Romans 6:6-14

6 For we know that our old self was crucified with him so that the body ruled by sin might be done away with, [a] that we should no longer be slaves to sin— 7 because anyone who has died has been set free from sin.

8 Now if we died with Christ, we believe that we will also live with him. 9 For we know that since Christ was raised from the dead, he cannot die again; death no longer has mastery over him. 10 The death he died, he died to sin once for all; but the life he lives, he lives to God.

11 In the same way, count yourselves dead to sin but alive to God in Christ Jesus. 12 Therefore do not let sin reign in your mortal body so that you obey its evil desires. 13 Do not offer any part of yourself to sin as an instrument of wickedness, but rather offer yourselves to God as those who have been brought from death to life; and offer every part of yourself to him as an instrument of righteousness. 14 For sin shall no longer be your master, because you are not under the law, but under grace.


Dig Deeper
Recently I was watching an amazing news story that has been taking place in the little country of Honduras. The thrust of the story was that there was a president in Honduras whose time in office had come to an end. There is, apparently, a law in Honduras which forbids a president from running again for a second term. Yet, he had decided that he wanted to continue to be president and claimed that he had the authority to declare himself as such. He had been deposed, though, and the government is being overseen by the proper authorities awaiting a legitimate election. The former Honduran president, though, is not taking that lying down. He was in a neighboring country, and continuing to declare himself the legitimate and rightful president of Honduras. This has become quite the situation but its rather surreal at its core. You have a ruler who, according to the laws of his own country has served his time and no longer has the right to rule and yet he refuses to recognize that. He has now moved back into his country but is being protected in the Brazilian embassy and is attempting to rule from there as though he is the current president despite the fact that he no longer has any legitimate power.

Paul ended chapter 5 and began chapter 6 with a picture in which Christians have escaped and been freed from the reign and realm of sin, being brought into a new land under a new ruler. When Christians are baptized they move from the land of sin and death into the realm of freedom and grace. It is now up to Christians to realize that and began living that reality. And that is the rub for many Christians, a topic that Paul will now move into discussing in this passage. In this case, however, it’s not that the ruler has moved or loss his country, it’s that we have moved and been completely taken from that country into a new one. We are no longer citizens of the country of sin and death but we can often tend to live as though we are. To do so, though, would be as silly as living in one country but allowing yourself to be ruled by the tyrant of a country from which you previously moved. When I was younger, I knew a family that had moved from the then Soviet Union to the United States. Once they got here they went through the difficult process of adjusting to life in their new country. Although it was challenging at times, they had no desire to continue to live as though they were citizens of the USSR, and were still bound to live according to its rules. They were free and wanted to live as such. This is precisely what Paul wants for those who have left the slavery of sin and death and entered into the new reality of the life of Christ. Honduras won’t put up with living under the control of their former ruler, why do we?

To boil it down to the simplest terms, Paul has described two realms of humanity that now exist. The first one is the realm of Adam into which we are all born, live, and will die. The second, the Messianic humanity. has broken into that bleak existence, though, and created an escape route. We can come out of the slavery of our Adamic existence and enter into the life of the Messiah. In doing so we grip tightly to the belief that what is true of the King is true of his people. Our old master was harsh and unrelenting and constantly induced us into taking part in his mission of hate, envy, self-seeking behavior, and rebellion against God. But our new King is much different. He wants to free us from the tyranny of sin and invites us to engage in his work of reconciling the world to himself. He wants us to take part in showing the world what it looks like when people and even places and things enter into reconciliation and peace with Jesus.

The challenge for us to truly grasp, as we die to self and enter into the new reality, is that at our baptism we truly died to the old world. As much as we might have been conditioned to think so, sin is not our normal condition and it is not beneficial to us. Humans are funny in that we can begin to think in distorted ways so quickly and adjust to our situation. For instance, the news has been full recently of a young girl who was kidnapped at age 11 and lived in a shed in the backyard of a very twisted man for 18 years, even having two children with him. Her thinking became so distorted that she didn’t even leave when he was thrown in jail for four months several years ago because life with him was all she knew anymore and she began to rely on him. We can get that with the rotting sin of our old lives. But Paul says that all changed precisely at our baptisms. We were freed from that life and died to and, no matter how much it doesn’t feel like it sometimes, we entered a new reality where all the power of the resurrection life is available to us. At our baptism we left the Adam realm for good just as Israel left Egypt and was no longer under its yoke, yet the vestiges of life in Egypt remained and had to be rooted out. The same holds true with us. Dying to the old regime has set us free from its chains but we now have to go through the work of transforming the way we think so that we no longer go along with the distorted thinking in which we lived in the old realm (a point that Paul will make directly in 12:2).

Because we have been connected with Christ in his death we know that we will live him both now and in the physical resurrection in the age to come. This requires resurrection faith in God both in the present, that we are truly free from the sin realm, and that we will be transformed and receive resurrection bodies and an inheritance in the age to come. It requires that we live in such a way as to demonstrate that we are fully persuaded that God has the power to do what he promised (cf. Rom. 4:21). We can pin this hope on the promises of God to save those in the Messiah and give them eternal life and by the fact that “we know” that Christ was raised from the dead. This wasn’t just a raising from the dead like Lazarus or Jairus’ daughter, people who would die again. Jesus walked into death and out the other side, being transformed into something new. He has a physical body, but a glorified body that is something more than physical and can never be touched by death again. He died to sin and resurrected to a new life and so, because we are in him, we know that we have also died to sin once-and-for-all and will take part in the physical resurrection in the age to come.

Because of all of this, we should count ourselves, says Paul using a a bookkeeping term, “dead to sin but alive to God in Christ Jesus.” By this Paul doesn’t mean that we are not really dead to sin but should just squeeze our eyes and do our best to believe that we are. By calculating that we are dead to sin we are not creating a new status by faith, we are adding up our baptism into Christ and realizing that what is true of the Messiah is true of his people. In urging us to count that all up and be aware of the truth of our new status. If Paul is urging faith in anything it is that those who have taken part in the new exodus are to believe that we have, in reality, been completely freed from sin and really did die to it. We have been placed into a new realm, a new reality where we are free from sin and free from its condemnation at the final judgment. Everything God promised to do for his covenant people through the Messiah has become reality. It is now our job to discover the balance between grasping the seriousness of our baptism and the new realm into which it has placed us and begin to live by the realities of that realm, and still grasping the seriousness of sin that can convince us to live out the old reality to the point that we do the unthinkable and walk back into slavery just as Israel threatened to do when they faced the harsh realities of uprooting the pagan nations from the promised land. Don’t buy into the lie that you are still in Adam and have little choice but to behave like you used to. Resisting that kind of temptation means learning how to transform your thinking and act like you truly believe that you live in the realm of the Messiah rather than Adam.

Being in the new reality means not living as though you live under the rule of the old tyrants of sin and death. Presenting yourself to your old ruler rather than realizing that you have truly died to that way of life is like singing “Beat it” when everyone else is singing the national anthem. It is to be completely out of step with reality. Our mortal bodies have yet to be redeemed (8:20) and so have appetites for the old country but that is not where we live any longer. Sin is still running loose in the world but it has no authority over the one who has been baptized into Christ. By presenting ourselves in the present to the resurrection life in Christ, we not only realize the defeat of sin in our lives but we point ahead to the time when sin and death will be completely destroyed.

Paul finishes this passage with a bit of a twist. We might expect him to say that sin is no longer our master because we are not under sin but grace. Yet, he makes a shift in his thinking to point us in the direction of where he is heading with the totality of his argument. Paul has clearly laid out that there are two realities or realms in which we can live, either in Adam or in Christ. Although the law was good, it only operates in the Adamic realm rather than the Messiah realm (something that Paul will explain fully in chapter 7). Don’t get the idea, says Paul, that the law might help you live in Christ more effectively. The law simply doesn’t work in the realm of grace. This is something that Christians would do well to remind ourselves when we insist on filling up our churches with restrictive rules and regulations to help us live in grace more effectively. Try as we might, that is like trying to row a boat when you’re now on land. Where there is grace, the law will not help. We are either governed by nothing but grace or we really have no grace at all.


Devotional Thought
When Paul says to count yourselves dead to sin, he doesn’t mean to pretend that you are dead to sin. He means that you really are and you need to do the math and realize that and begin to live that way. Have you fully embraced that you really are dead to sin and no longer beholden to that master? If not fully, what does this passage challenge you to do today?