Righteousness in Christian Living: Sanctification (6:1–8:39)
With chapter 6 of this letter, Paul takes up a new topic. However, before we turn to a discussion of that, it might be useful to retrace our steps to see where Paul’s epistle has taken us so far. Actually, we can review Paul’s two major points rather easily on the basis of the comparison between Adam and Christ just completed (5:12-21).
What Adam did brought sin and death to the whole world. None of his descendants in their natural state has any righteousness to offer God. Recall how that conclusion was forced on us in Paul’s first major section (1:18–3:20). Gentiles and Jews alike have sinned and are therefore lacking God’s approval. It makes no difference whether the lack of righteousness was incurred through the coarse immorality of the Gentiles (1:18-32), the selfrighteousness of the moralists (2:1-16), or the double standard of the Jews, who boasted in having God’s law but didn’t keep it (2:17-29). All show the effects of Adam’s sin. All are without righteousness; all lack God’s approval.
But just as what Adam did had the effect of losing righteousness for the human family, so what Christ did had the effect of regaining righteousness for a sinful world (3:21–5:11). Christ came to earth to live the perfect life sinners couldn’t; Christ died the death sinners should have died for their sins. Through the work of this substitute, there is now a righteousness from God, a robe of righteousness to be accepted by sinners through faith.
All believers in Christ receive this “alien righteousness” as Luther called it. It is a righteousness from the outside, credited to the believer without any inner change or moral improvement in the recipient. God declares the believer to be righteous. Hence all of this comes to the believer by grace, purely as a gift from God.
It bears repeating that all of these things come without any change or improvement in the believer. However, subsequent to becoming a child of God by faith and receiving the gift of free and full salvation, there is a marked change and a major transformation that takes place in the life of the believer. It is the change of now leading a life that conforms, more and more, to the will of God. The believer’s new life of faith, often called sanctification, becomes the focus of Paul’s attention in the next three chapters.
It will be immediately evident from Paul’s exposition that the driving force behind the believer’s ongoing attempts to conform to God’s will is that which brought the Christian’s new life in the first place. That powerful force is the death and resurrection of Christ. His death and resurrection free the Christian from an old life of disobedience and empower the Christian to now live a new life obedient to God’s will. Paul will be treating this newfound freedom in
three distinct but somewhat overlapping stages:
freedom from the clutches of sin (chapter 6);
freedom from the domination of the law (chapter 7);
freedom from the fear of death (chapter 8).
Freedom from the clutches of sin
What shall we say, then? Shall we go on sinning so that grace may increase? 2 By no means! We died to sin; how can we live in it any longer?
Paul has made the startling assertion that where sin increased, God’s grace in Christ increased all the more (5:20). The apostle anticipates a perverse logic that might reason, If that’s the case, then why not go on sinning so that grace will increase even more? Paul heads that thought off in no uncertain terms with his curt response, “We died to sin; how can we live in it any longer?”
But how did we die to sin? Paul answers this question with another question—the answer to which is self-evident. “Don’t you know that all of us who were baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death?” he asks. Note the major assumption on Paul’s part that Baptism is a means of grace.
Baptism is effective in doing something. It accomplishes something. What Baptism does is put the baptized person in touch with Christ, or, to be more specific, it makes the baptized person a partner in Christ’s death and burial. “We were therefore buried with him through baptism into death.” This close connection with Christ through Baptism is a theme that will be repeated throughout this section. In fact, the prepositional phrase “with him” occurs five times in verses 4 to 8.