Step 1: We Died to Sin
What shall we say, then? Shall we go on sinning so that grace may increase? By no means! We died to sin; how can we live in it any longer? Romans 6:1,2
Paul begins with a vehement denial of any thought that God’s grace gives us license to sin, ‘Shall we go on sinning so that grace may increase? By no means!’ He then presents eight steps to explain his position:
Step 1: we died to sin (6:2)
Step 2: how we died to sin was through our being united with Christ in
His death as portrayed in our baptism (6:3)
Step 3: having shared in Christ’s death, we now also share in His
resurrection (6:4,5)
Step 4: our former self was crucified with Christ so that we might be
freed from sin’s slavery (6:6,7)
Step 5: both the death and resurrection of Christ were decisive events:
He died to sin once for all and lives continually before God (6:8-10)
Step 6: we are now what Christ is: ‘dead to sin but alive to God’ (6:11)
Step 7: being alive from death we must now offer our bodies to God as
instruments of righteousness (6:12,13)
Step 8: sin shall not be our master because our position has radically
changed from being ‘under law’ to being ‘under grace.’ Grace
does not encourage sin; it outlaws it (6:14)
Step 1: we died to sin (6:2)
‘We died to sin; how can we live in it any longer?’ (6:2) or more literally: ‘We died to sin [in the past]; how then shall we live in it [in the future]?’ Paul is not talking about the impossibility of sin in believers but the moral and spiritual contradiction of it.
What does Paul mean by ‘died to sin’? He does not mean that Christians are no longer tempted by sin or that we are incapable of sinning. The commands in 6:11-14 are completely unnecessary if we were genuinely unresponsive to temptation. Why then does Paul use the imagery of ‘death’? Death is often represented in the scriptures in legal terms more than physical – not as a lying motionless but as the just penalty for sin. Whenever sin and death are coupled, from Genesis (‘when you eat … [sin], you will surely die’ [2:7]) to Revelation where the state of the unrepentant is called ‘the second death,’ the essential reason for the coupling of the two is that sin’s penalty is death. In Christ’s case, ‘The death he died, he died to sin once for all’ (6:10). The obvious meaning of this is that Christ bore sin’s condemnation, namely death. He met its claim. He paid its penalty and He did it ‘once for all.’ Because of this, sin has no more claim on Him. God raised Him from the dead to demonstrate His utter satisfaction with His sin-bearing and He now lives forever in God’s presence.
What is true of Christ is true of us. We too have ‘died to sin’ through our union with Christ. He died, not just instead of us as our substitute, (so we never need to die for our own sins), but He also died for us, as our representative, so we can be said to have died in and through Him. ‘We are convinced that one died for all, and therefore all died’ (2 Corinthians 5:14). Through our union with Christ, His death becomes our death.