6 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? 3 Or don’t you know that all of us who were baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death? 4 We were therefore buried with him through baptism into death in order that, just as Christ was raised from the dead through the glory of the Father, we too may live a new life.
A very common, and very wrong, conclusion to Paul's teaching that justification only comes by grace through faith apart from any works of the law, is that it opens the door to rampant sinning. After all, the more sin there is, the more forgiveness there is, and the more God's grace shines brighter. Does Paul's teaching open the door to careless living and a disregard for holiness?
Absolutely not, no way, no how - may it never be! His answer is "We died to sin; how can we live in it any longer?" What does this mean? First of all, it's a rhetorical question. Meaning, the answer is so obvious that the question doesn't need an answer. We can't! If we've died to sin, we can't go on living in it.
I love John Piper's introduction to looking deeply at this passage....
J. I. Packer compares the old English Puritans who lived and suffered from 1550 to 1700 with the Redwoods of California. They were giants whose roots were incredibly deep in the Bible, and whose branches reached to the heavens, and whose trunks were so strong and durable they could endure forest fires that scar them but don't kill them. But then Packer looks out over the pragmatic American landscape of our quick fixes for life's problems and our impatience with depth and complexity and pain, and says, "Affluence seems for the past generation to have been making dwarfs and deadheads of us all."1
Here's the difference between the pragmatists and the Puritans: pragmatists do not have the patience to sink the roots of hospitality and brotherly kindness and authentic love in the deep rock of Romans 6-8. We want to jump straight from justification to the practical application of chapter 12. Just give us a list. Tell us what to do. Fix the problem at the immediate surface level, so it goes away. But the Puritans were different. They looked at the book of Romans and saw that life is built another way. Being a sage, being a Redwood, being unshakable in storm and useful in times of indescribable suffering – that does not come quickly or easily. Romans is not two chapters long. It is 16 chapters long. It does not skip from chapter 5 to 12. It leads us down deep into the roots of godliness, so that when we come up, we are not people with lists, but people with unshakable life and strength and holiness and wisdom and love.
Why not? Paul answers starting in v3. When Christ dies, we died to sin with Him. When Christ rose, we were made alive in Him. And therefore, we are commanded to become in practice what we are in Christ - dead to sin and alive to God.
Just as we are justified because of unity with Christ, so do believers die with Christ because of our unity with Him. Therefore, we cannot go on living in sin.
Yes, we will still sin. We are not perfect. Becoming a Christian doesn't make us able to live perfect lives. That's not what Paul is saying. He's saying that we can't live in sin, we can't continue in sin, we can't allow sin to reign over us. when we have become united with Christ in his death, we cannot go on with an unchanged pattern of sin in our lives.... Being freed from the mastery or enslavement or dominion of sin is not the same as being sinlessly perfect....
If you are a Christian, God created a union between you and Christ, as verse 5 says. Because of this union, you died with Christ, when he died. Because you died, you are now free from the guilt and power of sin in your fullest and truest identity, that is, in your union with Christ. And because of this unshakable position and identity, you are already justified, and you are most certainly being sanctified, but you are not yet perfected. Therefore, confirm this great transaction by reckoning yourself to be what you really are in Christ.
That being said, I couldn't close without a few thoughts from John MacArthur as well....
Paul would not abandon grace to accommodate the legalists. And he would not abandon grace to restrict the libertine....
you don't need externally to control people who are redeemed because there is planted within them a control principle by virtue of the new nature, the new life which is under the control of the Holy Spirit of God so that the thing functions internally not externally....
Holiness is as much a gift of God to the believer as redemption is in the saving act. When a person is redeemed it is not only a divine transaction, it is a divine miracle of transformation. It is not only legal, it is real. It is not God just saying - Now you're saved. It is God transforming you. It is not only God saying something to be true, it is God making it true. It is not only God declaring you righteous, it is God recreating you in righteousness. You see, as I've been trying to point out earlier in the book of Romans, God doesn't say things that aren't so. And He's not about to call people righteous who aren't. And so, sanctification and justification are linked..
"Shall we continue in sin that grace may abound?" ....Shall we go on with that same relationship where sin had full control and we yielded fully to it, it was an unbroken habit? Are we going to continue that same abiding within the house of sin?.....In other words, to put it theologically, does justification not necessarily connect to sanctification? Can a person be saved and go on in the same life pattern? Can there be a divine transaction that has no impact on the life? Some in our Christian culture would say yes. Yes, if you've ever asked Jesus in your heart no matter what your life is like, you can be sure you're going to go to heaven. In other words, justification can exist apart from sanctification. One writer, current writer, says, "You can be saved and have absolutely no fruit. You can be saved and have no evidence, no practical righteousness. It isn't desirable, it isn't God's will, it isn't best but it is possible."
Let me put the question this way: does the gospel allow men to be unholy? Can you be really saved and unholy and continue to remain in, abide in, stay in, live in the same relationship to sin you had before? That's the question. Let's look at the answer in verse 2. "May me genoito," you don't see that in your Bible, it says "God forbid." But me genoitodoes not translate "God forbid." It is an idiom, the strongest reaction possible. It is outraged indignation. To put it in the words of my grandmother, "Perish the thought." You remember that one? To put it in the contemporary vernacular, "No way!" May it never be. It is denial with an abhorrence of such a thought. The very suggestion is thoroughly obnoxious to Paul. So that he doesn't spew out some great argument, he just says no, no, no. It is a blunt formula..by no means, absolutely not. A Christian continuing to remain in, abide in, live in sin is not only impermissible, it is impossible. The thought only creates disgust...
How shall we that have died to sin live any longer in it? He says it's impossible. You can't sustain the same relationship to sin you had before because you've died to it...Death and life are not compatible. I mean, you can't be dead and alive at the same time...So it is a fundamental logical contradiction for a Christian to be living in sin when he has died to it. You see? In a definite act in the past time, a once for all definite break with sin was made. That is a part of the believer's identity. And a believer cannot therefore live in sin. If a man lives in sin, if he abides in sin, if he continues in sin he is not a believer...
When you became a Christian you were immersed into Jesus Christ...we are baptized into Jesus Christ. We are placed in, immersed in deeply into Christ.
Now, I believe this is used metaphorically here. That is, it's not talking about H2o. I think he's speaking as he does in terms of baptism in 1 Corinthians 12 when he says we have all been baptized with the Holy Spirit. And he's not talking about water there, he's talking about an immersing ministry where the Spirit of God...the Christ is the baptizer and through the agency of the Spirit of God, He immerses in the Spirit and thereby in the church which carries in it the universal life of the Spirit. Now these are profound thoughts. But it's speaking metaphorically. We are fused into, immersed deeply into Jesus Christ. It speaks of an intimate, personal fellowship....
when you were saved, you were placed into Jesus Christ....We died with Christ. We rose with Christ. We ascend with Christ. We reign with Christ. And he says at the end of the third chapter of Revelation, "It is given to you to sit with Me in My throne."
So, listen...I mean, just from that alone, if we close the book of Romans and went home, we would know that it is impossible for a person to continue in the same relationship to sin that he had before that because he has been fused with Jesus Christ who is eternally holy....
We are identified not only in Christ but particularly in His death and resurrection....when you were saved, when you came to Jesus Christ and put your faith in Him, by some divine miracle you were placed into Jesus Christ and you were taken back 2,000 years and you died and you were buried and you were buried so that the old life could die and that you could rise to walk in what? Newness of life. A death took place and what comes out of that grave is something very different than what went into that grave. "If any man be in Christ he is a new creation."
So, the purpose for you dying to sin was so that you might live to God. Now, beloved, I think this is a very simple truth. Christians are different. And so, when you ask the question - well, let's just go on sinning. No, no, no, you can't do that. It is not that you don't have permission, it is that you can't do it because you're in a different sphere. You can't go on living in sin. You can't have the constant same habitual remaining in sin that characterized your former life. That's going to be different....This is a tremendous truth that when you come to Christ you are immersed in His death and you rise to walk in new life. You are totally different. We die in Christ in order to live in Christ. We share His death in order to partake of His life. We are justified to be sanctified. They are inseparable realities.....
We must be reconciled to God in order to be holy and we cannot be reconciled without becoming holy....
So, as Christ died and rose, so His people die to sin and rise to God. As Christ's resurrection life was the certain consequence of His death, so the believer's holy life is the certain consequence of His resurrection and death to sin. And now we walk in newness of life....
Being a Christian is not getting something new, it is becoming someone new. It means we have died to sin in our new nature. Sin no longer is the abiding power in our life. Marvelous...and all of this is more than something God says about us, it's something God did for us. ...
If you came to Christ, you've been saved unto holiness. You're not the same. You're different. And if you're not different, you better examine yourself to see whether you're in the faith.
Tomorrow's scripture focus: Romans 6:5-7
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