Romans 6:1-14

At the end of Romans 5, Paul said: “Where sin abounded, grace did much more abound.” And that leads immediately into the question which opens Chapter 6: if sin causes grace to abound, should we sin so that grace can abound? Several times throughout Romans, Paul will ask a question and then immediately answer it, almost as if he can hear the questions his readers are asking and is already ready with an answer. He does this twice in chapter 6, asking almost identical questions in verses 1 and 15; these two questions form the openings to the two sections of the chapter.

Twice in this chapter, Paul asks, in slightly different forms, this question: should we sin? And in both cases, the short answer to the question is NO. God forbid. Certainly not. By no means. Not a chance. Uh uh. 

The theme of this section of Romans is transformation, and this transformation isn't a sort of bonus or optional add-on though. Transformation isn't an afterthought.

In a previous article, I mentioned that some people describe their Christian experience by saying that when they become a Christian, they took Christ as their Savior and then, at some subsequent point, took Christ as their Lord--which usually means they accepted justification and then decided later to accept transformation. That may really describe a certain psychological process in the individual experience of some people. But the Bible makes it clear that transformation isn't some separate and unconnected matter but is part-and-parcel with the whole plan of salvation and is inescapably bound up together with justification.

So let's return to Romans 4:24-25 where Paul summarizes the doctrine of justification by faith. “But for us also, to whom it shall be imputed, if we believe on him that raised up Jesus our Lord from the dead; who was delivered for our offences, and was raised again for our justification.” This is the important thing to remember about justification by faith... faith isn't actually what saves us; at least, not on its own. Faith is the catalyst, but the actual ground of salvation is the death and resurrection of Christ. You cannot separate salvation from this sacrifice. You cannot separate Christianity from Christ. And Paul's argument in the first part of Romans 6 is that the very nature of that atonement which lies at the heart of the gospel necessitates this idea of transformation.

So let's think for a few minutes about the atonement of Christ. Jesus' life as a human began when he was miraculously conceived in the womb of the Virgin Mary and was then subsequently born in a manger in Bethlehem. From that beginning point, he grew up and continued with His life. We know very little about the years following that point, and most likely this is (at least in part) because there was nothing interesting about them. Probably, for the most part, these years were very ordinary and would not have been that different from the life of any other Jewish man of the same time period. Things changed at about age thirty when He began His public ministry and would spend most of the next three years preaching and working miracles throughout Judea and Galilee.

And then, on the Thursday before Passover in the third year of His ministry, He was arrested, and after a trial, He was condemned, and on Friday of that week, He was killed by crucifixion. This is the point of His death. Then, three days later He was resurrected from the dead and then forty days following that He ascended from this world and He is now reigning at the right hand of God.

So this is what we have to understand. Jesus lived. He died. And He lived again. But His resurrection did not merely negate or undo His death. The life he had had before His death—the ordinary life of a Jewish peasant or even the itinerant life of a Rabbi—that chapter of his life was closed forever, and a new chapter was opened. That is why, while dying, He made a point of entrusting his mother to the care of John—because, even though He was going to be coming back to life, He would no longer be able to fulfill the duties of a member of Mary's family. Someone else was going to have to take that role.

If a man were sick and almost died but then recovered, he might say something along the lines of: “I got my life back.” But Jesus did not get His life back in the sense of returning the life He had for the period from His conception to His crucifixion. So we have this sequence; life, death, new life—new not merely in matter of time but in the sense of being unique and different from that which went before.

This event is at the heart of the gospel. Our salvation lies in this event, and therefore Paul argues that our experience parallels this one. Paul's whole case in this passage is that as Christians, we in some sense share in or participate in the death and resurrection of Christ.

It should also be noted that Paul builds part of his argument off the idea of baptism and in fact treats baptism as more or less synonymous with salvation. Though it is clear from Acts that the New Testament church recognized that one could be baptized without being saved and could be saved without being baptized, the two things were generally so interconnected that they could be used synonymously. Also, most likely Paul is thinking of baptism by immersion, though this cannot be proved 100%.

And Paul pictures the moment that the convert goes under the water of baptism as if he had died and been buried and then comes out of the water a new man. But the picture is more than simply that of death and resurrection, but specifically the picture of identification with or participation in the death and resurrection of Christ. This sequence of life, death, and new life must be the reality in our life as well as in Christ's. The idea is that at the moment of salvation there is an appropriation of the death of Christ as incarnated in the sacrament of baptism. Salvation is often referred to as the New Birth, but if there is a new birth, then that new birth must be preceded by the termination of the life that began with the old birth. 

So for the Christian, there is the old life, before becoming a Christian; there is the death of that old life; and the beginning of a new life. Paul's whole picture of salvation is built around this analogy. Paul's typical way of describing being a Christian is the phrase “in Christ” which implies this connection or identification with Christ's life but, therefore, also His death.

And if that is true, then it is intrinsic that our old life be done away with. Our old life is dead, and a new life begins. Practically everything Paul says in this passage is built off this idea in one way or another. You could go through this passage verse by verse and show how this same image is used over and over again.

We can take verse 6 as being somewhat typical. Paul says that our old man, the person we used to be, our old life with its old behavior, is crucified with Christ; that we are dead and the old life is gone, that the body of sin might be destroyed, and that we would henceforth not serve sin. The phrase “Body of sin” seems to mean the life of sin, the physical manifestations and expressions of sin in the life and speech of a sinner. That is all ended, like the life of a man is ended at death.

This isn't an added extra to Christianity, but something implied in the very nature of what Christianity is. Justification and transformation are intrinsically bound together. You cannot have one without the other, though, as we saw in an earlier lesson, transformation is a process, and so it does not happen all at once. But no matter how it happens, there must be a change.

St. Augustine was known as something of a womanizer before his conversion. The story is told that after he became a Christian, one of his old girlfriends saw him on the street and she ran up to him and tried to get his attention saying: “Augustine, don't you remember me? It's old Claudia.” And he replied, “Yes, but I am not the old Augustine.” With salvation, there is a death of the old life and the beginning of a new life.