Buried & Raised

Dead to Sin Through Baptism (Romans 6:1–14)

Paul opens Romans 6 with one of his characteristic rhetorical questions: "What shall we say then? Shall we continue in sin that grace may abound?" (v.1). The logic behind the question is understandable — if God's grace is greater than sin, then more sin would provide more opportunity for grace to be displayed, right? Paul's response is the Greek me genoito — "Certainly not!" or more forcefully, "God forbid!" The idea is utterly and completely unthinkable. How can we who died to sin live any longer in it?

The basis for this impossibility is what Paul reveals in verses 3–4. Baptism is not a symbolic ceremony disconnected from the spiritual life — it is the moment of death and resurrection. "Do you not know that as many of us as were baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into His death?" Paul asks this as though it should be obvious information that every believer already knows. To be baptized into Christ is to be baptized INTO HIS DEATH. The burial that happens in water baptism is not a picture of spiritual burial — it IS the burial. The old self goes under the water dead. The new person comes up alive.

Verse 4 continues: "Therefore we were buried with Him through baptism into death, that just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, even so we also should walk in newness of life." The resurrection that happens coming up out of the water is not symbolic either — it is the actual beginning of a new life in Christ. Paul is describing a radical spiritual transformation: the person who was enslaved to sin is now dead to sin. Sin has no more legal claim on them. The old self died. They are new creatures.

Verses 11–14 give the application: "Likewise you also, reckon yourselves to be dead indeed to sin, but alive to God in Christ Jesus our Lord" (v.11). The word "reckon" (Greek: logizomai, the same bookkeeping word used for Abraham's faith in chapter 4) means to count it as true, to treat it as the operative reality. The believer must daily reckon themselves dead to sin and alive to God. This is not denial of the struggle but faith in the reality that the old self has been crucified with Christ (Galatians 2:20) and the new self belongs entirely to God.

Slaves to Righteousness (Romans 6:15–23)

Paul addresses the objection again from a different angle: "What then? Shall we sin because we are not under law but under grace?" (v.15). Certainly not! The grace of God is not a license to continue in sin — it is the power to be freed FROM sin. Paul uses the analogy of slavery to make his point clear. Every person is a slave to something — either to sin, which produces death, or to righteousness, which produces life. There is no neutral ground. The transition from slavery to sin to slavery to righteousness is precisely what happened in the new birth.

Verse 17 contains a crucial phrase that unlocks Apostolic soteriology: "But God be thanked that though you were slaves of sin, yet you obeyed from the heart that form of doctrine to which you were delivered." The Roman believers had been delivered to "a form of doctrine" — and they had OBEYED it from the heart. This language is remarkable. Salvation in Paul's framework involves obedience to a doctrine that has a form — a specific shape. You do not simply believe certain propositions and achieve salvation; you obey the form of the gospel. That form, Paul has already explained in the same chapter, is death, burial, and resurrection — experienced by the believer through repentance, water baptism, and the new birth of the Spirit.

Paul closes this section with the verse that may be the most well-known in Romans: "For the wages of sin is death, but the gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord" (v.23). Wages are what you earn. Sin has a paycheck, and it is death — spiritual separation from God. But eternal life is not a wage at all. It is a GIFT. It cannot be earned, merited, or deserved. It is given freely by God through Christ, received by those who obey the gospel from the heart.

The Struggle Under Law (Romans 7:7–25)

Romans 7 is one of the most debated passages in New Testament scholarship. Paul describes an agonizing internal conflict: a person who knows what is right, wants to do what is right, and yet finds themselves doing the very thing they do not want to do. "For the good that I will to do, I do not do; but the evil I will not to do, that I practice" (v.19). The will is pointed toward righteousness, but the flesh pulls toward sin. Who is Paul describing here?

Whether Paul is describing his pre-conversion experience, the experience of a believer still depending on their own strength to keep the law, or a rhetorical device to illustrate humanity's condition under the law — the point he is making is unmistakable: no one can achieve righteousness through their own willpower and law-keeping. The law reveals what righteousness looks like, but it provides no power to achieve it. "For I know that in me (that is, in my flesh) nothing good dwells; for to will is present with me, but how to perform what is good I do not find" (v.18). The law says "do this" but gives no strength to do it.

The description builds to a groan of desperation: "O wretched man that I am! Who will deliver me from this body of death?" (v.24). This is not the language of someone who is comfortably religious. This is the cry of a person who sees their own moral bankruptcy clearly, who knows the standard is beyond their reach, and who is desperate for a power outside of themselves. The answer comes immediately: "I thank God — through Jesus Christ our Lord!" (v.25). The deliverance comes not through better human effort but through a Person. Jesus Christ is the answer to the insoluble human problem of sin. And what He offers — as Romans 8 will show in breathtaking detail — is not just forgiveness but the indwelling Spirit who provides what the law never could: the power to actually live righteously from the inside out.