Chapter 6 of Romans was written to answer a question that is bound to be asked whenever the Gospel is truly preached. If, in fact, when we preach the Gospel, it is not asked, it means we have probably not preached the Gospel truly!
The question is (v. 1): "Shall we continue in sin that grace may abound?" Is the Gospel, in other words, a licence to sin?
Paul has been saying that no matter how serious sin is in the world, no matter how virulent it becomes, no matter how lost to it we have become, the forgiving grace of God avails to remedy it all. So amazing is this grace indeed, that the greater sin is in the world the more marvellous is grace seen to be, since it avails to cover it all.
To reassure us Paul has to say this, because he has shown us that God's judgment on sin consists in this, that He hands us over to its power - which means that sin's grip upon us is strengthened, and its spread throughout the world is multiplied. The effect of God's judgment upon sin is to make it very much worse.
That is tragic. Just how tragic, none knew better than Paul. There is no help for it, though, if the demands of righteousness are to be met. God cannot compromise with sin: so when we yield to it, we put ourselves on the other side of the wall from Him, and we are lost to His help. Lost to God's help, we lose the power to resist it, and it overmasters us, plunging the whole world into a maelstrom of sin and suffering.
And Paul says, "Yes, I know all that, and it's tragic. But it is a tragedy the Christian doesn't have to shut his eyes to, or protest about to God, because he knows that God in His great love has supplied a remedy for it all that is entirely adequate to deal with it. No matter how great sin becomes, the grace of God to remedy it is greater. Sin abounds in the world. I know. But grace all the more abounds. It is marvellous. None need despair; for all God requires of us is that we repent of our sin and trust Him to forgive it, and His grace avails to make us whole at once."
We do not have to get on top of our sins to get right with God - all we have to do is trust Him for their forgiveness and we are already right with Him. Then we can get on top of our sins again, because we are back in touch with Him, and the help we need that only He can give."
That is a Gospel. That is the good news.
Faith is the answer, not works; you do not have to perform, only believe.
But there are always those who object to this.
They say, "That's not a remedy at all - it's only an excuse to sin. Why, with a so-called Gospel like that, you cut moral earnestness out of men's hearts altogether; because it boils down to this: that it doesn't matter how you sin, you'll be forgiven anyway. And if, the greater your sin is the more marvellous does this 'grace of God' appear in forgiving it, then let's really sin - because the praise of God's grace in covering it will thereby be the greater. Let's give this grace of God something to forgive. Let's give it something to flex its muscles on. It all stands to the credit of His grace in the end, anyway. What your so-called 'gospel' is telling me is that the way to give God praise is to indulge your lusts to the full! Pshaw! ... you call that a gospel?"
Paul had no doubt heard this said many times in response to his preaching of the gospel. For forgiveness really is free: we do not have to earn it; and it does avail to cover all our sin!
So what is the answer? Romans 6! What it amounts to, in a nutshell, is this: the dynamics of forgiveness forbid it.
To the scoffers Paul says, "But you don't understand what it's like to be forgiven. The experience makes that attitude impossible. Every Christian knows that." Here in Romans 6 it is not the scoffers Paul is talking to but Christians, lest we be deceived into thinking like that.
To make sure we do not, he appeals to our experience.
It really is important to see that he is appealing to experience because nothing else enables us to make sense of the passage. Some of the ways in which it is understood left me confused for years; what blew the confusion away was a fresh experience of God's forgiveness in my life. *
These verses appeal to the experience of being forgiven; and Paul relates that experience to two events:
1. The death and resurrection of our Lord Jesus Christ, and
2. The believer's baptism, in which he confesses Christ.
It is quite obvious that Paul is here appealing from his own experience to the same experience he believes his readers to have had. The same experience had led to his baptism that had led to theirs. He is appealing from experience to experience. What gave rise to that experience, for them, as for him, was the preaching of Christ crucified and risen.
Let me spell this out from these verses.
The key to this passage is Paul's use of the verbs 'to know'.
For our one English word 'to know' there are in the Greek language in which Paul wrote two quite different words for two quite different kinds of knowing, and Paul here uses both.
I know, for example, that two sides of a triangle are together greater than the third. I only have to visualise the sloping sides of a triangle squashed down flat from the top to see that they are going to spread out past each end of the triangle's base line. That is something I see.
Now the word in Greek for that kind of knowing - knowing by perceiving - is 'oida'. Paul uses that word in one place in these verses - v. 9 - where speaks of what we know about Christ in His death and resurrection. He is saying that when the story of the Cross is told to us, we perceive the meaning the Saviour's dying and rising had in their relation to sin and to God.
I know, for example, that when I am struck a violent blow, it hurts; or if I am rejected in love it hurts!
That is knowledge that comes to me through the experience of pain. Knowledge of things like that we may have by observing their effect on others, but it is not the same. Nobody knows what it is really like to grieve until they lose a loved one. Then they know!
Now the Greek word for that kind of knowing is 'ginwskw'. Paul uses that word in two places: in v. 3 where he says "we know that in our baptism we were baptised into Christ's death," and in v. 6 where he says "we know that our old self was crucified with Him." In both those places, Paul is appealing to knowledge that his readers have through an experience that came to them.
Clearly, that experience was one which came to them when they perceived as true the meaning of the Lord's death in its relation to sin, and of the Lord's resurrection in its relation to God.
"When the message of the Cross was preached to you," Paul is saying, "and its meaning dawned on you, it produced an experience in you - an experience in which you knew certain things to which you witnessed in your baptism."
What other experience can that be but the experience of being forgiven and accepted by God? Our conversion is a real experience which happens as the result of certain truths coming home to us.
So let us look now at the truth first, and then the experience.
That truth - the thing we perceive when the message of the Cross is preached to us - concerns, first, the meaning the death of Jesus had in its relation to sin.
"The death He died," says Paul, "He died unto sin."
What does it mean that 'He died unto sin'? Grammatically the phrase is a 'dative of opposition.' It means that by dying, Jesus expressed His total opposition to it. He died 'unto sin'. The phrase does not mean that He was insensitive to its appeal.
I have heard it interpreted it that way often. When it is said that Jesus was dead to sin, and that in consequence we are to reckon ourselves dead to sin, we should understand this to mean, we are told, that we should reckon ourselves to be as insensitive to sin's appeal as if we were a corpse. I have heard preachers wax eloquent about this, inviting us to picture ourselves as a corpse lying in an open grave while sin postures on the edge of the grave above us in an attempt to seduce us to rise up and go with her; but we cannot because we are dead! As Jesus in His grave was dead to sin, so we must reckon ourselves to be dead to it. I was taught that way in fact. And I tried to believe it. But it did not work. It just was not true. I found myself then, and I find myself still, very much alive to sin's appeal - and no amount of self-persuasion avails to make it otherwise. This understanding of the verse will drive us in the end into one or other of two quite impossible alternatives: either we have to believe the Bible is not true, or we have to believe our own experience is not real. We end up either in unbelief ... "I'm not dead to sin, whatever the Bible says!" - or in deliberate self-deception ... "I am dead to sin, when I jolly well know I'm not!"
Mercifully, this is not what Paul means. It cannot be true, for the simple reason that Jesus Himself was not dead to sin in that way. He was not insensitive to sin's appeal. If He had been, how could He have been tempted? And He was tempted. His temptations were real. For Him then, sin was tempting. His death to sin cannot mean that He was wholly insensitive to its appeal, the way a deaf man (or a dead man) is insensitive, say, to the appeal of music. That Jesus resisted sin's appeal is clear enough. But the attraction it held for Him must have been very real indeed for His resistance to it to have been so energetic and costly a thing: "He learned obedience through what He suffered," as Heb. 5:8 tells us; it cost Him "loud cries and tears." He had to sweat to resist sin.
The phrase 'He died unto sin' means that, experiencing its appeal though He did, He resisted it. He resisted it the way we are told He resisted it (in Heb. 12:4) ... "unto blood." Above all other verses in Scripture that one that sheds light on what Paul means by his phrase.
• "In your struggle against sin, you have not yet resisted it to the point of shedding your blood" - meaning that Jesus did.
• "The death He died, He died unto sin."
Both verses mean the same thing: that for Jesus, resisting sin mattered more than staying alive. He chose to die rather than yield. He, no more than we, found such resistance easy. But where we fail, He succeeded. When it came to the crunch, He chose to die rather than yield to it.
We must nail this down at one point at least from the narrative, or the thing is all up in the air, when it is really very down to earth.
When, for example, Jesus was challenged by Caiaphas, "Are you the Christ, the Son of the living God?" Jesus answered straight out, "I am" and thereby sealed His own doom. If only He had kept His mouth shut! He did in front of Pilate - why not in front of Caiaphas? The whole trial was on the point of collapse; the High Priest could not get the witnesses to agree, so he could not make the charges stick. In a moment he would have to let Jesus off. So in desperation he challenged the prisoner to do what no court of Jewish Law was entitled to do - condemn himself out of his own mouth.
And Jesus went and did it! Why? He could have saved His neck simply by declining to answer. And He knew that. Why did He not? Because that would have been to lie by silence. And He would not do it. A real temptation it must have been. But He chose to die rather than yield to it. "He died unto sin."
The case was different in front of Pilate, when Jesus did hold His tongue. On that occasion, Pilate asked a question that meant one thing in his mind, and quite another in the mind of Jesus: "Are you the King of the Jews?" In the sense in which Pilate asked it He was not; on His own understanding of it He was. He could answer neither 'Yes' nor 'No' and be entirely truthful, so He chose not to answer at all ... and died for it. (A 'harmless little white lie' would have got Him off.)
Jesus chose to suffer evil rather than commit it. That is what it means that He died unto sin.
We die sin's victims. He did not; He died its victor.
In our case, death is the final mark in this life of sin's power over us. But for Jesus it was not; in His case, dying was the final step He took in mastering it. By choosing to die rather than yield to it, He carried His life-long resistance to it to absolute finality. It never defeated Him.
For us who sin, death is the final sign in this life of our condemnation for it. But not for Him. The way He died, He made His death a final condemnation of sin! When we die, it is because sin has defeated us. But when He died, He defeated it! As Paul will say in Rom. 8:3, "God, sending His own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh, and for sin, condemned sin in the flesh."
That is what Jesus, by dying, did. He called sin's bluff. He showed it can be beaten. He exposed its claim to us as a lie.
Jesus shared our humanity with us to the full, even to assuming the same human flesh, which in us is where sin has its lodgment. But not in Him. He made our human flesh the place where sin was mastered. By successfully resisting sin, from first to last, Jesus - in the flesh - condemned it.
We die of sin, He died to it!
"And," says Paul, "the death He died to sin He died for good and all" ... `eph´hapax in the Greek, 'once and for all.' He did a final job on it! And He did it because He lived to God. Even in His very dying, He was living to God - responding wholeheartedly to Him. Jesus did not live to sin, as we do: He lived to God. Neither did He die to God, as we do; He died to sin. He shared to the full God's hostility and opposition to it.
That is the truth you see when the Cross is preached as the Gospels tell it.
Now we must think about the experience to which it leads.
"Now," says Paul, "when you responded to the
preaching of Christ crucified, this is what you responded to. You
knew, as you heard the story the way the Gospels tell it, (which is
how the apostles preached it) that Christ by dying gave expression to
His Father's utter condemnation of sin - your sin! The preaching of
the Cross brought that home to you as nothing else did. At the
same time as the story of the Cross brought home to you the
marvellous truth of God's love for you, it brought home to you the
solemn truth of His opposition to the sins in you that put Him there
- of His hostility to them and His condemnation of them. And you knew
that the love wherewith God loves you is a love that has a death
to sin at its heart. If it is to Christ and His loving that you
live now, it is to love like that that you live - such a love
as would die rather than sin.
Two things are true about the meaning of His death:
1. "He died because He would not moderate His love for us; and ...
2. (As above) "He died because He would not compromise with sin.
"And when Christ crucified was preached to you, those were the twin truths to which your eyes were opened. That was the 'blended truth' that gave content to the experience you had as a result. In your heart you knew two things, equally and at the same time: that God's face was set against your sin, and that He bore the wounding of it to gather you to His heart.
"By trusting in His love and yielding to it, you knew your sin was put away, and you were given release from the guilt of it and its 'hold' over you. But at the same time, Christ's own mind on sin was given to you. There was awakened in you a passionate disavowal of it, akin to His."
That is how it happens, does it not? Do we not, when we respond to the love of Christ, conceive a hatred of the sins that wounded Him? If we do, we know what Paul is talking about here. If we don't, we won't ... and no amount of theology will ever enlighten us.
As our heart was drawn to Christ and His love for us, did our heart not turn against the sins that made Him suffer? As the Holy Spirit shed His love abroad in our heart, we were drawn into real fellowship with Him, fellowship so intimate we cannot call it anything else but union with Him. We knew then what it meant to be 'in Christ.' As our heart opened to Him, all that He is came alive in us. There was awakened in us the same mind on sin that was revealed in Him when He died rather than yield to it. We were drawn into sympathy with Him in that ... so "the man we used to be was crucified with Christ." v. 6. We identified with Him in what He was doing at Calvary - dying rather than sin. The 'body of sin' - that is to say, the 'sin-ruled self,' the self we used to be - was robbed of its mastery then. We were loosed from our sins, because at the same time, the meaning of His resurrection took a hold on our mind and heart too. For if Jesus declined to live to sin, what did He live to? He lived to God. 'Lived for God' we should more naturally say, as we say of a golfing man that 'he lives for golf'; but it does not say quite enough: Paul's phrase is better: 'He lived unto God.' So completely did He live unto God that He preferred to yield up His life rather than yield up His obedience - for God's own was the strength in which He both resisted sin and gave Himself in love for sinners.
And God put His seal on such a life by raising Him up from death. How could He not? As Peter said on the Day of Pentecost, "It was not possible that He should be held in the grip of death." If a man lives in every part of His being to God, how can he finally die? He lives to God Who is the author and giver of life for evermore.
"In that Jesus died unto sin, He died unto sin, once and for all; but in that He lives, He lives (eternally) unto God."
"And in this too," says Paul, "you were drawn into union with Christ. His mind on God was given to you in the same way - in the same experience - as His mind on sin was given to you. When the Holy Spirit brought all this blessed truth alive in you, He awakened you in every part of your being to God - to His righteousness, to His truth, to His faithfulness, to His power, to His mercy, to His compassion, to His love, and to His grace ... and all in fellowship with Christ. If we have been united with Christ in a dying like His, we shall also be united with Him in a rising like His."
It has to be so - there is no way to be united with Him at all except as we are united with Him in both things - in His mind on sin and in His mind on God.
"Christ reconciled you to God" is Paul's way of saying it, again and again: to be reconciled with someone means you agree with them - you really are agreed together about the things that matter to you both. So you cannot claim to be reconciled to God if you are still of an unforgiving nature, or if you still prefer your sins and the indulgence of them to Him.
If we are one with Him at all, we are one with Him in all the things He died to, and we are one with Him in all the things He lives to. "So reckon yourselves dead to sin and alive to God in Christ Jesus." For it is only in fellowship with Him that these things 'come to be' in us at all.
"Surely you understand," Paul says finally, "that this is what your baptism meant. Your baptism was the action by which you identified with Christ - in all that He died to and all that He lives to. You were buried with Him by baptism into His death" ... not death merely, please note, but into "HIS death" - that death which Paul has been at such pains to define ... "so that as Christ was raised up from the dead by the glory of the Father, we too might walk in the same newness of life. For if we have been united with Him in a dying like His, we shall certainly be united with Him also in a life of risenness like His ... both here and now, and hereafter."
This then is Paul's reply to those who said that God's grace, as the Gospel proclaims it, is a licence to sin.
"It is an impossible conclusion to draw," he says, "for as anybody knows who has received the grace of God through the Gospel, grace and sin stand totally opposed to each other. You cannot ... you simply cannot yield to both at the same time."
We are to reckon ourselves dead to sin and alive to God in Christ Jesus.
That does not mean we should count on being given some sort of immunity to sin, or to temptation to sin. The Gospel will not work that sort of silly magic for us. We are to count on the power of Christ in us to resist it though ... the Christ Who wrestled with it in the same flesh as ours, and conquered it.
That does not mean it will be easy. It never will be less than a struggle - a real struggle, as real as Christ's own. But we have Him to struggle with us and in us. Say 'Yes' to Him, all down the line, and we shall find the strength to say 'No' to sin. Grace does give us strength to resist it; but we do still have a fight on our hands.
Paul goes on to say indeed, in vs. 12-14, that we still have to resist. "So don't let sin rule you," v. 12. If we are dead to sin the way some say we are supposed to be dead to it, where is the need to strive with it? Paul knows it is very much alive in us and has to be tackled every day of our lives.
Now because Christ who wrestled with it in our flesh and overcame it there dwells in us, we have, in Christ Jesus, a resource upon which we can draw in our fight with it. We have sin's master dwelling in us.
He so resisted sin that He chose to die rather than yield to it, and in His strength so may we.
It is His mind on it we are to have. If we really do identify with Christ that way, we shall see ourselves as persons to whom Christ has communicated his repudiation of sin (His death to it), and His eager responsiveness to God (His risen aliveness to Him).
"Yield yourselves to God as if you'd been given life again after you'd died, and in gratitude yield everything in you to God to be tools in His hand to serve the cause of righteousness." **
* Which leads me to note in passing: when some scriptures are hard to understand, think it possible that our difficulty with them may be due, not our lack of intelligence, or even to our lack of spirituality, but to our lack of some necessary experience. A romantic poem, for example, is nonsense to a child of 7, but not to a youth in love for the first time. His new experience, not his greater intelligence, makes sense of what was once a mystery.
** It is worth observing here another clue to Paul's paragraph divisions in Romans. We have seen that he ends each paragraph with a verse which at the same time sums up what he has just said, and introduces what he is going to say next. Observe that each time he introduces what he does say next with a question which almost always reads "What then?" ... or "What shall we say then?" The development of his thesis is systematic and organised.
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