Monday, Oct. 8

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But where sin increased, grace increased all the more, so that, just as sin reigned in death, so also grace might reign through righteousness to bring eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord.  What shall we say, then? Shall we go on sinning so that grace may increase?  By no means! We died to sin; how can we live in it any longer?  Or don’t you know that all of us who were baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death?   - Romans 5:20-6:3

This passage from Romans marks a significant shift in the Apostle Paul’s emphasis to the Roman Christians.  In the first 5 chapters, Paul is dealing with what theologians call justification; meaning, how we, as sinful people, are made right, or justified, before a holy God.  Over an over again, Paul drives home the point that the only thing that can make us right with God is Grace.  We can never do enough good to justify ourselves before God, we can only receive His grace by faith.  It is grace and grace alone that justifies us and makes us right with God!  This is the very heart of the Gospel mesage.

In Romans 6-8, Paul shifts his emphasis toward what theologians refer to as sanctification.  In other words, once we have been justified by God’s grace, how does He help us to we grow and change as His children?

Romans 6:1 (in bold above) is a kind of test of whether you have correctly understood Paul’s basic message up to this point. If you’ve been tracking with him, he knows that you will be thinking, “If God’s response to increased sin is abundant grace (5:20), then why not sin more?” Since God freely justifies not those who try hard, and who are good people, but rather the ungodly; then why work at being good at all?  Another form of this objection might be, “If God is gracious towards sinners, then I’ll just sin and ask for His grace.”  Or, as poet W. H. Auden put it, “I like committing sins. God likes forgiving them. Really the world is admirably arranged.”

But Paul actually answers this question in the very next verse,he says, “By no means!  We died to sin; how can we live in it any longer?” 

So Paul means that if you are in Christ, when He died on the cross, you died in Him. It is not something that you feel, but rather it is a FACT that is true of you because God declares it to be true.  If Christ our Head died, we who are His body died with Him.  This is our new status or position before God.  Since Christ died to sin (romans 6:10) and we are now in Him, we also died to sin.  We derive the benefits of His death because we are now in Him.

In the Bible, death is not primarily cessation, but rather separation.  At physical death your soul is separated from your body.  When we died with Christ, we were separated from the reign of death and put under Christ’s reign of righteousness. Its reign over us was broken.  As a result, Paul implies (by his rhetorical question) that we cannot continue in sin or live in it. He is not talking about committing acts of sin, but rather about living in sin as a way of life.
1 John 3:9 says essentially the same thing from a slightly different perspective: “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.”  John is not saying that believers cannot sin at all, because in 1 John 1:8 he has said that if anyone claims that he has no sin is deceiving himself.  He means that those born of God cannot continue in their old way of life, which was characterized by sin.

So both John and Paul mean that those who are in Christ cannot continue in sin as a way of life. When we are saved by God’s grace, He places us in a new realm, under the reign of grace.  We obey a new law, because we have a new King and Master!

Jeff Frazier