23  Dying to Live (6:1-10)

What shall we say then? Are we to continue in sin that grace might increase? May it never be! How shall we who died to sin still live in it? Or do you not know that all of us who have been baptized into Christ Jesus have been baptized into His death? Therefore we have been buried with Him through baptism into death, in order that as Christ was raised from the dead through the glory of the Father, so we too might walk in newness of lite. For if we have become united with Him in the likeness of His death, certainly we shall be also in the likeness of His resurrection, knowing this, that our old self was crucified with Him, that our body of sin might be done away with, that we should no longer be slaves to sin; for he who has died is freed from sin. Now if we have died with Christ, we believe that we shall also live with Him, knowing that Christ, having been raised from the dead, is never to die again; death no longer is master over Him. For the death that He died, He died to sin, once for all; but the life that He lives, He lives to God. (Rom. 6:1–10)

In his early teens, John Newton ran away from England and joined the crew of a slave ship. Some years later he himself was given to the black wife of a white slave trader in Africa. He was cruelly mistreated and lived on leftovers from the woman’s meals and on wild yams he dug from the ground at night. After escaping, he lived with a group of natives for a while and eventually managed to become a sea captain himself, living the most ungodly and profligate life imaginable. But after his miraculous conversion in 1748, he returned to England and became a selfless and tireless minister of the gospel in London. He left for posterity many hymns that are still among the most popular in the world. By far the best-known and best-loved of those is “Amazing Grace.” He became the pastor of a church in England, and to this day the churchyard carries an epitaph that Newton himself wrote (Out of the Depths: An Autobiography [Chicago, Moody, n.d.], p. 151):

How could such a debauched, self-proclaimed enemy of the faith eventually be able to say with Paul, “I thank Christ Jesus our Lord, who has strengthened me, because He considered me faithful, putting me into service; even though I was formerly a blasphemer and a persecutor and a violent aggressor. And yet I was shown mercy” (1 Tim. 1:12–13)? How could that apostle have addressed the Corinthian believers as “those who have been sanctified in Christ Jesus, saints by calling” (1 Cor. 1:2) and yet say to them, “Do you not know that the unrighteous shall not inherit the kingdom of God? Do not be deceived; neither fornicators, nor idolaters, nor adulterers, nor effeminate, nor homosexuals, nor thieves, nor the covetous, nor drunkards, nor revilers, nor swindlers, shall inherit the kingdom of God. And such were some of you” (6:9–1 la; emphasis added)? Paul immediately gives the answer, reminding them that they “were justified in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ, and in the Spirit of our God” (v. 11b).

It is those and similar vital concerns that Paul deals with in chapters 6–8 of Romans. At this point in the epistle he begins a new development in his teaching about salvation and its practical effect on those who are saved. After extensive discussions of man’s sin and of his redemption through Christ, he now moves to the subject of the believer’s holiness—the life of righteousness that God demands of and provides for His children, the life of obedience to His Word lived in the power of His Spirit.

In his letter to the Galatian churches Paul gives a brief and beautiful summary of the divine principle that makes transformed life and transformed living possible: “I have been crucified with Christ; and it is no longer I who live, but Christ lives in me; and the life which I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me, and delivered Himself up for me” (Gal. 2:20).

In Romans 6:1–10, Paul links three elements in his opening defense of the believer’s holy life: the antagonist (v. 1), the answer (v. 2), and the argument explaining and defending that answer (vv. 3–10).

THE ANTAGONIST

What shall we say then? Are we to continue in sin that grace might increase? (6:1)

As he frequently does, Paul anticipates the major objections of his critics. Well before the time he wrote this epistle, he and Barnabas in particular—but doubtless the other apostles, teachers, and prophets as well—had already encountered considerable opposition against the preaching of salvation by grace through faith alone. The typical religious Jew of that day could not comprehend pleasing God apart from strict adherence to the Mosaic and rabbinic law. To them, conformity to such law was the embodiment of godliness.

While Paul and Barnabas were preaching in Antioch of Syria, some Jewish men who professed faith in Christ “came down from Judea and began teaching the brethren, ‘Unless you are circumcised according to the custom of Moses, you cannot be saved.’ And when Paul and Barnabas had great dissension and debate with them, the brethren determined that Paul and Barnabas and certain others of them should go up to Jerusalem to the apostles and elders concerning this issue” (Acts 15:1–2). When the two men arrived in Jerusalem, some other Jews who claimed to be Christians, a group of legalistic Pharisees, also opposed their teaching, “saying, ‘It is necessary to circumcise them [Gentile converts], and to direct them to observe the Law of Moses’” (Acts 15:5). During the ensuing council of Jerusalem, Peter boldly declared that God “made no distinction between us [Jews] and them [Gentiles], cleansing their hearts by faith. Now therefore why do you put God to the test by placing upon the neck of the disciples a yoke which neither our fathers nor we have been able to bear? But we believe that we are saved through the grace of the Lord Jesus, in the same way as they also are” (Acts 15:9–11).

After further comments by Paul and Barnabas and a summary by James, the council unanimously agreed that obedience to the Mosaic law contributes nothing to salvation and should not be made binding on any believer, Gentile or even Jew (see w. 12–29).

Some years later, after returning to Jerusalem from collecting offerings from largely Gentile churches on behalf of needy believers in Judea, Paul sought to conciliate immature Jewish believers—as well as defuse some of the opposition from unbelieving Jews—by going to the Temple to make a vow. When some unbelieving Jews from Asia saw him in the Temple, they falsely assumed he had defiled the Temple by bringing Gentiles into the restricted area. They nearly caused a riot in the city when they cried out, “Men of Israel, come to our aid! This is the man who preaches to all men everywhere against our people, and the Law, and this place; and besides he has even brought Greeks into the temple and has defiled this holy place” (Acts 21:28–36).

Paul also knew that, at the opposite extreme, some readers would misinterpret his assertion that “where sin increased, grace abounded all the more” (5:20). They would foolishly accuse him of teaching that sin itself glorifies God by causing His grace to increase. If that were true, they reasoned, then men not only are free to sin but are obligated to sin in order to enable God to expand His grace. If salvation is all of God and all of grace, and if God is glorified in the dispensing of grace, the sinful heart may be inclined to reason: “The more sin, the more grace; therefore, men should sin with abandon.” Or as others might put it, “If God delights in justifying the ungodly, as Romans 4:5 clearly states, then the doctrine of grace puts a premium on ungodliness, because it gives God more opportunity to demonstrate His grace.”

That is exactly the perverted interpretation taught by the infamous Rasputin, religious adviser to the ruling Romanov family of Russia in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. He taught and exemplified the antinomian view of salvation through repeated experiences of sin and false repentance. He believed that the more you sin, the more God gives you grace. So the more you sin with abandon, the more you give God the opportunity to glorify Himself. Rasputin declared that if you are simply an ordinary sinner, you are not giving God an opportunity to show His glory, so you need to be an extraordinary sinner.

Paul had already countered a similar hypothetical charge: “If our unrighteousness demonstrates the righteousness of God, what shall we say? The God who inflicts wrath is not unrighteous, is He? (I am speaking in human terms.)” The apostle answers his own question with an emphatic, “May it never be! For otherwise how will God judge the world?” (Rom. 3:5–6). He then proceeds to roundly condemn those who would teach the depraved idea of “Let us do evil that good may come” (v. 8).

Legalistic Jews would charge the apostle with just that sort of antinomianism, of contradicting the laws of God and advocating moral and spiritual license to do as one pleases—presumably justified on the grounds that such living actually glorifies God. Those opponents had an especially hard time accepting the idea of salvation on the basis of faith alone, apart from any works. To add to that doctrine the idea that increased sin somehow increases God’s grace would be to compound anathema with still worse anathema. In trying to protect the faith from that danger, however, they injected another danger: the idea that salvation as well as spirituality—even for believers in Christ—is produced by conformity to external law.

Throughout church history, some Christian groups have fallen into the same kind of error, insisting that conformity to countless man-made regulations and ceremony is necessary for true godliness. Whether in the form of extreme ritualism or of strictly prescribed codes of conduct, men have presumed to protect and bolster the pure gospel of grace working through faith alone by adding legalistic requirements of their own making.

The church also has always been in danger of contamination by false believers who wickedly use the freedom of the gospel as a justification for sin. As Jude declared, “For certain persons have crept in unnoticed, those who were long beforehand marked out for this condemnation, ungodly persons who turn the grace of our God into licentiousness and deny our only Master and Lord, Jesus Christ” (Jude 4).

Here Paul deals a death blow to that kind of antinomianism, yet he does so without yielding an inch of ground to those who would deny that God’s grace is sufficient for salvation. Under the leadership of the Holy Spirit, the apostle avoided the extreme of legalism on the one hand and of libertinism on the other. He would neither abandon God’s grace to accommodate the legalists nor abandon God’s righteousness to accommodate the libertines.

As Scripture makes plain throughout its pages, from Genesis through Revelation, a saving relationship with God is inextricably linked to holy living, and a holy life is lived by the power of God working in and through the heart of the true believer. In God’s redemptive act in a person’s heart, true holiness is as much a gift of God as is the new birth and the spiritual life it brings. The life that is not basically marked by holiness has no claim to salvation. It is true that no believer will be sinless until he goes to be with the Lord by death or by rapture, but a professed believer who persistently disregards Christ’s lordship and His standards of righteousness by disobedience has no claim on Christ’s saviorhood. It is that cardinal gospel truth that Paul forcefully defends in Romans 6–7.

In light of the pervasive antinomianism of our own day, there is no more important truth for believers to understand than the inseparable connection between justification and sanctification as salvation components, between new life in Christ and the living of that life in the holiness Christ demands and provides. By their unbiblical teachings of easy believism and the worldly lifestyles of both leaders and members, many churches who go under the banner of evangelicalism give little evidence either of redemption or of the holiness that necessarily accompanies saving grace.

“What shall we say then to such foolish assertions?” the apostle asks, adding rhetorically, “Are we to continue in sin that grace might increase?” Epimenō (to continue) carries the idea of habitual persistence. It was sometimes used of a person’s purposely living in a certain place and of making it his permanent residence. It is the word that John used of the determined Jewish leaders who persisted in trying to induce Jesus to contradict the law of Moses (John 8:7).

Paul was not speaking of a believer’s occasional falling into sin, as every Christian does at times because of the weakness and imperfection of the flesh. He was speaking of intentional, willful sinning as an established pattern of life.

Before salvation, sin cannot be anything but the established way of life, because sin at best taints everything the unredeemed person does. But the believer, who has a new life and is indwelt by God’s own Spirit, has no excuse to continue habitually in sin. Can he then possibly live in the same submissive relationship to sin that he had before salvation? Put in theological terms, can justification truly exist apart from sanctifi-cation? Can a person receive a new life and continue in his old way of living? Does the divine transaction of redemption have no continuing and sustaining power in those who are redeemed? Put still another way, can a person who persists in living as a child of Satan have been truly born again as a child of God? Many say yes. Paul says no, as verse 2 emphatically states.

THE ANSWER

May it never be! How shall we who died to sin still live in it? (6:2)

Immediately answering his own question, Paul exclaims with obvious horror, May it never be! Mēgenoito is literally and accurately translated May it never be, and it was the strongest idiom of repudiation in New Testament Greek. It is used some fourteen times in Paul’s letters alone. The apostle has already used it three times in chapter 3 of Romans (vv. 4, 6, 31) and will use it another six times before he concludes (see 6:15; 7:7, 13; 9:14; 11:1, 11). It carries the sense of outrage that an idea of this kind could ever be thought of as true.

The very suggestion that sin could in any conceivable way please and glorify God was abhorrent to Paul. The falsehood is almost too self evident to be given the dignity of detailed refutation. Instead it deserves only condemnation.

But lest his readers think he might be evading a difficult problem, the apostle seems almost to shout why the notion that sin brings glory to God is repugnant and preposterous. At this point he does not respond with reasoned argument but with a brief and arresting rhetorical question: How shall we who died to sin still live in it?

Paul does not recognize his antagonists’ assertion as having the least credence or merit. He does not now argue the truth but merely declares it. The person who is alive in Christ has died to sin, and it is inconceivable and self-contradictory to propose that a believer can henceforth live in the sin from which he was delivered by death. God’s grace is given for the very purpose of saving from sin, and only the most corrupt mind using the most perverted logic could argue that continuing in the sin from which he has supposedly been saved somehow honors the holy God who sacrificed His only Son to deliver men from all unrighteousness.

By simple reason it must be admitted that the person who has died to one kind of life cannot still live in it. The apostle Paul was not speaking of the present state of the believer as daily dying to sin but the past act (apothnēshō, second aorist active) of being dead to sin. Paul is saying it is impossible for a Christian to remain in a constant state of sinfulness. The act is in this sense once and for all.

Again by definition, a person does not continually die. If his death is real, it is permanent. The person who has truly died to sin cannot possibly still live in it. Both in the spiritual as well as the physical realms, death and life are incompatible. Both logically and theologically, therefore, spiritual life cannot coexist with spiritual death. The idea that a Christian can continue to live habitually in sin not only is unbiblical but irrational. Christians obviously are able to commit many of the sins they committed before salvation, but they are not able to live perpetually in those sins as they did before. “No one who is born of God practices sin,” John declares, “because His seed abides in him; and he cannot sin, because he is born of God” (1 John 3:9). It is not merely that Christians should not continue to live in the realm and dimension of sin but that they cannot.

The apostle does not equivocate about the superabundance of God’s grace. But the truth that “where sin increased, grace abounded all the more” (5:20b) obviously focuses on and magnifies God’s grace, not man’s sin. It declares that no single sin is too great for God to forgive and that even the collective sins of all mankind for all ages—past, present, and future—are more than sufficiently covered by the measureless abundance of God’s grace activated in the atonement.

Paul goes on to declare with equal unequivocation that a genuinely justified life both is and will continue to be a sanctified life. For the purposes of systematic theology and to make God’s work of redemption somewhat more comprehensible to finite human minds, we often speak of sanctification as following justification. There is, of course, a sense in which it does, in that justification involves what is often called a forensic, or legal, declaration of righteousness that is immediate, complete, and eternal. But justification and sanctification are not separate stages in salvation; rather, they are different aspects of the unbroken continuum of God’s divine work of redemption in a believer’s life by which He not only declares a person righteous but recreates him to become righteous. Holiness is as much a work of God in the believer as any other element of redemption. When a person is redeemed, God not only declares him righteous, but also begins to develop Christ’s righteousness in him. Thus salvation is not merely a legal transaction, but results inevitably in a miracle of transformation.

Growing in the Christian life is always a process, not to be perfected “until the day of Christ Jesus” (Phil. 1:6). But there is no such thing as a true convert to Christ in whom justification has been accomplished but in whom sanctification, both forensic and practical, has not already begun. In other words, there is never a cleavage between justification and sanctification. There is, however, always and inevitably a total and permanent cleavage between the old self and the new self. In Christ, the old self has been made a corpse; and a corpse, by definition, has in it no remaining vestige of life.

The old man, the old self, is the unregenerate person. He is not part righteous and part sinful, but totally sinful and without the slightest potential within himself for becoming righteous and pleasing to God. The new man, on the other hand, is the regenerate person. He is made pleasing to God through Jesus Christ and his new nature is entirely godly and righteous. He is not yet perfected or glorified, but he is already spiritually alive and holiness is at work in him. The new man will continue to grow in that holiness, no matter how slowly or falteringly, because, by its very nature, life grows. Dr. Donald Grey Barnhouse wrote, “Holiness starts where justification finishes, and if holiness does not start, we have the right to suspect that justification never started either” (Romans, vol. 3 [Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1961], 2:12).

There is therefore simply no such thing as justification without sanctification. There is no such thing as divine life without divine living. The truly saved person lives a new and godly life in a new and godly realm. He now and forever lives in God’s realm of grace and righteousness and can never again live in Satan’s realm of self and sin. As the natural, sinful, unregenerate man cannot restrain the manifestation of what he is, neither can the regenerate man.

Again, salvation not only is a transaction but a transformation, not only forensic but actual. Christ died not only for what we did but for what we are. Paul tells believers: “For you have died and your life is hidden with Christ in god” (Col. 3:3). even more explicitly he declares that “if any man is in Christ, he is a new creature; the old things passed away; behold, new things have come” (2 Cor. 5:17).

And so the phrase died to sin expresses the fundamental premise of this entire chapter in Romans, the rest of which is essentially an elaboration of the cardinal reality. It is impossible to be alive in Christ and also still be alive to sin. It is not that a believer at any moment before going to be with Christ is totally separated from the controlling power of sin, the sin life from which Christ died to deliver him. The sense in which this crucial fact is true unfolds in the following text.

THE ARGUMENT

Or do you not know that all of us who have been baptized into Christ Jesus have been baptized into His death? Therefore we have been buried with Him through baptism into death, in order that as Christ was raised from the dead through the glory of the Father, so we too might walk in newness of life. For if we have become united with Him in the likeness of His death, certainly we shall be also in the likeness of His resurrection, knowing this, that our old self was crucified with Him, that our body of sin might be done away with, that we should no longer be slaves to sin; for he who has died is freed from sin. Now if we have died with Christ, we believe that we shall also live with Him, knowing that Christ, having been raised from the dead, is never to die again; death no longer is master over Him. For the death that He died, He died to sin, once for all; but the life that He lives, He lives to God. (6:3–10)

The idea that a believer can glorify God by continuing in sin apparently was pervasive in the Roman churches and elsewhere, or Paul would not have given it such attention. In a series of four logical and sequential principles, he reasons from his basic point made in verse 2 that the person who has died to sin cannot continue to live in it.

WE ARE BAPTIZED INTO CHRIST

Or do you not know that all of us who have been baptized into Christ Jesus (6:3a)

The first principle is that all true Christians have been baptized into Christ Jesus.

When John the Baptist baptized in water for repentance of sin, the clear and obvious intent was a turning to righteousness. In receiving John’s baptism, the sinner renounced his sin and through symbolic cleansing henceforth identified himself with the Messiah and His righteousness. Baptism uniquely represented identification.

Kenneth S. Wuest defines this particular use of baptizō (to be baptized) as “the introduction or placing of a person or thing into a new environment or into union with something else so as to alter its condition or its relationship to its previous environment or condition” (Romans in the Greek New Testament [Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1955], pp. 96–97).

In his first letter to Corinth, Paul spoke of Israel’s being baptized into Moses (1 Cor. 10:2), symbolizing the people’s identity or solidarity with Moses as God’s spokesman and leader and the placing of themselves under his authority. By that identity and submission they participated in the leadership and consequent blessings and honor of Moses. The faithful Israelite was, as it were, fused with Moses, who was fused with God. In a similar but infinitely more profound and permanent way, all of us, that is, all Christians, have been baptized into Christ Jesus, thus permanently being immersed into Him, so as to be made one with Him. It should be noted here that the Greek term as well as the concept call for water baptism being by immersion in order to symbolize this reality properly.

In other passages, Paul affirmed the importance of water baptism in obedience to the Lord’s direct command (see 1 Cor. 1:13–17 and Eph. 4:5). But that is only the outward symbol of the baptism to which he refers here. He is speaking metaphorically of the spiritual immersion of believers into Christ through the Holy Spirit, of the believer’s intimate oneness with his divine Lord. It is the truth of which Jesus spoke when He said, “Lo, I am with you always, even to the end of the age” (Matt. 28:20), and which John describes as “our fellowship … with the Father, and with His Son Jesus Christ” (1 John 1:3). In 1 Corinthians Paul speaks of it as the believer’s being one spirit with Christ (1 Cor. 6:17), and he explains to the Galatian believers that “all of you who were baptized into Christ have clothed yourselves with Christ” (Gal. 3:27). In each instance, the idea is that of being totally encompassed by and unified with Christ.

It is in light of that incomprehensible truth that Paul so strongly rebukes the sexual immorality of some of the Corinthian believers, exclaiming incredulously, “Do you not know that your bodies are members of Christ? Shall I then take away the members of Christ and make them members of a harlot? May it never be!” (1 Cor. 6:15).

As noted above and throughout this volume on Romans, salvation not only is God’s reckoning a sinner as righteous but of granting him a new, righteous disposition or nature. The believer’s righteousness in Christ is an earthly as well as a heavenly reality, or else it is not a reality at all. His new life is a divine life. That is why it is impossible for a true believer to continue to live in the same sinful way in which he lived before being saved.

Many people interpret Paul’s argument in Romans 6:3–10 as referring to water baptism. However, Paul is simply using the physical analogy of water baptism to teach the spiritual reality of the believer’s union with Christ. Water baptism is the outward identification of an inward reality—faith in Jesus’ death, burial, and resurrection. Paul was not advocating salvation by water baptism; that would have contradicted everything he had just said about salvation by grace and not works in Romans 3–5, which has no mention of water baptism.

Water baptism was a public symbol of faith in God. The apostle Peter said baptism is a mark of salvation because it gives outward evidence of an inward faith in Christ (1 Pet. 3:21). Titus says the same thing in Titus 3:4–5: “But when the kindness of God our Savior and His love for mankind appeared, He saved us, not on the basis of deeds which we have done in righteousness, but according to His mercy, by the washing of regeneration and renewing by the Holy Spirit.” Paul says in Acts 22:16, “And now why do you delay? Arise, and be baptized, and wash away your sins, calling on His name.” Those verses are not saying a person is saved by water but that water baptism is a symbol of genuine saving faith.

The Roman believers were well aware of the symbol of baptism. When Paul says do you not know, he is in effect saying, “Are you ignorant of the meaning of your own baptism? Have you forgotten what your baptism symbolized?” They were unaware that water baptism symbolizes the spiritual reality of being immersed into Jesus Christ. The tragedy is that many mistake the symbol of water baptism as the means of salvation rather than the demonstration of it. To turn a symbol into the reality is to eliminate the reality, which in this case is salvation by grace through faith in Christ alone.

WE ARE IDENTIFIED IN CHRIST’S DEATH AND RESURRECTION

have been baptized into His death? Therefore we have been buried with Him through baptism into death, in order that as Christ was raised from the dead through the glory of the Father, so we too might walk in newness of life. For if we have become united with Him in the likeness of His death, certainly we shall be also in the likeness of His resurrection, (6:3b-5)

The second principle Paul emphasizes is an extension of the first. All Christians not only are identified with Christ but are identified with Him specifically in His death and resurrection.

The initial element of the second principle is that all true believers have been baptized into His [Christ’s] death. That is a historical fact looking back to our union with Him on the cross. And the reason we have been buried with Him through baptism into death is that as Christ was raised from the dead through the glory of the Father, so we too might walk in newness of life. That is a historical fact looking back to our union with Him in resurrection.

That truth is far too wondrous for us to understand fully, but the basic and obvious reality of it is that we died with Christ in order that we might have life through Him and live like Him. Again Paul emphasizes not so much the immorality but the impossibility of our continuing to live the way we did before we were saved. By trusting in Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior, we were, by an unfathomable divine miracle, taken back 2,000 years, as it were, and made to participate in our Savior’s death and to be buried with Him, burial being the proof of death. The purpose of that divine act of bringing us through death (which paid the penalty for our sin) and resurrection with Christ was to enable us henceforth to walk in newness of life.

The noble theologian Charles Hodge summarized, “There can be no participation in Christ’s life without a participation in his death, and we cannot enjoy the benefits of his death unless we are partakers of the power of his life. We must be reconciled to God in order to be holy, and we cannot be reconciled without thereby becoming holy? (Commentary on the Epistle to the Romans [Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1983 reprint], p. 195).

As Christ’s resurrection life was the certain consequence of His death as the sacrifice for our sin, so the believer’s holy life in Christ is the certain consequence of his death to sin in Christ.

Newness translates kairos, which refers to newness of quality and character, not neos, which refers merely to newness in point of time. Just as sin characterized our old life, so righteousness now characterizes our new life. Scripture is filled with descriptions of the believer’s new spiritual life. We are said to receive a new heart (Ezek. 36:26), a new spirit (Ezek. 18:31), a new song (Ps. 40:3), and a new name (Rev. 2:17). We are called a new creation (2 cor. 5:17), a new creature (Gal. 6:15), and a new self (Eph.4:24).

Continuing to affirm the truth that this union with Christ in His death brings new life and also inevitably brings a new way of living, Paul says, For if we have become united with Him in the likeness of His death, certainly we shall be also in the likeness of His resurrection. In other words, as an old life died, so a new one was necessarily born.

Bishop Handley Moule graphically asserted,

OUR BODY OF SIN HAS BEEN DESTROYED

knowing this, that our old self was crucified with Him, that our body of sin might be done away with, that we should no longer be slaves to sin; for he who has died is freed from sin. (6:6–7)

The third principle Paul stresses is that the old sinful self has been killed. The phrase knowing this obviously is an appeal to what should be common knowledge among believers, those to and of whom Paul is speaking. “You should be well aware,” he was saying, “that in Christ you are not the same people you were before salvation. You have new life, a new heart, a new spiritual strength, a new hope, and countless other new things that had no part in your former life.” When Christ redeemed us, our old self was crucified, that is, put to death and destroyed.

Old does not translate archaios, which simply refers to chronological age, but rather palaios, which refers to something that is completely worn out and useless, fit only for the scrap heap. For all practical purposes it is destroyed. In a passage quoted above from Colossians, Paul declares “I have been crucified with Christ,“—that is, my old “1” is dead and no longer exists—“and it is no longer I who live, but Christ lives in me” (Gal. 2:20). In other words, our new life as Christians is not a made-over old life but a new divinely-bestowed life that is Christ’s very own.

When Scripture is compared with Scripture, which responsible study of it always includes, it becomes clear that the “old self” to which Paul refers in Romans 6 is none other than the unregenerate, in-Adam man described in chapter 5, the person who is apart from divine redemption and the new life it brings.

The dualistic view that a Christian has two natures uses unbiblical terminology and can lead to perception that is extremely destructive of holy living. Some who hold such views go to the perverted extreme of the Gnostics in Paul’s day, claiming that because the evil self cannot be controlled or changed and because it is going to be destroyed in the future anyway, it does not much matter what you let it do. It is only “spiritual” things, such as your thoughts and intentions, that are of significance. It is not surprising that in congregations where such a philosophy reigns, immoral conduct among the membership as well as the leadership is common and church discipline is usually nonexistent.

Paul asserts that such a perverted view of Christian liberty is known by well-taught believers to be false and destructive and that it should be condemned out-of-hand in the church. In Romans 6:6 Paul mentions three marvelous truths that should protect believers from such false views about the old and new natures.

The first truth is that our old self was crucified with Him, that is, with Christ. Crucifixion does not simply produce extreme suffering; it produces death. To be crucified is to die. The old … self of every believer was crucified with his Lord, or else he has not been saved. There is no such thing as a true Christian who has not died with Christ.

In Ephesians, Paul writes in some detail about the old self, or the old man. He tells believers: “But you did not learn Christ in this way, if indeed you have heard Him and have been taught in Him, just as truth is in Jesus, that, in reference to your former manner of life, you lay aside the old self, which is being corrupted in accordance with the lusts of deceit, and that you be renewed in the spirit of your mind, and put on the new self, which in the likeness of God has been created in righteousness and holiness of the truth” (Eph. 4:20–24). The Christian’s new self is actually in God’s own likeness!

As John Murray and other New Testament scholars have pointed out, both “lay aside” (v. 22) and “put on” (v. 24) translate Greek infinitives that in this context should be rendered as infinitives of result. In other words, Paul is not giving an admonition or command but rather a statement of fact about what has already been accomplished, finished. Murray therefore translates verse 22 as, “So that ye have put off according to the former manner life the old man” (Principles of Conduct [Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1957], see pp. 211–19).

Another scholar, Bishop Handley Moule, translated that verse as, “Our old man, our old state, as out of Christ and under Adam’s headship, under guilt and in moral bondage, was crucified with Christ” (The Epistle to the Romans [London: Pickering & Inglis, n.d.], p. 164). Still another expositor and commentator, the late Martyn Lloyd-Jones, rendered the verse: “Do not go on living as if you were still that old man, because that old man has died. Do not go on living as if he was still there” (Romans: An Exposition of Chapter 6 [Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1972], p. 64).

Even if verse 22 is taken as a command, it would not be a command to reject the dictates of our old self—which the apostle has just declared has been crucified and is now dead, and therefore cannot dictate to us anymore. It would rather be a command for us not to follow the remaining memories of its sinful ways, as if we were still under its evil mastery.

Declaring again that true believers have already been removed from the presence and control of the old sinful self, Paul tells the Galatian church, “Those who belong to Christ Jesus have crucified the flesh with its passions and desires” (Gal. 5:24; emphasis added).

In a somewhat parallel passage in Colossians, Paul clearly states that a believer’s putting off the old self is a fait accompli, something that has already and irreversibly been accomplished. “Do not lie to one another,” he says, “since you laid aside the old self with its evil practices, and have put on the new self who is being renewed to a true knowledge according to the image of the One who created him” (Col. 3:9–10). It was not that every Colossian believer was fully mature and had managed to gain complete mastery over the residual old self. Paul was saying rather that every believer, at any level of maturity, can claim that his old self already has been laid aside “with its evil practices.” In exactly the same way, his new self in Christ is already “being renewed” into conformity with the very image of the God who has recreated him.

The second great truth Paul gives in verse 6 about the old and new dispositions is that our body of sin might be done away with. The phrase might be does not here carry the idea of possibility but is simply an idiomatic way of stating an already existing fact. In other words, our historical death to sin at the cross in Christ results in our sin being done away with. Those truths are so nearly synonymous that verse 6 is almost a tautology. Sin that is dead (crucified) is obviously done away with. Paul states the truth in those two different ways in order to make his point more understandable and to remove any possible ambiguity.

Both the NASB (done away with) and the King James (“destroyed”) can suggest that our body of sin is annihilated. But hatargeō (done away with) literally means “to render inoperative or invalid,” to make something ineffective by removing its power of control. That meaning is seen clearly in the term’s rendering in such other passages in Romans as 3:3, 31 (“nullify”), 4:14 (“nullified”), 7:2 (“released from”).

As every mature Christian learns, the more he grows in Christ, the more he becomes aware of sin in his life. In many places, Paul uses the terms body and flesh to refer to sinful propensities that are intertwined with physical weaknesses and pleasures (see, e.g., Rom. 8:10–11, 13, 23). New birth in Christ brings death to the sinful self, but it does not bring death to the temporal flesh and its corrupted inclinations until the future glorification. Obviously, a Christian’s body is potentially good and is intended to do only good things, else Paul would not have commanded believers to present their bodies to God as “a living and holy sacrifice, acceptable to God” (Rom. 12:1). It can respond to the new holy disposition, but does not always do so.

As Paul explains more fully in chapter 7 of this letter, a believer’s unredeemed humanness—of which he uses his own as example—remains with him until he is transformed to heavenly glory. And, as both Scripture and experience clearly teach, the remaining humanness somehow retains certain weaknesses and propensities to sin. The tyranny and penalty of sin both in and over the Christian’s life have been broken, but sin’s potential for expression in his life has not yet been fully removed. His human weaknesses and instincts make him capable of succumbing to Satan’s temptations when he lives apart from the Spirit’s Word and power. He is a new, redeemed, holy creation incarcerated in unredeemed flesh.

To combat that remaining weakness in regard to sin, the apostle admonishes believers later in the present chapter: “Just as you presented your members as slaves to impurity and to lawlessness, resulting in further lawlessness, so now present your members as slaves to righteousness, resulting in sanctification” (Rom. 6:19).

The third great truth Paul gives in verse 6 about the old and new natures is that we should no longer be slaves to sin. Again, the translation leaves the meaning somewhat ambiguous. But as the apostle makes unequivocal a few verses later, “Thanks be to God that though you were slaves of sin, you became obedient from the heart to that form of teaching to which you were committed, having been freed from sin, you became slaves of righteousness” (Rom. 6:17–18; emphasis added). All the verbs in those two verses make clear that a believer’s slavery under sin has already been broken by Christ and is henceforth a thing of the past. Several verses later, Paul reiterates the truth that the believer’s new enslavement to righteousness is made possible because he is now enslaved to God (v. 22; emphasis added).

In other words, the immediate context of should no longer be slaves of sin carries the more precise—and extremely significant—meaning that believers can no longer be slaves of sin. As already noted, Paul does not teach that a Christian is no longer capable of committing sin but that he no longer is under the compulsion and tyranny of sin, nor will he dutifully and solely obey sin as he formerly did. For all genuine Christians, slavery to sin no longer exists.

The reason, of course, is that he who has died is freed from sin. Because the old life has died, what characterized the old life has died with it, most importantly slavery to sin, from which all the redeemed in Christ are once and forever freed.

In his first epistle, Peter strongly emphasizes that truth. “Therefore, since Christ has suffered in the flesh,” he says, “arm yourselves also with the same purpose, because he who has suffered in the flesh has ceased from sin, so as to live the rest of the time in the flesh no longer for the lusts of men, but for the will of God” (1 Pet. 4:1–2). Peter is not, however, teaching sinless perfection in this present earthly life, because he goes on to give the severe warning: “By no means let any of you suffer as a murderer, or thief, or evildoer, or a troublesome meddler” (v. 15).

Martyn Lloyd-Jones offers a helpful illustration of the believer’s relation to his old sinful disposition (Romans: An Exposition of Chapter 6 [Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1972], pp. 26–27). He pictures two adjoining fields, one owned by Satan and one owned by God, that are separated by a road. Before salvation, a person lives in Satan’s field and is totally subject to his jurisdiction. After salvation, a person works in the other field, now subject only to God’s jurisdiction. As he plows in the new field, however, the believer is often cajoled by his former master, who seeks to entice him back into the old sinful ways. Satan often succeeds in temporarily drawing the believer’s attention away from his new Master and his new way of life. But he is powerless to draw the believer back into the old field of sin and death.

THE ONE DEATH OF CHRIST WAS A DEATH TO SIN

Now if we have died with Christ, we believe that we shall also live with Him, knowing that Christ, having been raised from the dead, is never to die again; death no longer is master over Him. For the death that He died, He died to sin, once for all; but the life that He lives, He lives to God. (6:8–10)

The fourth principle is that Christ’s one death to sin brought not only the death of sin but the death of death for those who, by faith, have died with Him. These three verses are essentially a summary of what Paul has just been teaching about the believer’s death to sin and his new life in Christ. He also stresses the permanence of that awesome and glorious truth.

The assurance that we shall also live with Him obviously applies to the believer’s ultimate and eternal presence with Christ in heaven. But the context, which focuses on holy living, strongly suggests that Paul is here speaking primarily about our living with Him in righteousness in this present life. In Greek, as in English, future tenses often carry the idea of certainty. That seems to be the case with Paul’s use of suzaō (or sunzaō), here rendered shall also live. As the apostle makes clear in verse 10 in regard to Christ, he is not merely speaking of existing in the presence of God but of living to God, that is, living a life fully consistent with God’s holiness.

Building on that thought, Paul goes on to say, knowing that Christ, having been raised from the dead, is never to die again; death no longer is master over Him. The point is that, because we have died and been raised with Christ (vv. 3–5), we, too, shall never die again. The sin that made us subject to death is no longer master over us, just as it no longer is master over Him. It also can never be our executioner.

The climax of this section of chapter 6 is that the death that He died, He died to sin, once for all; but the life that He lives, He lives to God. Because death is the penalty of sin (Rom. 6:23), to break the mastery of sin is to break the mastery of death.

Two extremely important truths in verse 10 should be emphasized. The first is that Christ died to sin. Having lived a perfectly sinless life during His incarnation, Christ obviously never had the same relationship to sin that every other human being has. He not only was never mastered by sin but never committed a sin of the least sort. How then, we wonder, could He have died to sin? Yet it is clear from this verse that in whatever way Christ died to sin, believers also have died to sin.

Some suggest that believers have died to sin in the sense of no longer being sensitive to the allurements of sin. But that view is not borne out by Christian experience, and it obviously could not apply to Christ, who was never, in the first place, sensitive to sin’s allurements. Others suggest that Paul is teaching that believers ought to die to sin. But again, such an interpretation could not apply to Christ. Nor could it mean that Christ died to sin by becoming perfect, because He was always perfect.

It seems that Paul means two things in declaring that Christ died to sin. First, He died to the penalty of sin by taking upon Himself the sins of the whole world. He met sin’s legal demand for all mankind who would trust in Him. By their faith in Him, empowered by His divine and limitless grace, believers have forensically died to sin. Second, Christ died to the power of sin, forever breaking its power over those who belong to God through their faith in His Son. Paul assured even the immature and sin-prone believers in Corinth that God “made Him who knew no sin to be sin on our behalf, that we might become the righteousness of God in Him” (2 Cor. 5:21).

It was perhaps the twin truth that believers die both to the penalty as well as to the power of sin that Augustus Toplady had in mind in the beautiful line from his great hymn “Rock of Ages“—“Be of sin the double cure, save from wrath and make me pure.”

The second crucial emphasis in verse 10 is that Christ died to sin, once for all. He achieved a victory that will never need repeating, a profound truth that the writer of Hebrews stresses again and again (7:26–27; 9:12, 28; 10:10; cf. 1 Pet. 3:18).

In addition to being actually identified with Christ in the ways Paul mentions in this passage—namely, His death and resurrection, the destruction of the body of sin, and the death to sin—believers are also analogically likened to their Lord in His virgin birth, in that both He in His physical birth and they in their spiritual births have been conceived by the Holy Spirit. He identified with our humanity in His incarnation; then through His circumcision He placed Himself temporarily under the authority of the Mosaic law in order to redeem those under the law (Col. 2:11). We also relate to our Lord in His sufferings, as we, like Paul, bear the marks of suffering for Him. In so many ways, believers are so completely and inextricably identified with the Lord Jesus Christ that He is not ashamed to call them brothers (Heb. 2:11).