Sin shall not lord it over you any longer."
A bold statement! Does Paul really mean it?
But if that is surprising, what is even more surprising is the reason he gives why it is true: "Sin shan't have the mastery of you, since you're no longer under the Law!" What is the man saying? What else will deter us from sinning but the Law? Take that away and sin, like June, will just "come busting out all over." Remove the Law and what is there left to stop us sinning?
"Grace," says Paul. "Grace, not Law, is the answer to our sin problem."
Paul is serious about this. Quite clearly, from verses 12-14, it is our personal struggle with sin in daily life that he is talking about. "Don't let sin rule in your mortal bodies to make you obey their passions." That is down-to-earth enough.
"Yielding to grace," he says, "is the way 'to get out from under' the power of sin over you."
At v. 15 he begins: "What then? Are we to go on sinning because we are not under law, but under grace?" Paul is still answering the question whether grace is a licence to sin, but he is moving on a step further with his answer.
Paul's argument is that sin's power over us is removed because the Law is removed. But the Law of Commandments is the force that opposes sin and restrains it, is it not? "No," says Paul, "it is not. That's just where we've all been wrong. In fact, far from deterring us, the Law incites us to sin. Sin takes the Law of God into its service and uses it to put a stranglehold on us so we finish up completely at sin's mercy."
How sin does that Paul will show us in ch.7 - a quite remarkable chapter. Here in this second half of ch. 6 he expands on the statement that what does free us from our servitude to sin is grace. Verse 14 is the section heading; and just as the heading is in two parts, Law and Grace, so the section is in two parts - the rest of ch. 6 about Grace, then ch. 7 about the Law.
Not from God's Law, then, comes the power to free us from sin's dominion, but from God's Grace. But how? That is the question Paul tackles now. It follows on so closely from what he has said in vs. 1-14 that we must briefly recapitulate them; he does so himself in any case in v. 17, referring to them as "the standard of teaching to which you were committed."
"Your conversion and baptism," Paul has said, "happened as the result of hearing the Gospel of Christ crucified and risen. Christ was so preached to you that you understood His death to mean two things: that He died rather than yield to sin, and that He died bearing it rather than moderate His love for sinners. So the preaching of the Cross brought home to you both His condemnation of your sin, and His forgiveness of it. As His forgiving grace flooded your heart then, you were drawn into an experience of real fellowship with Him in which His own mind on sin was begotten in you; it loosed sin's hold over you.
"You saw too that He 'died unto sin' because He lived unto God. God was the inspiration of all His living - and His continuing responsiveness to God is what constituted His obedience. Into fellowship with Him in that obedience too you were drawn. In your newly experienced intimacy with Christ Jesus you came alive with Him to God, so that His yieldedness to God was begotten in you too.
"And since Christ is for ever risen, your fellowship with Him in both these ways goes on. You walk in newness of life."
That is what Paul means by "the standard of teaching to which you were committed," "to which you became obedient from the heart." (He calls it "the pattern of sound words" when he writes to Timothy. II Tim. 1:13)
We must bear this in mind, or we cannot get to grips with v. 17. On the face of it, it is a puzzling verse: "Thanks be to God that you who once were slaves of sin have become obedient from the heart to the standard of teaching to which you were committed." Why did Paul not express himself more simply by saying, "Thanks be to God that you became obedient from the heart to Christ"?
That of course is what he means. But he is anxious that there should be no misunderstanding at this point about just what sort of Christ it is we have responded to. It is the Christ Who is both the enemy of our sin and the bearer of our sin - the Christ Who is presented to us in the 'standard of teaching,' the 'pattern of sound words.' Fellowship with Him means fellowship with Him in His resistance to sin and His obedience to God. The grace of God - and Christ Jesus Himself Who is the gift in that grace - not only looses sin's hold on us; it also sets our face against it.
This explains too another curious feature in this paragraph which calls for explanation. Three times over, in verses 16, 18 and 22, Paul speaks of contrasting slaveries. Each time, slavery to sin on the one hand is contrasted with slavery to something or someone else on the other. We would expect him each time to say that the alternative to our slavery to sin is slavery to God or to Christ. But he does not. In v. 16 he calls it our new 'slavery to obedience'; in v. 18 our 'slavery to righteousness'; and only in v. 22, at last, our 'slavery to God.' Where we would expect him to say "You are slaves to Christ," he does not; he says instead, "slaves to obedience." He does mean 'Christ,' but his choice of words is deliberate. We are enslaved to Christ - but not to just any old Christ our wayward imaginations might invent, but precisely to the Christ Who was obedient.
At his conversion, the Christian says to Christ, as the slave in Israel of old might say to his master, "I love my master; I will not go out free." The Lord's love for us makes us His willing bond-slaves. But it is to the Lord in His obedience to the Father that we are bonded. It is to the righteousness which is Christ's in virtue of that obedience that we are committed. It is to that God Who is the source and supply of Christ's own righteousness that we are reconciled.
Our slavery to sin can only be broken as we are transferred into another slavery - slavery to the marvellous grace of God: but slavery to grace, as Paul is so anxious we should understand, means obedience and righteousness of life. If we are to be freed from bondage to sin, there is nowhere else we can go but into the service of righteousness; and that is exactly where grace takes us.
But what a renewing power there is in God's grace - what liberating power. It is the same power that God put forth when He raised up Christ Jesus from the grave of death, and exalted Him to His own right hand in glory. That power - the power of grace - is the power that looses sin's grip upon us. (Eph. 1:19-20)
"Sin shall no longer lord it over you, since you are now under grace."
The grace of God, in its gracious way, exerts a tough and stubborn constraint upon the heart of the forgiven man or woman. Anyone who has been forgiven knows that. If we have not really experienced the forgiveness of those sins in us that provoke God to wrath, so we have smarted under that wrath, and then awoken to the miraculous release from it that His forgiveness brings, we shall never know what Paul is talking about here. But if we have, then we will find ourselves having to ask, "How can I wound by sinning the only love that can release me from its guilt?"
That leads us into one final puzzle in this paragraph, and then we may sum it up. That is the odd statement in v. 19 where Paul says, "I am speaking in human terms because of your natural limitations."
What does he mean by that? Literally, in the Greek, it reads, "I'm speaking humanly, because of the weakness of your flesh." It can be so read as to suggest that Paul is being rather disparaging at this point, saying to his readers, in effect, "I know this isn't the best way to say it, but you're too dumb to grasp the point any other way." The phrase 'the weakness of the flesh' is taken to mean 'your lack of spiritual intelligence.' But that would represent Paul as a snob.
How else may his phrase 'the weakness of the flesh' be understood? He has repeatedly referred to our obedience to God as a slavery, and he wants to say, "But it is not really a slavery at all; it is the most blessed freedom. I call it a slavery, to you as I do to myself, because I know only too well that if I don't, we shall all wriggle out from under the challenge of it." The 'weakness of the flesh' Paul refers to here is something he knows only too well and which he shares with his readers (and us too). Sad experience of the weakness of his own flesh has taught him the need to say in this stringent and seemingly inept way what our yieldedness to Christ really means.
"Look," he wants to say, "the service of sin is a real bondage, and the service of God is a real freedom. But I am calling the service of God a bondage too, because if I call it a freedom we shall all be tempted to think of it as the freedom to do as we please. I know. The moment I say, 'In Christ, I am a free man now,' I am apt to forget the 'in Christ' bit, and in the name of freedom rush out to indulge my sinful appetites!"
That is what he means by 'the weakness of the flesh.' So he put it to himself the way he puts it to us: "Don't call it a freedom; better to call it a slavery, or you'll slither into self-deception. The freedom wherewith Christ has set us free is not a freedom to sin, but the freedom to fight sin in the power of Christ's victory. We must never let ourselves forget it."
The notion that we can ever be free in the sense that we owe allegiance to nothing and to no-one at all outside ourselves is nonsense - and a ruinous lie. The only freedom we creatures of God ever have is the freedom to choose who shall be our master. Indulging our sins is no sort of freedom - it is a slavery. Doing as we please means the same thing as becoming a slave to our pleasures. Paul is right: "Don't you know that whatever you give in to thenceforth rules you?" (v. 16) "Let's not pussyfoot around," he says. "When it comes down to it, you know as well as I do that there are only two masters we can any of us choose between - God or sin. Which of the two we yield to decides everything. Yield to sin, and it will kill us (v. 26a - 'the wages of sin is death'), or yield to God, and we shall live for ever (v. 26b - 'the free gift of God is eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord')."
Now we can sum up.
It is a simple fact of life that there is no freedom open to any of us that is not founded on the prior acceptance of an inner bondage. I watch Vladimir Askenazy playing the piano and marvel at his 'freedom of the keyboard.' He can do anything with it. But he achieved that mastery, that freedom, only by submitting to the bondage of hours and hours and hours of daily practise. It is true of dancers and athletes - of any sort of mastery, indeed. The way to freedom lies only through the acceptance of a willing bondage.
The freedom not to sin lies only that way too. Only as we willingly submit ourselves to be ruled by Christ, yielding to the persuasion of His sin-resistant love, shall we find the service which is perfect freedom.
It is a paradox - one of those apparent contradictions which is the only way to express the truth. But its logic can be expressed very simply: only Christ is truly free; bind ourselves to Him, and we are bound to the free! "If the Son of God shall make you free, you shall be free indeed." (John 8:36)
Everything depends on what or whom we yield to - sin or Christ. Sin will enslave and kill us. Christ will liberate and lead us into life. "Sin pays its minions - and the wage packet has nothing in it but death. But God gives freely to those who enter His service - and the free gift of God is life ... life which is sin-re-sistant, and death-proof!" 6:26
So we are not to set up the Law before us as our daily task; rather we are to set the Grace of God before us as our daily diet. To refresh ourselves daily in the love of Christ and drink every day from the fountain of God's refreshing grace - that is the way to get the mastery of sin.
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