The Irreversible Death to Sin (Rom. 6:8-11)
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Before we come to look at this text together, both its meaning and application to us, I want to make a simple observation about this text here at the beginning. There is something different about verse 11, something that we have not yet encountered here in Romans. It is this: verse 11 contains an imperative verb, and it is the first imperative verb in Paul’s letter to the Romans. Imperative verbs of course are meant to convey commands. This is the first time in six chapters that Paul gives a command to his audience.
Does that surprise you? Do you wonder that Paul waited this long to get to “something to do”? I think perhaps we should ask ourselves if we are too eager to say, “Just tell me what to do,” when God wants you to understand why you should do what you are supposed to do. That is to say, doctrine is important, and preaching that does not teach doctrine, that is not careful to be precise in matters of doctrine is not being Biblical. The whole point of Romans is that before you can take even one step in terms of your obedience to God, you need to understand some things. You need to understand who God is, how we have sinned, and how Christ is the only answer to the problem that sin presents. And we need to understand these things, not on a superficial level, but deeply. That’s why Paul has written five and a half chapters of pure doctrine before he gets to a single command. And he will go one writing doctrine to the end of chapter 11! Clearly, what’s important for Paul ought to be important for us as well. Brothers and sisters, let’s care about Biblical truth and doctrine. Beware of preachers and teachers that say we need to minimize it for the sake of doing this or that.
We can see how it is important right here in these verses. I want you to consider three words here in verses 8-11. They are believe in verse 8, knowing in verse 9, and reckon in verse 11. There is an order to them that is important as well. We believe because we know, and it is on that basis that we are to reckon. This word reckon is the same word Paul uses numerous times in chapter 4, where it is translated as “impute” as well as “reckon,” “counted,” and “considered.” We believe things we know, and on the basis of that knowledge we are to consider certain things to be true about ourselves. It is then on that basis that the apostle will proceed to tell us to not let sin reign in our mortal bodies that we should obey it in the lusts thereof.
But the point is that you can’t reckon anything about yourself if you don’t believe it , and you won’t believe it if you don’t know it! We have to know somethings, and Paul is laboring here in this chapter to help us to see them so that we’ll believe them, so that we’ll apply them. As Lloyd-Jones pointed out many years ago, verses 1-10 are pure doctrine. It is only at the point of verse 11 that we begin to get application. Clearly, we can’t apply what we don’t know. This is doctrine we need to know. We must know it, and our lives as Christians are going to be incredibly impoverished if we don’t.
So what is Paul talking about here?
The Interpretation of this Text
We noted when we looked at verses 5-7 that the emphasis in these verses is the inevitability of rising to walk in newness of life for those who have died with Christ. And it’s important for us to see that, because it means that we are united to the whole Christ, to Jesus in every aspect of his redemptive work. You can’t get part of Jesus. You get all of him, or none of him. And that means that it is utter nonsense to imagine a group of people out there who have Jesus as Savior but not as Lord, or who have this aspect of his redemptive work but not another. Everything that Jesus died for every believer has, either in promise or possession. Believer, know this, and let it comfort and strengthen your heart.
When we come to verse 8, you might notice that Paul seems to be repeating himself. In verse 5, we read, “For if we have been planted together in the likeness of his death, we shall be also in the likeness of his resurrection.” Now in verse 8, you have essentially the same thing: “Now if we be dead with Christ, we believe that we shall also live with him.” Both verses say that those who have died with Christ will live with him. But what we see in verses 9 and 10 is that Paul takes this reality and makes a slightly different emphasis upon this connection between union with Christ in his death and life. In verses 6 and 7 the emphasis was on the certainty of one leading to the other. Now the emphasis is on the once-for-all nature of this death to sin.
Why would Paul make this point? Well, I think it is for this reason: I think it is because he is still answering this question back from verse 1: “What shall we say then? Shall we continue in sin, that grace may abound?” His argument in this chapter is an unpacking of the logic behind his disgust at the very notion: “God forbid!” (2). In verse 2, we see that the fundamental reality and premise of his argument is that all who belong to Christ have died to sin, a reality which is witnessed to in every one of our baptisms (3-4). But Paul doesn’t stop there: he goes on to argue that this death to sin inevitably leads to a new life (5-7). One cannot say that they have the benefit of Christ’s death if they are not also walking in the power of his resurrection life.
However, someone else perhaps could come back with this response: “Well,” they might say, “What if we can come back under the power of sin again? Maybe it is true that everyone who believes makes this transition from death to sin to life in Christ, but what if it’s possible to slip back under the power of sin? Could it not be that the one who is continuing in sin at the present is just no longer dead to sin, though he once was?” I think it is perhaps this kind of reasoning that the apostle forestalls in these verses.
Now, the fact of the matter is that many years aga I actually heard a preacher make this very argument. He went to various passages in the NT, places like Hebrews 6 for example, applying them to the elect, and arguing that the elect can not only backslide but apostatize, that they can sin so deeply and badly as to never be able to recover from it this side of heaven. There is only one thing to say to that: it is utter rubbish and complete nonsense. Apart from being a serious misinterpretation of passages like Hebrews 6, it is a denial, as I hope to show in a moment, of the very argument that the apostle is making here in these verses.
His argument is this. We are united to Christ in both his death and resurrection, which is the statement of verse 8. Now in verses 9-10 you will notice that we don’t come into the picture. The apostle is talking exclusively here about the Lord. But verse 8 alerts us to the fact that what the Lord does, he does for us, for those who are united to him. Jesus didn’t act for himself; he acted for the sake of others. Everything he did was for the sake of those the Father gave him to save, for the elect. And what the apostle is saying is that because of this union between the believer and Christ, what he did will be reflected in the life of a believer. Because his death to sin inevitably led to resurrection in life, so will ours. Because his death to sin was a once-for-all death, so will ours be. We cannot come back under its power again.
Now it’s important to go back to verse 5 and highlight that word “likeness” again. Christ did not die to sin in the same sense in which we must die to sin. He died to sin by bearing the penalty due to our sin. We do not die to sin by bearing the penalty of our sin. Our dying to sin is the result of his dying to sin and there is a likeness between the two in the sense that ours follows from his. We die to both the penalty and the power of sin in the new birth when Christ applies his redemption to us and brings us to faith in him. But Christ was never a sinner, and he never had a polluted nature and never had to die to sin in that sense. Thus Paul will say in 2 Cor. 5:21 that though he became sin for us, he never personally knew sin by being himself a sinner. He was and ever will be “holy, harmless, undefiled, separate from sinners, and made higher than the heavens” (Heb. 7:26). Nevertheless, Christ came under the “power” of sin and the “rule” of sin in the sense that he suffered sin’s penalty, death, so that we could be freed from its power to enslave and corrupt and kill us, both physically and morally and spiritually and eternally.
The point is that Christ only came under the power of death once, and, having risen from the dead, can come under its power no longer. The language Paul uses in verse 10 to say this is actually very strong. “He died unto sin once,” which could be translated, “once for all time.” This is the word he uses, for example, in his letter to the Hebrews, when he writes (note the emphasis on once):
By the which will we are sanctified through the offering of the body of Jesus Christ once for all [same Greek word as in Rom. 6:10]. And every priest standeth daily ministering and offering oftentimes the same sacrifices, which can never take away sins: But this man, after he had offered one sacrifice for sins for ever, sat down on the right hand of God; From henceforth expecting till his enemies be made his footstool. For by one offering he hath perfected for ever them that are sanctified. (Heb. 10:10-14).
The writer of Hebrews is underlining as forcibly as he possibly can that Christ not only died once, but that he could only die once. Our Lord “offered one sacrifice for sins for ever,” never to be repeated again. He dealt such a blow to sin, he satisfied all the demands of the law, so that he could never come under its power again. There is no need to. The sting of death has been taken out by Christ. He was utterly victorious over sin, death, and the grave.
And this is the point of the apostle here. Having been raised from the dead, he dies no more, because death can have no further dominion over him (9). He died to sin once for all time, and now that he lives, he lives unto God.
What does that mean, “He lives unto God”? Remember, “he” is Christ. It must be a reference to the state into which he entered after his death and resurrection. He lives unto God in this sense: that he is no longer enduring the wrath of God for our sakes, but having satisfied the wrath of God, he is now enthroned at his right hand in glory. He ascended up, as Paul will tell Timothy, in or up into glory. Or, to use the language of Hebrews 10 again, it means that he “sat down on the right hand of God; From henceforth expecting till his enemies be made his footstool. For by one offering he hath perfected for ever them that are sanctified.”
Now the application is that this is true of us, if we belong to Christ. If you are a born-again believer, this is true of you. You have died to sin in Christ, and therefore you can never come under its rule again. Never! He died so that “henceforth we should not serve sin” (6). He died so that we could say, “Sin shall not have dominion over me, because I am no longer under the law but under grace” (14). You can never sin yourself into a place from which you cannot recover. Impossible. Why? Not because we’ve done the right things, but because we are inseparably united to the living Christ.
This is true of you, if you have been drawn by the Spirit to true faith in Christ, regardless of how you feel. It is true that the way we apply this text, and this truth is to kill sin in our life. But the point we need to remember is that this is an objective reality. It is not dependent upon your feelings or your past or present. It is dependent upon Christ and your union to and with him alone. The saint can backslide, yes, but the saint cannot apostatize. The saint can never come under the power of sin so as to have to die to it again.
So this is what the text is saying: the Christian who is united to the Christ who completely defeated death can never come under the power of sin again so as to need to die to it again.
The Implications of this Truth
It means, first of all, that if you are a true believer – that is, if you have been drawn by the Holy Spirit in faith and repentance to Christ – then you are saved, and you can never be unsaved. For a saved person to lose their salvation would mean that they have come under the power of sin again. But that is precisely what Paul says cannot take place. It cannot take place because Christ can never be taken by death again.
Now some will argue that what is true of Christ is not necessarily true of us and that we can come under the power of death again. And their reason for this is that since it was by an act of the will that we are saved in the first place, then we can be unsaved by an act of the will. And I would agree with the logic of that as far as it goes. The problem is that it isn’t biblical! Of course our wills are involved in conversion to Christ, but our wills are not the only will involved here and they are not ultimately determinative. The will of God is also at work and God’s will guarantees that we cannot be lost. What is the will of God when it comes to the salvation of sinners? It is this, in the words of our Lord: “And this is the Father's will which hath sent me, that of all which he hath given me I should lose nothing, but should raise it up again at the last day” (Jn.6:39).
But more than that, as we have seen, salvation is being united to Christ. We come to Christ to be united to him, and, as our Lord again put it, “All that the Father giveth me shall come to me; and him that cometh to me I will in no wise cast out” (37). We are not only united to Christ dying on the cross; we are united to Christ risen from the dead, and ascended up into heaven. It’s not just that we hold on to Christ; he holds on to us, and he does so from a position of unassailable power and grace. As Paul will later put it in the eighth chapter,
Who is he that condemneth? It is Christ that died, yea rather, that is risen again, who is even at the right hand of God, who also maketh intercession for us. Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? shall tribulation, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or sword? As it is written, For thy sake we are killed all the day long; we are accounted as sheep for the slaughter. Nay, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him that loved us. For I am persuaded, that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor powers, nor things present, nor things to come, Nor height, nor depth, nor any other creature, shall be able to separate us from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord. (Rom. 8:34-39)
It means, secondly, that the elect can never sin themselves into a place from which they cannot recover. Now that doesn’t mean that we can’t sin. Of course we can; otherwise the exhortations of verses 12 and following wouldn’t make any sense. Nor does this mean that we can’t sin greatly. It doesn’t mean we can’t bring great hurt to people in our lives through our sins. We all need to be honest about this possibility. There is no sin, short of the unpardonable sin, that the elect cannot commit. I tremble when I hear of ministers falling into sin. I don’t look at them and tell myself the lie that it couldn’t happen to me. It can, which means that I have to be on my guard 24/7. I can never stop fighting sin because the moment I do I am going to be in serious trouble. I can never stop guarding my heart, because the battle is either won or lost there. It doesn’t matter who you are, or what great things you have done for Jesus: we are all vulnerable to sin. King David proves it; the apostle Peter proves it.
But what these verses tell us is that even when we sin, our relationship to sin is still fundamentally different from what it was before we were united to Christ by faith. We are no longer in the realm of sin where it rules over us, and we can never come back to that realm. We are in the realm of grace and righteousness, where Christ is our Lord and Savior. All grace is ours through him. And that means even if we have fallen into a deep, deep pit, it is not so deep that the grace of God cannot reach down and bring us out. We are still united to Christ, to his grace, to his power, to his righteousness, and there just is no sin that can overcome or overpower the grace, power, and righteousness of God. It would be blasphemy to think so!
And that means that, one way or another, God will bring his elect to repentance when they sin. Did we mention King David and the apostle Peter and their sins? Yes, but did not the Lord restore them again?
The reality is that the ability to fight the sin in our lives is not ultimately rooted in past successes, nor is the inability to fight rooted in past failures. Look, I’m not saying that you can’t make things harder for yourself. Of course you can. We cannot sin with impunity, no matter who we are. You can make provision for the flesh to fulfill the lusts thereof. You can put yourself in the wrong place at the wrong time. You can make light of sin, and as a result find yourself in sin, even terrible sin. But what we must never allow ourselves to say is that God’s people are ever out of reach of his restorative grace. And by restorative grace, I don’t just mean the grace that brings forgiveness but also the grace that causes us to turn from the sin and back to obedience to God. That is why this claim that a true believer can sin so as never to be able to recover from it is so disgraceful. It is a denial of everything the apostle Paul is saying here. We should say to that as well, “God forbid! How shall we, who are dead to sin, live any longer in it?”
Of course we should not let this truth relax our vigilance against sin. Nothing I have said should make you go there. But I do think that sometimes in our fight with sin, with a particular sin, we can get really discouraged. We can think that we will never be able to overcome it. Or perhaps that we have sinned so greatly that maybe we just won’t be able to make it back into the Lord’s favor and blessing. My friend, let me say this. All the power to overcome that sin does not depend upon your past success or failure. It depends solely upon Christ, and I want to say to you that his love and grace and power is more than enough to bring you out of whatever bondage you find yourself in right now. Trust in him, go to him in prayer, ask for his help. And, yes, fight the sin with all your might. Pluck out an eye, cut of a hand if that is what it takes. Strive, mortify, fight, wrestle with the sin in your life. But do in the power of God’s might. Do it from this unbreakable position of union with Christ by faith.
Third, it means that future salvation will be certainly ours. Though the immediate application of this truth here in Romans 6 is present obedience, the fact that we are united to the risen and exalted Christ who can never come under the power of death again means that not only are we irreversibly delivered from the bondage of sin, but that we are irreversibly being led to glory, to physical resurrection, and eternal life in the presence of God in heaven. We are on a journey that has many twists and turns, and often it is impossible to see what’s around the next corner. But we know where the journey ends. It ends in the immediate presence of the risen Christ. It ends, as Jude puts it, “faultless before the presence of his glory with exceeding joy” (Jude 24).
And we are clearly meant to live this life in light of that reality. Believer, you are connected to the one who says to you, as he said to John, “Fear not; I am the first and the last: I am he that liveth, and was dead; and, behold, I am alive for evermore, Amen; and have the keys of hell and of death” (Rev. 1:17-18). Christ is bringing you to heaven with him. You are already united to him, and it is impossible for you to become disconnected from him. Heaven may be future to you, but it is not uncertain for you. I think Toplady put it so well when he wrote,
Do you live as one who is almost to heaven? Look, this is not something I’m making up, this is the repeated emphasis of the NT. You are meant to live this way. Live in the sight of heaven. As Paul puts it, “For our conversation[citizenship] is in heaven; from whence also we look for the Saviour, the Lord Jesus Christ: Who shall change our vile body, that it may be fashioned like unto his glorious body, according to the working whereby he is able even to subdue all things unto himself” (Phil. 3:20-21). How can you live as a citizen of heaven without the expectation of being there, without the longing for it, and unless you find your ultimate sense of belonging and identity there? Peter likewise encourages us: “Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, which according to his abundant mercy hath begotten us again unto a lively hope by the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead, To an inheritance incorruptible, and undefiled, and that fadeth not away, reserved in heaven for you, Who are kept by the power of God through faith unto salvation ready to be revealed in the last time” (1 Pet. 1:3-5). What are we to rejoice in? That our names are written in heaven (cf. Lk. 10:20).
In fact, in a very real sense, we are already there in Christ. Isn’t this what Paul tells us when he says, “But God, who is rich in mercy, for his great love wherewith he loved us, Even when we were dead in sins, hath quickened us together with Christ, (by grace ye are saved;) And hath raised us up together, and made us sit together in heavenly places in Christ Jesus: That in the ages to come he might shew the exceeding riches of his grace in his kindness toward us through Christ Jesus” (Eph. 2:4-7).
Now, believer, you are to consider this as true of yourself. That is the point of verse 11: “Likewise reckon ye also yourselves to be dead indeed unto sin, but alive unto God through Jesus Christ our Lord.” Christ died to sin once and now lives unto God, and did this for you so that you might die to sin once and live from henceforth unto God: consider that to be true of you. You have been definitively, irreversibly delivered from the power of sin and put in the realm of grace. You are dead to sin and alive to God. Know that, believe that, apply that to yourself. Live in light of that reality.
By the way, just to be clear about what Paul is saying, he is not telling us to make this true of ourselves by believing it to be true. He is telling us to believe something that is already true. We have died to sin: now live in light of that. We have risen to newness of life: now live in light of that. We’re not making something real by believing it to be true. That is not Biblical teaching at all. You don’t believe something into existence. We are told to believe what is true of all who have been led by the Holy Spirit to put their trust in Jesus.
Thus, when Paul tells the Ephesians and the Colossians to put off the old man and put on the new man, he is telling them to be what they are. Your old man is gone, and you are a new man: now live like it! The fact is, if you are a true Christian, you have died, and you will need to die to sin in this sense no more. Again, this does not mean that we don’t die continually to particular sins, but that our ongoing mortification of sin in our life is possible because of this previous death to sin that delivers us from its dominion. Not its presence, but its dominating hold on us. Sin is no longer the Master; Jesus is, and we gladly live under his reign and in the power of his grace. But we can sometimes forget this, and become tired and discouraged because we forget the resources that we have in Christ. Don’t forget the riches that you have in Jesus. Reckon this to be true of yourself because it is true. Know what you have by grace through Christ and live in joyful hope.
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