Two Masters: Two Ends (Rom. 6:15-18)

 

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Most of you know, I’m sure, that on Monday, July 14, the beloved Bible teacher, pastor, and author, Dr. John MacArthur, passed into glory after many years of faithful ministry.  Many of us have been very blessed by his ministry over the years.  I’ve been reading his books and listening to his sermons since the mid ‘90s.  His book The Gospel According to Jesus had a significant impact early on upon my ministry (I have an autographed copy in my office which I will always cherish).  I am thankful for his resolute faithfulness to the authority of Scripture over the years, and his unwillingness to budge even when it made him unpopular.  I am thankful for his prophetic voice and his courageous and difficult stands that endure as a call for the church to be the pillar and ground of the truth in a post-Christian age.  And I am thankful for the example of graciousness that always existed alongside his boldness, a balance that is often frankly missing today.

Speaking of The Gospel According to Jesus, the subject matter of that book is relevant to the passage before us.  In that book, MacArthur was arguing that a person cannot come to Jesus for salvation from the penalty of sin without also coming to him for salvation from the power of sin, that you cannot have Jesus as Savior without also having him as Lord, that you can’t have faith without repentance.  The position he was advocating for came to be known as “Lordship salvation,” and his book is still a rallying point for Biblically faithful expositors as well as a target for those who are opposed to it.  

This is what MacArthur says in the introduction to his book (and if you haven’t read it, I would recommend that you get a copy and do so):

The gospel in vogue today holds forth a false hope to sinners.  It promises them they can have eternal life yet continue to live in rebellion against God.  Indeed, it encourages people to claim Jesus as Savior yet defer until later the commitment to obey him as Lord.  It promises salvation from hell but not necessarily freedom from iniquity.  It offers false security to people who revel in the sins of the flesh and spurn the way of holiness.  By separating faith from faithfulness, it teaches that intellectual assent is as valid as wholehearted obedience to the truth. 

Thus the good news of Christ has given way to the bad news of an insidious easy-believism that makes no moral demands on the lives of sinners.  It is not the same message that Jesus proclaimed. 

I would agree.  This is relevant to Romans 6 because Paul is answering the equivalent of easy-believism in his day, and having done it once in the first fourteen verses, he picks up the gauntlet again in verses 15-23: “What then?  Shall we sin, because we are not under the law, but under grace?” (15).  Now there are people who will not only take grace as a license for sin, but there are also those who will say, “Well, we shouldn’t sin, but grace nevertheless means that you can be a slave to sin and yet still be saved.”  Some would argue that as long as you made a profession of faith as some point, no matter what your life looks like afterward, even if you are living in blatant and unrepentant rebellion against God, you are saved.  Others would argue that you don’t even have to believe in Jesus or the gospel, as long as you are a half-way descent person, you will be saved.  In other words, they want to detach faith in and obedience to Christ as Lord from salvation.  I want to argue that this passage simply won’t allow us to do that.  

How is that?  What is the argument of the apostle Paul in this text?  He is arguing here that there are only two masters and only two ends. He is arguing that everyone of us is a slave.  The word “servant” throughout the passage is the Greek word doulos, which just means “slave” or “bondservant.”  Slaves are not members of any trade union, and they don’t have a lot of rights.  A slave can’t just decide to quit.  You don’t own yourself; someone else does.  And the apostle is saying that everyone of us is a slave, and that there are only two options: you will either be a slave of sin, or you will be a slave of obedience to God.  And then he goes on to say that each instance of slavery leads inevitably to something: sin to death and obedience to righteousness and life.  You cannot be a slave to sin and expect life; and God will not give to those who belong to him, who are his slaves, anything less than eternal life in Jesus Christ our Lord.

Really, Paul is answering the same question that was asked in 6:1, “Shall we continue in sin, that grace may abound?”  Notice that in both 6:1 and 6:15, grace is used as an excuse for continuing in a lifestyle of sin.  We’ve noted previously that chapter 6 divides into two parts, 6:1-14 and 6:15-23, and that in the first part Paul refutes the assumption of the questioner by an appeal to the believer’s union with Christ in terms of death and life, whereas in the second part he does so in terms of slavery and freedom.  This is what we are looking at now.

This second part of the chapter essentially itself divides into two further parts.  In verses 16-18 we have Paul’s argument that we should not sin because we are not under law but under grace.  Then, in verse 19 the apostle switches to application and exhortation and the following verses to that (20-23) confirm and support that exhortation.  Today, I want us to look carefully at verses 15-18, and to consider the apostle’s argument before we get to his application and appeal.

There are a couple of main points I think the apostle makes here to substantiate his rejection of the premise that grace is consistent with a lifestyle of sin.  The first has to do with the where sin and obedience lead (16), and the second has to do with what grace does (17-18).

Where Sin Ends (16)

Paul begins his argument again with the words, “Know ye not?”  Ye despisers of doctrine, listen!  A failure to know and grasp the truth of God’s word, its doctrine and teaching, is precisely the reason why people get ensnared in bad doctrine, accept false premises, make wrong applications, and embrace sinful choices.  The apostle is saying here that the assumption behind this question is rooted in a lack of Biblical knowledge.  He is implying that if they just knew something they would never have asked this question in the first place. Our Lord accused the Sadducees of the very same thing, when they denied the resurrection: “Ye do err, not knowing the scriptures, nor the power of God” (Mt. 22:29).  Brothers and sisters, how important it is to know the Scriptures and the power of God and to see the connection between the two experientially in our lives!

What are we to know?  Verse 16: “Know ye not, that to whom ye yield yourselves servants to obey, his servants ye are to whom ye obey; whether of sin unto death, or of obedience unto righteousness?”  At first, Paul’s logic seems to be a tautology, but there is something important here that he is getting at.  He is reminding us that when we yield ourselves as servants, slaves, to sin, it is sin that we become the slaves to. And when we yield ourselves as servants to obedience to God, it is obedience to God that we become the slaves to.  

The point, I think, is this: you cannot sin with impunity.  Those who give themselves to sin will suffer the consequences of sin; they will receive the wages of sin.  If sin is your master, you get sin’s compensation.  The apostle will come back to this point in verse 23: “For the wages of sin is death.”  Those who are the slaves of sin will receive sin’s wages, which is death.

Now this death is not just natural and physical death.  We know that because it is contrasted with righteousness in verse 16 and with eternal life in verses 22 and 23.  Physical death is not contrary to being righteous; in fact, all those who are righteous will die in this sense unless Christ returns.  Millions of righteous men and women have died and will go on dying physical deaths.  But those who are declared legally righteous in Christ and those who are being made righteous by the work of the Holy Spirit will live and will be resurrected in the age to come.  They will have eternal life.  What the apostle is saying is that slavery to sin leads inevitably to eternal punishment and death.

On the other hand, those who are slaves to obedience are the slaves of God (note verse 22: “But now being set free from sin and become servants to God, ye have your fruit unto holiness and the end everlasting life).  And slavery to God leads inevitably and irreversibly to righteousness, not only in the sense of being right with God but also in the sense that being right with God means having the blessing of God, which is eternal and everlasting life. 

It's important to notice that though there is a necessarily connection between sin and death, and obedience and life, they are not connected in the same way.  Sin and death are connected like work and wages.  Sin merits death.  Impenitent sinners get death as a just wage.  But obedience and life and not connected that way.   We don’t get life because our obedience merits it.  Notice how the apostle puts it in verse 23: “For the wages of sin is death; but the gift of God is eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord.”  It is so crucial that we see that the contrast the apostle makes here is not between the wages of sin and the wages of obedience, but between the wages of sin and the gift of God through Jesus Christ.

It has to be this way because our obedience is always faulty and imperfect.  Walking in the light involves continually confessing and being cleansed from our sins (1 Jn. 1:5-10).  Walking in obedience means praying, along with provision for your daily bread, “Forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors” (Mt. 6:12).  So we can never expect God to give us life because our obedience demands it; rather it is the grace of God that puts obedience and life together through Jesus Christ.  Christ is the only one who merits eternal life, and the only way we can get it is freely through him, not because we are good enough. We must not forget the first 5 chapters!  We are justified through faith in Jesus Christ whose righteousness imputed to us is what gives us acceptance before God.

Let’s be clear therefore what the apostle is saying.  Everyone is either a slave to sin or a slave to God.  If you remain a slave to sin you will die an eternal death; if you by the grace of God become a slave to God you will receive eternal life as a gift through Christ.  It is impossible, therefore, that a person can claim to be a recipient of the grace of God in Christ and yet go on living in sin, for that would mean they are the slaves of sin. You cannot be a slave of sin and have the grace of God. 

What then does it mean to be a slave of sin?  It means to be under the dominion of sin; it means to live a life in which disobedience to God rather than obedience to God is the primary feature of the life.  It refers to one whose life is not lived in order to please God, but to please self, not out of love to God but out of love to self.  

On the other hand, what does it mean to be a slave to obedience?  Well, first of all, it doesn’t that you are without doubts.  It doesn’t mean that you are without sin.  People will sometimes lambast “Lordship salvation” by making a caricature out of it: they will paint it as if it taught that every true believer is going to live basically sin-free lives.  But that is a misrepresentation of the doctrine, and it is not what the apostle is saying here either.  He is saying that a true believer cannot go on living in sin.  They cannot, of course, because they have died to sin with Christ.  There is a fundamental change in their relationship to sin.

The Greek word used here literally means “to listen under.”  A man or woman obedient to God is one who listens to God as those who are under the authority of his word.  They obey the word of God.  They are not obeying their own desires, they are not licking their finger and sticking it into the winds of cultural change, they are submitting themselves to Scripture and obeying it.  They are men and women who obey the parts of the word of God that may not necessarily be currently offensive to the world, but they also obey the parts of the word of God that are offensive to the world.  They obey in the little things, and they obey in the big things.  They are servants of God when no one is looking, and they are servants of God when they are under the spotlight.  

There are only two ways, brethren.  There is the way of sin and there is the way of obedience to God.  There is no other way.  There are not people who have given themselves to the way of sin and unbelief making their way to heaven.  This is not only the words of the apostle Paul, which would be enough as the apostle of Christ, but it is also the words of Christ himself.  Do you remember what he said in the Sermon on the Mount?  Our Lord warns us and reminds us: “Enter ye in at the strait gate: for wide is the gate, and broad is the way, that leadeth to destruction, and many there be which go in thereat: Because strait is the gate, and narrow is the way, which leadeth unto life, and few there be that find it” (Mt. 7:13-14).  Two ways and two ends.  You don’t walk down the broad way and end in life, just as you don’t walk down the strait way and end in death.  Our Lord went on to say: “Beware of false prophets, which come to you in sheep's clothing, but inwardly they are ravening wolves. Ye shall know them by their fruits. Do men gather grapes of thorns, or figs of thistles? Even so every good tree bringeth forth good fruit; but a corrupt tree bringeth forth evil fruit. A good tree cannot bring forth evil fruit, neither can a corrupt tree bring forth good fruit. Every tree that bringeth not forth good fruit is hewn down, and cast into the fire. Wherefore by their fruits ye shall know them” (Mt. 7:15-20).  You will know them by their fruits is just another way of saying that you will know them by the master whom they serve: sin or God?  Where are you?  Are you in the broad way, doing whatever you please, going with the crowds, in a way that leads to destruction?  Or are you in the strait and narrow way, obeying the Lord and walking with the saints?

 Where Grace Begins (17-18)

So the apostle’s first argument is that it is impossible to think of being a Christian and going on in sin because those who are the slaves of sin will receive the wages of their master, which is eternal death and judgment.  And he says that those who are the slaves of God, who obey him, will receive righteousness and life.  

So then it’s not just a matter of whose slave we are; it’s also a matter of what grace does.  And grace is not antithetical to obedience.  Rather, obedience is the outcome of grace.  As the apostle Paul put it to the Ephesians, “For by grace are ye saved through faith; and that not of yourselves: it is the gift of God: not of works, lest any man should boast. For we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus unto good works, which God hath before ordained that we should walk in them” (Eph. 2:8-10).

That’s what he said to the Ephesians.  He says essentially the same thing here, only in different words: “But God be thanked, that ye were the servants of sin, but ye have obeyed from the heart that form of doctrine which was delivered you. Being then made free from sin, ye became the servants of righteousness” (Rom. 6:17-18).  What Paul means in Eph. 2 when he says, “by grace are ye saved,” is what he means in Rom. 6 when he says, “But God be thanked.”  Paul is thanking God for the salvation of the Roman Christians.  Literally, he says, “Grace to God.”  God is the one who called them, who regenerated them, who converted them, who brought them to faith and repentance.  He doesn’t praise the Romans for making the right decision.  They did choose Christ, of course.  They did receive him by faith (cf. Jn. 1:12; Col. 2:6).  But they chose him because Christ first chose them.  

Now Paul isn’t just saying that God made provision for their salvation and that is why he is being thanked, but then that it was up to them to take advantage of that provision.  He is saying that the fact that they were freed from sin and made servants to God, that they obeyed from the heart the gospel that was preached to them, is owing first and foremost to the powerful and efficacious grade of God.  Brothers and sisters, we must never forget that God’s grace is the decisive reason anyone is a Christian.  We don’t just thank God for making salvation possible; we thank him for sovereignly bringing us into the enjoyment of that salvation.  If my will is the decisive reason I am a Christian, then I get some of the praise.  But that attitude is totally unknown in the Bible.  Salvation is of the Lord.  It is not of him that willeth nor of him that runneth, but of God that showeth mercy (Rom. 9:16).  If you are saved, give the thanks and the praise to God, and to God alone!

The focus of the thanks is their conversion: “ye were” – in the past – “servants of sin, but” – no longer, for “ye have obeyed from the heart that form of doctrine which was delivered you.”  The ESV translates verse 17 like this: “But thanks be to God, that you who were once slaves of sin have become obedient from the heart to the standard of teaching to which you were committed.”  The Greek word which is translated “form” refers to “the impression of a die, a type, pattern.”   The idea of the word then is a pattern into which we are cast, that shapes us, and the doctrine and the teaching of the Bible is what does that.  The gospel shapes us as we believe it and obey it.  That’s the idea.  We do believe.  We do obey.  Our minds and wills and hearts are involved.  But God is the one who shapes us by his word.  It is his Spirit that draws out our faith and obedience by the word of God.

But that’s just the thing: this is what God’s grace does.  God’s grace doesn’t leave a man or a women in sin.  God’s grace brings us out of sin.  God’s grace doesn’t leave a person in darkness and ignorance.  Sometimes people will appeal to the grace of God as a reason to believe that folks in false religions will be saved.  But Paul says that the grace of God doesn’t leave us in ignorance and in false religions: it saves us from them.  It brings the gospel to us and us to the gospel.  And it doesn’t stop there; as we are confronted with the word of God, the grace of God works faith in us and brings us to repentance.  We are molded by the word of God.

Listen to the way the book of Acts talks about the grace of God.  The first time the word grace, charis, is used with respect to God’s grace in the book of Acts, the record of the early church, is in Acts 4.  There we are told how the early church prayed for boldness to speak the word of God, and how God answered their prayer, and how that “they were all filled with the Holy Ghost, and they spake the word of God with boldness” (31).  Then Luke sums up the whole event in these words: “And with great power gave the apostles witness of the resurrection of the Lord Jesus: and great grace was upon them all” (33).  In other words, the grace of God came upon the church to empower them to speak the word of God, the gospel, this “form of doctrine” which made converts, refuted the opposers, and strengthened the believers.  

In Acts 11, we are told how Barnabas was sent to Antioch to investigate the reports of recent conversion to Christ there.  We are told that “when he came, and had seen the grace of God, was glad, and exhorted them all, that with purpose of heart they would cleave unto the Lord. For he was a good man, and full of the Holy Ghost and of faith: and much people was added unto the Lord” (23-24).  Again, you see how the grace of God was at work in causing people to become converted to Christ, to be formed and molded by the pattern of teaching of the gospel.  In fact, in Acts 14:3, the gospel is expressly called “the word of his [God’s] grace,” not only because it is about the grace of God but also because it is the instrument of the grace of God.  In Acts 14:26, it is the grace of God that enabled Paul and Barnabas to fulfill the work of evangelism and mission.  In Acts 20:32, it is called “the word of his [God’s] grace, which is able to build you up, and to give you an inheritance among all them which  are sanctified.”  

My point is that God’s grace uses the gospel, “that form of doctrine” as Paul puts it here, as its instrument in order to bring us to conversion and to grow us in the grace of God.  On the one hand, this is humbling because it reminds us that it is only the grace of God that can make his word effectual in any of us.  But it is also encouraging because it reminds us that despite our weakness and limitations (which are many) what makes the word of God powerful is not ultimately our wisdom or eloquence or intelligence but the power of God and the grace of God working through the word of God.

Grace comes through the word to bring about the obedience of faith (Rom. 1:5).  Though we are not justified because of our obedience, yet the faith through which we are justified is an obedient faith.  As it has often been put, we are saved by faith alone but not by a faith which is alone.  True faith is always accompanied by the fruits of the Spirit.  This is the reason why Paul immediately goes on to say, in verse 18 of chapter 6, “Being then made free from sin, ye became the servants of righteousness.”  What does the “then” point to?  It points to the time that they believed and obeyed from the heart that form of doctrine into which they were delivered, the gospel.  It was then that they were made free from and became servants of righteousness.

So you see that the Biblical understanding of conversion is that a person doesn’t just nominally embrace Jesus on an intellectual level, but that when a person is converted, they are set free from slavery to sin and they become slaves – slaves! – to righteousness.  

What is righteousness?  Righteousness is defined by the word of God.  Listen to the way the apostle Paul puts it to Timothy: “Knowing this, that the law is not made for a righteous man, but for the lawless and disobedient, for the ungodly and for sinners, for unholy and profane, for murderers of fathers and murderers of mothers, for manslayers, for whoremongers, for them that defile themselves with mankind, for menstealers, for liars, for perjured persons, and if there be any other thing that is contrary to sound doctrine; according to the glorious gospel of the blessed God, which was committed to my trust” (1 Tim. 1:9-11).   All these sins are not only contrary to the law of God; they are also contrary to the gospel!  We must never think that because we are not under the law of Moses, that therefore we can live anyway we want, or that the gospel doesn’t require us to live in a certain way.  We may not be under the law of Moses, but we are under the law of Christ (1 Cor. 9:21).  

Righteousness means that we live before God and for God according to the standards of God.  It means that we model our lives along the lines of his word in the Holy Scriptures.  What Paul is saying here is that a true Christian is someone who doesn’t decide for themselves what is right or wrong, but rather that they have the mindset of a slave, a slave to righteousness.  They are people who seek to submit their entire lives to the teaching of the Bible.  And grace makes us that kind of person.

It's not that the gospel brings people into slavery and that people are free apart from the gospel, although this is certainly a lie that the devil wants you to believe.  The gospel simply frees us from a slavery that kills and ruins and destroys a person, and brings us into a slavery that ends in life eternal and joy forever.  In fact, the slavery of the gospel can really only be called slavery in a sort of analogy, as Paul will go on to argue (19).  It’s not really slavery because it entails no real bondage, and it gives us real freedom.  It’s like what Jesus said, in his wonderful invitation at the end of Matthew 11: “Come unto me, all ye that labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you, and learn of me; for I am meek and lowly in heart: and ye shall find rest unto your souls. For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light” (Mt. 11:28-30).  Jesus is the only one whose yoke and burden is easy and light, and when we take it we find rest.  But you will wear a yoke.  The only other yoke is the yoke of sin and the devil.  You will not find rest there, as the prophet put it, “I create the fruit of the lips; Peace, peace to him that is far off, and to him that is near, saith the Lord; and I will heal him. But the wicked are like the troubled sea, when it cannot rest, whose waters cast up mire and dirt. There is no peace, saith my God, to the wicked” (Isa. 57:19-21).

So, my friend, whose yoke are you wearing today?  It’s not a yoke of your making.  It’s either the yoke of sin which will end in death or it’s the yoke of Christ which will end in life.  Do not deceive yourself into thinking that you can have the yoke of Christ and yet be led by sin.  Do not think that you can be a slave to sin, in bondage to lusts, and have a good ending.  There is only one who can give us righteousness and life, and that is Jesus Christ.  It is through Christ that God exercises his grace to us and delivers us from slavery to sin.  Believe on him, receive him as Lord and Savior, and you will find that he has already been at work in you to free you from sin and make you a servant of righteousness.  May the Lord do his work and continue to do his work in each and every one of us.