Step 6: We Are Dead to Sin and Alive to God
In the same way, count yourselves dead to sin but alive to God in Christ Jesus Romans 6:11
Paul is emphatic that God’s grace not only forgives sin but actually delivers the Christian from sinning. Grace does more than justify; it also sanctifies. It unites us to Christ (6:1-14) and brings us into slavery to righteousness (6:15-23). God has decisively changed the believer’s position in relationship to sin. Paul is explaining this change in eight steps.
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)
We come now to the next step
Step 6: we are now what Christ is: ‘dead to sin but alive to God’ (6:11)
If Christ’s death was a death to sin (which it was) and if His resurrection was a resurrection to God (which it was), and if by faith (and pictured in water-baptism) we have been united with Christ in His death and resurrection (which we have been), then we ourselves have died to sin and risen to God. We must therefore ‘count’ ourselves ‘dead to sin but alive to God’ through our union with ‘Christ Jesus.’ We are to remember and realise that our former self did die with Christ. This is a fact. We are ‘dead to sin but alive to God’ through our union with ‘Christ Jesus.’ The score is settled, the debt paid and the law satisfied.
Remember the illustration that closed the last devotional. Imagine your life divided into two books. The first book covers your whole life from birth up until the moment before your conversion and the second from your conversion on until the present. The first book closed with your judicial death; the second opened with your resurrection. It doesn’t require mental gymnastics to recognise the first book is no longer who you are. It was finished a long time back. Your life is now found exclusively in the second book. Going back to the first book means denying your death and resurrection ever took place.
Can a Christian live as if they’re still in their sins? It’s not impossible but it would mean denying who they really are. A core secret of holy living centres in our thinking. It is knowing that our former self was crucified with Christ (6:6), knowing that baptism into Christ is baptism into His death and resurrection (6:11) and then counting, grasping, registering the truth that through Christ we are dead to sin and alive to God. A regenerate Christian should no more consider a return to unregenerate living than adults to their childhood or a freed prisoner to his jail cell. Our union with Christ has severed us from the old life and committed us to the new. Our water baptism stands between the two like a door between two rooms, closing off one and opening to the other. We have died and risen. How can we even think of living in what we’ve already died to?