Romans 6

Romans 6:1-23

Subdivision 2. (Romans 6:1-23.)Dead with Christ to sin, no more to be in bondage to it. We come now at once to that deliverance, which is detailed for us in two parts, which are taken up in perfect order, -first from sin, and then from law; the first positional, the second, practical deliverance. Necessarily deliverance from sin comes first, in order that deliverance from law may not mean lawlessness, but freedom to serve in newness of spirit. And yet deliverance from law must be, in order that there may be practical deliverance from sin. The positional is judicial clearing, as the use of the word “justified” (ver. 7) -“he that hath died is justified from sin” -sufficiently shows. This is not the same as from “sins,” let us note, but goes beyond it. We are in Christ, who has died once and for all to that which He took upon Him, so that no question as to it can be ever raised again.

We too, therefore, as in Him are once for all cleared, because He, our Representative, is. We have a place in absolute perfection before God unchangingly. And this by and by we shall find to be the “law of the Spirit,” even that “life in Christ Jesus,” by which we are practically “delivered from the law of sin and death” (Romans 8:2). It is the delivering principle which the Spirit uses; but the question of law must be settled also, that it may practically avail us. Questions at once assail us here, and these the apostle deals with, as we shall see, continuously. To be freed at once from all possible charge of sin, and with this from law also, would seem in the eyes of more than natural men unholy from first to last, while sin is nevertheless admittedly within us still, and the devil and the world are both around to incite and allure us. But grace really reigns; and “sin,” says the apostle, “shall not have dominion over you, because ye are not under the law, but under grace” (ver. 14). It is strange, yet true, that even the Christian is slow to recognize in all the length and breadth of it, the truth of such an assertion; yet it is the thesis which Paul sets himself to maintain all through, and against all who may gainsay it. Let us watch his argument as having that personal interest in it which indeed we have.

1. He starts at once with the argument of an objector, of course, founded on his previous declaration that “where sin abounded grace did overabound.” “What then?” he asks; “shall we continue in sin, then, that grace may abound?” Spite of the answer given to it here, that question is substantially raised today, as if there had been none; as if in fact, it were really unanswerable. But it is true that the apostle’s answer is very little understood; and even by those who are quite satisfied with it. Rejecting utterly the thought, he puts it away with another question. “We who have died to sin,” he asks, “how shall we still live in it?” The putting that as a question shows how unanswerable he deems it; and unanswerable it clearly is, if only the premise is rightly taken. If we are dead to sin, then it is an undeniable consequence that we cannot live in it. But the difficulty is with the assertion itself, that we are dead to sin. Most Christians are content to say, that they ought to be dead to sin, but wince as they look into the book of their experience, and are ready to declare that there never was more than One on earth, who could truly affirm this of himself. Yet it is as plain as possible that, whether from his experience or in some other way, this is just what the apostle does affirm; and that not only of himself, or of some people of special attainment, but of Christians as a class -of all Christians. It is true as to all Christians that where sin abounded grace did much more abound, and that is the ground of the objection taken, and of course, of Paul’s answer too. This at once settles it against the so-called perfectionists, that he is not affirming as to any one’s experience, that he is dead to sin: for Paul is certainly speaking of all Christians, and it is not the universal experience, and is not claimed that I am aware, that it is that, that all are in this sense “dead.” And we shall see in a little while that this is not given as an experience of any, but as a faith. His words later on are, “Reckon yourselves dead indeed unto sin;” and the reckoning is from this that “Christ died unto sin once.” This therefore is a reckoning of faith, as is clear, and not an experience. It is plain, without need of looking further, that in this being dead to sin, however little as yet we may grasp the full meaning of it, we have another example of our identification with our Representative Head. It is necessarily true therefore of every one of us, however great the need also of having it believingly realized, as the apostle urges. He goes on to press the truth as conveyed in baptism, which as that which brings into the ranks of Christian discipleship, has been given as a picture-lesson of what discipleship implies. “Or know ye not,” he asks, “that so many of us as were baptized unto Christ, were baptized unto His death? We were buried therefore with Him through baptism unto death, that as Christ was raised up from among the dead by the glory of the Father, so also we should walk in newness of life.” We need to go slowly here, so many things being in question. It is a sad sign of the confusion of the day that thus in the very rite of initiation into what is our common profession, we should yet be so little able to agree as to what is meant by it. Happily, neither mode nor subjects are before us here, though doubtless we may find what will have its implication in both these directions. But we are in company with one of those who could say, “He that is of God heareth us; he that is not of God heareth us not;” and we must surrender ourselves to his guidance absolutely. “Baptized unto Christ Jesus” is certainly correct, instead of “into,” though the Greek words, as words merely, might mean either. But the parallel “baptized unto Moses” is absolutely decisive. The Israelites were set apart to Moses in the cloud and in the sea, -to be Moses, disciples; where we plainly could not say, “into.” The phrase is thus freed from all suspicion of such a ritualistic force as in very opposite interests it has been made to bear, -as if the wondrous place in Christ were conferred in baptism. “So many of us” again does not imply a smaller out of a larger number, but is on the contrary an emphatic way of saying “every one;” or as if one said, “If we were baptized to Christ at all, we were baptized to His death.” To see the force of it clearly, we have but to go back in our minds to John’s preparatory baptism in Jordan, the river of death, in which men took their place as confessing their sins, and owning their rightful condemnation. Thus he baptized unto death; but it was not Christian baptism -it was not “to Christ’s death,” which is the distinctive feature of the present time, but simply to the acknowledgment of its being worthily their own. Nevertheless it was for remission -“the baptism of repentance for the remission of sins”: not present yet, so that it could be a testimony of sins actually remitted, but in view of the One coming whose forerunner John was. Nor did John close without the fuller witness that, in fact, He had come. Come! and to the very place of that which these penitents acknowledged as their due! The Lord’s baptism in Jordan was for Him no baptism of repentance, but the solemn pledge to what He afterwards called “the baptism that He was to be baptized with” (Luke 12:50). Thus alone could deliverance be achieved for men who were under death, and the virtue of that death abides; so that now convicted sinners such as these in John’s day, brought to own their place in death before God, find all changed for them; they learn that He has been in death for them, and find a new life for them where death was. Thus Christian baptism is still to death but to His death, a death which is life to all that come to Him; and here we have the key to that which baptism expresses. Baptism has in itself no reference to life: it is burial, and burial has to do with death, not life, -it is the dead who must be buried. Now comes the necessary question: in what sense are we dead, to be so buried? Notice that in the idea which baptism presents, we are baptized to Christ, not with Him. We are not baptized because we have touched Him, but, so to speak, we touch Him in it -as to what is intended. In other words, baptism is a gospel picture acted out. As we have seen in the words of Ananias to Saul (Acts 22:16) it is itself in some sense, the washing away of sins: we are not baptized because they have been washed away, but we wash them away in it.

And this agrees perfectly with Peter’s words in his first epistle (1 Peter 3:21) that in a figure baptism saves; not marks out the saved, as so many put it, but saves. And this again agrees with what John’s baptism speaks of, and which the thought of baptism as burial confirms. It is as sinners we come to it, not saints; and in it we find remission of sins and salvation. These are things, as we know, upon which ritualism builds; and they are facts, but of no use to ritualism. Its followers might as well try to support life upon a picture of food, or to take names for things and prove to us there is no difference between them. There is an illustration from the Old Testament which may more vividly present to us the truth that we have here: “Elisha died, and they buried him. And the bands of the Moabites invaded the land at the coming in of the year. And it came to pass, as they were burying a man, that, behold, they spied a band of men; and they cast the man into the sepulchre of Elisha; and when the man was let down, and touched the bones of Elisha, he revived, and stood up on his feet” (2 Kings 13:20-21). Elisha, in the miracles done by him, answered to his name, which means “My God is salvation.” We have in this one a beautiful illustration of baptism, just because it is a vivid and beautiful picture of salvation through the gospel. The man is dead, and so they bury him: burying is but putting the dead into the place of death. He is let down into the grave of one who had died before: he is buried with Elisha. So buried, he touches the one who had preceded him in death, and is quickened out of it: he stands upon his feet a living man. Here we have two deaths brought together, and the one the cure of the other. The man that you bury must be dead; and this, of course, must apply to baptism; but in what sense then dead? dead with Christ, since it is burial with Christ? That is the contention of some, and is plausible at first sight, but only at first sight; for, as we have seen, it is only the one already alive in Christ that can be dead with Christ, and the man buried in baptism is buried to touch the dead Christ and to live. Dead with Christ means dead to sin, as we have heard already, and as is to be more fully shown us; but none can be dead to sin who is not spiritually alive, -who has not already touched Christ so as to live. Buried with Christ does not then imply dead with Christ, as might be thought. Buried because dead in sins, then? That is nearer to, but is not yet the truth. The death that we see pictured in John’s baptism is the death which is the due of sin, and not the inward condition, which is but the inveteracy of the sinful state itself. The death here is that into which Christ came; but He did not come into any sinful condition, but under its penalty. Hence burial with Christ is the owning of the penalty, which the conscience anticipates before it comes, Christ having also anticipated that place for us, that we may live. Baptism, as before said, is but a typical or acted out gospel; with a significant protest against ritualism also: for the baptism is, as the word itself shows, and the argument also but immersion -burial, Christ alone as the quickening Spirit giving the life.

It does not go on, as Colossians in our common version teaches, to resurrection.* It is the confession of death, for which we are put into Christ’s sepulchre, that we may live. What is contemplated here is power for the new walk; it cannot itself give this: it is a baptism to death, and not to life.
This corresponds exactly also with the true rendering of 1 Peter 3:21, which really speaks of baptism, not as the answer of a good conscience, which from all that we have seen it could not be, but rather “the demand* of a good conscience,” not the declaration that we have found it. The baptism, not as an ordinance, but in the idea that it conveys, ends with effecting this. It is but the introduction of the soul to Christ, with whom all satisfaction of the conscience lies. The doctrine of Scripture is as to this consistent throughout, as it must always be.
Christ, then, was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father. That for which He had come into the world demanded for Him deliverance from death, into which He came for this. But such acceptance of His work for sinners means necessarily their deliverance from the power as well as penalty of sin. Thus the practical effect for those who are His is a “walk in newness of life.” The old man, as we shall presently see, is not to revive out of this burial. The “newness” as the word implies, is a newness of kind (kainotees), another sort of life. The river of death has swept over the old one. 2. The apostle goes on to show how the cross of Christ as the crucifixion of the old man becomes in the wisdom of God a means to the sin still in us being overcome. But we have to ask ourselves the question in the first place, what the expression “our old man” means. The common thought is, perhaps, that it is the sin in us personified; thus what is called afterwards the flesh: a term which we may note has not yet been used in Romans, in this sense, and the proper place to examine which will be in the next chapter. But there is one thing which is important to take into account, as to the old man, the significance of which, if not the fact, is largely overlooked, that it is never spoken of as existing in the Christian, but always as crucified or put off. It is so even in Ephesians 4:22, where the common version is at least ambiguous, but where instead of “that ye put off” should be read “that ye did put off.” Thus it refers to what for us is past, not present, and this is so far against the thought of its being the sin in us, while the fact of there being as to the Christian a “new man,” which he has put on, replacing the old one, really demonstrates this from the other side. Always the putting off is connected with the putting on, and the two men are not co-existent but exclusive of one another.
The necessary conclusion is that the new man is characteristic of the Christian; and conversely the old man is the man before his Christian course began. There is no personification in either case: it is the person that was and the person that is, each characterized morally; while, of course, the same individual persists all through. But in this way “our old man” is surely as easily read as it is significant. It is the person that was, with evident allusion to the first fallen man, the repetition of whom in all his natural descendants may account for the plural with the singular (“our old man”), the self-same man with each and all of us! For this “the one” and “the many” of the last chapter has prepared us; it is evident that the transmitted image of the first man in the many must for those to whom Christ is Head and Saviour be met and cancelled; while the new man is just the man in Christ, a new creation. Let us now go back to the beginning of what is here. “For if,” says the apostle, continuing his reference to the truth in baptism, “we have become united with Him in the likeness of His death, we shall be also in that of His resurrection.” The likeness of His death is, of course, baptism itself, and the being united* to Him in His death, is that which we have seen baptism to represent. If therefore that which baptism represents is fulfilled in us, then on the other hand, we shall be in the likeness of His resurrection. This may, no doubt, go on to complete realization in physical resurrection, yet surely is intended to have a present practical application, according to the whole tenor of the thought here. “We shall be” is only necessarily future from the standpoint of union with Him in His death, and its argumentative force for the present is blunted by an exclusive physical reference. The contrast between “become” and “be” favors also the present application: “if we have become united, then we shall as the result be (now) in this likeness.” For as Christ was not left in the grave, so for us also the power of His resurrection must approve itself. It is contended indeed that resurrection with Christ is not found in Romans in this way. It is true that it is not dwelt upon, as in Ephesians and Colossians; yet there are references to it which can hardly be mistaken: what, for instance, does “yield yourselves unto God, as those alive from among the dead” mean?

And how could the thought be absent from the “newness of life” in which we are to walk? Does not the being by the Spirit united to Christ, as in the next chapter, necessitate it? or may we have the full thought of alive in Christ, and even as a means of deliverance from the law of sin and death (Romans 8:2) apart from this? The truth will be developed more and more as we go on with it; nevertheless the germ of all that relates to our position individually is already here.
And in connection with this it is that the crucifixion of the old man, of which the apostle goes on to speak, comes to be delivered from all ascetic mournfulness, and attains its proper character as that which annuls (or brings practically to nothing) the body of sin. It is sin as dwelling in us, acting through the body in the lusts and passions which reflect themselves in it, which in its entirety needs to be annulled. Similarly, in the next chapter, the man who has come to despair of self-mastery groans aloud for deliverance from the “body of this death;” while in Colossians 2:11 we have the parallel term, the “body of the flesh.” By and by we shall be warned that the “body is dead because of sin” (Romans 8:10), and that we are to “mortify the deeds of the body” (ver. 13). All this it is not yet the place to enter into, yet it enables us to realize sufficiently what is meant here. The crucifixion of the old man is the inflicting penal sentence upon it; and in this we must remember that it is not man’s part in the Cross that is before us, but that the lifting up from the earth was that which in the law of Moses indicates the awful sentence of God upon sin: “he that hangeth upon a tree is accursed of God” (Deuteronomy 21:23). Thus the cross was God’s judgment upon fallen man, with whom each one of us had his place naturally. The sentence is here, not merely upon our sins but upon ourselves, and here is a meaning of the Cross most important for us to realize and take to heart. The thoughts of man’s heart, his wisdom and his will, received in it their condemnation; thank God, they were put away from before Him by our glorious Substitute; so that we have our deliverance judicially and practically at the same time. How immense a gain to have learned God’s estimate of ourselves in nature, so as to have learned the renunciation of our wisdom and our wills; while finding the complete ruling aside of all from before God as in a dead man they are necessarily set aside: for you can charge nothing against a dead man; whatever he may have been, as now dead, “he that hath died is justified from sin.” It is plain in the way the apostle is speaking, crucifixion in this case does not come short of death, as many would argue: it gives character to it as divine condemnation, and this is for the breaking of our thraldom to sin and the annulling it in its totality. Divine righteousness has branded it, -divine love has removed its burden from me, so that I should be its slave no more. 3. But if we do not stand any more as identified with what we were in nature, or under the doom of sin, -if it is with Christ that we have died, this means for faith that we shall also live with Him. Touching Him in faith, we are henceforth identified with Him. As we have seen, He is the living Head and Representative of His people, and in Him our life is. Thus we have the assurance which He has given to His own, “Because I live, ye shall live also” (John 14:19). The future tense in both passages simply affirms, of course, the perpetuity of what has already begun, and that is founded on what is a matter of Christian consciousness, that “Christ being raised from the dead, dieth no more: death hath no more dominion over Him.

For in that He died, He died unto sin once for all; but in that He liveth, He liveth unto God.” Thus that which was the burden upon Him has been for ever rolled away, and that, burden was our burden. It is not partly removed, but wholly; there is no such thing as partial removal for any of His own. We are to reckon ourselves dead to sin as He is; and alive to God for ever in Him who is eternally alive to God, His glorious work achieved. We reckon this so, not feel it to be so. It is an entire mistake, and fraught with important consequences, to imagine this being dead to sin to be feeling or experience. We cannot feel Christ’s death on the cross, and it was there He died to sin, and we because He died. If it were experience, it would be an absolutely perfect one, no evil thought, feeling, or desire, ever in the heart; and this not true of some of the more advanced, but of all Christians always; but this is contrary to the experience of all. The attempt to produce such a condition in oneself ends in the misery of utter failure, or, still worse, in self-satisfaction, indeed, the well-nigh incredible delusion for a Christian man, that he is as impassive to sin as Christ Himself! The words do not, as already said, express such an experience; as indeed, in any such sense as this, Christ never died to sin: what for us might be the expression of perfection would be the denial of such perfection as was His.

In every way, then, in which we look at it, it is plain that it is not an experience of which the apostle is speaking here. We could not be told to reckon that we experience: what we reckon is a fact for faith, the fruit of the work done for us, not of that done in us: because Christ died unto sin once for all, and in that He liveth, liveth unto God, thus also do we reckon ourselves dead indeed unto sin, and alive unto God in Christ Jesus. These last words carry us back, as there can be no right question, to those which we have heard front the Lord’s own lips in the Gospel of John. Thus, looking forward to the present time, the time of His absence from His own, as gone back to Him from whom He had come, He says, “In that day ye shall know that I am in the Father, and ye in Me, and I in you” (John 14:20). He has prefaced this with the assurance, “Because I live, ye shall live also.” His parable of the Vine and its branches, which shortly follows, gives us the fundamental thought in these expressions so often repeated, “we in Him and He in us,” and we see it to be life in Him that is all through at the root of them. The epistle of John afterwards gives it more precise doctrinal statement, that “God hath given unto us eternal life, and this life is in His Son” (1 John 5:11). It is a life which, all through the Gospel, we are shown that He communicates to us, and which we have abiding in us. Thus we are “in the Son;” and because the life is divine life, we can be said, not only to be in the Son, but in the Father also (John 17:21; 1 Thessalonians 1:1; 2 Thessalonians 1:1; 1 John 2:24).

But this at once distinguishes the doctrine of Romans here from that of John. John speaks of life and nature only -what we have as children of God and born of Him; it is condition and not position, as is plain, for the thought of “in the Father,” and “in the Son” alike exclude position.

But Paul, as we have seen, while his doctrine is based upon a life which we have received, a life eternal, in no wise different in this way from what is revealed to us in John, yet develops in another manner this truth, and shows us other implications of it. For him the life is in Christ, the new Adam of a new creation, which rises out of the fallen one, to stand in the perfection of its Head before God, and in the value of the glorious work which has much more than redeemed us from the sin and ruin in which we were involved. and made us partakers in an infinite wealth of blessing. Thus it is “in Christ” that we live, -in Him who is before God, not simply in the right, which was always His, of the Only begotten of the Father, but as Christ, in the place He had taken for men, and as having accomplished the work by which they are brought to God; and the pentecostal anointing of the gathered disciples was but the overflow of that upon the priestly Head, which was thus flowing down to the skirts of His garments (Psalms 133:2). So was He now in the fullest sense the Christ -the Anointed. Life was now in One who was the Representative Head of His people, and “alive unto God in Christ Jesus” puts together condition and position. If “in Christ” brings in the thought of new creation, as the apostle declares (2 Corinthians 5:17), the new creation stands in the New Man to whom it has been committed -the Antitypical Adam of the race to whom He has become a “quickening Spirit.” All this must faith reckon in, to have the fulness of the blessing here. 4. Now then the apostle can exhort to a walk suited to such a place. We see at once that he has no thought of sin having been done with in such sort that there shall be no danger from it any more. The believer is, indeed, set free from subjection to it, but therefore in a place in which the full responsibility is his of manifesting that freedom. He is not beyond the need of the warning, “Let not sin, therefore, reign in your mortal body, to obey its lusts.” These bodies, though with the sign of the fall still upon them in their evident mortality, can yet be yielded* up now to God by those who are now alive from the dead, and their members as instruments of righteousness to God. And it is to this that grace enables and constrains.

No need of weakening the sense of it, then, or qualifying it with some other and therefore opposite principle! Nay, “sin shall not have dominion over you, because ye are not under law, but under grace.” Shall the delivered soul call in again its jailer to make good its deliverance. Nay, it is grace alone in which there is any help whatever, or ray of hope. And, thank God, it is all-sufficient also. Sin shall not have dominion over the subjects of divine grace, is the apostle’s assurance: grace reigns through righteousness unto eternal life.
5. Everything here will be questioned, however, by the soul ignorant of itself and of God; and such questions, because of their importance, must have careful answer. Again therefore we have the objection of the mere moralist taken up to be indignantly set aside: “What then? Are we to sin, because we are not under law, but under grace? Far be the thought.” Yet the heart of man is in fact capable of such abuse of divine goodness; yes, but what would such an argument mean? A soul set free willingly yielding itself to that from which God has delivered it?

Is this deliverance when the heart is still deliberately seeking that from which it assumes to be delivered? Well, says the apostle, if I am addressing any in such a condition, let me remind them that here the whole nature of God is in question. Does not then the way of sin deliberately pursued, end in death? Does the gospel change this relation of sin to death? does it not manifest God, and in all His attributes? His holiness being more shown indeed in the agony of the Cross, than even the uttermost punishment of the sinner could have shown it. Thus then, if one freely yields himself to obey a master, he cannot but be reckoned as belonging to the master he has chosen, whether on the one hand to sin with its terrible wages, or of obedience to God for righteousness.

In all this there rules a fundamental necessity, which the gospel could not subvert and be still a gospel. It was necessary, therefore, to give this the clearest expression; but, while the apostle does so, he has a joyful conviction with regard to those whom he is addressing, that their own experience well interprets that which he is saying. With them he is assured, their bondage to sin is indeed past, and with heartfelt appreciation of the glorious change, they have entered upon the new service to righteousness. Melted and subdued by the power of the Word, they have been as ductile metal run into the mould, and taking form in the pattern of their present life by the doctrine to which they are surrendered, so as, being set free from sin, to become bondservants to righteousness. Strange phrases these might seem still to use in connection with the redeemed and enfranchised children of God. The apostle in some sort apologizes for them; yet that divine love has had to conquer us for itself, we surely know; and having conquered, that it has made us bondservants to it for ever, -bound by the grace that has enfranchised us more fully and securely than any slave as such could be. Yet, alas, of this bond we need to be reminded, strangely as we are often in contradiction to ourselves: we are not beyond the exhortation to yield our members bondservants to righteousness for sanctification, -righteousness which has in it the apprehension of God’s peculiar and double rights in us, -redemption more than doubling His creative claim.

From the opposite side, as bondservants to sin, we were indeed free in regard to righteousness. Can we not vividly remember those shameful, barren days as to good? and the end of those things is death! How great the contrast now! “But now being freed from sin, and being made bondservants to God, ye have your fruit unto sanctification, and the end eternal life. For the wages of sin is death, but the gracious gift of God eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord.” This is the summing up in contrast of the two sides already set before us. The end on the one side is what man has earned; the end on the other is the full realization -the entering into -of that which is, not simply at the end, but now also, God’s gracious gift to us. This has been shown us abundantly; but notice how again here “our Lord” -“in Christ Jesus our Lord” -closes this subject with the glad witness of what brings all the life into that harmonious order which is the result of the deliverance from sin. The Christ whom we have known in His lowliness as Jesus, now in the place of exaltation which has given us a “gospel of glory,” has bowed our hearts in obedient homage to Himself. As the unwilling prophet testified of a people of other days, “the shout of a King is among” us, the pledge of victory over every foe, -“higher than Agag” with all his rebellious rout. There can be no deliverance where Christ is not enthroned; there can be nothing else, where He has His due place and acknowledgment. Put Him only in His place, and He cannot but manifest His power; and that will be more and more simple as we proceed with what is before us now.