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“If you’re able, please stand.” Reading Rom. 5:20–6:11. “Thanks be to God.”
Illustration
Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. The main character is Victor Frankenstein. He is consumed by ambition and pride. He goes to university and is captured by the idea of building a man. Eventually he finds the secret to life. Brings his 8-foot tall creation to life. But it all goes wrong. He finds the creature he made hideous and runs away from him. The creator rejects the creature.
The creature eventually leaves the place where Frankenstein made him. Tries to integrate in society, but everywhere he is rejected.
Eventually he reads Milton’s Paradise Lost and he hears the story of Adam and Eve. He hears of another Creator who loves his creature and gives everything desirable to his creature.
Eventually the monster finds the journals of Victor Frankenstein. Reads of the day he was created and Frankenstein’s hatred of him.
Rejected by his creator, the creature attempts to exact his revenge on Frankenstein. Kills the people Frankenstein loves most.
The monster is given new life by a selfish creator who ultimately despises him.
In Romans 1–5 we are told the story of our Creator who we rejected. We were given life but rejected the Creator.
We earned his wrath and deserved God’s judgment for it. We became hideous, murderous creatures. But how did our Creator act toward this horrific rebellion? In wisdom he designed a way for his rebel creatures to be saved.
The rescue is through the gospel:
For I am not ashamed of the gospel, for it is the power of God for salvation to everyone who believes, to the Jew first and also to the Greek. 17 For in it the righteousness of God is revealed from faith for faith, as it is written, “The righteous shall live by faith.” (Rom 1:16–17)
We worked through Romans 1–5 last year. Now we turn to Romans 6–8.
The second major section in the greatest letter ever written. Written by Paul the apostle to the church in Rome.
In Romans 6–8 we focus on “walking in newness of life.”
In chapter 6 we go from justification (chps 1–5) to sanctification. But both are ours in Christ!
What is true of us as Christians? (1) Died to sin; (2) Baptized into Christ; (3) Walk in Newnes of Life.
Prayer
Read Rom. 6:1–2.
Why does this question make sense? Because of what he’s been saying in 3:21–5:22.
Our good works contribute nothing to our salvation, and our sins seem to bring about even more grace. This gospel is not the invention of man!
There are two ways such a gospel can be twisted or criticized.
Paul asks, “Are we to continue in sin that grace may abound?” (Rom 6:1).
The Antinomian is the person who rejects God’s law. The Antinomian says God’s law can’t save, and God’s law isn’t a good guide for life. Paul asks, “Are we continue in sin?” The Antinomian basically says, “Yes.” Not directly. But effectively that’s what they’re saying. The important thing is “authenticity.” “The important thing is to just love people and live in the freeness of God’s love for us. Don’t worry about God’s law, just love.”
The Antinomian rejects the true gospel.
Then there’s the Legalist. The Legalist is the person who says holiness is required to be saved. Grace saves us by making us holy, and holiness is what really saves us. Paul asks, “Are we to continue in sin?” The Legalist says, “No, because our standing before God is all about our obedience.”
But the Legalist rejects the true gospel as well.
Paul asks, “Are we to continue in sin?” but the answer that the true gospel gives is completely unexpected. Read Rom. 6:1–2.
Paul asks his question and then gives a reflex, emotional response: “By no means!” (Rom 6:2).
But then we get his real answer in the form of a question: “How can we who died to sin still live in it?” (Rom 6:2).
Christians are presented here as a special class of people. What defines a Christian is this: They have died to sin.
That’s the idea that is the foundation of everything he says in chapter 6. And to some extent in chapter 7 as well.
Why is it non-sensical to continue to sin, if you are a Christian? For the same reason that you don’t go to a cemetery to recruit athletes for your football team. Dead people can’t play football or do anything else.
You don’t post police officers in cemeteries to prevent people from hurting each other or stealing from each other. Dead people don’t commit crimes.
Paul is saying that as a Christian we have “died to sin,” so how can we “still live in it?”
It’s important to see here, that he doesn’t state this as something that becomes true if you believe it’s true. He states it as a fact. This is true of us, whether we feel like it’s true or not. It’s like saying, “I was born in Newark, Ohio.” However I’m doing feeling emotionally or mentally, it’s simply true that I was born in Newark, Ohio. Nothing can change that fact.
Another part of my identity is that I “died to sin.”
John Murray speaks of this and says it’s almost as if Paul is saying sin is a realm, a place, where we can live. The Christian no longer lives there. We’re simply not “in that realm or sphere.”[1]
Well, we don’t feel very dead, do we? We feel pretty alive. And if we’re honest, we feel like sin is pretty alive, too. So, what’s going on here?
Paul goes on.
Read Rom. 6:3–4. Paul often answers questions with questions. He takes his question in Rom. 6:2 and then adds another question to answer the question we have.
Now Paul answers for us how it can be that a Christian has “died to sin.” The true gospel has the real answer for the problem of us. The answer isn’t to say it’s no big deal. Or to say you just have to try harder and you’ll stop sinning.
The true gospel answers the problem of sin is the idea that we have brought “into Christ” (Rom 6:3). We were “baptized into Christ.” We were “baptized into his death.”
He’s not saying that “baptism” is a magical ceremony where going into the water makes this true. That idea is sometimes called ex opere operato (“by the work worked.” It means that the sacrament or ceremony affects us without any activity in the recipient. For a Roman Catholic, the baptism of infants washes away original sin, since baptism brings forgiveness of sins.[2]
Paul isn’t teaching that the waters of baptism have some special power.
In the New Testament, conversion and baptism always go together. When a person believes in Jesus, he is baptized. There’s no period of years of waiting. You repent and believe, and then you get baptized.
So, faith and repentance and baptism all go together. The notion of an unbaptized Christian would have made no sense and been seen as something troubling and irregular.
So, when Paul says the Romans were “baptized into Christ Jesus,” he’s speaking of their conversion. Being “baptized into Christ Jesus” is a work that the Spirit does when we’re converted. The Spirit takes us from being outside of Christ to being “in Christ Jesus.”
The water of baptism is a “sign and seal” of this reality, but the water doesn’t make it happen.
***Next week we’re going to devote a sermon to the topic of baptism.
Saying “baptized into Christ Jesus” is like Jesus is the deep, refreshing pool, and in baptism we go into him and are covered up by him. We are immersed by Christ.
What Paul is getting at here we sometimes call “union with Christ.” When we are converted, there’s a deep spiritual connection that’s made between us and Christ. We call it being united with Christ or union with Christ.
John Calvin:
How do we receive those benefits which the Father bestowed on his only-begotten Son—not for Christ’s own private use, but that he might enrich poor and needy men? First, we must understand that as long as Christ remains outside of us, and we are separated from him, all that he has suffered and done for the salvation of the human race remains useless and of no value for us. Therefore, to share with us what he has received from the Father, he had to become ours and to dwell within us.
John Calvin, Institutes (3.1.1)
Paul has many ways of speaking to this union.
Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us in Christ with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places, 4 even as he chose us in him before the foundation of the world, that we should be holy and blameless before him. (Eph 1:3–4)
But in Romans 6 the accent is different. It’s on the way our union with Christ connects us to his actions at the cross.
In Rom. 6:3–4 union with Christ means being united with him in his:
Burial is important, because that’s what confirms the death. The death was final, complete, real. We know that because a burial took place.
Christ’s death will get a lot of focus in Romans 6. Because at death is where Christ stopped being affected by sin. After Christ’s death, temptation no longer existed for him.
When he was resurrected, there is no more power the devil has over him. No more temptations.
Before Christ’s death, there are his temptations in the wilderness (Matt 4) and his temptation in the Garden of Gethsemane (Matt 26:36–46).
But after his death, it’s over. He “died to sin.” And because Christ “died to sin” and we are in Christ, then we, too, “died to sin.”
Union doesn’t stop at death, though. We are also united with Christ in his resurrection!
John Murray:
Death to sin is not of itself an adequate characterization of the believer’s identity; it is basic and it is the fundamental premise of the argument. But death to sin is but the precondition of that life which is the final issue of grace. And baptism as signifying union with Christ (v. 3) must mean also union with Christ in his resurrection and therefore in his resurrection life....We cannot be partakers of Christ’s resurrection life unless we are partakers of his death, and death is certified and confirmed in burial.
John Murray, Romans[3]
Read Rom. 6:4.
Let’s go back to Paul’s question in Rom. 6:2.
His answer involves the fact we “died to sin” through union with Christ.
But the passage doesn’t end with death or even resurrection. It ends with us “walking in newness of life.”
In Shelley’s Frankenstein, part of the cruelty of Victor Frankenstein is that he brought this lifeless thing to life and then abandoned him. He never gave to him what he needed to be a moral, good creature. Instead, he became a monster.
The true gospel unites us with Christ so that we can LIVE DIFFERENTLY. The power of sin is broken because of our union with Christ. And the result? We “walk in newness of life.”
“Walk” is a common way to talk about the life of the Christian and the follower of God.
In Ephesians:
I therefore, a prisoner for the Lord, urge you to walk in a manner worthy of the calling to which you have been called. (Eph 4:1)
Look carefully then how you walk, not as unwise but as wise. (Eph 5:15)
To “walk in newness of life” means to live a holy life, an obedient life, a life empowered by Christ.
Union with Christ means going from sin to “walking in newness of life.” Union with Christ brings a radical, transforming effect.
Examples:
It makes sense if you remember passages like John 15, the vine and the branches. Jesus talked about being the vine, and we are the branches. Branches connected to a healthy vine bear good fruit. They can’t help it! They get all the nutrients and water they need.
But that connection is a union—union of branch and vine. The branch is in the vine, and the vine is in the branch.
Our union with Christ brings that same kind of fruit.
We will need to work and exercise faith. But the union with Christ is what brings to us the blessings and fruit and “newness of life.”
The gospel of free grace is so lavish with grace, so generous toward sinners, that grace abounds more where there’s more sins.
But have you received this gospel of such grace?
“For God so loved the world, that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life.” (John 3:16)
Receive it today!
The gospel of such grace to sinners prompts Paul’s question, “Are we to continue in sin that grace may abound?”
The answer is, “Absolutely not!”
Why? Because we are united with Christ. We are baptized into Christ in his death, burial, and resurrection.
The result? Now we can “walk in newness of life.”
There’s a reminder in these verses of what is true of us in Christ. There’s also a reminder here of what kind of statement our baptism makes.
Sinclair Ferguson summarizes it:
What baptism says, and the message faith receives from it:
I am no longer the person I was in Adam; I am a new person in Jesus Christ.
In Christ I am someone who has died to the dominion of sin and been raised to new life.
In Christ I am someone who has been delivered from the dominion of sin and has been transferred into the kingdom of God.
Sinclair Ferguson, Devoted to God[4]
Next week we’ll look more at the topic of baptism.
In Christ, everything is different. We’re no Frankenstein monster, made by a creator who hates us.
We’re filled with the very life of our Creator, united with him now and forever.
And able to walk in newness of life.
Are you discouraged by besetting sins, sins that won't die?
[1] John Murray, Romans, NICNT (Eerdmans), 1:213.
[2] See https://www.catholic.com/magazine/print-edition/to-explain-infant-baptism-you-must-explain-original-sin.
[3] John Murray, Romans, NICNT, 1:216.
[4] Sinclair Ferguson, Devoted to God (Banner of Truth, 2016), 88.
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