Romans 6 (Introduction)

Among the Jews of Paul's day, there were various ideas regarding salvation, but one of the primary ideas was legalism. Legalism is the belief that we can find a right standing with God by our own good works--that obedience to the law and proper actions could earn God's approval. There is an obvious plausibility to this idea since this is so often the case in life. So many things in this world if we are to obtain at all, we must obtain by earning them. 

But Paul's main contention in the first few chapters of Romans is that legalism is false--that we cannot earn God's approval, because in fact we are sinners and under the wrath of God. The only hope of obtaining righteousness is through faith, through accepting the free and gracious gift of salvation provided by the death and resurrection of Christ, who gave His life for us even though we were unworthy. Rather than trying to merit salvation by anything we do, we must fully trust in God's provision. Augustus Toplady summarized this doctrine in these words: “Not the labors of my hands/Can fulfill thy law's demands;/Could my zeal no respite know,/Could my tears forever flow,/All for sin could not atone;/Thou must save, and thou alone./Nothing in my hand I bring,/Simply to the cross I cling.”

That is the main thing that Paul has been trying to drive home in the first four or five chapters of Romans. But all of that brings us to one very pressing question. We do not find salvation through the law but through grace. As Paul said at the end of chapter 5, where sin abounded, there did grace much more abound. But that all brings us to one large question: “Shall we continue in sin, that grace may abound?... Shall we sin, because we are not under the law, but under grace?” (Romans 6:1, 15)

This is the obvious question that follows the doctrine of justification by faith—if we are saved by faith and not by our own good works, then does it even matter whether our works are good or not? If we cannot be good enough to earn God's favor and shouldn't even try to be good enough to earn God's favor, then do we need to be good at all? In an earlier lesson, I put it that when we come to God for salvation, then our own personal merit isn't even factored into the calculation—and if God doesn't consider it, then why should we consider it?

Suppose a boy wanted to get into some sort of exclusive academic club in his school for those with the best grades. If he really wants to get in, then he going to study and work as hard as he can to excel at his studies. But if the club changed their rules to admit anyone, regardless of their grades, do you think he would keep studying so intensely?

The issue here is ANTINOMIANISM, the belief that Christians have no obligation to follow the law--that because we are saved by grace, it doesn't matter how we live. The issue comes up multiple times throughout the New Testament, even earlier in Romans. The fact that this occurs throughout the New Testament shows that it was a very pressing issue for the churches of the first century.

But it is also a pressing issue for the church today. I believe this may be one of the biggest issues which the Christian church—in America, anyway—needs to deal with and can be connected in a large measure to the ineffectiveness of the church in our society. Antinomianism, in its strict and explicit form, is not a major factor in modern Christianity, though it does still exist and have its proponents. But western evangelicalism puts such a high emphasis on grace and so little emphasis on anything else that the growth of such an implicit antinomianism is inevitable. If you preach justification 51 weeks in a year and transformation 1 week, it is not hard to calculate what the net impression you will create is. Furthermore, the cornerstone of modern evangelicalism is the belief that salvation is unloseable; the belief that is often referred to as once-saved-always-saved. And while that is a separate question from this matter of antinomianism, the practical result of this teaching is often to encourage antinomianism.

That is why, for us today it is very important to answer the question which Paul posses here: Shall we continue in sin, that grace may abound? Paul's answer is in verse 2 and is fairly straight forward. NO. But exactly why? If our good works do not save us, then why do they matter? The question is so important and so complex that I want to look at it from a somewhat broader perspective before we dig into this passage and see exactly how Paul answers it. 

But first—and I do not think this can be emphasized too strongly—we have to remember this: in our zeal to contradict the error of antinomianism, we must never tamper with or minimize the doctrine of justification by faith. It would be tempting to try to encourage obedience and good works by tacking them onto salvation somewhere; we could turn Paul's formula into a percentage: the just shall live 90% by faith but 10% by works. But if you do that, you are undermining the entire foundation of Romans and the entire foundation of Christianity. Up to this point in Romans, Paul has made it quite clear that the only possible approach to God is through faith and not through our own good works. Whatever role good works DO play, they do not create or maintain our relationship with God. That is by faith.

So then why would we do good works? Why does it matter how we live? A couple of scriptures may point us towards the answer. “The word which God sent unto the children of Israel, preaching peace by Jesus Christ: (he is Lord of all:).” (Acts 10:36) “These shall make war with the Lamb, and the Lamb shall overcome them: for he is Lord of lords, and King of kings: and they that are with him are called, and chosen, and faithful.” (Revelation 17:14)

These two verses are important because they both, in slightly different terms, refer to Jesus as the supreme, the highest, the ultimate Lord. Now, this word Lord is somewhat strange to us because we don't really use it that much in casual American English and it is mostly relegated to religion and fantasy novels. But the basic idea of the word, both in Greek and in English, is of authority. A lord is someone who gives orders and commands, a ruler. Strong defines the Greek word as “ supreme in authority, i.e.... controller; by implication, Master.” (#2962)

But there is something more to this word in the context of the Bible. In the Old Testament, God revealed His name to the Jewish people. This special name of God is translated in English as Jehovah, but we don't actually know how it was pronounced in Hebrew, because the Jews would never pronounce it out loud. Instead, whenever they were reading the scripture aloud and came to that name, they would replace it with the Hebrew word for Lord. This practice was carried through into the Greek translation of the Old Testament and therefore in the New Testament's quotations from the Old Testament, which replaced the name Jehovah with the Greek word for Lord—and it even carried through into the English KJV, which nearly always replaces Jehovah with the word LORD written in all capitals.

The point is that often when you see the word Lord in the New Testament, it carries with it implicitly a reference to the sacred name of God. And we understand why that matters if we go back to Exodus 3:14. “And God said unto Moses, I AM THAT I AM: and he said, Thus shalt thou say unto the children of Israel, I AM hath sent me unto you.”

That is the special, sacred name of God—He is The I AM.  This name emphasizes God's self-existence. My name is the name my parents gave me, and my nicknames are what my friends (or enemies) gave me. If my parents had given me up for adoption and I had been raised by different people, and in a different environment, I might have a different name and I would be a very different person. To a large extent, I am what others have made me. Only God can say I AM THAT I AM, because His existence is not dependent or contingent on anything or anyone else and everything else exists because of Him. It is interesting that this name was revealed to Moses as Moses is also believed to have written or at least compiled the book of Genesis which contains the account of creation. Because God is The I Am, He is the creator; everything that comes into existence must depend for its existence on the one who exists on His own. We are because He Is.

So for the Bible to say that Jesus is Lord contains within it this idea that Jesus is The I AM; the self-existent creator. And that idea is also explicit in the New Testament. For instance, Colossians 1:16-17 speaks of Jesus in these words: “For by him were all things created, that are in heaven, and that are in earth, visible and invisible, whether they be thrones, or dominions, or principalities, or powers: all things were created by him, and for him: and he is before all things, and by him all things consist.”

Now, if Jesus is The I Am, the self-existent creator, the one by whom all things exist, then the Lordship of Christ is, so to speak, a given. Jesus, being who He is, is by definition in a position of authority and—if you'll pardon the expression—He couldn't help being in that position. And while there is a special relationship between Christ's lordship and His work in the atonement and the resurrection, the general truth is that He is Lord merely because He is who He Is; because He is the I AM.

Sometimes people say that when they became a Christian, they accepted Jesus as their Savior, and then at some later point they accepted Him as their Lord. That may represent a real psychological experience in the spiritual life of an individual. But the objective fact is that Jesus is your Lord whether you accept Him as such or not because His Lordship is based on His own nature and not on your personal experience. As an American citizen, you are bound to America's laws; but you could reject your citizenship, deny that authority, and move to another country. But you are bound to the laws of gravity whether you want to be or not. In fact, look at Philippians 2:10-11: “That at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, of things in heaven, and things in earth, and things under the earth; and that every tongue should confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.”  The implication here is that someday everyone—all sentient creature, human and otherwise, regardless of their character or relation to God--will acknowledge Jesus as Lord.

And I realize this has been a circuitous route, but the point we need to grasp is this. Jesus, because of who He is, is Lord--He is the one in authority, the one who sets the rules and creates boundaries and defines values. This is a primary fact of reality and is given by the very facts of the case. If God exists at all, then He is Lord.

Therefore we have a duty to obey and follow God which is separate from this whole question of salvation. A crossword puzzle is a grid with numbers corresponding to certain hints which tell you what words need to be filled into the puzzle to complete it. If you are solving a crossword puzzle, you are trying to find the answers that the author of the puzzle had in mind. It is unlikely, in most cases, that you will ever meet the author of the puzzle; if you did, he probably wouldn't have any particular love or respect for you because you solved his puzzle. But that doesn't change the fact of what a crossword puzzle is; it is an attempt to find those predetermined answers. If you don't do that—if you just write down your own words at random—then you are merely doodling on a piece of paper and are not solving a crossword puzzle at all. If you are living in this world, you should be trying to live according to God's laws, which are the predetermined goals and boundaries of this world, even though that attempt will not bring salvation. 

And that's a rather clumsy analogy, but I want to drive home this bottom line—that God is in a position of authority over us and we are in a subordinate position to God, almost by definition, by the very nature of who we are and who God is. That is why we should try to live in obedience to God's law merely because it is God's law, even though it is not the means of salvation.

So that is our first point. But there is a second one that stands as a parallel to it, which we find in 2 Corinthians 5:14-15. “For the love of Christ constraineth us; because we thus judge, that if one died for all, then were all dead: and that he died for all, that they which live should not henceforth live unto themselves, but unto him which died for them, and rose again.”

We recently talked about this when going through Romans 5—this is the wonder of the Gospel, that God would willingly choose to enter into this world of life and death in order to suffer and die in order to save us. As Christians, we have salvation, we have hope, we have life solely because of the sacrifice of Jesus. Therefore we have a duty to Him. In 1 Corinthians 6:19-20, Paul puts it that we are not our own because we have been bought with a price.

In W. S. Gilbert's play The Yeomen of the Guard, Colonel Fairfax has been falsely accused of a crime and sentenced to death. And one of his fellow soldiers determines to take the very dangerous and risky step of trying to help him escape because Fairfax had once saved his life and he felt only right to risk his life in return. He puts it in these words: “The breath I breathe to him I owe/My life is his, so count it naught.”

And so as those for whom Christ died, we do owe something back to Him. But as we saw before, the sacrifice of Christ is something different from any other sacrificial death, because it was truly voluntary and born solely out of love. The fact that Jesus willingly did that for us should inspire us not merely with a sense of duty but a sense of love. And that love should lead to a change in our actions. Jesus told His disciples: “If ye love me, keep my commandments.” (John 14:15) Notice that Jesus puts obedience to His commandments as a result of a relationship of love not as the ground of that relationship. The fact that God loved us and gave Himself for us to provide salvation should cause us to love Him and want to serve Him.

Jesus is our Lord and He is our Savior. These two facts need to be kept in tandem. The duty owed to our Lord might seem cold and impersonal without the knowledge that He is our Savior. And the love and affection we owe to our Savior might cloy or dissipate without the reminder that He is our Lord. And the message of both of these is this—that we owe to God our obedience; that we should try to live in a way that is pleasing to Him—not in order to find salvation but simply because of who He is. 

Both of those points look to the past. But there is a third point which looks towards the future. Imagine someone who goes to the gym and works out regularly. Why do they do it? There would be many different reasons—to get stronger, to improve their appearance, to gain ability in some sport, to gain confidence—but we can broadly say that it is to get in better shape. Suppose, then, that you went up to such a person and offered them a drug that would allow them to exercise without actually getting in better shape, a miracle pill that would prevent fat loss or muscle growth no matter how much they worked out. Do you think anyone would be interested in something like that? Almost certainly not—because that removes the entire point; it takes away the primary reason why people exercise, making it almost completely futile.

But a Christianity which does not deliver from sin, which does not make a difference in the life of the believer, is just as futile. We see this in Romans 6:22. Paul speaks of how Jesus set us free from sin, from the power and from the penalty of sin. And this leads to “fruit unto holiness, and the end everlasting life.” This is the theme of this entire section of Romans. Beginning with Romans 5:1, Paul has been showing this point—that God wants to make a difference in the life of His people; that be justified and becoming a Christian is the beginning of a journey; not the end. God is working on a process of changing the believer so that the Righteousness of God becomes an actual reality as well as a legal one in the life and heart of the Christian. This process is the effect and not the cause of our relationship with God; it is the goal and not the ground.

Suppose you are cooking a meal. The actual act of putting the food on the stove is the cause of the meal. That is HOW it happens. But when you put the food on the table and start eating it—that is the purpose of the meal; that is WHY it happens. So, with salvation, HOW it happens is through our faith and God's grace, but the WHY—the purpose and final goal, is that “we should be holy and without blame before him in love.” (Ephesians 4:1)  And if that is God's final goal, then it should be our final goal as well, and if it is our final goal it ought to be reflected in our actions—we should be heading towards that destination. 

“This is a faithful saying, and these things I will that thou affirm constantly, that they which have believed in God might be careful to maintain good works. These things are good and profitable unto men.” (Titus 3:8) Notice the progression—they which have believed—faith is first and primary—should be careful to maintain Good works. Our faith should change our actions to reach the goal, the goal in this context being to be good and profitable unto men, since that is part of God's goal for us.

Some time ago, I was involved in a discussion with a friend on Facebook concerning some controversial point of ethics, and they brought up a verse that I wouldn't usually connect with ethics, that verse being Philippians 4:8 “Finally, brethren, whatsoever things are true, whatsoever things are honest, whatsoever things are just, whatsoever things are pure, whatsoever things are lovely, whatsoever things are of good report; if there be any virtue, and if there be any praise, think on these things.” And what's interesting about that verse is this. Paul doesn't simply say—don't think about things that false or sinful. He doesn't simply tell them to avoid anything that is technically immoral. He tells them to treasure up, meditate upon, highly value and esteem that which is good, that which is best.

There are foods which are not poisonous—that will not kill you or make you sick if you eat them—but which still aren't the foods you would eat if you want to be in the best health possible. Not everything that is lawful is edifying—not everything that is technically moral will build up either the individual or the church. If you are a legalist—if you are trying to earn salvation by your own actions—then all that matters is whether something is right or wrong. But as Christians, we aren't looking to our actions to earn salvation—rather, we are looking to Jesus as our leader, leading us to our goal—and so we judge and evaluate our choices, our actions, and our attitudes, based on that goal.

Also, as a subpoint under this matter of our goal, we have to add something else. “Let your light so shine before men, that they may see your good works, and glorify your Father which is in heaven.” (Matthew 5:16) Part of our goal as Christians is to reveal God to the world and so our lives should be such that people can see God in us. We have to be careful with this point since our final evaluation must come from God and not from other people, but it would be naïve to deny the reality that our actions do have an effect on others, they have a witness. Paul already talked about this earlier in Romans—of the fact that God's name was blasphemed among the Gentiles because of the sins of those who were known as God's people. And that statement is just as relevant today as it was in Paul's day. Our witness does have an impact, and often all we can do is be a witness—not merely by our words, but by our actions. We cannot solve all the problems in the world; often we can't solve most of them. But we can live our lives in such a way as to be a witness to the answer. We cannot dispel every lie, but we can be a witness to the truth.

Now, before we finally come back to Romans, we have to look at a passage that is very pivotal to this whole discussion, and one which has spawned a deal of confusion and controversy, and that is James 2:14-26. It parallels a passage we've already talked about in Romans, and it is one of the key passages in the New Testament for this whole discussion. Both Paul and James take the statement from Genesis that Abraham believed God and it was imparted unto him for righteousness, and then Paul says this shows that Abraham was justified by faith and James says it shows that Abraham was justified by works. It seems strange that such apparently divergent opinions could be formed from the same primary data.

But the first thing we have to notice about James' argument is that he does not discount faith. We don't read anything along the lines of: “Yeah, faith doesn't matter. Just ignore it. All we need is works.” Instead, over and over in these verses, he pictures a sort of fusion or synergy between faith and works. Verse 26 acts as a good summary. A body that has no spirit (or soul or whatever you want to call it) is dead; it is just a corpse. It is that fusion of soul and body—the psychosomatic unity—which makes a living person. Just so, faith and works must exist together to be a real, living thing. Faith without works is dead. And by James' logic, works without faith would also be dead. These two things have to exist together as a single entity to exist at all.

This is true regardless of the kind of faith in question. In studying this, a couple commentators pointed out something about verse 17. There James mentions the fact that the demons have a belief in God. And that belief does have an effect; it does lead to works. They believe and tremble. The Greek is almost literally: they believe, and their hair stands on end. The faith of demons is not, one would suppose, the highest or best kind of faith, certainly not Christian faith—and yet it does have an impact on their attitude and disposition.

In verses 15-16, James uses a different analogy. Suppose a person were freezing and dying of starvation. No amount of charity and good wishes would help him without actual food and clothes. Charity, like faith, is a nonentity without works.

Now, this is a passage that has caused debate and confusion for two thousand years, so I'm not sure we can completely clear all that up here, but we're sure going to try. Imagine that you saw the following scene play out—two men each took a couple of one-dollar bills from their wallets and handed them to a third man so that he had four dollars. If you saw that happen, what would you have seen? Was it an act of two people giving a third money or was it a mathematical equation?

Ultimately, both. We can separate the physical action and the mathematical formula for purposes of discussion, and for certain purposes it would be very important to look at the two things separately. But in reality, what you saw was a single event. Describing it as a physical act of transfer or as an abstract mathematical formula is taking one part of it and separating it, but in reality, it was only one event and the two halves could not exist alone. You cannot give somebody money (or anything else) without an act of addition occurring. And while we can write down abstract math formulas on a piece of paper, we never find them wandering around in the real world without attaching to something. 

Just so—when Abraham placed Isaac on an altar to sacrifice him at the command of God—was that faith or was it works? Obviously, it was both. You can separate the faith and actions for the purposes of discussion, but what really happened was a single reality, a fusion of faith and works into a single event. I don't think any sort of division between faith and works was present in the mind of Abraham. Sacrificing Isaac was a physical action, a work, a deed, but it was only happening because of faith. And Abraham's faith was such that would have inevitably led to that sacrifice, given the circumstances.

Faith and works are ultimately a single entity. That is why James can say Abraham was justified by works and Paul say he was justified by faith and both be true, because, in this sense, they are simply two different ways of looking at the same reality. Someone who tried to have works without faith would fail as would someone who tried to have faith without works. Ultimately, the two things must exist as one.

That said, there is one important disclaimer. When I was talking about mathematics and the transferal of money, I wrote in my notes that you never have a mathematical formula without a physical action of some kind. And after I wrote that, I realized that it wasn't completely true. So, during tax season, I got a refund from the State of Ohio. In my bank statement and in my budget, there is a transferal of money, an addition to my account balance. But I doubt that there was any physical transferal—I don't think anybody in the Ohio government put cash, or even a check, in an envelope and mailed it to my bank. I assume it's all done electronically and there is no actual physical exchange. To someone simply observing from the outside, it would seem like an abstract formula with no real basis.

But I could have gone down to my bank and withdrawn that money and gotten it in a physical form. I could have used a check or my debit card to buy something with that money. In other words, there was a physical reality corresponding to the mathematical one, but it wasn't immediately obvious. And because of the complexity of our modern financial system, it would be very hard for someone looking on to see the direct correlation between the mathematical formulas and the physical realities, even though that correlation is definitely there. 

Just so, faith and works will always exist together but that doesn't mean it's always obvious how they exist together and you cannot always be certain whether a person does or does not have faith merely by looking at their works. And while faith and works are a single thing, the works side can be hindered or expedited by various things. To use the analogy of charity, it is true that a real charity will be incarnated in action—unless it is hindered by something. A person who truly cares about their neighbor will want to help them, but they may not be able to—they may like the means or the opportunity or even the knowledge. Therefore, you cannot always be certain by seeing that a person fails to perform some act of charity that they lack love and compassion. Just so, you cannot be 100% by looking at a person's actions whether they truly do or do not have faith in God. As Paul will say later in Romans, faith in action is conditioned by knowledge. If we don't know the right thing, we obviously can't do it.

You can picture faith like the needle of a compass. If the needle does not have an attraction to the north, then it isn't a compass at all. That's intrinsic to the nature of a compose to have that northward pull. But if you put your finger inside the compass to block the needle, then it's not going to point north. Its nature hasn't changed, but something is blocking it. The same is true of both faith and love—both are, by their very nature, practical works as well as abstractions, but they may, in individual cases, fail to act and may even act contrary to what they ought to because of other factors, but that doesn't change the nature of what they are.

I already mentioned Paul's admonition in Titus that those who believe God should be careful to do good works. Faith is, so to speak, one and the same as good works, but just as we ought to cultivate and encourage our faith so we ought to cultivate and encourage good works. And often those two things go together.

This has been something of a side trail away from Romans. We have been seeking to find some general answers to the question which Paul poses in Romans 6: Shall we sin because we are not under the law but under grace. If we are Christians, does it matter how we live?

And the general answer is simply this--that as Christians we ought to care about how we live. Faith is not contrary to works. God forbid that we should sin because we are under grace and not under the law. Indeed, this whole distinction between faith and works, though proper and necessary in its place, is an artificial and abstract distinction, like the distinction between cooking as an art, and the actual act of putting a pan on the stove.