25  Free from Sin (6:15-23)

What then? Shall we sin because we are not under law but under grace? May it never be! Do you not know that when you present yourselves to someone as slaves for obedience, you are slaves of the one whom you obey, either of sin resulting in death, or of obedience resulting in righteousness? But 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, and having been freed from sin, you became slaves of righteousness. I am speaking in human terms because of the weakness of your flesh. For 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. For when you were slaves of sin, you were free in regard to righteousness. Therefore what benefit were you then deriving from the things of which you are now ashamed? For the outcome of those things is death. But now having been freed from sin and enslaved to God, you derive your benefit, resulting in sanctification, and the outcome, eternal life. For the wages of sin is death, but the free gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord. (6:1523)

Sin is the most devastating, debilitating, degenerating power that ever entered the human stream. Its evil, in fact, corrupted the entire creation, which “groans and suffers the pains of childbirth together until now” (Rom. 8:22).

Scripture characterizes sin and its effects in many ways. It refers to it as defiling, a pollution of the soul. It is to the human soul what corrosion is to a precious metal or smog is to a beautiful sky. Sin is called “an impure thing” (Isa. 30:22), and it is compared to “the venom of serpents, and the deadly poison of cobras” (Deut. 32:33). Even things that men consider to be righteous are like “a filthy garment” (lit., “menstrual cloth”) in God’s sight (Isa. 64:6; cf. Zech. 3:3–4). Paul refers to sin as “defilement of flesh and spirit” (2 Cor. 7:1) and to sinners as those whose minds and consciences are defiled (Titus 1:15).

Sin is rebellious, ignoring and even trampling on God’s Word. Someone has called sin God’s would-be murderer, because if sin had its way it would destroy God Himself along with His righteousness.

Sin is ungrateful, refusing to acknowledge God as the source of every good thing. The sinner indulges in God’s gracious provisions that are all around him but fails to credit, much less thank, God for those things. He takes God’s blessings and uses them to serve self and Satan. Every sinner is like Absalom, the undisciplined son of David who kissed his father while plotting to usurp his throne (see 2 Sam. 14:33—15:6).

Sin is incurable by man’s own efforts and power. Even if fallen man wanted to rid himself of sin, he could not do it, any more than “the Ethiopian [could] change his skin or the leopard his spots” (Jer. 13:23). The Puritan writer John Flavel commented on the damning effect of sin by writing that if a sinner’s penitential tears were as numberless as all the drops of rain that have fallen since the Creation, they could not wash away a single sin.

Sin is overpowering, hanging above fallen mankind like darkness over night. It dominates the mind (Rom. 1:21), the affections (John 3:19–21), and the will (Jer. 44:15–17).

Sin brings satanic control, because every sin serves the purposes of “the prince of the power of the air” (Eph. 2:2). Every unredeemed sinner is a spiritual child of the devil (John 8:44).

Although sin promises satisfaction, it instead brings misery, frustration, and hopelessness. Job lamented that “man is born for trouble, as sparks fly upward” (Job 5:7). In fact, because of sin, all “creation was subjected to futility” (Rom. 8:20).

Worst of all, sin damns the unredeemed soul to hell. In his vision on Patmos, the apostle John “saw the dead, the great and the small, standing before the throne, and books were opened; and another book was opened, which is the book of life; and the dead were judged from the things which were written in the books, according to their deeds. And the sea gave up the dead which were in it, and death and Hades gave up the dead which were in them; and they were judged, every one of them according to their deeds. And death and Hades were thrown into the lake of fire. This is the second death, the lake of fire. And if anyone’s name was not found written in the book of life, he was thrown into the lake of fire” (Rev. 20:12–15).

With the single exception of Jesus Christ, every human being born into this world has been born with a sinful nature. The natural, unredeemed person is under the tyranny of sin. It controls his thoughts, words, actions—his total existence. Jesus declared that “everyone who commits sin is the slave of sin” (John 8:34), and because every unsaved person is unable to commit anything but sin, every unsaved person is a slave of sin.

As Paul notes in the present passage, the natural man is a willing slave of sin. Men prove that truth every day of their lives as they reject the light of God that they have. Although unregenerate persons often want desperately to escape the unpleasant and destructive consequences of their sins, they do not want to relinquish the cherished sins themselves.

It has often been noted that some black slaves willingly fought with their masters during the American Civil War. Not unlike sinners who oppose and reject the One who offers to save them, those slaves fought against the Union forces who wanted to emancipate them.

Paul began the major theological section of this epistle with the sobering declaration that “the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men, who suppress the truth in unrighteousness, because that which is known about God is evident within them; for God made it evident to them. For since the creation of the world His invisible attributes, His eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly seen, being understood through what has been made, so that they are without excuse” (Rom. 1:18–20; emphasis added).

Sin is the terrible, life-wrecking, soul-damning reality that resides and grows in every unredeemed human heart like an incurable cancer. Even when men try to escape from sin, they cannot, and when they try to escape its guilt, they cannot. The greatest gift God could give to fallen mankind is freedom from sin, and it is that very gift that He offers through His Son, Jesus Christ. It is on that great, unsurpassable gift of redemption from sin that Paul now focuses his great inspired mind.

As he continues his discourse on sanctification, Paul first reminds his Christian readers of their own past enslavement to sin and then reminds them of their new enslavement to righteousness through their trust in Jesus Christ. His primary point in 6:15–23 is that believers in Jesus Christ should live in total subjection to Christ and His righteousness and not fall back into their former sins, which no longer have claim over them. Because they have died in Christ to sin and risen with Him to righteousness, they are no longer under the lordship of sin but are now under the lordship of righteousness. Because the Christian has a new relationship to God, he also has a new relationship to sin. For the first time, he is able not to live sinfully and able also for the first time to live righteously.

Paul’s development of Romans 6:15–23 closely parallels that of verses 1–10 (see chap. 23 of this volume). He presents the antagonist (v. 15a), the answer (v. 15b), the axiom (v. 16), the argument (vv. 17–22), and the absolute (v. 23).

THE ANTAGONIST

What then? Shall we sin because we are not under law but under grace? (6:15a)

With his brief introductory question, What then? the apostle again anticipates the false conclusions his antagonists would derive from his declaration that believers “are not under law, but under grace” (v. 14b). To them, the idea of no longer being under law but under grace was tantamount to being free of all moral restraint. “If the law no longer needs to be obeyed, and if God’s grace covers all sins,” they would argue, “then believers are perfectly free to do as they please.” Jewish legalists, on the other hand, believed obedience to God’s law was the only way of salvation. To them, Paul exalted righteousness out of one side of his mouth, while in reality giving license to sin out of the other side. They accused Paul of condoning lawlessness in the name of God’s grace.

The doctrine of grace has always been subject to that false charge, which the apostle first answers in the first half of chapter 6. But because the misunderstanding was so common and the issue so critical, he gives the answer again from a slightly different perspective. The doctrine of salvation by God’s grace, working only through man’s faith and apart from any works, is the furthest thing from a license to sin.

THE ANSWER

May it never be! (6:15b)

Paul gives the same forceful and unambiguous denial he gave in verse 2. The idea is, “No, no, a thousand times no!” The mere suggestion that God’s grace is a license to sin is self-contradictory, a logical as well as a moral and spiritual absurdity. The very purpose of God’s grace is to free man from sin. How, then, could grace possibly justify continuing in sin?

Grace not only justifies but also transforms the life that is saved. A life that gives no evidence of moral and spiritual transformation gives no evidence of salvation.

THE AXIOM

Do you not know that when you present yourselves to someone as slaves for obedience, you are slaves of the one whom you obey, either of sin resulting in death, or of obedience resulting in righteousness? (6:16)

An axiom is a general truth that is so self-evident it needs no proof. Do you not know? is clearly rhetorical, implying that his readers would readily acknowledge the truth of what he was about to say if they gave it the least thought. What could be more obvious than the fact that when you present yourselves to someone as slaves for obedience, you are slaves of the one whom you obey? The phrase present yourselves indicates the willing choice of obedience to a master and makes Paul’s point even more obvious. By definition, all slaves, particularly voluntary ones, are bound to total obedience to their master, the one whom they obey. A person who is not so bound is not a slave.

The apostle applies the axiom to the life-style of believers, the matter of sanctified living about which he has been teaching (vv. 1–14). In relation to God’s will, a saved person has but two choices: either to sin, which is to disobey Him, or of obedience. A person’s general pattern of living proves who his true master is. If his life is characterized by sin, which is opposed to God’s will, then he is sin’s slave. If his life is characterized by obedience, which reflects God’s will, then he is God’s slave. The end result of the first slavery is both physical and spiritual death, whereas that of the second slavery is righteousness, the inescapable mark of eternal life. Believers are God’s “workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand, that we should walk in them” (Eph. 2:10). The habitually unrighteous life cannot be a Christian life.

In the previous chapter Paul described the same truth from the opposite perspective, that of the master. In the unregenerate life, the life in Adam, sin and death reign, whereas in the redeemed life, the life in Christ, righteousness and eternal life reign (5:12–21). There is no other alternative, no neutral ground. All men are either mastered by sin, which is to say they are under the lordship of Satan, or they are mastered by righteousness, which is to say they are under the lordship of Jesus Christ. As Matthew Henry observed, “If we would know to which of these two families we belong, we must inquire to which of these two masters we yield our obedience” (Matthew Henry’s Commentary on the Whole Bible, vol. 6 [Old Tappan, N.J.: Revell, n.d.], p. 405).

Although the natural, freedom-seeking, rebellious mind recoils at the truth, no human being is his own master. The popular notion that a person can master his own life and destiny is a delusion that Satan has foisted on mankind ever since the Fall. It was by that lie, in fact, that Adam and Eve were drawn into the first sin. Warning against false teachers in the first century who proclaimed that attractive falsehood, Peter wrote: “For speaking out arrogant words of vanity they entice by fleshly desires, by sensuality, those who barely escape from the ones who live in error, promising them freedom while they themselves are slaves of corruption; for by what a man is overcome, by this he is enslaved” (2 Pet. 2:18–19). If the reality of man’s situation is honestly acknowledged, it becomes obvious that human beings are not independent creatures. They are not and cannot be free in the sense in which the world defines and values freedom.

Many people resist the claims of Christ because they are afraid of having to give up their cherished freedoms. Actually, of course, they have no freedoms to lose. The unsaved person is not free to do good or evil as he chooses. He is bound and enslaved to sin, and the only thing he can do is to sin. His only choices have to do with when, how, why, and to what degree he will sin.

It should be just as self-evident that no human being can be the slave of two different masters. “No one can serve two masters,” Jesus declared; “for either he will hate the one and love the other, or he will hold to one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and mammon” (Matt. 6:24).

Paul’s point in the second half of Romans 6 is the same one that Jesus made in the above passage. A person cannot have two different and opposing natures at the same time, and he cannot live in two different and opposing spiritual worlds at the same time. He is either the slave of sin, which he is by natural birth, or he is the slave of righteousness, which he becomes by the new birth.

Paul is not speaking here of moral and spiritual obligation but of moral and spiritual reality. He is not saying that believers ought to admire righteousness or desire righteousness or practice righteousness, although they should, of course, do those things. He is not here teaching that a Christian ought to be a slave of righteousness but that every Christian, by divine creation, is made a slave of righteousness and cannot be anything else. Paul is saying exactly what John says in his first letter: “No one who is born of God practices sin, because His seed abides in him; and he cannot sin, because he is born of God. By this the children of God and the children of the devil are obvious: anyone who does not practice righteousness is not of God, nor the one who does not love his brother” (l john 3:9–10).

“And although you were formerly alienated and hostile in mind, engaged in evil deeds,” Paul tells the Colossian believers, “yet He [Jesus Christ, the Son] has now reconciled you in His fleshly body through death, in order to present you before Him [God the Father] holy and blameless and beyond reproach” (Col. 1:21–22). In other words, for the Christian, the life of unrighteousness, of alienation from and hostility toward God, is past. The old sinful way of life cannot continue to characterize a true Christian. Obedience to God in righteous living is a certainty in the life of a truly justified person. Because of temporary unfaithfulness, sinful disobedience may at times appear to dominate a Christian’s life. But a true believer cannot continue indefinitely in disobedience, because it is diametrically opposed to his new and holy nature, which cannot indefinitely endure sinful living.

John emphasizes that truth repeatedly in his first epistle. “If we say that we have fellowship with Him and yet walk in the darkness, we lie and do not practice the truth; … The one who says, ‘I have come to know Him,’ and does not keep His commandments, is a liar, and the truth is not in him; … No one who is born of God practices sin, because His seed abides in him; and he cannot sin, because he is born of God” (1 John 1:6; 2:4; 3:9).

THE ARGUMENT—EXPLAINING THE TWO SLAVERIES

But 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, and having been freed from sin, you became slaves of righteousness. I am speaking in human terms because of the weakness of your flesh. For 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. For when you were slaves of sin, you were free in regard to righteousness. Therefore what benefit were you then deriving from the things of which you are now ashamed? For the outcome of those things is death. But now having been freed from sin and enslaved to God, you derive your benefit, resulting in sanctification, and the outcome, eternal life. (6:17–22)

Paul here explains and applies the principle he has just stated (v. 16), namely, that a person is a slave either to sin and Satan or to righteousness and God. In doing so, he contrasts the three aspects of each of those two domains of servanthood: their position, their practice, and their promise.

THEIR POSITION

But 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, and having been freed from sin, you became slaves of righteousness. (6:17–18)

First the apostle gives thanks … to God that his believing readers were no longer subject to the slavery that leads to death. He does not thank or praise them for their own wisdom or intelligence or moral and spiritual determination, because none of those things had a part in their salvation. “No one can come to Me,” Jesus said, “unless the Father who sent Me draws him, … [and] unless it has been granted him from the Father” (John 6:44, 65). Our thanks for salvation should always be to God alone, because it is God alone “who gives us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ” (1 Cor. 15:57).

Believers are saved solely by the grace and power of God. And by His grace, habitual disobedience to Him is in the past tense. Formerly, Paul says, you were slaves of sin, but no more. Were translates an imperfect Greek tense, signifying an ongoing reality. In other words, the unregenerate person is under the continual, unbroken slavery of sin. That is the universal position of the natural man, with no exceptions. No matter how outwardly moral, upright, or benevolent an unsaved person’s life may be, all that he thinks, says, and does emanates from a proud, sinful, ungodly heart. Quoting from Psalm 14, Paul had already made that truth clear. “As it is written, There is none righteous, not even one; there is none who understands, there is none who seeks for God; all have turned aside, together they have become useless; there is none who does good, there is not even one’” (Rom. 3:10–12).

That Paul is not speaking about merely outward righteousness is made clear from his declaration that you became obedient from the heart. God works His salvation in a person’s innermost being. Through the grace provided by His Son, God changes men’s very natures when they trust in Him. A person whose heart has not been changed has not been saved. Righteous living that issues from an obedient … heart is habitual. And just as God’s grace operates only through a trusting heart, His righteousness operates only through an obedient heart.

Faith and obedience are inescapably related. There is no saving faith in God apart from obedience to God, and there can be no godly obedience without godly faith. As the beautiful and popular hymn admonishes, “Trust and obey, there’s no other way.” Our Lord “gave Himself for us,” Paul says, not only to save us from hell and take us to heaven but to “redeem us from every lawless deed and purify for Himself a people for His own possession, zealous for good deeds” (Titus 2:14).

Salvation comes “according to the foreknowledge of God the Father, by the sanctifying work of the Spirit,” Peter wrote to persecuted believers throughout the Roman world, in order that those who believe may “obey Jesus Christ and be sprinkled with His blood” (a symbol referring to a covenant of obedience, see Ex. 24:1–8). Later in the epistle he admonished: “Since you have in obedience to the truth purified your souls for a sincere love of the brethren, fervently love one another from the heart, for you have been born again not of seed which is perishable but imperishable, that is, through the living and abiding word of God” (1 Pet. 1:2,22–23; emphasis added). Obedience to Jesus Christ and obedience to His truth are totally synonymous, and His truth is “the living and abiding word of God.”

Obedience neither produces nor maintains salvation, but it is an inevitable characteristic of those who are saved. Belief itself is an act of obedience, made possible and prompted by God’s sovereign grace, yet always involving the uncoerced will of the believer. A person is not transported passively from slavery in Satan’s kingdom of darkness to slavery in God’s kingdom of light. Salvation does not occur apart from an act of commitment on the believer’s part. The life-changing work of salvation is by God’s power alone, but it does not work apart from man’s will. God has no unwilling children in His family, no unwilling citizens in His kingdom.

Genuine faith not only is in God’s Son but in God’s truth. Jesus said, “I am the way, and the truth, and the life; no one comes to the Father, but through Me” (John 14:6). Paul had confidence in the salvation of his readers in the church at Rome because they obeyed to that form of teaching to which [they] were committed. No believer, of course, comprehends all of God’s truth. Even the most mature and faithful Christian only begins to fathom the riches of God’s Word in this present life. But the desire to know and obey God’s truth is one of the surest marks of genuine salvation. From its inception, the early church was characterized by its devotion “to the apostles’ teaching” (Acts 2:42). And Jesus made it clear that those who obeyed His word were the true believers (see John 8:31; 14:21, 23, 24; 15:10; etc.).

Form translates tupos, which was used of the molds into which molten metal for castings was poured. Committed translates the aorist passive of paradidōmi, which carries the basic meaning of deliver over to. And because eis (to) can also be translated into, it seems that a more precise rendering of this phrase is “that form of teaching into which you were delivered.” It is true, of course, that, through its reading and preaching, God’s Word is delivered to believers. But Paul’s point here seems to be that the true believer is also delivered into God’s Word, His divine teaching. The idea is that when God makes a new spiritual creation of a believer, He casts him into the mold of divine truth. The J. B. Phillips rendering of Romans 12:1 uses the same figure: “Don’t let the world around you squeeze you into its own mould, but let God re-mould your minds from within.” In other words, “Do not let Satan’s forces try to fit you back into the old sinful mold from which God delivered you. Let God continue to fashion you into the perfect image of His Son.”

Throughout his epistles, Paul emphasizes the crucial relationship of God’s truth to faithful Christian living. In his second letter to Timothy, he advised his young protege in ministry to “retain the standard of sound words which you have heard from me, in the faith and love which are in Christ Jesus” (2 Tim. 1:13). He later warned him that “the time will come when [men] will not endure sound doctrine; but wanting to have their ears tickled, they will accumulate for themselves teachers in accordance to their own desires” (4:3). The apostle maintained that an overseer, or elder, in the church should hold “fast the faithful word which is in accordance with the teaching, that he may be able both to exhort in sound doctrine and to refute those who contradict” (Titus 1:9). Later in the same letter he admonished Titus to “speak the things which are fitting for sound doctrine” (2:1). The Christian who faithfully obeys God’s Word becomes conformed to the truth of that Word, a living model of the gospel. The divine teaching to which a believer submits himself in Jesus Christ stamps him with the authentic image of his Savior and Lord.

A person does not become a Christian by claiming the name of Christ and then believing and doing whatever he himself wants. You cannot become a Christian by merely saying or doing certain things, even the godly things extolled in Scripture. But after genuine salvation a person will have the innate, Spirit-led desire to know and to obey God’s truth.

After a businessmen’s luncheon at which I spoke, a man said to me, “I’ve been in this group for a long time, and I’ll tell you how I think you can get to God. You see, there is this long stairway, and at the top there is a door and behind it is this guy Jesus. What you really want to do is try to make it up the stairs and get through the door and then hope Jesus lets you in. As you’re on your way up the stairs, you’ve got all these preachers and movements cheering you on, but you just continue going up the stairs your own way. I call it the stairway of hope. That’s what I think the gospel is.” With a heavy heart I replied, “Sir, you cannot be a Christian. What you just said has nothing to do with the gospel, and your stairway to heaven is hopeless. You need to depend on Jesus Christ alone for your salvation. You have no idea of what it means to be saved, and you cannot be on your way to heaven.”

A person cannot invent his own way to God, no matter how sincere his efforts might be. God has established the only way to come to Him, and that is the way of faith in His Son, Jesus Christ. And saving faith in Jesus Christ is built on God’s revelation about Him, not on men’s ideas about Him. There is divinely-revealed content to the gospel, and the person who rejects or circumvents that content gives unmistakable evidence that he is not truly seeking God’s kingdom and His righteousness.

Witness Lee, founder of the Local Church movement, wrote a book entitled Christ Versus Doctrine, the main thesis of which is that it is a personal relationship to Christ that matters and that doctrine actually interferes with that relationship. The book not only is unbiblical but, as one might guess from the title, is also self-contradictory. Doctrine is simply another word for teaching, and the purpose of Lee’s book, of course, was to teach his own doctrine.

THEIR PRACTICE

I am speaking in human terms because of the weakness of your flesh. For 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. (6:19)

It is difficult to put divine principles and truths into terms that finite human minds can comprehend. In saying, I am speaking in human terms because of the weakness of your flesh, Paul meant that the analogy of masters and slaves was used as an accommodation to his readers’ humanness.

Flesh is here used as a synonym for humanness, or mortality, and is equivalent to “the members of your body” in verse 13 and members at the end of verse 19. The flesh is the human faculty influenced by sin, and as long as believers remain in their mortal bodies, sin still has a beachhead, a place to launch its attacks. That is why Paul admonishes believers to present their bodies as “a living and holy sacrifice, acceptable to God” (Rom. 12:1). Although the inner person of a believer has been transformed into the likeness of Christ, the outer person, represented by the flesh, is still subject to the defilement of sin.

Paul here changes the focus from position to practice, admonishing believers to make their living correspond to their new natures. Although it is still possible for Christians to sin, they no longer are bound by sin. Now they are free not to sin, and they should exercise that divinely-provided ability in obedience to their new Lord and Master.

Before salvation, believers were like the rest of fallen mankind, having no other desire or ability but to follow their natural bent to impurity and to lawlessness. Those two terms refer, respectively, to inward and outward sin. The unregenerate person is both internally and externally sinful, and as he lives out his sinfulness it results in still further lawlessness. Like a cancer that reproduces itself until the whole body is destroyed, sin reproduces itself until the whole person is destroyed.

After the brilliant writer Oscar Wilde’s homosexuality and other deviant behavior was made public, he wrote, “1 forgot that what a man is in secret he will some day shout aloud from the housetop.” Another famous writer, Sinclair Lewis, was the toast of the literary world and received the Nobel Prize in literature in 1930. To mock what he considered the hypocrisy of Christianity, he wrote Elmer Gantry, the fictitious story of a Bible-pounding evangelist who was secretly an alcoholic, a fornicator, and a thief. Few people know, however, that Lewis himself died an alcoholic in a third-rate clinic outside Rome, a devastated victim of his own sinful life-style.

Because it is possible for them to resist sin and to live righteously, believers should now present their members as slaves to righteousness. And just as the life of sin leads to further sin, so the life of righteousness leads to further righteousness, whose ultimate end is complete sanctification.

The late Martyn Lloyd-Jones wrote, “As you go on living this righteous life, and practising it with all your might and energy, and all your time … you will find that the process that went on before, in which you went on from bad to worse and became viler and viler, is entirely reversed. You will become cleaner and cleaner, and purer and purer, and holier and holier, and more and more conformed unto the image of the Son of God” (Romans: An Exposition of Chapter Six [Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1972], pp. 268–69).

No one stands still morally and spiritually. Just as unbelievers progress from sinfulness to greater sinfulness, a believer who is not growing in righteousness, though never falling back altogether out of righteousness, will slip further and further back into sin.

God’s purpose in redeeming men from sin is not to give them freedom to do as they please but freedom to do as He pleases, which is to live righteously. When God commanded Pharaoh to let His people go, He also made clear His purpose for their deliverance: “that they may serve Me in the wilderness” (Ex. 7:16). God delivers men from enslavement to sin for the sole purpose of their becoming enslaved to Him and to His righteousness.

THEIR PROMISE

For when you were slaves of sin, you were free in regard to righteousness. Therefore what benefit were you then deriving from the things of which you are now ashamed? For the outcome of those things is death. But now having been freed from sin and enslaved to God, you derive your benefit, resulting in sanctification, and the outcome, eternal life. (6:20–22)

Unsaved persons, who are slaves of sin, are free in regard to righteousness. That is, they have no connection to righteousness; it can make no demands on them since they possess neither the desire nor the ability to meet its requirements. They are controlled and ruled by sin, the master whom they are bound to serve. In that sense, they have no responsibility to righteousness, because they are powerless to meet its standards and demands. That is why it is foolish to preach reformation to sinners. They cannot reform their living until God transforms their lives.

Many unsaved people, of course, do not think their lives need reformation, much less transformation. The world is full of people who are decent, honest, law-abiding, helpful, and often very religious, who think their lives are exemplary. But Paul declares that apart from salvation through Jesus Christ, all people are slaves of sin and are free in regard to, that is, totally separated from and unrelated to, God’s standard of righteousness. Paul described his own good works and religious accomplishments before salvation as rubbish, or dung (Phil. 3:8).

In God’s sight, there is absolutely no benefit that men can derive from the things they do apart from salvation, things of which after salvation they become ashamed. The only possible outcome of those things is death, the second death, which is spiritual death and eternal torment in hell.

One of the marks of true salvation is a sense of being ashamed of one’s life before coming to Christ. Whether the previous life was marked by sordid immorality or great propriety, by heinous crimes or sacrificial service to others, by extreme selfishness or extreme generosity, it is a life about which the true believer can be nothing but ashamed. No matter how it may appear before the world, the life apart from God is a life apart from righteousness.

John Calvin wrote,

But for those who have been freed from sin and enslaved to God through faith in Jesus Christ, the benefit is sanctification and the outcome is eternal life. In salvation God not only frees us from sin’s ultimate penalty but frees us from its present tyranny.

Freed from sin does not mean that a believer is no longer capable of sinning but that he is no longer enslaved to sin, no longer its helpless subject. The freedom from sin about which Paul is speaking here is not a long-range objective or an ultimate ideal but an already accomplished fact. Without exception, every person who trusts in Jesus Christ as Savior and Lord is freed from sin and enslaved to God. Obviously some believers are more faithful and obedient than others, but Christians are equally freed from bondage to sin and equally enslaved to God, equally granted sanctification and equally granted eternal life.

THE ABSOLUTE

For the wages of sin is death, but the free gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord. (6:23)

This verse expresses two inexorable absolutes. The first is that the wages of sin is death. Spiritual death is earned. It is the just and rightful compensation for a life that is characterized by sin, which is every life apart from God.

The second inexorable absolute is that the free gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord. By definition, a gift is free, but lest anyone underestimate the magnitude of God’s grace, Paul speaks of God’s free gift. Salvation cannot be earned by works, by human goodness, by religious ritual, or by any other thing that man can do. “For by grace you have been saved through faith,” the apostle reminded the Ephesian believers; “and that not of yourselves, it is the gift of God; not as a result of works, that no one should boast” (Eph. 2:8–9).

If a person wants what he deserves—eternal death—God will give that to him as his just wages. And if person wants what he does not deserve—eternal life—God offers that to him as well, but as a free gift, the only source of which is Christ Jesus our Lord.

That is Paul’s great climax to chapter 6 of Romans: Jesus Christ is the only way from sin to righteousness, from damnation to salvation, from eternal death to eternal life.

As he stood before the Sanhedrin shortly after Pentecost, Peter boldly proclaimed that same truth, testifying that “there is salvation in no one else; for there is no other name under heaven that has been given among men, by which we must be saved” (Acts 4:12). To the unbelieving Pharisees, Jesus said, “Truly, truly, I say to you, I am the door of the sheep. All who came before Me are thieves and robbers, but the sheep did not hear them. I am the door; if anyone enters through Me, he shall be saved, and shall go in and out, and find pasture” (John 10:7–9). During the Upper Room discourse, Jesus said, “I am the way, and the truth, and the life; no one comes to the Father, but through Me” (John 14:6).

The noted German pastor and theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer was imprisoned for several years by the Nazis and was executed just before the close of World War II. In his book The Cost of Discipleship, he wrote the following insightful words about what he called the gospel of cheap grace:

Only the Son of God could have paid the cost of salvation. But He calls His followers to pay the cost of discipleship. “If anyone wishes to come after Me,” Jesus said, “let him deny himself, and take up his cross, and follow Me. For whoever wishes to save his life shall lose it; but whoever loses his life for My sake shall find it” (Matt. 16:24–25).

Luke records the matter of dealing with the cost when he quotes Jesus in 14:26–33:

When our Lord gave the parables of the pearl and the treasure in the field (Matt. 13:44–46), in both cases, the man sold all he had to make the purchase.

Jesus Christ is not looking for people who want to add Him to their sin as insurance against hell. He is not looking for people who want to apply His high moral principles to their unregenerate lives. He is not looking for those who want only to be outwardly reformed by having their old nature improved.

Jesus Christ calls to Himself those who are willing to be inwardly transformed by Him, who desire an entirely new nature that is created in His own holy likeness. He calls to Himself those who are willing to exchange their sinfulness for His holiness. He calls to Himself those who are willing to die with Him in order to be raised with Him, who are willing to relinquish slavery to their sin for slavery to His righteousness. And when men come to Him on His terms, He changes their destiny from eternal death to eternal life.