9. God’s people united in Christ

What is immediately noteworthy at the end of Romans 4 and the beginning of Romans 5 is Paul’s change of pronoun to the first person plural, ‘we’. The characteristic pronoun in the first half of Romans 1 is ‘I’ (‘I am not ashamed of the gospel’) and in the second half ‘they’, as Paul portrays the demoralized pagan world. With chapter 2 the pronoun changes to ‘you’ as he addresses first the moralizer (‘You . . . have no excuse’) and then the Jew (‘Now you, if you call yourself a Jew’). In Romans 3 Paul reverts to ‘they’, describing first ‘the whole world held accountable to God’ and then ‘all who believe’, who in the first half of chapter 4 are called the offspring of Abraham. But suddenly, in the last phrase of Romans 4:16, Paul introduces the first person plural by designating Abraham ‘the father of us all’ and (17) ‘our father’.

The first person plural is maintained for the rest of chapter 4, and then Paul begins chapter 5 with a sequence of ‘we’ affirmations: ‘we have peace with God’, ‘we have gained access . . . into this grace’, ‘we boast in the hope of the glory of God’, ‘we also glory in our sufferings’, ‘we [shall] be saved’ and ‘we also boast in God’. By these magnificent statements of faith the apostle identifies himself with all who have been justified by faith, whether Jewish or Gentile, and expresses the solidarity of the people of God, the new community of Messiah Jesus. Hence the title I have given this chapter. Emphasis on the unity of the people of God continues in the second half of chapter 5, as Paul contrasts Adam and Christ, and their respective communities, and in chapter 6 where ‘we’ are characterized first as having died and risen with Christ and then as slaves of God through Christ.

1. The results of justification (5:1–11)

Having explained the need for justification (1:18 – 3:20) and the way of justification (3:21 – 4:25) the apostle now describes its fruits. It is as if he is enlarging on what he has called ‘the blessedness’ of those whom God justifies (4:6).

The whole paragraph (verses 1–11) depends on the opening words: Therefore, since we have been justified through faith . . . Paul makes six bold assertions in the name of all whom God has justified.

a. We have peace with God (5:1)

The pursuit of peace is a universal human obsession, whether it is international, industrial, domestic or personal peace. Yet more fundamental than all these is peace with God, the reconciled relationship with him which is the first blessing of justification. Thus ‘justification’ and ‘reconciliation’ belong together, for ‘God does not confer the status of righteousness upon us without at the same time giving himself to us in friendship and establishing peace between himself and us’. And this peace becomes ours through our Lord Jesus Christ, who was both delivered to death and raised from death (4:25), in order to make it possible. This is the heart of the peace which the prophets foretold as the supreme blessing of the messianic age, the shalom of the kingdom of God, inaugurated by Jesus Christ, the prince of peace.

Moreover, we have peace with God now, Paul writes, as a present possession. But is this the correct reading? In the great majority of manuscripts the verb is in the subjunctive (echōmen, ‘let us have’), not in the indicative (echomen, ‘we have’). In the Greek text the difference is only a single letter, and the pronunciation of the two words will have been almost identical. If echōmen is right, then ‘let us have peace’ would have to be understood as an exhortation to ‘enjoy it to the full’. Yet, in spite of its strong manuscript support, most commentators reject this reading. It seems to be one of those rare cases in which the context must be allowed to take precedence over the text, the internal evidence over the external, theology over grammar. For the paragraph consists of a series of affirmations, and contains not even one exhortation. ‘Only the indicative is consonant with the apostle’s argument.’

b. We are standing in grace (5:2a)

Literally, ‘through him [Christ] we have obtained our introduction into this grace in which we have taken our stand’.

‘Grace’ is normally God’s free and undeserved favour, his unsolicited and unconditional love. But here it is not so much his quality of graciousness as our privileged position of acceptance by him.

Two verbs are used in relation to this grace, denoting respectively our entry into it, and our continuance in it. Both are in the perfect tense. First, we have gained access into this grace. Prosagōgē occurs elsewhere in the New Testament only in Ephesians 2:18 and 3:12. A better translation than ‘access’ (which might suggest that we take the initiative to enter) would be ‘introduction’ (which acknowledges our unfitness to enter, and our need for someone to bring us in). The Greek word has ‘a certain touch of formality’ about it, although it is uncertain whether the imagery is of a person being brought into God’s sanctuary to worship or into a king’s audience chamber to be presented to him.

Second, we have taken our stand firmly in or on this grace into which we have been introduced. Justified believers enjoy a blessing far greater than a periodic approach to God or an occasional audience with the king. We are privileged to live in the temple and in the palace. The perfect tenses express this. Our relationship with God, into which justification has brought us, is not sporadic but continuous, not precarious but secure. We do not fall in and out of grace like courtiers who may find themselves in and out of favour with their sovereign, or politicians with the public. No, we stand in it, for that is the nature of grace. Nothing can separate us from God’s love (8:38f.).

c. We boast in [our] hope of the glory of God (5:2b)

Christian hope (elpis) is not uncertain, like our ordinary everyday hopes about the weather or our health; it is a joyful and confident expectation which rests on the promises of God, as we saw in the case of Abraham. And the object of our hope is the glory of God, namely his radiant splendour which will in the end be fully displayed. Already his glory is being continuously revealed in the heavens and the earth. Already it has been uniquely made known in Jesus Christ, the incarnate Word, most notably in his death and resurrection. One day, however, the curtain will be raised and the glory of God will be fully disclosed. First, Jesus Christ himself will appear ‘with great power and glory’. Second, we will not only see his glory, but be changed into it, so that he will ‘be glorified in his holy people’. Then redeemed human beings, who were created to be ‘the image and glory of God’, but now through sin ‘fall short of the glory of God’ (3:23), will again and in full measure share in his glory (8:17). Third, even the groaning creation ‘will be liberated from its bondage to decay and brought into the freedom and glory of the children of God’ (8:21). The renewed universe will be suffused with its Creator’s glory. All this is included in the glory of God and is therefore the object of our sure hope. We exult in it. And our vision of future glory is a powerful stimulus to present duty.

We pause, after Paul’s first three affirmations about the ‘blessedness’ of the justified, and reflect. The fruits of justification relate to the past, present and future. ‘We have peace with God’ (as a result of our past forgiveness). ‘We are standing in grace’ (our present privilege). ‘We boast [or rejoice] in the hope of glory’ (our future inheritance). Peace, grace, joy, hope and glory. It sounds wonderful. It is – except for Paul’s fourth affirmation.

d. We also glory in our sufferings (5:3–8)

The ‘sufferings’ in mind are not what we sometimes call ‘the trials and tribulations’ of our earthly existence, meaning our aches and pains, fears and frustrations, deprivations and disappointments, but rather thlipseis (literally, ‘pressures’), referring in particular to the opposition and persecution of a hostile world. Thlipsis was almost a technical term for the suffering which God’s people must expect in the last days before the end. So Jesus warned his disciples that ‘in this world’ they would ‘have trouble’, and Paul also warned his converts that they ‘must go through many hardships to enter the kingdom of God’.

What attitude should Christians adopt to these ‘sufferings’? Far from merely enduring them with stoical resilience, we are to glory, or ‘rejoice’, in them. This is not masochism, however, the sickness of finding pleasure in pain. It is rather the recognition that there is a divine rationale behind suffering. First, suffering is the one and only path to glory. It was so for Christ; it is so for Christians. As Paul will soon express it, we are ‘co-heirs with Christ, if indeed we share in his sufferings in order that we may also share in his glory’ (8:17). That is why we are to glory in them both.

Second, if suffering leads to glory in the end, it leads to maturity in the meantime. Suffering can be productive, if we respond to it positively, and not with anger or bitterness. We know this, especially from the experience of God’s people in every generation. Suffering produces perseverance (3, hypomonē, endurance). We could not learn endurance without suffering, because without suffering there would be nothing to endure. Next, perseverance produces character. Dokimē is the quality of a person who has been tested and has passed the test. It is ‘a mature character’, ‘the temper of the veteran as opposed to that of the raw recruit’. Then the last link in the chain is that character produces hope (4), perhaps because the God who is developing our character in the present can be relied on for the future too.

Third, suffering is the best context in which to become assured of God’s love. Of course many people will immediately assert the opposite, since it is suffering which makes them doubt God’s love. But consider Paul’s argument. He has traced the sequence of chain reactions from tribulation to perseverance, from perseverance to character, and from character to hope. Now he adds that hope does not put us to shame (5a), and never will. It will never betray us by proving to be an illusion after all. But how do we know this? What is the ultimate ground on which our Christian hope rests, our hope of glory? It is the steadfast love of God. The reason our hope will never let us down is that God will never let us down. His love will never give us up.

But how can we be sure of God’s love? To be sure of the love of his or her parents is almost indispensable to the healthy emotional development of a child. To be sure of the love of spouse or friend is enormously beneficial for human fulfilment. To be sure of God’s love brings even richer blessings. It is the major secret of joy, peace, freedom, confidence and self-respect.

The apostle spells out two major means by which we come to be sure that God loves us. The first is that God’s love has been poured out into our hearts through the Holy Spirit, who has been given to us (5b). This is the first mention in Romans of the work of the Holy Spirit in the life of the Christian, and it teaches us some important lessons.

The first is that the Holy Spirit is God’s gift to all believers (since Paul is listing the consequences of justification), so that it is not possible to be justified by faith without at the same time being regenerated and indwelt by the Spirit. Second, it teaches us that the Holy Spirit was given to us at a particular time (dothentos, an aorist tense), namely at what is popularly called our ‘conversion’, or when we were justified. Third, having been given to us, one of the Holy Spirit’s distinctive ministries is to pour God’s love into our hearts. Indeed, he has done this in such a way that the initial outpouring remains a permanent flood (ekkechytai, a perfect tense). It is understandable that many see here a reference to the pouring out of the Spirit at Pentecost, since the same verb is used (ekcheō). But to be strictly accurate the apostle writes here not of the outpouring of the Spirit but of the outpouring of God’s love by the ministry of the Spirit in our hearts. The genitive in the expression ‘love of God’ must surely be subjective, not objective, in that it is God’s love for us, not ours for him, which is in mind (niv God’s love). ‘Under the vivid metaphor of a cloudburst on a parched countryside’, what the Holy Spirit does is to make us deeply and refreshingly aware that God loves us. It is very similar to Paul’s later statement that ‘the Spirit himself testifies with our spirit that we are God’s children’ (8:16). There is little if any significant difference between being assured of God’s fatherhood and of his love.

It may be appropriate at this point to refer to the teaching of some Puritan theologians, popularized some years ago by Dr Martyn Lloyd-Jones, that this outpouring of God’s love in the heart, which they also identified as the ‘sealing’ of the Spirit, is an experience subsequent to regeneration and given only to some.

You cannot be a Christian without the Holy Spirit, but you can be a Christian without having the love of God shed abroad in your heart . . . All Christians have not had this experience, but it is open to all; and all Christians should have it.

Dr Lloyd-Jones goes on to cite examples from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries of well-known evangelical leaders who described how God’s love ‘seemed to come in wave after wave until they were melted under the glory of it’.

Now it is not my purpose to deny that such post-conversion deeper, richer, fuller experiences of God’s love are authentic, for they are well documented in Christian biographies, and indeed I think I myself know from experience what it is on occasion to be ‘filled with an inexpressible and glorious joy’. My question is whether Romans 5:5 is primarily intended to describe unusual and overpowering experiences which are given only to some, even if they are ‘open to all’. I do not think so. For Paul applies both his statements (that ‘the Holy Spirit . . . has been given to us’ and that ‘God’s love has been poured out into our hearts’) to the same ‘us’ whom he has in mind throughout this paragraph, namely all justified believers. Should we not say, therefore, from both the Bible and experience, that all Christian people are given by the Holy Spirit some measure of assurance of God’s love (5:5) and fatherhood (8:16)? At the same time we recognize that there are differing degrees in which this assurance is given, and that some of God’s children sometimes are simply overcome by love and joy, until they cry to him to stay his hand, lest they should collapse under the strain. Indeed, it may well be that many spiritual experiences are precisely this – a vivid, heightened, intense, even overwhelming assurance of God’s presence and love.

But God has a second and objective way of assuring us of his love. It is that he has proved his love by Christ’s death on the cross. Previously Paul has written that God demonstrated his justice on the cross (3:25f.). Now he sees the cross as a demonstration of God’s love. Indeed, ‘demonstrate’ is really too weak a word; ‘prove’ would be better. For ‘Christ died for us while we were yet sinners, and that is God’s proof of his love towards us’ (8, reb).

In order to grasp this, we need to remember that the essence of loving is giving. ‘God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son . . . ’ ‘The Son of God . . . loved me and gave himself for me.’ Moreover, the degree of love is measured partly by the costliness of the gift to the giver, and partly by the worthiness or unworthiness of the recipient. The more the gift costs the giver, and the less the recipient deserves it, the greater the love is seen to be. Measured by these standards, God’s love in Christ is absolutely unique. For in sending his Son to die for sinners, he was giving everything, his very self, to those who deserved nothing from him except judgment.

The costliness of the gift is clear. Verses 6 and 8 say only that ‘Christ died’. But verse 10 clarifies who ‘Christ’ is by saying that God reconciled us to himself ‘through the death of his Son’. Formerly God had sent prophets, and sometimes angels. But now he sent his only Son, and in giving his Son he was giving himself. Further, he gave his Son to die for us. Some commentators seem anxious to add that there is no doctrine of atonement here, and certainly no substitutionary doctrine, since the preposition in the expression ‘for us’ is hyper (‘on behalf of’), not anti (‘instead of’). This is a superficial judgment, however. For what is written is that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us (8), and whenever sin and death are coupled in Scripture, death is the penalty or ‘wage’ of sin (6:23; cf. 5:12). This being so, the statement that ‘Christ died for sinners’, that though the sins were ours the death was his, can mean only that he died as a sin offering, bearing in our place the penalty our sins had deserved. This helps us to understand the costliness of the gift.

What about the worthiness of the recipients? We for whom God made this costly sacrifice are described in four ways. First, we are sinners (8), that is, we have departed from the way of righteousness, fallen short of God’s standards and missed the target. Second, at just the right time . . . Christ died for the ungodly (6). Instead of loving God with all our being, we have rebelled against him. Third, ‘we were God’s enemies’ (10). This certainly means that we cherished a deep-seated hostility to God (‘the mind governed by the flesh is hostile to God’, 8:7), a resentment of his authority. But we cannot be satisfied with the notion that the hostility was entirely on our side and not at all on God’s. For in 11:28 the opposite of ‘enemies’ is ‘loved’, so that the word ‘enemies’ must be passive too. The context contains references to God’s wrath (e.g. 5:9), which is God’s holy hatred of sin; and since the reconciliation between God and us is said to have been ‘received’ (11), it cannot mean our turning from our hostility, but must refer to God’s reconciling himself to us. ‘There is not only a wicked opposition of the sinner to God, but a holy opposition of God to the sinner.’

Paul’s fourth description is that we were still powerless (6a), meaning that we were helpless to rescue ourselves. ‘Sinners’, ‘ungodly’, ‘enemies’ and ‘powerless’. This is the apostle’s ugly fourfold portrayal of us. Yet it is for us that God’s Son died. Why, he adds, very rarely will anyone die for a righteous person [probably referring to somebody whose uprightness is rather cold, clinical and unattractive], though for a good person [whose goodness is warm, generous and appealing] someone might possibly dare to die (7). But God [the stark contrast is underlined] demonstrates, even ‘proves’, his own love for us [a love distinct from every other love, a love uniquely God’s own] in this: while we were still sinners [neither good nor righteous, but ungodly, enemies and powerless], Christ died for us (8).

Human beings can be very generous in giving to those they consider worthy of their affection and respect. The unique majesty of God’s love lies in the combination of three factors, namely that when Christ died for us, God (a) was giving himself, (b) even to the horrors of a sin-bearing death on the cross, and (c) doing so for his undeserving enemies.

How, then, can we doubt the love of God? To be sure, we are often profoundly perplexed by the tragedies and calamities of life. Indeed, Paul has been giving his teaching about God’s love within the context of ‘suffering’, which can be very painful. But then we remember that God has both proved his love for us in the death of his Son (8) and poured his love into us by the gift of his Spirit (5). Objectively in history and subjectively in experience, God has given us good grounds for believing in his love. The integration of the historical ministry of God’s Son (on the cross) with the contemporary ministry of his Spirit (in our hearts) is one of the most wholesome and satisfying features of the gospel.

e. We shall be saved through Christ (5:9–10)

So far the apostle has concentrated on what God has already done for us through Christ. We have been justified. We have peace with God. We are standing in grace. We boast in our hope and in our sufferings. Yet there is more – much more – still to come, which is not yet ours. In fact, verses 9 and 10 are notable examples of the familiar New Testament tension between the ‘already’ and the ‘not yet’, between what Christ has achieved at his first coming and what remains to be done at his second, between our past and our future salvation. For salvation has a future tense as well as past and present tenses, and the words common to these two verses are the statement that we shall be saved. If, therefore, we are asked whether we have been saved, it would be just as biblical to say ‘No’ as ‘Yes’, although the correct answer would be ‘Yes and no.’ For yes, we have been saved through Christ from the guilt of our sins and from the judgment of God upon them, but no, we have not yet been delivered from indwelling sin or been given new bodies in the new world.

What, then, is the future salvation which Paul has in mind here? He uses two expressions, the first negative and the second positive. First and negatively, we shall be saved from God’s wrath through Christ (9). Of course we have already been rescued from it in the sense that through the cross God has himself turned it away from us, so that now we have peace with him and are standing in his grace. But at the end of history there is going to be a day of reckoning which Paul has called ‘the day of God’s wrath, when his righteous judgment will be revealed’ (2:5) and his wrath will be poured out on those who have rejected Christ (2:8). From that fearful coming wrath we shall be saved, for, as Jesus put it, the believer ‘will not be judged but has [already] crossed over from death to life’.

Second and positively, we shall be saved through his life (10). For the Jesus who died for our sins was raised from death and lives, and means his people to experience for themselves the power of his resurrection. We can share his life now, and will share his resurrection on the last day. Paul will go into these truths in Romans 8; he does no more than sketch them here in promising that we shall be saved through Christ’s life.

So the best is yet to be! In our present ‘half-saved’ condition we are eagerly looking forward to our full and final salvation. But how can we be sure of it? It is mainly to answer this question that Paul comes to verses 9 and 10. Both are ‘how much more’ arguments. The basic structure of the two verses is identical, namely that ‘if one thing has happened, much more will something else take place’. What, then, has happened to us? The answer is that we have been justified (9) and reconciled (10), both of which are attributed to the cross. On the one hand, we have now been justified by his blood (9a), and on the other, we were reconciled to him [God] through the death of his Son (10a). So the Judge has pronounced us righteous, and the Father has welcomed us home.

In addition, it is essential to Paul’s argument that he stresses the costliness of these things. It was by his blood (9a), shed in a sacrificial death on the cross, that we have been justified, and it was while we were God’s enemies (10a) that we were reconciled to him. Here then is the logic. If God has already done the difficult thing, can we not trust him to do the comparatively simple thing of completing the task? If God has accomplished our justification at the cost of Christ’s blood, much more will he save his justified people from his final wrath (9)! Again, if he reconciled us to himself when we were his enemies, much more will he finish our salvation now that we are his reconciled friends (10)! These are the grounds on which we dare to affirm that we shall . . . be saved.

f. We also boast in God (5:11)

What is extraordinary about this sixth and last affirmation is that, verbally speaking, it is identical with the Jewish attitude which Paul has earlier condemned: 2:17 reads ‘you . . . boast in God’, and 5:11 reads ‘we . . . boast in God’. The verb, the noun and the preposition are all the same. But Christian exulting in God, according to Paul, is quite different from Jewish bragging about him. The latter was a boast in God as if he were their exclusive property and they had a monopoly interest in him, whereas the former is the opposite. Christian exultation in God begins with the shamefaced recognition that we have no claim on him at all, continues with wondering worship that while we were still sinners and enemies Christ died for us, and ends with the humble confidence that he will complete the work he has begun. So to exult in God is to rejoice not in our privileges but in his mercies, not in our possession of him but in his of us.

In spite of our knowledge that for Christian people all boasting is excluded (3:27), we nevertheless boast or rejoice in our hope of sharing God’s glory (2), in our tribulations (3) and above all in God himself (11). This exulting is through our Lord Jesus Christ, because it is through him that we have now received [‘the’ or ‘our’] reconciliation (11).

It seems clear from this paragraph, then, that the major hallmark of justified believers is joy, especially joy in God himself. We should be the most positive people in the world. For the new community of Jesus Christ is characterized not by a self-centred triumphalism but by a God-centred worship.

2. The two humanities, in Adam and in Christ (5:12–21)

So far Paul has surveyed both the universal extent of human sin and guilt and the glorious adequacy of God’s justifying grace in and through Christ. In so doing he has led us both down into the depths of human evil and up into the heights of divine mercy. He has also indicated his readers’ involvement (whether Jews or Gentiles) in both the guilt and the grace. On the one hand, he has ‘made the charge that Jews and Gentiles alike are all under . . . sin’ (3:9), whereas on the other, he has declared that Abraham is ‘the father of us all’ through faith (4:16; my emphasis). Here then are two communities, one characterized by sin and guilt, the other by grace and faith. Anticipating verses 12–21 a little, we may say that the former is in Adam and the latter in Christ.

We go on to observe that Paul has identified himself with the new, believing community by his consistent use of the first person plural. Having been both justified (1) and reconciled (11), all of us are enjoying peace with God, standing in grace, rejoicing in present sufferings and future glory, assured of final salvation, and exulting in God through Christ by whom these blessings have become ours (1–11).

Therefore, Paul continues. The word must not be overlooked. It shows that the next verses (12–21) are not an alien intrusion into the argument, or an isolated section unconnected with what precedes or follows, or even a digression, but a logical development, indeed a conclusion of his argument thus far and a necessary transition to what comes next. Two particular links between the two halves of Romans 5 (1–11 and 12–21) may be mentioned.

The first is that Paul has attributed our reconciliation and salvation to the death of God’s Son (9–10). This immediately prompts the question how one person’s sacrifice could have brought such blessings to so many. It is not that (in Winston Churchill’s famous saying) so many owe so much to so few; it is rather that so many owe so much to only one person. How can that be? Paul’s answer is contained in his analogy between Adam and Christ. For both demonstrate the principle that many can be affected, for good or ill, by one person’s action.

A second possible clue to the link between the two halves of Romans 5 is that both conclude with the expression ‘through our Lord Jesus Christ’ (11 and 21). Determined as he is to honour Jesus Christ as the only mediator of all our blessings, Paul presents Adam and Christ, the respective heads of the old and new humanities, in such a way as to demonstrate the overwhelming superiority of the work of Christ.

All students of verses 12–21 have found it extremely condensed. Some have mistaken compression for confusion. But most have marvelled at the almost ‘mathematical precision’ of Paul’s writing, and have admired its craftsmanship. It may be likened to a well-chiselled carving or a carefully constructed musical composition.

The text divides itself naturally into three short paragraphs, in each of which Adam and Christ are related to each other, although with significant differences. First (12–14), Adam and Christ are introduced, Adam as responsible for sin and death, and as ‘a pattern of the one to come’ (14), who is Christ. Second (15–17), Adam and Christ are contrasted. In each of these three verses the work of Christ is said to be either ‘not like’ Adam’s or ‘much more’ successful than his. Third (18–21), Adam and Christ are compared. The structure now (in 18, 19 and 21) is ‘just as . . . so also’. For through the one man’s one deed (Adam’s disobedience or Christ’s obedience) the many have been either cursed or blessed.

a. Adam and Christ are introduced (5:12–14)

Paul begins with a sentence he never completes. His opening words are Therefore, just as sin entered . . . , but the corresponding words we expect (‘so also . . .’, as in the sentence structure of verses 18, 19 and 21) never come. What he was intending to write we can only guess. But the symmetry would require something like this: ‘Just as through one man sin entered the world, and death through sin, and so death came to all because all shared his sin, so also through one man righteousness entered the world, and life through righteousness, and so life came to all because all shared his righteousness.’ Indeed, this is more or less what Paul does write later. Verses 18–19 may be regarded as completing the sentence which he began in verse 12. Instead, however, he breaks off his argument in order to explain and justify (in verses 13–14) what he has just written (in verse 12).

The topic of verse 12 is sin and death, and in it Paul describes three downward steps or deteriorating stages in human history, from one man sinning to all people dying.

First, sin entered the world through one man. Adam is not named but is obviously meant. Paul is not concerned with the origin of evil in general, but only with how it invaded the world of human beings. It entered through one man, that is, through his disobedience. Eve was also implicated, although Paul leaves her out of the picture here, because he holds Adam responsible.

Second, death then entered the world through sin. Just as Adam was the door through which sin entered, so sin was the door through which death entered. This is a reference to Genesis 2:17 and 3:19, where death (both physical and spiritual) is said to have been the penalty for disobedience (cf. Rom. 1:32; 6:23). I will come back later to modern questions about the historicity of Adam and the origin of death.

Third, in this way death came to all people, because all sinned (12). The apostle is still handling the relation between sin and death, but now he moves on from their presence in one man to their presence in all people (the human race). Moreover, he sees a similarity between these two situations (houtōs, in this way). This may refer to the essential connection between sin and death: as death came to one man because he sinned, so death came to all people because they sinned. Or it may refer to the means through which both happened: as through one man sin and death ‘entered’ the world (eisēlthen), so through one man they ‘spread’ throughout the world (diēlthen).

Here then are the three stages – from Adam’s sin to Adam’s death, to universal death due to universal sin. But what is the meaning of the third statement, that death came to all people, because all sinned? In what sense have all sinned so that all die?

Grammatically speaking, there are two possible answers to this question. Either all sinned by copying and so repeating Adam’s sin, or all sinned when Adam sinned and were included in his sinning. The first would be a case of imitation (all sinned like Adam), and the second a case of participation (all sinned in and with Adam). The first explanation is usually associated with the name of Pelagius, the early-fifth-century British monk, who denied original sin, taught a form of self-salvation and was opposed by Augustine. In Pelagius’s view Adam was simply the first sinner, and everybody ever since has followed his bad example. Moreover, Paul’s actual language could justly be understood in this way. His two words all sinned (pantes hēmarton) are precisely those which he has used in 3:23 when affirming that ‘all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God’. As John Murray has written,

verse 12 of itself is compatible with a Pelagian interpretation, and if Paul had entertained the Pelagian view he could have stated it admirably well in these terms . . . If Paul meant that death passed upon all because all men were guilty of actual transgression, this is the way he would have said it. At least no more suitable way could be considered.

Consequently, many have held this position, not least because of the difficulties inherent in the alternative view. Some scholars make much of the use of Adam in the literature of Judaism at that time. Take 2 Esdras: ‘a grain of evil seed was sown in Adam’s heart from the beginning, and how much ungodliness it has produced until now . . . !’ ‘O Adam, what have you done? For though it was you who sinned, the fall was not yours alone, but ours also who are your descendants.’ ‘In the light of contemporary and near-contemporary Jewish thought,’ writes John Ziesler, ‘it is more likely that Adam is Everyman (and Everywoman), so that to say that Adam sinned is a way of saying that everybody sins. Everyone is his or her own Adam.’ Others, wanting to preserve a stronger link between Adam’s sin and the sinning of his posterity, have stressed the transmission of his depraved nature to them: ‘If they sinned, their sin was due in part to tendencies inherited from Adam.’

Inheriting Adam’s nature, following Adam’s example and recapitulating Adam’s story: I am not wishing to deny these truths. But is this what Paul meant by writing because all sinned? That is the primary question. And in seeking to answer it, context as well as grammar must be taken into consideration.

That Paul meant ‘all sinned in and through Adam and therefore all died’, although theologically difficult, is surely the correct way of interpreting the text. There are three main arguments. The first concerns the addition of verses 13–14, in which Paul makes three points. First, sin was in the world before the law [of Moses] was given (13a). There is nothing controversial here. It is a fact that sin came a long time before the law, as Adam came before Moses. Second, but sin is not charged against anyone’s account [i.e. punished] where there is no law (13b). For ‘where there is no law there is no law to break’. So, until the law of Moses was given and could exercise its role of defining and identifying sin (cf. 3:20), sin was not reckoned against sinners. Nevertheless [this is Paul’s third point], death reigned from the time of Adam to the time of Moses, that is, throughout the period before the law was given, even over those who did not sin by breaking a [specific, explicit] command, as did Adam (14). Of course some flagrantly disobeyed God’s moral law, which was written in their hearts (2:14f.), and were punished, as in the flood, the judgment of those who built the tower of Babel, and the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah. But Paul’s point is that there were others who did not sin ‘by disobeying a direct command’, as Adam did, and as the people of the flood, Babel and Sodom did. These others ‘did not voluntarily and overtly violate an expressly revealed ordinance of God’. Yet all died (the reference is clearly to physical death), and death is the penalty for sin. There can be only one explanation. All died because all sinned in and through Adam, the representative or federal head of the human race.

The second argument for this interpretation is the wider context, especially verses 15–19. Five times in these five verses, once in each verse, Paul states that the trespass or disobedience of one man brought death, judgment or condemnation to all people. The language varies slightly from verse to verse, but the meaning is the same. Verse 15 clinches the matter: the many died by the trespass of the one man. That is, universal death is attributed to a single, solitary sin.

The third argument relates to the comparison between Adam and Christ, and between those who are in Adam and those who are in Christ. If death comes to all because they sin like Adam, then by analogy we would have to say that life comes to all because they are righteous like Christ. But that would turn the way of salvation on its head. And the correspondence between Christ and Adam must preserve, not destroy, this truth. It should read, therefore: ‘As we are condemned on account of what Adam did, (so) we are justified on account of what Christ did.’

These three arguments (from the text, the context and the analogy) seem decisively to support the view that ‘all sinned in and through Adam’. Dr Martyn Lloyd-Jones summed up the argument in these words:

God has always dealt with humanity through a head and representative. The whole story of the human race can be summed up in terms of what has happened because of Adam, and what has happened and will yet happen because of Christ.

But can we accept this teaching? It may be true to the text, but is it theologically and personally meaningful? Paul evidently believed it; can we?

The concept of our having sinned in Adam is certainly foreign to the mindset of Western individualism. But are we to place our own cultural perspective above that of the Bible? Africans and Asians, who take for granted the collective solidarity of the extended family, tribe, nation and race, do not have the difficulty which Western people experience with this.

More important even than African and Asian models, however, is that the Bible itself contains a number of significant variations on the theme of human solidarity. The first takes us back to Abraham’s day and to the use which the author of Hebrews makes of that mysterious king-priest Melchizedek. He not only blessed Abraham, the ancestor of Levi, but accepted from him a tithe of the battle spoils. ‘One might even say’, the writer concludes, ‘that Levi himself, who receives tithes, paid tithes through Abraham, for he was still in the loins of his ancestor [Abraham] when Melchizedek met him [long before his birth].’

Second, when Achan stole some Jericho treasure, which by God’s decree had been devoted to destruction, we read that ‘the Israelites were unfaithful’ and ‘the Lord’s anger burned against Israel’. That is, the nation was regarded as implicated in Achan’s sin. ‘Israel has sinned,’ God said; ‘they have violated my covenant.’

My third example takes us to the cross. We like to identify with Pilate, who washed his hands and declared his innocence. We were not guilty, we say; it had nothing to do with us. The apostles disagree. Not only did Herod and Pilate, Gentiles and Jews ‘conspire’ against Jesus, but the sins which led to his death are our sins too. Moreover, if we turn away from God, we ‘are crucifying the Son of God all over again’. ‘Were you there’, the song asks, ‘when they crucified my Lord?’ The only possible answer is that we were there, and not merely as spectators, but as guilty participants.

My fourth and final example also relates to the cross, but sees it now not as a deed done by us but as a sacrifice offered for us. How can his death of long ago benefit us? One answer, specially developed by Paul, is that believers have become identified with Christ in his death and resurrection, and so have died and risen with him: ‘we are convinced that one died for all, and therefore all died [by union with him]’ and ‘live . . . for him who died for them and was raised again’. We shall encounter the same truth when we reach Romans 6.

So, Levi paid a tithe in and through his ancestor Abraham; Israel sinned in and through Achan; we hounded Christ to the cross in and through his enemies; and in particular, if it is true that we sinned in and with Adam, it is yet more gloriously true that we died and rose again in and with Christ. It is in this way that Adam’s sin and Christ’s righteousness have been imputed to us or reckoned as ours.

Paul ends this paragraph (12–14), in which he has concentrated on Adam’s sin and death, with the briefest possible reference to the corresponding figure of Christ. Adam, he writes, was a pattern of the one to come (14b), the Coming One, the Messiah. He will develop the analogy in the next paragraphs. For now, it is enough to call Adam the typos of Christ, because he ‘foreshadows’ (reb) him. Like Adam, Christ is the head of a whole humanity.

b. Adam and Christ are contrasted (5:15–17)

Paul has called Adam the pattern or prototype of Christ (14). But he has no sooner made this statement than he feels embarrassed by the inappropriateness of what he has said. To be sure, there is a superficial similarity between them in that each is one man through whose one deed enormous numbers of people have been affected. But there can be no doubt that the likeness between them ends there. How can the Lord of glory be likened to the person of shame, the Saviour to the sinner, the giver of life to the broker of death? The correspondence is not a parallel, but a contrast. So before returning to the solitary similarity between them (18–21), Paul sets out how they differ. The structure of each of verses 15–17 represents a statement that Christ’s gift is either not like Adam’s trespass (15–16) or much more effective than it (15–17). The differences concern the nature of the two actions (15), their immediate results (16) and their ultimate effects (17).

First, the nature of their actions was different. But the gift is not like the trespass (15a). This concise statement is almost a text for the rest of the paragraph. Adam’s trespass was a fall (paraptōma), indeed ‘the fall’, as we call it, a deviation from the path which God had clearly shown him. He insisted on going his own way. With it Paul contrasts Christ’s gift (charisma), an act of self-sacrifice which bears no resemblance to Adam’s act of self-assertion. It is this enormous discrepancy which Paul expands on in the rest of the verse: if the many died by the trespass of the one man, how much more did God’s grace and consequent gift [presumably of eternal life, 6:23] . . . overflow in rich, undeserved abundance to the many! (15b).

Second, the immediate effect of their actions was different. Nor can the gift of God be compared with the result of one man’s sin (16a). The words are almost identical with those which introduced the previous verse. But the emphasis is now on the consequence of each action. In the case of Adam God’s judgment . . . brought condemnation; in the case of Christ God’s gift . . . brought justification (16b). The contrast is absolute. Yet there is more to this contrast than the two words ‘condemnation’ and ‘justification’. It is that God’s judgment followed only one sin, whereas God’s gift followed many trespasses. The secular mind would have expected many sins to attract more judgment than one sin. But grace operates a different arithmetic. ‘That one single misdeed should be answered by judgment,’ writes Charles Cranfield, ‘this is perfectly understandable: that the accumulated sins and guilt of all the ages should be answered by God’s free gift, this is the miracle of miracles, utterly beyond human comprehension.’

Third, the ultimate effect of the two actions is also different (17). Once more the one man Adam and the one man Jesus Christ are set against each other, and so are the end results of their actions, which now are said to be death and life. But this time the contrast is subtly modified in order to highlight the superiority of the work of Christ. On the one hand, we are given the stark information that death reigned, not now temporarily from Adam to Moses (14), but permanently. On the other hand, we are not told that through Christ ‘life reigned’. The words how much more, together with the reference to God’s abundant provision of grace and of the gift of righteousness, alert us to expect a greater blessing. Even so we are not prepared for what follows, namely that the recipients of God’s abundant grace will themselves reign in life. Formerly death was our king, and we were slaves under its oppressive tyranny. What Christ has done for us is not just to exchange death’s kingdom for the much more gentle kingdom of life, while leaving us in the position of subjects. Instead, he delivers us from the rule of death so radically as to enable us to change places with it and rule over it, or reign in life. We become those who reign, sharing the kingship of Christ, with even death under our feet now, and one day to be destroyed.

c. Adam and Christ are compared (5:18–21)

Having completed his contrast between Adam and Christ, Paul now develops the comparison. His sentence structure is no longer either ‘not like’ or ‘how much more’ (as in verses 15–17), but ‘just as . . . so also’ (as in verses 18, 19 and 21). Not that contrast and comparison are mutually exclusive. Even while painting the contrasts in verses 15–17 (between trespass and gift, condemnation and justification, death and life), Paul did not forget the comparison (the one affecting the many). So now in verses 18–21, while emphasizing the parallel, he will not overlook the contrasts. Yet his ‘just as . . . so also’ structure in each verse is intended to highlight the similarity between Adam and Christ: the one act of the one man determined the destiny of the many.

Verse 18 takes up the immediate results of the work of Adam and Christ, as in verse 16, namely condemnation and justification. Yet the emphasis is on the parallel: just as one trespass resulted in condemnation for all people, so also one righteous act resulted in justification and life for all people.

Verse 19 takes up the nature of their actions, as in verse 15, though using different language. There it was trespass and gift; here it is disobedience and obedience. Yet again the emphasis is on the parallel that just as through the disobedience of the one man the many were made sinners, so also through the obedience of the one man [obedience ‘to death – even death on a cross!’] the many will be made righteous. The expressions ‘made sinners’ and ‘made righteous’ cannot mean that these people actually became morally good or evil, but rather that they were declared legally righteous or unrighteous in God’s sight. Lloyd-Jones clarifies the situation for us: ‘Look at yourself in Adam; though you had done nothing you were declared a sinner. Look at yourself in Christ; and see that, though you have done nothing, you are declared to be righteous. That is the parallel.’ Professor Dunn adds that, since ‘righteous’ (dikaios) was ‘such a favourite self-description of devout Jews’, Paul may be emphasizing that ‘the many’ who will be finally acquitted will include Gentiles as well. He is ‘denying the limited nationalism of the normal Jewish hope’.

Verse 20 is a digression, but a necessary one. Paul has been developing his analogy between Adam and Christ. His Jewish readers may have been asking if there was any room in his scheme for Moses. ‘Ought we not to distinguish three ages, ruled by the names of Adam, Moses and Christ?’ But no, that would be ‘a complete misunderstanding of the role of the law. Adam and Christ are . . . such total opposites that they leave place for no third.’

What then was the purpose of the law? It was brought in so that the trespass might increase (20a). Part of what Paul meant by this he has already explained in previous places. The law reveals sin (3:20; cf. 7:7, 13), defining and displaying it. The law turns sin into transgression, since ‘where there is no law there is no transgression’ (4:15; cf. 5:13; Gal. 3:19). In Romans 7:8 Paul will add that the law even provokes sin. These statements must have been shocking to Jewish people, who thought of the law of Moses as having been given to increase righteousness, not to increase sin. Yet Paul says that the law increased sin rather than diminishing it, and provoked sin rather than preventing it.

God, however, had made ample provision for the increase of sin by the increase of his grace, for where sin increased, grace increased all the more (20b). If, as some exegetes believe, the ‘trespass’ (20a) is a reference to the specific sin of Adam, and if its ‘increase’ is its spread and intensification across history, reaching a ‘hideous climax’ in the rejection of Christ at the cross, then God’s abounding grace will refer to ‘the divine self-giving of the cross’. This allusion to grace introduces Paul’s third comparison between Adam and Christ, in which he takes up the alternative ultimate issues of life and death. It is true that verse 21 contains no explicit mention of Adam, but he can be seen behind it all the same in the reference to sin and death. Once more the contrasts are not forgotten, as grace and life are set against sin and death. But the emphasis is again on the parallel which compares two kinds of ‘reign’. God’s purpose is that just as sin reigned in death, so also grace might reign through righteousness to bring eternal life (21).

Nothing could sum up better the blessings of being in Christ than the expression ‘the reign of grace’. For grace forgives sins through the cross, and bestows on the sinner both righteousness and eternal life. Grace satisfies the thirsty soul and fills the hungry with good things. Grace sanctifies sinners, shaping them into the image of Christ. Grace perseveres even with the obstinate, determining to complete what it has begun. And one day grace will destroy death and bring in the kingdom. So when we are convinced that ‘grace reigns’, we will remember that God’s throne is a ‘throne of grace’, and will come to it boldly to receive mercy and to find grace for every need. And all this is through Jesus Christ our Lord, that is, through his death and resurrection. The same reference to the mediation of Jesus Christ also concluded the previous paragraph (verse 11) and will conclude the next three chapters (6, 7 and 8) as well as this one.

d. The scope of the work of Christ

The parallel between Adam and Christ, on which we have been reflecting, has led a number of students to conclude that Paul is teaching ‘universalism’, namely that the life won by Christ will be as universal as the death caused by Adam. Is this so? According to verse 18, one trespass brought condemnation for all people, while one act of righteousness brought justification for all people. Similarly, according to verse 19, through one man’s disobedience the many were constituted sinners, while through one man’s obedience the many will be declared righteous. With these verses it is natural to associate Paul’s statement in 1 Corinthians: ‘For as in Adam all die, so in Christ all will be made alive.’ For example, Professor Cranfield comments (although on another verse): ‘Something has been accomplished by Christ which is as universal in its effectiveness as was the sin of the first man. Paul is no longer speaking just about the church: his vision now includes the whole of humanity.’

One of the arguments which universalists use is that (as in verses 18–19 quoted above) the expressions ‘the many’ and ‘all people’ appear to be the same and therefore interchangeable. In an often quoted article on polloi (‘many’) in TDNT, Joachim Jeremias shows that in Greek writing polloi is ‘exclusive’, referring to the many or the majority as opposed to all, whereas in Hebrew and Jewish Greek literature polloi is ‘inclusive’, meaning ‘the many who cannot be counted’, ‘the great multitude’, indeed ‘all’. He draws special attention to Isaiah 52:13 – 53:12, where ‘many’ or ‘the many’ occurs five times, apparently meaning ‘all’. He also points out that the expression the many died in verse 15 means the same as death came to all people in verse 12. Professor Jeremias’s case is not conclusive, however. As he himself concedes, hoi polloi could mean ‘a very large number’ in contrast to ‘one’, rather than ‘all’ as opposed to only ‘some’.

We would certainly be mistaken to insist that the word ‘all’ is invariably absolute and can never admit any qualification, for the Bible itself often uses it relatively of all within a certain category or context, or from a particular perspective. For example, on the day of Pentecost the statement that God poured out his Spirit ‘on all people’ does not mean every single human being in the world, but people of all categories, of all nations, ages and social strata, and of both sexes. When Luke later declares that ‘all . . . who lived in the province of Asia heard the word of the Lord’ through Paul in Ephesus, he clearly means representatives from every part of the province.

So in Romans 5 the ‘all people’ who are affected by the work of Christ cannot refer to absolutely everybody, for a number of reasons. First, the two communities of people related to Adam and Christ are related to them in different ways. We are ‘in Adam’ by birth, but ‘in Christ’ only by new birth and by faith. So, although the phrase in a related passage, ‘as in Adam all die’, means literally everybody without exception, the ‘all’ who in Christ are made alive are identified as ‘those who belong to him’. Second, this is made clear in Romans 5:17, where those who reign in life through Christ are not everybody, but ‘those who receive God’s abundant provision of grace’. Third, Paul emphasizes throughout Romans that justification is ‘by faith’ (e.g. 1:16f.; 3:21ff.; 4:1ff.); therefore not all people are justified, irrespective of whether they believe or not. Fourth, Romans also contains solemn warnings that on the last day God’s wrath will be poured out (2:5, 8), and that those who persist in their sinful self-seeking will perish (2:12). This cumulative evidence makes it difficult, if not impossible, to interpret Paul’s ‘all’ as ‘everybody without exception’ and to believe in universal salvation.

Nevertheless, Romans 5:12–21 gives us solid grounds for confidence that a very large number will be saved and that the scope of Christ’s redeeming work, although not universal, will be extremely extensive. There are three indications of this in the language Paul uses in the text.

First, he employs kingdom language. Five times the verb basileuō occurs, meaning to reign as basileus (king), to wield kingly rule, to exercise authority. Three times it is used of the reign of sin and death (14, 17, 21), and twice of God’s people reigning in life through Christ and of grace reigning unto life. This cannot be taken to teach that both reigns will involve a universal jurisdiction, since all kings in history have ruled over particular kingdoms with limited territories. Nevertheless, Paul’s use of the same picture language in relation to both kingdoms surely implies that the reign of life will be substantially comparable to the reign of death, and the reign of grace to the reign of sin.

But the work of Christ is not merely equivalent to the work of Adam. It is more appropriate to contrast than to compare them. Hence, second, the superlative language which Paul presses into service, especially the verbs perisseuō, to ‘abound’, ‘exist in abundance’, ‘surpass’ or ‘overflow’, and hyperperisseuō, to ‘exist in even greater abundance’. These are the words Paul uses in regard to God’s grace and gift (15, 17), adding that where sin increased, grace superabounded (20). Whether he is picturing the ample provision of the harvest, or the abundance of rain, or the overflowing of a river, we must give full weight to his words. What is clear is that he uses them of Christ’s work alone; it would have been wholly inappropriate to apply them to the work of Adam. Although Adam’s disobedience led to universal sin and death, there has been a lavish extravagance about the grace of Christ, in both quality and quantity, which was entirely absent from Adam and all his works.

Third, Paul twice employs ‘how much more’ language, in both cases in order to affirm that the gift is not like the trespass (15a). For if through the one man’s one trespass the many died (the substance of this is repeated in verses 15 and 17), how much more through the grace of the one man Jesus Christ did God’s grace and gift overflow to the many (15b), and how much more will the recipients of God’s abundant grace and gift reign in life (17)! Thus Adam was simply ‘one man’ (unnamed), whereas Jesus Christ was the special agent of God’s grace. The one man committed a trespass, whereas God’s grace overflowed in a gift. The trespass led to death, which (it is implied, cf. 6:23) was earned, whereas the gift was entirely free and unearned. Three contrasts have therefore been made relating to the actor, his action and its consequences; and all three are examples of the greater excellence of Jesus Christ. For God is superior to humanity, grace to sin, and life (God’s free gift) to death (sin’s wage).

The deliberate use of these three ways of speaking (kingdom, superlative and ‘how much more’ language) surely justifies the conclusion that the work of Christ will in the end be seen to be much more effective than the work of Adam; that Christ will raise to life many more than Adam will drag to death; and that God’s grace will flow in more abundant blessings than the consequences of Adam’s sin. When it is asked in what way the gift is not like the trespass (15), but enormously surpasses it, cautious scholars tend to say that the argument is purely logical, not numerical, and means only ‘much more certainly’. But this surely falls far short of what Paul’s statements suggest. He is affirming that Christ’s work is superior to Adam’s not only in the nature of his action and achievement, but in the degree of its success. Granted that ‘the many’ does not mean ‘all’, it certainly means ‘a very great many’, in other words, a majority.

Commenting on verse 20, C. H. Hodge affirms that ‘the gospel of the grace of God has proved itself much more efficacious in the production of good, than sin in the production of evil’. Then on verse 21 he writes: ‘That the benefits of redemption shall far outweigh the evils of the fall, is here clearly asserted.’ This is partly, he explains, because Christ ‘exalts his people to a far higher state of being than our race, if unfallen, could ever have attained’, and partly because the blessings of redemption ‘are not to be confined to the human race’, since through the church God’s wisdom is to be revealed throughout the ages to principalities and powers, but first and foremost because ‘the number of the saved shall doubtless greatly exceed the number of the lost’. He concludes: ‘We have reason to believe that the lost shall bear to the saved no greater proportion than the inmates of a prison do to the mass of the community.’

But we do not rely only on Romans 5 for this assurance. We are also persuaded that God will fulfil his promise to make Abraham’s seed as numerous as the stars in the sky, the dust of the earth and the sand on the shore. This refers of course to his spiritual family, and that includes all who believe. Abraham is our father now, not Adam, and Abraham’s children will far outnumber Adam’s. For when the redeemed are all gathered before God’s throne, they will be ‘a great multitude that no one could count’, from all the world’s nations, tribes, peoples and languages.

This expectation should be a great encouragement to world evangelization. For God’s promise assures us that the church’s mission will be attended by great blessing, and that a mighty harvest is yet to be reaped. Exactly how God will achieve this result we are not told. All we know is that we are to preach the gospel to all nations, and that God’s grace will triumph in the end.

Ultimately our confidence is in the grace of God. ‘Grace’ is the key word in the three ‘languages’ mentioned above. Grace will ‘reign’ (21), grace ‘overflows’ (15), and much more will those who receive God’s grace reign in life (17). This repetition challenges our perspective. Who reigns today? Who is on the throne? Before Christ came, the throne was occupied by sin and death (14, 17), and the world was strewn with corpses. But since Christ came, the throne has been occupied by grace and by those who have received grace, and their reign is characterized by life (17, 21). Verse 21 sums up God’s purpose that [hina], just as sin reigned in death, so also grace might reign through righteousness to bring eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord. Is this our vision? In our view of ultimate reality, who is occupying the throne today? Are we still living in the Old Testament, with the whole scene dominated by Adam, as if he remained unchallenged and Christ had never come? Or are we authentic New Testament Christians, whose vision is filled with Christ crucified, risen and reigning? Is guilt still reigning, and death? Or is grace reigning, and life? To be sure, sin and Satan may seem to be reigning still, since many continue to bow down to them. But their reign is an illusion, a bluff. For at the cross they were decisively defeated, dethroned and disarmed. Now Christ reigns, exalted to the Father’s right hand, with all things under his feet, welcoming the nations, and waiting for his remaining enemies to be made his footstool.

e. The historicity and death of Adam

It is fashionable nowadays to regard the biblical story of Adam and Eve as ‘myth’ (whose truth is theological but not historical), rather than ‘significant event’ (whose truth is both). Many people assume that evolution has disproved and discarded the Genesis story as having no basis in history. Since ‘Adam’ is the Hebrew word for ‘man’, they consider that the author of Genesis was deliberately giving a mythical account of human origins, evil and death.

We should certainly be open to the probability that there are symbolical elements in the Bible’s first three chapters. The narrative itself allows no dogmatism about the six days of creation, since its form and style suggest that it is meant as literary art, not scientific description. As for the identity of the snake and the trees in the garden, since ‘that ancient snake’ and ‘the tree of life’ reappear in the book of Revelation, where they are evidently symbolic, it seems likely that they are meant to be understood symbolically in Genesis as well.

But the case with Adam and Eve is different. The Bible clearly intends us to accept their historicity as the original human pair. For the biblical genealogies trace the human race back to Adam; Jesus himself taught that ‘at the beginning the Creator “made them male and female”’ and then instituted marriage; Paul told the Athenian philosophers that God had made every nation ‘from one man’; and in particular Paul’s carefully constructed analogy between Adam and Christ depends for its validity on the equal historicity of both. He affirmed that Adam’s disobedience led to condemnation for all, as Christ’s obedience led to justification for all (5:18).

Moreover, nothing in modern science contradicts this. Rather the reverse. All human beings share the same anatomy, physiology and chemistry, and the same genes. Although we belong to different so-called ‘races’, each of which has adjusted to its own physical environment, we nevertheless make up a single species, and people of different races can intermarry and interbreed. This sameness of the human species is best explained by suggesting our descent from a common ancestor. ‘Genetic evidence indicates’, writes Dr Christopher Stringer of London’s Natural History Museum, ‘that all living people are closely related and share a recent common ancestor.’ He goes on to express the view that this common ancestor ‘probably lived in Africa’ (though this is not proved) and that from this ancestral group ‘all the living peoples of the world originated’.

But how ‘recent’ was our ‘common ancestor’? The evidence of Genesis 2 – 4 is that Adam was a Neolithic farmer. The New Stone Age ran from about 10000 to 6000 bc, and its beginning was marked by the introduction of agriculture, the original ‘green revolution’, which seems to have begun in the region of Eastern Turkey, near the headwaters of the Euphrates and Tigris rivers (cf. Gen. 2:10, 14), and which has been described as the most important cultural development in all human history. So Adam cultivated the garden of Eden, and he and Eve made clothing for themselves. Then the next generations, we read, domesticated and reared stock, as well as working the soil and cultivating crops; built a protected settlement, which Genesis graces with the word ‘city’; made and played musical instruments; and ‘forged all kinds of tools out of bronze and iron’.

But surely the human fossil and skeleton record indicates that the genus homo existed hundreds of thousands of years before the New Stone Age? Yes. Homo sapiens (modern) is usually traced back to about 100,000 years ago, and homo sapiens (archaic) to about half a million years ago, homo erectus to about 1.8 million years ago, and homo habilis even to two million years ago. Moreover, homo habilis was already making stone tools in East and South Africa; homo erectus was making wooden tools as well and living in caves and camps; while homo sapiens (especially the European Stone Age subspecies Neanderthal man), although still a hunter-gatherer, was beginning to paint, carve and sculpt, and even to care for the sick and bury the dead. But were these species of homo ‘human’ in the biblical sense, created in the image of God, endowed with rational, moral and spiritual faculties which enabled them to know and love their Creator? Ancient skeletons cannot answer this question; the evidence they supply is anatomical rather than behavioural. Even signs of cultural development do not prove that those involved were authentically human, that is, God-like. The likelihood is that they were all pre-Adamic hominids, still homo sapiens and not yet homo divinus, if we may so call Adam.

Adam, then, was a special creation of God, whether God formed him literally ‘from the dust of the ground’ and then ‘breathed into his nostrils the breath of life’, or whether this is the biblical way of saying that he was created out of an already existing hominid. The vital truth we cannot surrender is that, though our bodies are related to the primates, we ourselves in our fundamental identity are related to God.

What then about those pre-Adamic hominids which had survived natural calamity and disaster (as large numbers did not), had dispersed to other continents and were now Adam’s contemporaries? How did Adam’s special creation and subsequent fall relate to them? Derek Kidner suggests that, once it became clear that there was

no natural bridge from animal to man, God may have now conferred his image on Adam’s collaterals, to bring them into the same realm of being. Adam’s ‘federal’ headship of humanity extended, if that was the case, outwards to his contemporaries as well as onwards to his offspring, and his disobedience disinherited both alike.

Having thought about Adam’s creation and fall, we are ready to ask about his death. ‘Adam . . . died.’ Why did he die? What was the origin of death? Was it there from the beginning? Certainly vegetable death was. God created ‘seed-bearing plants . . . that bear fruit with seed in it’. That is, the cycle of blossom, fruit, seed, death and new life was established in the created order. Animal death existed too, for many fossils of predators have been found with their prey in their stomach. But what about human beings? Paul wrote that death entered the world through sin (5:12). Does that mean that, if he had not sinned, he would not have died? Many ridicule this notion. ‘Obviously’, writes C. H. Dodd with great self-confidence, ‘we cannot accept such a speculation as an account of the origin of death, which is a natural process inseparable from organic existence in the world we know.’

We have already agreed that death is ‘a natural process’ in the vegetable and animal kingdoms. But we must not think of human beings as merely rather superior animals, who on that account die like animals. On the contrary, it is because we are not animals that Scripture regards human death as unnatural, an alien intrusion, the penalty for sin, and not God’s original intention for his human creation. Only if Adam disobeyed, God warned him, would he ‘certainly die’. Since, however, he did not immediately die, some conclude that it was spiritual death, or separation from God, which was meant. But when God later pronounced his judgment on Adam, he said to him, ‘Dust you are, and to dust you will return.’ So physical death was included in the curse, and Adam became mortal when he disobeyed. Certainly the rabbis understood Genesis in this way. For example, ‘God created us for incorruption, and made us in the image of his own eternity; but through the devil’s envy death entered the world.’ This is why the biblical authors lament death, and are outraged by it. They see it as demoting us, levelling us down to the animal creation, so that we (God’s special creation) have become ‘like the beasts that perish’. The author of Ecclesiastes feels the indignity of it too: ‘Surely the fate of human beings is like that of the animals; the same fate awaits them both: as one dies, so dies the other. All have the same breath; humans have no advantage over animals.’

It appears, therefore, that for his unique image-bearers God originally had something better in mind, something less degrading and squalid than death, decay and decomposition, something which acknowledged that human beings are not animals. Perhaps he would have ‘translated’ them like Enoch and Elijah, without the necessity of death. Perhaps he would have ‘changed’ them ‘in a flash, in the twinkling of an eye’, like those believers who will be alive when Jesus comes. Perhaps too we should think of the transfiguration of Jesus in this light. His face shone, his clothing became dazzling white, and his body translucent like the resurrection body he would later have. Because he had no sin, he did not need to die. He could have stepped straight into heaven without dying. But he deliberately came back in order of his own free and loving will to die for us.

All this evidence confirms the straightforward statement of the apostle Paul: sin entered the world through one man, and death through sin (5:12).

3. United to Christ and enslaved to God (6:1–23)

The apostle has been painting an idyllic picture of the people of God. Having been justified by faith, they are standing in grace and rejoicing in glory. Having formerly belonged to Adam, the author of sin and death, they now belong to Christ, the author of salvation and life. Although at one point in the history of Israel the law was added to increase sin (5:20a), yet ‘grace increased all the more’ (5:20b), so that ‘grace might reign’ (5:21). It is a splendid vision of the triumph of grace. Against the grim background of human guilt, Paul depicts grace increasing and grace reigning.

But is his picture not unbalanced? In concentrating on the secure status of the people of God, he has said little or nothing about Christian life or growth or discipleship. He seems to have jumped straight from justification to glorification, without any intervening stage of sanctification. By this omission (so far) he has laid himself open to being misrepresented by his critics. Already they have ‘slanderously’ misquoted him as saying, ‘Let us do evil that good may result’ (3:8). At that point he dismissed their charge, but he did not answer it. Now, however, as they rally to the attack, he refutes their slander. This is the topic of Romans 6.

What was their criticism? It was not just that Paul’s gospel of justification by grace through faith without works seemed to make the doing of good works unnecessary. Worse than that, it seemed to encourage people to sin more than ever. For if, in his understanding of Israel’s story, the law led to an increase of sin, and sin led to an increase of grace (5:20f.), then logically, in our story too, we should increase our sinning in order to give God the chance to increase his gracious forgiving. They put it in the form of a question: ‘Shall we go on sinning, so that grace may increase?’ (1). They were implying that Paul’s gospel of free grace actually encouraged lawlessness and sin, because it promised sinners the best of both worlds: they could indulge themselves freely in this world, without any fear of losing the next.

The technical term for people who argue like this is ‘antinomians’, since they set themselves against the moral law (nomos) and imagine that they can dispense with it. Antinomianism has had a long history in the church. We meet it already in the New Testament, in the false teachers Jude described as ‘ungodly people, who pervert the grace of our God into a licence for immorality and deny Jesus Christ our only Sovereign and Lord’. While recognizing antinomianism in others, however, we must not be allowed to conceal its ugly presence in ourselves. Have we never caught ourselves making light of our failures on the ground that God will excuse and forgive them?

Incidentally, it is highly significant both that Paul’s critics made the charge of antinomianism against him, and that he took time, trouble and space to answer them, without withdrawing or even modifying his message. For this shows conclusively that he did preach the gospel of grace without works. Otherwise, if he did not teach this, the objection would never have been raised. It is the same today. If we are proclaiming Paul’s gospel, with its emphasis on the freeness of grace and the impossibility of self-salvation, we are sure to provoke the charge of antinomianism. If we do not provoke this criticism, the likelihood is that we are not preaching Paul’s gospel.

Paul’s answer to his critics is that God’s grace not only forgives sins, but also delivers us from sinning. For grace does more than justify: it also sanctifies. It unites us to Christ (1–14), and it initiates us into a new slavery to righteousness (15–23). These two halves of Romans 6 are closely parallel to one another in at least five respects.

First, both are prompted by the same exaltation of God’s grace: verses 1–14 by the statement that ‘grace increased . . . so that . . . grace might reign’ (5:20f.), and verses 15–23 by the statement that ‘we are not under the law but under grace’ (15).

Second, both ask the same probing question about sin in relation to grace. Verse 1: ‘What shall we say, then? Shall we go on sinning, so that grace may increase?’ And verse 15: ‘What then? Shall we sin because we are not under the law but under grace?’ In other words, does grace undermine ethical responsibility and promote reckless sinning?

Third, both react to the question with the same indignant, outraged, even horrified, expostulation: ‘By no means!’

Fourth, both diagnose the same reason for the antinomian question. They trace it to ignorance, especially about Christian beginnings. Verse 3: ‘Don’t you know that all of us who were baptised into Christ Jesus were baptised into his death?’ Verse 16: ‘Don’t you know that when you offer yourselves to someone as obedient slaves, you are slaves of the one you obey . . . ?’ If they had understood the meaning of their baptism and their conversion, they would never have asked their question.

Fifth, both teach the same radical break between our old, pre-conversion, pre-baptism life and our new, post-conversion, post-baptism life, and therefore the total incongruity of sin in converted and baptized believers. Both express this by a counter-question. Verse 2: ‘We are those who have died to sin; how can we live in it any longer?’ Verse 16 (paraphrased): ‘We offered ourselves as slaves to obedience; how can we go back on our commitment?’

Having noted these five similarities between the two halves of Romans 6 (1–14 and 15–23), we are ready to examine the text of each in greater detail.

a. United to Christ, or the logic of our baptism (6:1–14)

Paul begins with a vigorous rejection of the notion that God’s grace gives us freedom to sin. What shall we say, then? Shall we go on sinning, so that grace may increase? (1). By no means! (2a). But on what grounds can he be so categorical? At first sight, logic seems to be on the side of the antinomians, since the more we sin, the more opportunity God will have to display his grace. What counter-logic does the apostle propose? Because the first half of Romans 6 is such a tightly packed argument, it may be helpful to outline it in eight steps or stages.

1. We died to sin. This is the foundation fact of Paul’s thesis. How can we live in what we have died to (2)?

2. The way in which we have died to sin is that our baptism united us with Christ in his death (3).

3. Having shared in Christ’s death, God wants us also to share in his resurrection life (4–5).

4. Our former self was crucified with Christ in order that we might be freed from sin’s slavery (6–7).

5. Both the death and the resurrection of Jesus were decisive events: he died to sin once for all, but he lives continuously unto God (8–10).

6. We must realize that we are now what Christ is, namely ‘dead to sin but alive to God’ (11).

7. Being alive from death, we must offer our bodies to God as instruments of righteousness (12–13).

8. Sin shall not be our master, because our position has radically changed from being ‘under the law’ to being ‘under grace’. Grace does not encourage sin; it outlaws it (14).

We need now to consider these eight steps in greater detail.

i. We died to sin (6:2)

Paul lays down this fundamental truth as being in itself an entirely satisfactory answer to the antinomians. They say that believers may persist in sin; he says that they have died to it. How can we live in it any longer? (2). The Greek verb is in the simple future tense (zēsomen). So the sentence could be translated: ‘We died to sin [in the past]; how then shall we live in it [in the future]?’ It is not the literal impossibility of sin in believers which Paul is declaring, but the moral incongruity of it. J. B. Phillips catches the point in his rendering: ‘We, who have died to sin – how could we live in sin any longer?’

Paul is drawing attention to the essential anomaly of living in sin when we have died to sin. What, then, does he mean by our having died to sin? Let us consider first a popular misunderstanding.

Soon after my own conversion, I was taught the following way of thinking about this. When we die, our five senses will cease to operate. We will no longer be able to touch, taste, see, smell or hear. We will lose all ability to feel or to respond to external stimuli. Just so, it is argued, to die to sin means to become insensitive to it. For example, if we see a dog or cat lying in the gutter, we cannot tell from a distance whether it is alive or dead. But touch it with our foot, and we will know at once. If it is alive, there will be an immediate reaction: it will jump up and run away. If it is dead, however, there will be no response at all. Just so, according to this popular view, having died to sin, we are as unresponsive to temptation as a corpse is to a physical stimulus. And the reason for this, we are assured from verse 6, is that our old nature was in some way crucified with Christ. For he bore not only our guilt but our ‘flesh’, our fallen nature. It was nailed to the cross and killed, and our task (however much evidence we may have to the contrary) is to consider it dead (11).

Several commentators appear to hold this view. C. J. Vaughan, for example, wrote: ‘A dead man cannot sin. And you are dead . . . Be in relation to all sin as impassive, as insensible, as immovable, as is he who has already died.’ And J. B. Phillips writes that ‘a dead man can safely be said to be immune to the power of sin’ (7), and that we are to look upon ourselves as ‘dead to the appeal and power of sin’ (11).

There are, however, at least three fatal objections to this popular view. First, it is incompatible with the meaning of the death of Christ. The expressions ‘died to sin’ or ‘dead to sin’ occur in this section twice of Christians (2, 11) and once of Christ (10). Since it is a correct principle of interpretation that the same phrase recurring in the same context bears the same meaning, we must find an explanation of this death to sin which is true both of Christ and of Christians. What, then, did Paul mean when he stated that Christ ‘died to sin once for all’ (10)? It cannot mean that at some point he became unresponsive to it, since this would imply that previously he had been responsive to it. To be sure, his temptations were real. But was our Lord Jesus Christ earlier so continuously alive to sin that he needed on the cross to die to it decisively, once for all? That would be an intolerable slur on his character.

Second, this view is incompatible with Paul’s concluding appeals. If our fallen nature has effectively died, or we have died to it, so that we are no longer responsive to temptation, it would be unnecessary for the apostle to urge us not to let sin ‘reign’ in our body, lest we obey its ‘evil desires’ (12), and not to ‘offer’ our faculties to sin (13). Nor later in his letter could he have urged us to ‘put aside the deeds of darkness’ and not to think ‘how to gratify the desires of the flesh’ (13:12, 14). How could he have written these things if our fallen nature were dead and had no desires, or if we were people from which the inclination to sin had been removed?

Third, it is incompatible with Christian experience. It is important to note that Paul is not referring in these verses to a minority of exceptionally holy Christians. He is describing all Christians, who have believed and been baptized into Christ (2–3). So, whatever the ‘death to sin’ may be, it is common to all Christian people. But are all God’s people ‘dead to sin’ in the sense of being unresponsive to it? No; scriptural and historical biographies, together with our own experience, combine to deny this. Far from being dead, in the sense of dormant, our fallen nature is so alive and active that we are urged not to obey its desires, and are given the Holy Spirit to subdue and control them.

A serious danger of this popular view is that it can easily lead to disillusion or self-deception. If we struggle to ‘count’ ourselves to be ‘dead to sin’ (i.e. unresponsive to it), when we know full well that we are not, we feel torn between the Bible and experience, and may then be tempted either to doubt God’s Word or, in order to maintain our interpretation of it, to resort even to dishonesty about our experience. To sum up the objections to the popular view: Christ did not ‘die to sin’ in the sense of becoming insensitive to it, for he never was alive to it in such a way that he needed to die to it. And we have not died to sin in this sense either, because we are still alive to it, as Paul’s appeals and our experience demonstrate. Indeed, we are told to ‘put to death’ our fallen nature and its activities (e.g. 8:13). But how can we put to death what is already dead? There must be a better and more liberating interpretation of the death to sin which is true of Christ and of Christians – all Christians. So we turn now to Paul’s true meaning.

The popular misunderstanding well illustrates the danger of arguing from an analogy. In every analogy we need to consider at what point the parallel or similarity is being drawn; we must not press a resemblance at every point. For instance, when Jesus told us to become like little children, he did not mean that we were to copy every characteristic of children (including their immaturity, waywardness and selfishness), but only one, namely their humble dependence. In the same way, to say that we have ‘died’ to sin does not mean that we must exhibit every characteristic of dead people, including their insensibility to stimuli. We have to ask ourselves: at what point is the analogy of death being made?

If we answer these questions from the Bible rather than from analogy, from biblical teaching about death rather than from the properties of dead people, we shall find immediate help. Death is represented in the Bible more in legal than in physical terms; not so much as a state of lying motionless but as the grim though just penalty for sin. Whenever sin and death are coupled in the Bible, from its second chapter (‘when you eat . . . [i.e. sin] you will certainly die’) to its last two chapters (where the fate of the unrepentant is called ‘the second death’), the essential connection between them is that death is sin’s penalty. This is plain also in Romans, in which we read that those who sin ‘deserve death’ (1:32), that death entered the world through sin (5:12) and that ‘the wages of sin is death’ (6:23).

Take Christ first: ‘the death he died, he died to sin once for all’ (10). The natural and obvious meaning of this is that Christ bore sin’s condemnation, namely death. He met its claim, he paid its penalty, he accepted its reward, and he did it ‘once for all’ (ephapax), an adverb which is applied many times to his atoning death in the New Testament. As a result, sin has no more claim or demand on him. So God raised him from the dead, in order to demonstrate that his sin-bearing was effective, and he now lives for ever unto God.

What is true of Christ is equally true of Christians who are united to Christ. We too have ‘died to sin’, in the sense that through union with Christ we may be said to have borne its penalty. Some may object that we surely cannot speak of our bearing the penalty of our sins, even in Christ, since we cannot die for our own sins; he alone has done that. Is not the suggestion that we could do so a veiled form of justification by works? But no, it is nothing of the kind. Of course Christ’s sin-bearing sacrifice was altogether unique, and we cannot share in its offering. But we can and do share in its benefits by being united to Christ. So the New Testament tells us not only that Christ died instead of us, as our substitute, so that we will never need to die for our sins, but also that he died for us, as our representative, so that we may be said to have died in and through him. As Paul wrote elsewhere, for example, ‘we are convinced that one died for all, and therefore all died’. That is, by being united to him, his death became their death.

Among the commentators only Robert Haldane appears to understand Paul in this way. ‘To explain the expression “dead to sin” as meaning dead to the influence and love of sin’, he writes, ‘is entirely erroneous.’ Paul is referring not to a death to the power of sin, but to a death to its guilt, that is, to our justification.

Paul’s next step is to explain how we may be said to have died to sin, namely through our baptism by which we were united to Christ in his death.

ii. We were baptized into Christ’s death (6:3)

Or don’t you know, the apostle asks incredulously, that all of us who were baptised into Christ Jesus were baptised into his death? (3). Those who ask whether Christian people are free to sin betray their complete ignorance of what their baptism meant. In order to grasp Paul’s argument, three clarifications need to be made about baptism.

First, baptism means water baptism unless in the context it is stated to the contrary. It is true that the New Testament speaks of other kinds of baptism, for example a baptism ‘with fire’ and a baptism ‘with the Spirit’. Some commentators have suggested that Paul here is referring to baptism with the Spirit as uniting us with Christ, and have quoted 1 Corinthians 12:13 as a parallel. But it is safe to say that whenever the terms ‘baptism’ and ‘being baptized’ occur, without mention of the element in which the baptism takes place, the reference is to water baptism. Whenever water baptism is not meant, however, the alternative baptismal element is mentioned; for instance, ‘with the Spirit’. The reason some have been hesitant to understand Romans 6 as referring to water baptism is usually plain. They fear that Paul will then be held to teach ‘baptismal regeneration’, namely that the mere administration of water in the name of the Trinity automatically bestows salvation. But the apostle neither believed nor taught this.

Second, baptism is a sign of our union with Christ, especially with Christ crucified and risen. It has other meanings, including cleansing from sin and the gift of the Holy Spirit, but its essential significance is that it unites us with Christ. Hence the use of the preposition eis, ‘into’. True, at its institution, baptism was said to be into the single name of Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Elsewhere, however, it is ‘in the name of the Lord Jesus’ or simply ‘into Christ’. And to be baptized into Christ means to enter into relationship with him, much as the Israelites were ‘baptised into Moses in the cloud and in the sea’, that is, into allegiance to him as their leader.

Third, baptism does not by itself secure what it signifies. To be sure, the New Testament speaks of baptism in terms of our washing away our sins, our clothing ourselves with Christ and even of our being saved by it, but these are examples of dynamic language which attributes to the visible sign the blessing of the reality signified. It is unthinkable that the apostle Paul, having spent three chapters arguing that justification is by faith alone, should now shift his ground, contradict himself and declare that salvation is by baptism after all. No, we must give the apostle credit for consistency of thought. ‘The baptized’s faith is, of course, taken for granted . . . not forgotten, nor denied.’ So union with Christ by faith, which is invisibly brought about by the Holy Spirit, is visibly signified and sealed by baptism. The essential point Paul is making is that being a Christian involves a personal, vital identification with Jesus Christ, and that this union with him is dramatically displayed in our baptism. That is step two.

iii. God intends us to share also in Christ’s resurrection (6:4–5)

Verses 3–5 contain references to the death, burial and resurrection of Christ, and to our participation with him in all three events. For the basic theme of the first half of Romans 6 is that the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ are not only historical facts and significant doctrines, but also personal experiences, since through faith-baptism we have come to share in them ourselves. So we read that we ‘were baptised into his death’ (3b) and that we were therefore buried with him through baptism into death (4a), in order that, just as Christ was raised from the dead through the glory of the Father, that is, through a glorious display of his mighty power, we too may live a new life (4b), in fact ‘the new resurrection life’ of Christ, which begins now and will be completed on the day of resurrection.

Verse 5 seems to underline this emphasis on our sharing in Christ’s death and resurrection, for if we have been united with him in a death like his, more literally ‘with him in the likeness of his death’, we will certainly also be united with him in a resurrection like his, or probably ‘with him in the likeness of his resurrection’. Exactly what the ‘likeness’ (homoiōma) of Christ’s death and resurrection is has puzzled all commentators. It seems to refer either to baptism as representing death and resurrection, or to the fact that our death and resurrection with Christ are very similar to his, though not identical with them. Or it may be better to translate the verse in more general terms: ‘For if (in baptism) we have become conformed to his death, we shall certainly also . . . be conformed (in our moral life) to his resurrection.’

These verses seem to allude to the pictorial symbolism of baptism, although its significance stands firm (our sharing in Christ’s death, burial and resurrection), even if the symbolism should not be pressed. It is far from certain whether the first baptisms were by total immersion, for some early pictures of, for example, Jesus’ baptism portrayed him wading in the river up to his waist, while John poured water over him. But the symbolic truth of dying to the old life and rising to the new remains, whatever mode of baptism is used. ‘In other words,’ wrote C. J. Vaughan, ‘our baptism was a sort of funeral.’ A funeral, yes, and a resurrection from the grave as well. For by faith inwardly and baptism outwardly we have been united with Christ in his death and resurrection, and so have come to share in their blessings. Paul now enlarges on what these are, elaborating the significance of his death in verses 6–7 and of his resurrection in verses 8–9, bringing them together in verse 10.

iv. We know that our old self was crucified with Christ (6:6–7)

Verse 6 contains three closely related clauses. We are told that something happened, in order that something else might happen, in order that a third thing might happen. We know that our old self was crucified with him [Christ] so that the body ruled by sin might be done away with, that we should no longer be slaves to sin (6). Perhaps the best way to grasp Paul’s logic is to take these three stages in the opposite order. God’s end purpose, he tells us, is our freedom from sin’s tyranny: that we should no longer be slaves to sin. That is plain.

But before our rescue is possible, the body ruled by sin must be done away with. This conquest must come before our deliverance. What is it? The ‘body ruled by sin’ should not be taken to imply that the human body itself is contaminated or corrupt. That was a gnostic notion. The biblical doctrines of creation, incarnation and resurrection all give us a high view of our body as the God-intended vehicle through which we express ourselves. The body ruled by sin means ‘the body as conditioned and controlled by sin’, because sin uses our body for its own evil purposes, perverting our natural instincts, degrading sleepiness into sloth, hunger into greed and sexual desire into lust.

Now God’s purpose is that this sinful self should be done away with. The verb katargeō has a wide range of meanings from ‘nullify’ to ‘abolish’. Since it is used in this verse of our sinful nature, and in Hebrews 2:14 of the devil, and since both are alive and active, it cannot here mean ‘eliminate’ or ‘eradicate’. It must mean rather that our selfish nature has been defeated, disabled and deprived of power.

To understand how this has happened we come to the first clause of verse 6, which says that our old self was crucified with him (Christ). This cannot refer to our sinful self or old nature, if that is what the body ruled by sin means. The two expressions cannot mean the same thing, or the sentence makes nonsense. No, our old self denotes not our lower self but our former self, the person we used to be in Adam. So what was crucified with Christ was not a part of us called our old nature, but the whole of us as we were in our pre-conversion state. This should be clear because the phrase our old self was crucified (6) is equivalent to ‘we . . . died to sin’ (2).

One of the causes of confusion in understanding verse 6 is Paul’s use of the verb crucified. For many people associate it with Galatians 5:24, where ‘those who belong to Christ Jesus’ are said to ‘have crucified the flesh with its passions and desires’. A mental link between these two verses would naturally suggest that here too in verse 6 Paul is alluding to the crucifixion of our old nature. But the two verses are entirely different, since Romans 6:6 describes something which has happened to us (our old self was crucified with him), whereas Galatians 5:24 refers to something which we ourselves have done (we ‘have crucified the flesh’). There are, in fact, two quite distinct ways in which the New Testament speaks of crucifixion in relation to holiness. The first is our death to sin through identification with Christ; the second is our death to self through imitation of Christ. On the one hand, we have been crucified with Christ. But on the other, we have crucified (decisively repudiated) our sinful nature with all its desires, so that every day we renew this attitude by taking up our cross and following Christ to crucifixion. The first is a legal death, a death to the penalty of sin; the second is a moral death, a death to the power of sin. The first belongs to the past, and is unique and unrepeatable; the second belongs to the present, and is repeatable, even continuous. I died to sin (in Christ) once; I die to self (like Christ) daily. It is with the first of these two deaths that Romans 6 is chiefly concerned, although the first is with a view to the second, and the second cannot take place without the first.

But how has the fact that our former self was crucified with Christ resulted in the disabling of our sinful self and so in our rescue from sin’s slavery? Verse 7 supplies the answer. It is because anyone who has died has been set free from sin. At least that is the niv rendering. This may not be right, however, since set free translates dedikaiōtai which means ‘has been justified’. It is true that there is some slight evidence from early Jewish literature that dikaioō could mean to ‘make free or pure’ (BAGD). But there is a perfectly good word in Greek for to ‘set free’, namely eleutheroō, which in fact Paul uses in verses 18 and 22, whereas dikaioō comes fifteen times in Romans, and twenty-five times in the New Testament, in all of which occurrences the natural meaning is to ‘justify’. So surely the verse should be translated ‘anyone who has died has been justified from sin’. But exactly how are our death and consequent justification (7) the basis of our liberation from sin (6)?

The only way to be justified from sin is that the wages of sin be paid, either by the sinner or by the God-appointed substitute. There is no way of escape but that the penalty be borne. How can someone be justified who has been convicted of a crime and sentenced to a term of imprisonment? Only by going to prison and paying the penalty of the crime. Once the term has been served, the person can leave prison justified. He or she need have no more fear of police or magistrates, for the demands of the law have been satisfied. The person has been justified from his or her sin.

The same principle holds good if the penalty is death. There is no way of justification except by paying the penalty. You may respond that in this case to pay the penalty is no way of escape. And you would be right if we were talking about capital punishment on earth. Once a murderer has been executed (in countries where the death penalty survives), his or her life on earth is finished. The person cannot live again on earth justified, as can someone who has served a prison sentence. But the wonderful thing about our Christian justification is that our death is followed by a resurrection, in which we can live the life of a justified person, having paid the death penalty (in and through Christ) for our sin.

For us, then, it is like this. We deserved to die for our sins. And in fact we did die, though not in our own person, but in the person of Jesus Christ our substitute, who died in our place, and with whom we have been united by faith and baptism. And by union with the same Christ we have risen again. So the old life of sin is finished, because we died to it, and the new life of justified sinners has begun. Our death and resurrection with Christ make it unthinkable that we should go back. It is in this sense that our sinful self has been deprived of power and we have been set free.

v. We believe that we will also live with Christ (6:8–10)

Verses 6–7 set out the implication of Christ’s death in relation to us, namely that our former self was crucified with him. Now verses 8–9 set out the implication of his resurrection, again in relation to us, namely that we will also live with him. Now if we died with Christ, we believe that we will also live with him (8). Commentators are divided as to whether the verb will live is logical (future in relation to the death which preceded it) or chronological (future in relation to the present moment). If the former, the reference will be to our sharing Christ’s life now; if the latter, to our sharing his resurrection on the last day. It is doubtful, however, whether Paul would have thought of either without the other. He will write later that, in consequence of the Holy Spirit’s indwelling, ‘your spirit is alive’ and ‘he . . . will also give life to your mortal bodies’ (8:10f. mg.). Life is resurrection anticipated; resurrection is life consummated.

The guarantee of the continuing nature of our new life, beginning now and lasting for ever, is to be found in Christ’s resurrection. For we know that since Christ was raised from the dead, he cannot die again (9a). This is because he was not resuscitated, brought back to this life, in which case like Lazarus he would have had to die again. Instead he was resurrected, raised to an altogether new plane of living, from which there will never be any question of return. Death no longer has mastery over him (9b). Having been delivered from its tyranny, he has passed beyond its jurisdiction for ever. As the glorified Lord himself declares: ‘I am the Living One; I was dead, and now look, I am alive for ever and ever!’

Next Paul summarizes the death and resurrection of Jesus about which he has been writing in a neat saying. As he does so, although he implies that they belong together and must never be separated, he also indicates that there are radical differences between them. The death he died, he died to sin once for all; but the life he lives, he lives to God (10). There is a difference of time (the past event of death, the present experience of life), of nature (he died to sin, bearing its penalty, but lives to God, seeking his glory) and of quality (the death ‘once for all’, the resurrection life continuous). These differences are of importance for our understanding not only of the work of Christ but also of our Christian discipleship, which, by our union with Christ, begins with a once-for-all death to sin and continues with an unending life of service to God.

A simple illustration may help. Imagine an elderly believer called John Jones, who is looking back over his long life. It is divided by his conversion into two halves, the old self (John Jones before his conversion) and the new self (John Jones after his conversion). These are not his two natures, but his two consecutive lives. By faith and baptism John Jones was united to Christ. His old self died with Christ to sin, its penalty borne and finished. At the same time John Jones rose again with Christ, a new man, to live a new life unto God. John Jones is every believer. We are John Jones if we are one with Christ. We died with Christ (6–7); we have risen with Christ (8–9). Our old life ended with the judicial death it deserved; our new life began with a resurrection.

vi. We must count ourselves dead to sin but alive to God (6:11)

We could put it in this way. 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-baptism we have been united to 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 in, or by reason of our union with, Christ Jesus (11).

This ‘reckoning’ is not make-believe. It is not screwing up our faith to believe what we do not believe. We are not to pretend that our old nature has died when we know perfectly well it has not. Instead we are to realize and remember that our former self did die with Christ, thus putting an end to its career. We are to consider what in fact we are, namely dead to sin and alive to God (11), like Christ (10). Once we grasp this, that our old life has ended, with the score settled, the debt paid and the law satisfied, we shall want to have nothing more to do with it.

Let me revert to John Jones. We saw that his life was divided into two halves, his biography into two volumes. Volume 1 ended with the judicial death of his former self; volume 2 opened with his resurrection. He must remember these facts about himself. It is not to pretence that Paul calls him, but to reflection and recollection. He has to keep reminding himself: ‘Volume 1 is long since closed. I am now living in volume 2. It is unthinkable that I should reopen volume 1, as if my death and resurrection with Christ had never taken place.’

Can a married woman live as though she were still single? Well, yes, I suppose she could. It is not impossible. But let her remember who she is. Let her feel her wedding ring, the symbol of her new life of union with her husband, and she will want to live accordingly. Can born-again Christians live as though they were still in their sins? Well, yes, I suppose they could, at least for a while. It is not impossible. But let them remember who they are. Let them recall their baptism, the symbol of their new life of union with Christ, and they will want to live accordingly.

So the major secret of holy living is in the mind. It is in knowing (6) that our former self was crucified with Christ, in knowing (3) that baptism into Christ is baptism into his death and resurrection, and in counting ourselves (11) dead to sin and alive to God through Christ. We are to recall, to ponder, to grasp, to register these truths until they are so much a part of our way of thinking that a return to the old life is unthinkable. Regenerate Christians should no more contemplate a return to unregenerate living than adults to their childhood, married people to their singleness or discharged prisoners to their prison cell. For our union with Jesus Christ has severed us from the old life and committed us to the new. Our baptism stands between the two like a door between two rooms, closing on the one and opening into the other. We have died, and we have risen. How can we possibly live again in what we have died to?

vii. We must therefore offer ourselves to God (6:12–13)

The word therefore introduces the conclusion of Paul’s argument. Because Christ died to sin and lives to God, and because through union with Christ we are ourselves ‘dead to sin but alive to God’, and must ‘count’ or consider ourselves so, therefore our whole attitude to sin and to God must change. Do not offer yourselves to sin (13a), because you have died to it; but offer yourselves to God (13b), because you have risen to live for his glory. This is the emphasis of these verses.

Paul’s appeal has negative and positive aspects, which complement one another. The negative comes first. Therefore do not let sin reign in your mortal body so that you obey its evil desires (12). Paul’s use of the adjective ‘mortal’ shows that he is referring to our physical body. Not all its desires are evil, as we saw when considering the meaning of ‘the body ruled by sin’ (6), but sin can use our body as a vantage point from which to govern us. So Paul calls us to rise up in rebellion against sin. The Roman Christians ‘must revolt in the name of their rightful ruler, God, against sin’s usurping rule’. A second negative exhortation follows: Do not offer any part of yourself [or your body] to sin as an instrument of wickedness (13a). Since the ‘body’ seems again to be our material frame, its parts (melē) are likely to be our various limbs or organs (eyes and ears, hands and feet), although probably including our human faculties or capacities, which can be used by sin as instruments of wickedness. Hopla is a general word for tools, implements or instruments of any kind, though some think sin is here personified as a military commander to whom it would be possible to offer our organs and faculties as ‘weapons’.

Instead of giving in to sin, letting it rule over our bodies and surrendering them to its service, Paul now presses us to the positive alternative: rather offer yourselves to God (13b). Whereas the command not to offer ourselves to sin was in the present tense, indicating that we must not go on doing it, the appeal to offer ourselves to God is an aorist, which is clearly significant. Although it may not be a call for a once-for-all surrender, it at least suggests ‘deliberate and decisive commitment’. As with the negative prohibitions, so with the positive commands, Paul looks beyond a general self-offering to the presentation of every part (again both members and faculties) of our bodies to God, this time as an instrument [or weapon] of righteousness (13c).

And the ground on which these appeals are based is that we have been brought from death to life (13b). The logic is clear. Since we have died to sin, it is unthinkable that we should let sin reign in us or offer ourselves to it. Since we are alive to God, it is only appropriate that we should offer ourselves and our faculties to him. This theme of life and death, or rather death and life, runs right through this section. Christ died and rose. We have died and risen with him. We must therefore regard ourselves as dead to sin and alive to God. And, as those who are alive from death, we must offer ourselves to his service.

viii. Sin will not be our master (6:14)

The apostle now supplies a further reason for offering ourselves not to sin but to God. It is that sin shall no longer [he is expressing an assurance, even a promise, not a command] be your master. Why not? Because you are not under the law, but under grace (14). This is the ultimate secret of freedom from sin. Law and grace are the opposing principles of the old and the new orders, of Adam and of Christ. To be under the law is to accept the obligation to keep it and so to come under its curse or condemnation. To be under grace is to acknowledge our dependence on the work of Christ for salvation, and so to be justified rather than condemned, and thus set free. For ‘those who know themselves freed from condemnation are free to resist sin’s usurped power with new strength and boldness’.

So the first half of Romans 6 is wedged between two notable references to sin and grace. In the first verse the question is asked whether grace encourages sin; in the last verse (14) the answer is given that, on the contrary, grace discourages and even outlaws sin. It is law which provokes and increases sin (5:20); grace opposes it. Grace lays upon us the responsibility of holiness.

b. Enslaved to God, or the logic of our conversion (6:15–23)

Verse 15 (Shall we sin because we are not under the law but under grace?) is clearly parallel to verse 1 (‘Shall we go on sinning, so that grace may increase?’). It is true that there are differences between sinning and persisting in sin, and between sinning so that grace may increase and sinning because we are under grace. But these are minor. Much the same question is being asked in both verses, namely whether grace sanctions sin, and even encourages it. And in both cases it leads the apostle to utter the same passionate protest: By no means! (2, 15).

We might say that Paul has returned to the beginning of the track, and will now replay it, although with two significant shifts of emphasis. First, although he develops the same argument that freedom to sin is fundamentally incompatible with our Christian reality, he describes this in terms of our being united to Christ in verses 3–14 and of our being enslaved to God in verses 16–23. It is not only the figure of speech which is different, however, namely ‘dead to sin but alive to God’ (11) and ‘free from sin and . . . slaves of God’ (22). It is also, and second, how these radical changes came about. The emphasis of the former is on what was done to us (we were united to Christ), while the emphasis of the latter is on what we did (we offered ourselves to God to obey him). The passive statement refers to our baptism (we were baptized), whereas the active is properly called conversion (we turned from sin to God), although of course only grace enabled us to do it.

What Paul does in the second half of Romans 6 is to draw out the logic of our conversion, as in the first half he has drawn out the logic of our baptism. In both cases his argument begins with the same astonished question, ‘Don’t you know . . . ?’ (3, 16), and continues by probing our understanding of our Christian beginnings. Since through baptism we were united to Christ, and as a result are dead to sin and alive to God, how can we possibly live in sin? Since through conversion we offered ourselves to God to be his slaves, and in consequence are committed to obedience, how can we possibly claim freedom to sin?

i. The principle: self-surrender leads to slavery (6:16)

The apostle’s basic question to his readers is this: Don’t you know that when you offer yourselves to someone as obedient slaves, you are slaves of the one you obey . . . ? (16a). The concept may surprise us because we tend to think of Roman slaves as having been either captured in war or bought in the marketplace, not as having offered themselves. But there was such a thing as voluntary slavery. ‘People in dire poverty could offer themselves as slaves to someone simply in order to be fed and housed.’ Paul’s point is that those who thus offered themselves always had their offer accepted. They could not expect to give themselves to a slave-master and simultaneously retain their freedom. It is the same with spiritual slavery. Self-surrender leads inevitably to slavery, whether we thus become slaves to sin, which leads to death, or to obedience, which leads to righteousness (16b). The notion of slavery to sin is readily understandable (not least because Jesus spoke of it), and so is the fact that it leads to death (separation from God both here and in the future), since at the end of the chapter Paul will refer to death as the ‘wages’ which sin pays (23). It is less easy, however, to understand his apparently inexact parallels. As the alternative to being ‘slaves to sin’ one might have expected ‘slaves to Christ’ rather than ‘slaves to obedience’, and as the alternative to ‘death’ the expectation would be ‘life’ rather than ‘righteousness’. Yet the idea of being ‘obedient to obedience’ is a dramatic way of emphasizing that obedience is the very essence of slavery, and ‘righteousness’ in the sense of justification is almost another word for life (cf. 5:18). At least Paul’s general meaning is beyond doubt. Conversion is an act of self-surrender; self-surrender leads inevitably to slavery; and slavery demands a total, radical, exclusive obedience. For, as Jesus said, no-one can be the slave of two masters. So, once we have offered ourselves to him as his slaves, we are permanently and unconditionally at his disposal. There is no possibility of going back on this. Having chosen our master, we have no further choice but to obey him.

ii. The application: conversion involves an exchange of slaveries (6:17–18)

Having laid down the principle that surrender leads to slavery, Paul applies it to his Roman readers, reminding them that their conversion involved an exchange of slaveries. Indeed, so complete is the change which has taken place in their lives that he breaks out into a spontaneous outburst of praise: thanks be to God. He then sums up their experience in four stages, which concern what they used to be (slaves to sin), what they did (obey from your heart), what happened to them (set free from sin) and what they had become (slaves to righteousness).

First, you used to be slaves to sin (17a). Paul does not mince his words. All human beings are slaves, and there are only two slaveries, to sin and to God. Conversion is a transfer from the one to the other. Second, you have come to obey from your heart the pattern of teaching that has now claimed your allegiance (17b). This is a most unusual description of conversion. That they had ‘obeyed’ is understandable, since the proper response to the gospel is ‘the obedience that comes from faith’ (1:5). But here it is not God or Christ whom they are said to have obeyed, but a certain pattern of teaching. This must have been a ‘pattern of sound teaching’, or structure of apostolic instruction, which probably included both elementary gospel doctrine and elementary personal ethics. Paul evidently sees conversion not only as trusting in Christ but as believing and acknowledging the truth. Moreover, Paul writes not that this teaching was committed to them, but that they were committed (claimed your allegiance) to it. The verb he uses is paradidōmi, which is the regular word for passing on a tradition. ‘One expects the doctrine to be handed over to the hearers,’ writes C. K. Barrett, ‘not the hearers to the doctrine. But Christians are not (like the Rabbis) masters of a tradition; they are themselves created by the word of God, and remain in subjection to it.’

Third, the Romans have been set free from sin (18a), emancipated from its slavery. Not that they have become perfect, for they are still capable of sinning (e.g. 12–13), but rather that they have been decisively rescued out of the lordship of sin into the lordship of God, out of the dominion of darkness into the kingdom of Christ. In consequence, fourth, they have become slaves to righteousness (18b). So decisive is this transfer by the grace and power of God from the slavery of sin to the slavery of righteousness that Paul cannot restrain himself from thanksgiving.

iii. The analogy: both slaveries develop (6:19)

Verse 19 begins with a kind of apology by Paul for the human limitations within which he has been describing conversion. For slavery is not an entirely accurate or appropriate picture of the Christian life. It is an accurate indicator of the exclusivity of our allegiance to the Lord Christ, but does not describe the easy fit of his yoke, the gentleness of the hand that lays it on us or the liberating nature of his service. Why then did the apostle use it? He gives his reason: because of your human limitations, which must be a reference to their fallenness, either in their minds, so that they find it hard to understand, or in their characters, so that they are vulnerable to temptation and need to be reminded of the obedience to which they have committed themselves.

In spite of his apologetic explanation, Paul continues to compare and contrast the two slaveries. But this time he draws an analogy between them (Just as . . . so now) in the way they both develop. Neither slavery is static. Both are dynamic, the one steadily deteriorating, the other steadily progressing. Just as you used to offer yourselves as slaves to impurity and to ever-increasing wickedness [literally ‘and of lawlessness unto lawlessness’], so now offer yourselves [which you have done already, but will be wise to do again] as slaves to righteousness leading to holiness (19b; hagiasmos, the process of sanctification, that is, of being changed into the likeness of Christ). Thus despite the contrast between them, an analogy is also drawn between the grim process of moral deterioration and the glorious process of moral transformation.

iv. The paradox: slavery is freedom and freedom is slavery (6:20–22)

Still the comparison and contrast between the two slaveries continue. This time the apostle points out that each slavery is also a kind of freedom, although the one is authentic and the other false. Similarly, each freedom is a kind of slavery, although the one is degrading and the other ennobling. On the one hand, he writes, When you were slaves to sin, you were free from the control of righteousness (20), although that sort of freedom is better called licence. On the other hand, he writes, But now . . . you have been set free from sin and have become slaves of God (22a), although that sort of slavery is better called liberty. Moreover, the way to assess the rival claims of these two slaveries or freedoms is by evaluating their benefit, literally their ‘fruit’. The negative benefits of slavery to sin and freedom from righteousness are remorse in the present (a sense of guilt over the things you are now ashamed of, or ‘blush to remember’, jbp), and in the end death (21), here surely meaning the eternal death of separation from God in hell, which is called in the final chapters of the book of Revelation ‘the second death’. But now, Paul goes on, the positive benefits of freedom from sin and slavery to God are holiness in the present and in the end eternal life (22b), surely here meaning fellowship with God in heaven. Thus there is a freedom which spells death, and a bondage which spells life.

v. The conclusion: the ultimate contrast (6:23)

In this final verse of the chapter Paul continues his stark contrast between sin (personified) and God, whom he has characterized throughout as the alternative slave-masters, to one or other of whom all human beings are in bondage. Those who are in Adam serve sin, while those who are in Christ serve God. He also repeats the warning that these two slaveries are so completely opposed to each other that the ultimate destinies to which they lead are either death or eternal life. What is new is the third contrast, which concerns the terms of service on which the two slave-owners operate. For the wages of sin is death, but the gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord (23). Thus sin pays wages (you get what you deserve), but God gives a free gift (you are given what you do not deserve). Opsōnia normally refers to ‘ration [money] paid to a soldier’ (BAGD), but in this context perhaps to ‘the pocket money allowed to slaves’. Charisma, on the other hand, is a gift of God’s grace. If, then, we are determined to get what we deserve, it can only be death; by contrast, eternal life is God’s gift, wholly free and utterly undeserved. The only ground on which this gift is bestowed is the atoning death of Christ, and the only condition of receiving it is that we are in Christ Jesus our Lord, that is, personally united to him by faith.

Here, then, are two lives which are totally opposed to each other. Jesus portrayed them as the broad road which leads to destruction and the narrow road which leads to life. Paul calls them two slaveries. By birth we are in Adam, the slaves of sin; by grace and faith we are in Christ, the slaves of God. Bondage to sin yields no return except shame and continuing moral deterioration, culminating in the death we deserve. Bondage to God, however, yields the precious fruit of progressive holiness, culminating in the free gift of life.

Looking back over Romans 6, we recall that both its halves begin with an almost identical question: ‘Shall we go on sinning?’ (1) and ‘Shall we sin?’ (15). This question was posed by Paul’s detractors, who intended by it to discredit his gospel; it has been asked ever since by the enemies of the gospel; and it is often whispered in our ears today by that most venomous of all the gospel’s enemies, the devil himself. As in the garden of Eden he asked Eve, ‘Did God really say, “You must not . . . ”?’ so he insinuates into our minds the thought, ‘Why not continue in sin? Go on! Feel free! You are under grace. God will forgive you.’

Our first response must be the outraged negative, ‘God forbid!’ ‘By no means!’ But then we need to go further and confirm this negative with a reason. For there is a reason (solid, logical, irrefutable) with which to rebut the devil’s devious arguments and with which at the same time Paul brings his high theology down to the level of practical everyday experience. It is the necessity of remembering who we are, on account of our conversion (inwardly) and our baptism (outwardly). We are one with Christ (1–14), and we are slaves of God (15–23). We became united to Christ by baptism and enslaved to God by the self-surrender of conversion. But whether we emphasize baptism or faith, the point is the same. Being united to Christ, we are ‘dead to sin but alive to God’ (11), and being enslaved to God we are inevitably committed to obedience (16), pledged to ‘the total belongingness, the total obligation, the total commitment and the total accountability which characterize the life under grace’. It is unthinkable that we should go back on this by wilfully persisting in sin and presuming on grace. The very thought is intolerable, and a complete contradiction in terms.

So, in practice, we should constantly be reminding ourselves who we are. We need to learn to talk to ourselves, and ask ourselves questions: ‘Don’t you know? Don’t you know the meaning of your conversion and baptism? Don’t you know that you have been united to Christ in his death and resurrection? Don’t you know that you have been enslaved to God and have committed yourself to his obedience? Don’t you know these things? Don’t you know who you are?’ We must go on pressing ourselves with such questions, until we reply to ourselves: ‘Yes, I do know who I am, a new person in Christ, and by the grace of God I shall live accordingly.’

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