pursuing things other than academic success than I was with actually behaving like a serious college student. From the very beginning, my parents warned me that my behavior and choices were going to have severe consequences for my future. Generally speaking, people who behave like I did in college tend to have fairly bleak futures. Yet, the consequences of that behavior weren’t just reserved for the future. It wasn’t as though I was sailing along doing stupid things and behaving immaturely, but only piling up negative consequences for myself many years down the road. I had a clear choice, in a sense, of two types of behavior and I chose the irresponsible and self-focused path rather than the responsible and right one. But one did not have to look at my choices and actions for very long to see that they had failure and destruction written all over them in the present. My choices had the stench of stupidity permeating them through and through and each action that I took, whether it be to skip classes to play more basketball, to stay out all night rather than study, or any other poor choice, they served as an advance sign for the type of life that I was living and where I would end up in the end if I didn’t make some sort of radical change.

Paul has delved quite deeply into working out the reality of the new humanity in the Messiah and how that plays against the Adamic humanity. Particularly Paul has dealt with the reality of being in the Messiah, showing that the new humanity really has died to the realm of sin and are not in some sort of limbo where they have one foot in Adam’s realm and the other in Christ’s. They really have died to sin but that doesn’t mean that sin is not still powerful and dangerous, able to entice one back into slavery. What Paul now wants to make clear is something that he has hinted all along. The choices to be made between these two realms have very real implications for eternity but the realm in which we live in the present age have very real consequences in the present as well.

In verse 19 Paul asked his readers to consider the amount of time and energy that they spent in serving themselves under the reign of sin and to spend that same amount of time and energy under their new master. Now he continues to urge them to think about the benefits of their actions when they were slaves to sin versus their actions as slaves to God’s covenant purposes. Paul begins the discussion that will continue into the next chapter concerning the fruit that comes from the two ways of life that he has been discussing since the previous chapter. What was the result, the fruit, of the slavery to which they were previously beholden? He sets up a strange thought in order to make a parallel point in verse 22. The slavery of sin does come with a freedom of sorts. It is a freedom from the control of God’s covenant purposes, his righteousness. Thus the old slavery left its captives free from reconciliation with God and resigned to bearing the chains of shame and death. When we are stuck in the slavery of sin we do things that we are not ashamed of but should be as the fruit and “benefit” of those things are shown in that they lead to death.

On the other side of the ledger of sin, death, and freedom from righteousness, is the state of entering into Christ and becoming slaves of God. While the slavery of sin promises freedom but really brings death. This is a slavery that promises death but really brings freedom. When one dies to self and enters into the life of Christ by crossing in faith through the waters of baptism (just as Israel left the slavery of Egypt by crossing thought the Red Sea) they are freed from the tyrant that truly enslaves all of humanity and leads to death and eternal separation from the purposes of God. If anyone, we can almost imagine Paul declaring, really wants to be eternally separated from God’s covenant and his purposes of reconciling the world to himself, then they should stay right exactly in the realm of sin because that is the freedom that they will have. But if they want to be truly set apart for God’s purposes (the ultimate meaning of the word “holiness”) then the new slavery is the way to go. The old slavery leads to nowhere but death while the new slavery leads to eternal life.

Just as in 5:15-17 when Paul was pointing out that things between these two realms don’t really balance out, neither do they here. The wages of sin is death. A wage is something that is given in direct portion to what has been done. When you do a certain amount of work, you earn that wage. Thus, the sinner who bears the fruit of the realm of sin earns their wage which is death and eternally missing out on reconciliation with God. But God gives beyond anything we could hope, imagine, or earn. The gift of eternal life in Christ Jesus is not a wage, it is a gift precisely because we could never earn such a thing. Thus Paul has made a stark contrast that is easy to miss. The fruit of the realm of sin is a wage that we earn. The fruit of the realm of grace is a gift that we could never earn.

To fully grasp the power of what Paul is saying in this passage, however, we must see that he is not simply making a distinction of what happens when we die. True enough the realm of sin leads to death and the realm of grace leads to eternal life but we cannot simply reduce the choice to a giant reward given at the finish line. In chapter 1, Paul began to discuss the idea that the realm in which we live displays in the present the aroma of the final judgment of where we live. In other words, our present life already is bearing the fruit of our ultimate destination. The result of the things that are done in the realm of sin is death but those things have the smell of death all over them. The behavior shows the sign of its final destination. It’s not as if we commit a bunch of unrelated sin that brings wonderful results into our lives and then at the end, the final verdict is death and separation from God. Each action that we take in the realm of sin is an act of death and separation that point precisely in the road down which we are heading.

In the same way, eternal life cannot be reduced to something that we solely experience when we die. That is the whole point of the resurrection of Christ and what Paul has said throughout this chapter. The resurrection took the life of the age to come (eternal life) and brought it forward into the present. It changed the world at precisely the point where the world was eternally separated from life, enslaved to death. It is there that the resurrection broke through that barrier and offered life. The life of the age to come, the resurrection life, can be entered into now. As Paul says in Philippians 3:10-11, “I want to know Christ—yes, to know the power of his resurrection and participation in his sufferings, becoming like him in his death, and so, somehow, attaining to the resurrection from the dead.” Christ had resurrected into the life of the age to come and has brought that age forward into the present age. When people hear the gospel and respond to it with faith in the life of Christ, the signs of the life of the age to come, come bursting forth into the present world. That is what Christian community is all about. It is the place where a group of people have been brought together as the people of God and begin to live in unity by the values of the age to come rather than the values of the present age. The way that Christians live point ahead to the life of the age to come as each of our actions bear the fruit of life rather than death. This is why Christian life and behavior matter in the present. The Christian life isn’t a bunch of restrictive rules but they are the signs of where we’re heading. We either bear the fruit of life in our lives or the rotten fruit of death.

When Christians look at the two choices of Adam and Christ we should have no doubt that we are in Christ, a life that must be put into effect by no longer allowing sin to reign in our bodies. This is a victory that has already been accomplished for us and now we just need to implement it. Paul has now clearly laid out the distinction between the two realm s and is now about to turn his full attention to what happens when you add the law to the mix of these two realms 7:7-25). He will then, in chapter 8 show that God’s response to this is pure grace as he does what the law could not (8:1-11) and that the result is the fulfillment of the covenant promises that culminate in the renewal of all things (8:12-30).


Devotional Thought
Do you view the Christian life as restrictive and binding at times or as the advance signs of living by the values of the age to come? How does it change your thinking to embrace the idea that God calls us to obedience because he loves us and wants to lead us to eternal life both in time and for eternity?