Risen With Christ
RISEN WITH CHRIST
ROMANS 6:5-10
Paul continues his argument on the newness of life as a Christian
Union with Christ at one point, in his death, means union with him in the whole sequence of events which followed—his resurrection and his exaltation. Victorious living, and our immortality, is implicit in this reality. To imagine that sinners could accept the gift of grace, and then continue living their old life, would betray an error of such a fundamental nature as to call into doubt their whole affirmation of acceptance.
He who has “died with Christ” is set free from a slavery (6:6); but is released, as death in all cases releases, from all bonds and obligations (6:7). The new life in Christ will be the same life which Christ himself lives, a life inaccessible to death. Something between thirty and forty years were to pass before John closed the canon of the New Testament with his Gospel and the first of his three letters which accompanied it. Over that period Paul’s doctrine of union with Christ, which appears in more than one form and context in his writings, had been taught and experienced in the church. Perhaps that is one reason why John so stresses “eternal life” in his writings. “Eternal life” is the life of this passage, that mode of living which Christ, risen from the dead, experiences, and which is shared by those “in him.”
The new life in Christ gripped the imagination of the early church, and one of the commonest graffiti in the catacombs beneath Rome, so haunted by the early Christians of the city to which Paul addressed his words, is the phrase “in Christ,” scratched on wall and sepulcher in Latin and in Greek. “Remain in me,” said Jesus in the last hours before his death, and that last talk with his disciples should be studied alongside this passage. Remaining (abiding) in Christ is “that continuous act by which we set aside all that which we might derive from ourselves, to draw all resources from Christ by faith” (Godet, adapted). It is all “by faith.”