Dr. Robert Martin
At 3:21 Paul turns a corner–now to open up the gospel. His theme is Sola Scriptura, Sola fidei, Sola gratia, Solus Christus, Soli Deo gloria. He speaks of a saving righteousness from God that is imputed to the believer and of God’s righteousness in doing this, i.e., of his honoring his own law in such a way that he may be just and the justifier of those who have faith in Jesus.
At 6:1 he turns another corner–this time to speak of the implications of the gospel re. the possibility of believers continuing in sin. As he develops this question he assumes a number of truths, including the continuing prescribing function of God’s moral law as a rule of life for the believer. This is woven into the canvas on which he displays his case. By the time we get to 7:25, this is explicit. Now, we can’t follow Paul at every turn from 6:1 to 7:25, where he says, “So then, with the mind I myself serve the law of God”–but we need to see enough to understand how important that statement is to our appreciating the place of the moral law in our living the Christian life.
Having spoken of the role of the gospel in securing forgiveness of sins and a saving righteousness, in chap. 6 Paul begins to address the believer’s relation to his indwelling sin (the “sin that dwells in me”) and esp. the incongruity of the believer’s continuing to practice sin as a pattern of life. He builds on what he’s already said about our union with Christ and argues that the gift of his righteousness does not encourage a life of sin in those who embrace the gospel. In order to make his point, he treats two questions:
1. Shall we continue in sin, that grace may abound? (6:1-14). The answer–union with Christ makes continuing in sin absurd.
2. Shall we sin, because we are not under law but under grace? (6:15-23). The answer–though we are not under the law as a way of salvation, we remain under the law as a rule of duty.
Paul has just said, “where sin abounded, grace abounded much more” (5:20). Some took this to imply that continuing in sin not only is acceptable but also leads to a greater display of God’s grace and thus to his greater glory in saving sinners. This was an attractive argument for those who wished to abuse the gospel of free grace in order to justify their sinful lives. But does God’s grace in justification free men from any obligation to God’s law?
The issue of course is not occasional lapses or sins. All believers “continue (to some degree) in sin,” but this is very different from the idea of a life of unchallenged sin. Later Paul will define “continue in sin” in terms of being “slaves to sin” (6:6) and of letting “sin reign in your mortal body, that you should obey it in its lusts” (6:12). He refers to “a supine indulgence of inward lust [of the flesh or indwelling sin], in distinction from a steady struggling with and conquest of it” (Shedd, Romans, 145-46).
Paul’s answer to such ideas is emphatic: mh. ge,noito, lit. “it must not be.” The idea of one joined to Christ continuing in sin (without repentance, mortification, and an earnest following after holiness) draws Paul’s sternest rebuke, reserved for the most egregious abuses of truth. Any who think this way are as far from the truth as it is possible to be.
Paul next poses a question that shows how absurd this all is: “We who died to sin, how shall we any longer live in it?” He speaks of a past event with profound present implications. Later he will exhort us to reckon ourselves now to be “dead to sin” (6:11), but he begins with the fact of our objectively having “died to sin” at a definite point in the past. The when was at the cross, where “our old man was crucified with Christ” (6:6) and the how is that God reckoned us as united to his Son at the time of his death, so that when he “died to sin” we “died to sin.”
Elsewhere Paul speaks of Christ’s death in terms of his dying “in our place” and “for our sake” and “because of our sins.” We ordinarily think of this merely in legal terms–that Christ bore our sins and died in our place so that the demand of God’s law is satisfied in his suffering and death and our sins are forgiven because they have been punished in him. This is correct, but it does not exhaust the meaning of Christ dying “in our place” and “because of our sins.” In his death, Christ also broke the dominion of indwelling sin over us, so that even as “sin reigned in death” because of Adam’s sin (a rule made stronger by our own “many offenses”), “even so grace reigns (i.e., rules over us) through (his) righteousness unto eternal life” (5:21). It is in terms of this experiential liberty from sin’s dominion that Paul here says that “we died to sin” in the death of Christ. This means not only that we are freed from sin’s penalty and the law’s power to condemn us, but also that Christ’s death freed us from slavery to our indwelling sin and its dominion over us. This, as much as the forgiveness of our sins, is the fruit of his death for us. And it is this that makes sense of Paul’s challenge at 6:2. “We who died to sin, how shall we any longer live in it? Continuing in a life of sin–not marked by on-going repentance, mortification, and the pursuit of holiness is incongruous with union with Christ in his death for us and for our sins.
In 6:3-5 Paul makes his point from the symbolism of baptism, which portrays union w/ Christ in his death, burial, and resurrection. When you were baptized, you were symbolically professing that your union with Christ is complete, so that you died to sin in his death to sin, were buried with him in his tomb, and were raised with him to walk in newness of life. Paul’s point is that if we meant this, continuing to live in sin is triply absurd.
Union with Christ in his death is foundational. By virtue of this union, your indwelling sin’s mastery has been broken. Burial with him confirms the definiteness of your union in his death. Burial is a decisive event that unequivocally testifies that a man’s life is no longer his own but belongs to God. Burial with Christ is the seal set to the fact of your death with him and shows that your old life is over and that you no longer are under your indwelling sin’s dominion. Therefore you are to “reckon yourselves to be dead indeed to sin” (6:11). And this is meant to arm you to say no to sin’s devices so that you do not “obey it in its lusts” or “present your members as instruments of unrighteousness to sin” (6:12-13).
And yet in the claiming of your life imaged in burial with his Son, God calls you to much more than a negative morality (in which you simply say no to sin). There also is a positive morality to be embraced, a new life to be lived, in which you reckon yourself to be alive to God (6:11) and present your members as instruments of righteousness to him (6:13). Paul also includes this in his argument from baptism. Death and burial w/ Christ have a larger purpose than death to sin. Continuing with the imagery of baptism, Paul says, “we were buried with him through baptism into death, in order that just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, even so we also should walk in newness of life.”
The ultimate purpose of union with Christ is a new life marked by walking with God in obedience to his law. And this is the ultimate symbolism of baptism. Just as believers are reckoned as in Christ in his death and burial, so we are also in his resurrection. And joined to him in his resurrection, we are to live in the light of this fact. As Paul says later in this chapter, “For the death that he died, he died to sin once for all [and we in him]; but the life that he lives, he lives to God. Likewise you also, reckon yourselves to be dead indeed to sin, but alive to God in Christ Jesus our Lord” (6:10-11).
This being “alive to God” is seen in our “walking in newness of life.” The image of “walking” of course refers to conducting one’s life in a certain way or direction–in this case, in a life of fellowship with God and service to him and in obedience to his moral law. Thus the term “newness” refers not just to something new in our experience but also to a quality of life unlike the lawless life to which we have died in Christ. In view is a present experience of what Paul later calls that “eternal life” that is “the gift of God in Christ” (6:23). This is the kind of life that we will be enjoy in fulness at the end of our earthly life, but it is also the kind of life that we now may experience in a substantial and an increasing measure as part of a normal earthly Christian life.
In the rest of the chapter Paul expands on the moral implications of union with Christ. He directs us to a life of faith in which we receive as true our union with Christ in his death, burial, and resurrection. By faith we embrace the truth of the end of sin’s lawful rule over us, and we embrace as fact that we have been made “alive to God in Christ Jesus our Lord,” so that we may walk in newness of life. Yogi Berra said that 90% of baseball is half mental. We can say the same about the Christian life–at the mental level, we are to reckon ourselves dead to sin but alive to God. But that’s only half the story. The imperatives of vv. 12-13 take us far beyond any idea of passivity. Here he speaks of a life of active resistance to indwelling sin’s efforts to reassert its rule. He does not say, “Reckon yourself dead to sin and alive to God and his Spirit will step in and you can step out of the battle with your remaining sin.” No, he addresses you, and exhorts you to resist. You have not been made “dead to sin” and “alive to God” so that you need do nothing.
As with resisting the devil, so resisting your sin’s efforts to reassert its mastery over you is active business, in which you are to use means. This is the one-half of the battle with sin that is not mental but that involves all the members of your body, guided by a new will that is set free from the necessity to serve sin. Paul here then exhorts you to exercise the faculty of choice (the choice of a will now freed from sin’s dominion) one temptation at a time. You are to do this negatively and positively, choosing “not to present your members as instruments of unrighteousness to sin, but to present yourselves to God as being alive from the dead, and your members as instruments of righteousness to God.”
Your members are the parts and faculties of your redeemed humanity, i.e., of your new man–physical and mental–your hands, feet, eyes, ears, tongues, sexual organs, as well as all the faculties of the inner man–your minds, affections, consciences. Faced with temptation, and armed with the truth that these things are not under sin’s mastery, you are to say to the flesh,
These are not yours, to do with as you please. These are free of your rule. You have no right to their service. They will not be for you the instruments of unrighteousness but instruments of righteousness to God. They will serve him. They belong to him. By the strength that he gives, I resist you. And by the strength that he gives I will serve him.
This is to be our continual response to sin’s efforts to reassert its rule. And the promise that the Lord makes to all who pray and trust and energetically resist the flesh is this: “For sin shall not have dominion over you, for you are not under law but under grace” (6:14).
The last part of this verse, of course, is one of the most abused statements in Scripture. God’s law has two powers: the power to prescribe right and wrong, and the power to condemn transgression of its precepts. This second function is “the curse of the law” (Gal. 3:16). Evangelicals agree that Christ’s death has ended the condemning power of the law in the case of all those for whom he died. Many however also argue for a view of the Christian life in which the believer is freed from the prescribing power of God’s law as well. This view usually includes the idea that Christ has put self-denying love in the place of the moral law. But when we ask, what does love look like in specific situations, if we are biblical in our answer, we must say that the specific commands of the moral law define the duties of love. Paul makes this point at 13:8-10. It will not do then to say that the Christian ethic is about love but not about law.
Paul has spoken therefore of our liberty from the rule of indwelling sin. H has also called us to “present ourselves to God as being alive from the dead, and our members as instruments of righteousness to him.” From these words we must deduce that our liberty from sin’s dominion is not meant to be used independently of any master but in the service of righteousness and under God’s rule. And the standard by which this life is to be lived is God’s law. The terms that Paul uses make this deduction inescapable. He speaks of “sin” not just as a law in our members but also as acts against God’s law. The terms “righteousness” and “unrighteousness” also have no meaning apart from the idea of God’s law. So also with the term “holiness” (6:22). It is no surprise then that in chap. 7, Paul at last comes to the subject of the believer’s relation to God’s law.
He begins with an illustration taken from the law of marriage. In applying this imagery, he says, “you also have become dead to the law through the body of Christ, that you may be married to another” (7:4). Earlier he said that we are not “under law but under grace” (6:14), meaning that God’s grace has freed us from the law’s condemning power. So also here, when he says that you have become “dead to the law,” he means dead to its condemning power. If he also means dead to the law as a rule of righteousness, then we will be at a loss to say what he means by the purpose of our marriage to Christ being to bear fruit unto God. Even as sin (disobedience of God’s law) bears “fruit unto death,” so the “fruit unto God” which is the issue of our marriage to Christ must be understood in terms of acts done in obedience to God’s law. And this is confirmed by the words of 7:6: “we have been delivered from the law, having died to what we were held by, so that we should serve (whom? God and righteousness, and God’s law in its prescriptive role as a rule of life, cf., 7:25, and how?) in the newness of the Spirit, not in the oldness of the letter.”
The unbeliever’s life is the old way of the letter, i.e., of the law as condemner. This life of service to the law leads to death (“for the letter kills,” 2 Cor. 3:6). The believer’s life, however, is lived in the new way of the Spirit, who performed a circumcision of the heart that the law could not perform (2:29, “the letter kills, but the Spirit gives life,” 2 Cor. 3:6). And it is by the Spirit’s power that we serve God’s law as a rule of life. Note also Paul’s remarks at 8:5-9. The plain implication of these words (esp. “they that are after the Spirit mind the things of the Spirit”) is that the renewed mind, which is set on the things of the Spirit, can and will submit itself to the law of God as a rule of conduct. As Paul says at 7:25, “with the mind I myself serve the law of God.”
Beginning at 7:7, Paul adopts the first person and his words become very personal. His own experience illustrates the relation that the Christian has to God’s law. He speaks first of his relation to God’s law as an unbeliever and then as a Christian–as Shedd says, first as unconvicted and then under conviction, then as a believer contending with his remaining depravity. In the process of doing this, Paul defends the character of God’s law. It is holy, righteous, and good. Its function is to reveal sin. And because of this, it is a rule of life, since that which reveals the boundaries of sin reveals also the features of the righteousness that pleases God. We pass by vv. 7-13, where he speaks of the role of the 10th Commandment in his own conversion. He says that God’s moral law came to bear on his conscience and convinced him that he was a sinner in need of a righteousness that he did not possess. And in this role, he concluded, “the law is holy, and the commandment holy, and righteous, and good” (7:12). This, of course, is an illustration of our earlier premise–that the work of the law in the unbeliever’s conscience prepares the way for the work of the gospel.
At 7:14ff. he depicts his experience as a Christian, for whom the moral law is a rule of life. If you do not approach the text this way, you will never make sense of it in any way that relates to experimental Christianity. Here Paul describes his experience as a believer–not at all times but on those occasions when he yields to the efforts of his remaining sin to reassert its mastery over him. Psychologically this is a complex experience (as Paul’s description of it shows), but we must pass by all that to come to what Paul says about the law.
Paul the Christian describes the battle between what he calls “the law of my mind” and “the law of sin that is in my members,” i.e., between his renewed will and his remaining sin. But in this battle how did he view the moral law and his relation to it? Four things:
1. “The law is spiritual” (7:14). This may point to the divine origin and character of the moral law or to the fact that the law addresses our inner man as well as our outward actions, holiness of heart as well as holiness of deed. This is how Paul experienced the 10th commandment in his conversion. He certainly uses the word “spiritual” to describe the law’s character in contrast with his carnal behavior, so that he is saying that the law of God accords with the pattern of a “spiritual” life, i.e., a life of walking in the Spirit. However conceived, in this role the moral law is still in force: “the law is (present tense) spiritual.”
2. “I agree with the law that it is good” (7:16). Here Paul describes his attitude towards God’s law even when he disobeys it. When he sins against the prevailing commitment of his mind and heart to God’s law (when “what I would not, that I do”), he does not, however, in his conscience repudiate the law as the moral standard by which his actions are to be judged. Describing his experience of self-condemnation that inevitably follows, he says, “I agree with the law that it is good.” Again, he maintains the present validity of the moral law. In his thinking, it remains the standard by which his sin is to be measured, even as a Christian.
3. “I delight in the law of God after the inward man” (7:22). Read 7:22-23. In his battle with his flesh, in resisting the efforts of his indwelling sin to reassert rule over him, Paul recognizes the presence and vigor of a “different law.” The prevailing disposition of his inner man, however, is commitment to God’s law. As he says, “I delight in the law of God after the inward man.” In spite of the struggle and frustration that he experiences in his battle with his remaining sin, he delights in God’s law, not in a surface, external way, but in the deepest recesses of his soul. He regards God’s law as spiritual and good and he acknowledges that it is the rule by which he is to live as a Christian and by which his conscience is to judge him. He does not resent the moral law. It is the delight of his heart. Paul echoes the words of the psalmist:
I love your commandments above gold, yea, above fine gold. Therefore I esteem all your precepts concerning all things to be right; and I hate every false way. Your testimonies are wonderful; therefore my soul keeps them. The opening of your words gives light; it gives understanding to the simple. I opened wide my mouth, and panted; for I longed for your commandments . . . Your law is my delight (Psa. 119:127-31, 174).
Does Paul delight in a law which is no longer in force? Does he have merely an antiquarian interest in a dead code? No. He delights in what God’s moral law is to him now as a Christian.
4. “I of myself with the mind, indeed, serve the law of God” (7:25). Here he sums up this warfare. He acknowledges the continuing presence of the flesh and concedes that it serves the law of sin. This is the source of the cry of verse 24. He also says, however, that “with the mind,” with the consent of who he most deeply and centrally is as a new man in Christ, he “serves the law of God.” The moral law is more to him than an object that he avows is spiritual and good. And it is more than an object in which his soul delights. It is much more! His positive view of God’s law came to practical expression in his seeking to serve God’s moral law in his walk as a Christian. If this had not been the case, he would have had no reason to believe that he was a Christian. And though he struggles greatly with his remaining sin, God (not his remaining sin) is his Master. And he serves God’s law because it is his Master’s revealed will.
In sum, God’s moral law, which once convinced Paul that he was a sinner in need of a righteousness that he did not possess, continues as the rule of his Christian life. He serves his Lord by walking in the light of it–all of it, for there is no hint in what he says that he regards any moral commandment differently from the rest.
Our time is gone, but in closing I want to press one point. Is Paul’s experience your experience? In spite of the struggle and frustration of continual war with the flesh, do you still regard God’s law as holy and righteous and good. Do you delight in it, and most importantly do you strive to serve it? For example, the 7th commandment when you are at your computer? The 3rd commandment in your handling holy things (including preaching the word)? The 4th commandment in how you spend the Lord’s day? As a general rule, holiness will rise no higher in our sheep than it does in us. And therefore before we preach the law to our people, let us be sure to preach it to ourselves.
All rights reserved.
