I remember when I first discovered Romans 6 as a student. It felt like wonderful dynamite! `Sin shall not have dominion over you’, it said (I was reading the AV in those days). `Reckon ye yourselves to be dead indeed unto sin… For he that is dead is freed from sin’. Can this be? Fantastic! We’re risen with Christ, guaranteed victory in our lives. These weren’t `ought-to-bes’; on Scripture’s authority they were facts, realities, now! Triumph! For a while it was my favourite chapter.
And then, somehow, it lost its shine; I couldn’t quite remember how it worked. Yet, it was obviously a potential life-changer.
In our next three posts we’re going to seek to figure this vital, practical matter out…
First, let’s get some context. Romans is Paul’s clearest expression of the gospel, of just how God’s people live by faith (cf 1:15-17). We’ve probably got some feel for his first five chapters, or at least for their basic ideas:
The horror of human lostness and alienation, with no future except God’s wrath (read ch1)
(By the way: I never used to understand why in chapter 1 Paul focuses quite so much importance on the spread of LGB behaviours, apparently as if they were particularly far-reaching and damaging results of a culture’s longterm rejection of God. I think I do now. Anyway: )
No one is truly `righteous’ – every one of us, `religious’ Jews as much as pagans, are equally lost, equally sinners, and equally fall short of God’s holy glory (read 2:1-3:20);
God’s magnificent solution, forgiveness through faith in Jesus’ death for all of us (read 3:21-31);
The way that this faith fulfils the old testament, so that even Abraham was justified through faith, not the sacrament of circumcision (read ch4);
and finally the glorious assertion that now, `since we have been justified by faith, we have peace with God‘ – security, freedom from his judgment, assurance that He has done all we could ever need; and His love being poured into our hearts by the Holy Spirit. Jesus has put triumphantly right everything that went wrong from the very beginning (read ch5).
Glory to You in the highest, Lord Christ! These are the most important ideas in the world; if we haven’t mastered them we must, because for everyone around us they represent the difference between life and death. If our church is doing its job they’ll have been preached quite frequently. They comprise about five pages in our new testament – thirty minutes’ reading? Doubtless we all need to reread them every few years.
But that’s chapters 1-5. Somewhere round ch6, my own grasp of Romans tended to falter… And that, since Romans is Paul’s expression of the real basics, was a real pity; doubly so since, when we read it, Romans 6 seems to hold one of the `keys to the universe’. It promises us something enormous: `Sin shall not be your master!’ (v14, NIV now as usual). Let’s absorb just what that verse means: There are absolutely no wrongful or destructive actions that we cannot, as believers, break free from doing!
Think about that! – temper; deceit/lying; grudges; greed; prayerlessness; lust; selfishness; all can be overcome! Wonderful! But…. Well: it’s seriously irritating when you have a vital key in your hands, you know it’s the right key but you still can’t turn the lock…
And that was my situation. To make matters worse, on rereading it I found Paul didn’t say quite what I thought. It wasn’t merely, You are dead with Christ therefore you’re guaranteed victory; Paul then went on, `Sin shall not have dominion over you, for you are not under law but under grace’; whatever that meant (v14). Frankly, it felt like a backward step, one I didn’t understand. Surely freedom from the law was something to do with my getting forgiven and saved and born again, not with my ongoing Christian life. Still, one has to be disciplined and, when a biblical writer doesn’t say what we want, to try to adjust… But the gloss had gone off the passage. Like the Pink Floyd album from the same era, it didn’t get thrown away, but it didn’t get listened to so often either.
And somehow, as the years go by, `freedom from sin’ seems less of a passionate concern than it did at 20? I wonder how older readers feel. Does that very phrase have a ring of earlier years, of deeper hunger for holiness, of passions and heights and depths that go with first love? At our stage in life we’ve identified an acceptable level of compromise that we feel we can reasonably account for to God at the final judgment seat; and, well, anyway, somehow one doesn’t think that way quite so often, what with everything else that’s going on.
And yet – we know holiness really does matter. A fair proportion of the old testament seems given over to underlining brutally just how much it matters. `Make every effort to… be holy’, says Hebrews, writing, presumably, not just for under-20s: `Without holiness no one will see the Lord.’ `Everyone who has this hope in him purifies himself’ (1 John 3:2-3). Hmmm. `Freed from sin… Sin shall not have dominion over you’: did Paul mean it?
… What then is Romans 6 promising, and how do we access it? We’ll try to answer that in these next posts…
Two PSs: First, a book’s `basic ideas’, such as I’ve tried to summarize here, may not be the same as the author’s most pressing personal concerns when he wrote. It certainly seems that Paul was seeking here to provide the church at the empire’s centre to which many visitors came, with a thorough and accurate presentation of the gospel (so crucial, 1:14-16). Perhaps too he was aiming to provide a presentation of his own message before his hoped-for arrival, combating misrepresentations of it by judaizers, while building up the Roman believers? But also, doesn’t the argument of Romans seem to come to summation in the call for unity among real Jesus-followers in 15:5-13? – with a sense of Paul’s task having been completed by 15:15 (`I have written boldly to you’), and what follows being a series of `PSs’? (His aid project (15:25-27) is then a very practical way of sealing this unity.) If so, doesn’t it suggest that Paul’s pressing concern when writing Romans was to bind together Jews and Gentiles in unified praise (15:6-7), breaking down the agelong division, as the mission to the world went forward? Thus chs1-3 present both Gentiles and Jews needing the same salvation; chs9-11 show them both headed for the same glory. But then, God used this occasion also to give us a brilliant presentation of the gospel’s fundamentals! Also: Romans is a book where we can often do with some serious help. John Stott’s commentary in the Bible Speaks Today series is, as usual with Stott, a classic, clear, thought-provoking guide, the kind every young Christian should work through in their first five years in the faith. Or for a really thorough, scholarly, detailed commentary, Douglas Moo (New International Commentary on the New Testament) is magnificent.
