Read the New Testament in 24 Weeks

Leaving the state of sin through baptism

6 What are we to say, then? Shall we continue in the state of sin, so that grace may increase? ² Certainly not! We died to sin; how can we still live in it? ³ Don’t you know that all of us who were baptized into the Messiah, Jesus, were baptized into his death? ⁴ That means that we were buried with him, through baptism, into death, so that, just as the Messiah was raised from the dead through the father’s glory, we too might behave with a new quality of life. ⁵ For if we have been planted together in the likeness of his death, we shall also be in the likeness of his resurrection.

Dead to sin, alive to God

⁶ This is what we know: our old humanity was crucified with the Messiah, so that the bodily solidarity of sin might be abolished, and that we should no longer be enslaved to sin. ⁷ A person who has died, you see, has been declared free from all charges of sin.

⁸ But if we died with the Messiah, we believe that we shall live with him. ⁹ We know that the Messiah, having been raised from the dead, will never die again. Death no longer has any authority over him. ¹⁰ The death he died, you see, he died to sin, once and only once. But the life he lives, he lives to God. ¹¹ In the same way you, too, must calculate yourselves as being dead to sin, and alive to God in the Messiah, Jesus.

The call to holy living

¹² So don’t allow sin to rule in your mortal body, to make you obey its desires. ¹³ Nor should you present your limbs and organs to sin to be used for its wicked purposes. Rather, present yourselves to God, as people alive from the dead, and your limbs and organs to God, to be used for the righteous purposes of his covenant. ¹⁴ Sin won’t actually rule over you, you see, since you are not under law but under grace.

The two types of slavery

¹⁵ What then? Shall we sin, because we are not under law but under grace? Certainly not! ¹⁶ Don’t you know that if you present yourselves to someone as obedient slaves, you really are slaves of the one you obey, whether that happens to be sin, which leads to death, or obedience, which leads to final vindication? ¹⁷ Thank God that, though you once were slaves to sin, you have become obedient from the heart to the pattern of teaching to which you were committed. ¹⁸ You were freed from sin, and now you have been enslaved to God’s covenant justice. ¹⁹ (I’m using a human picture because of your natural human weakness!) For just as you presented your limbs and organs as slaves to uncleanness, and to one degree of lawlessness after another, so now present your limbs and organs as slaves to covenant justice, which leads to holiness.

Where the two roads lead

²⁰ When you were slaves of sin, you see, you were free in respect of covenant justice. ²¹ What fruit did you ever have from the things of which you are now ashamed? Their destination is death. ²² But now that you have been set free from sin and enslaved to God, you have fruit for holiness. Its destination is the life of the age to come. ²³ The wages paid by sin, you see, are death; but God’s free gift is the life of the age to come, in the Messiah, Jesus our Lord.

Dying to the law

7 Surely you know, my dear family—I am, after all, talking to people who know the law!—that the law rules a person as long as that person is alive? ² The law binds a married woman to her husband during his lifetime; but if he dies, she is free from the law as regards her husband. ³ So, then, she will be called an adulteress if she goes with another man while her husband is alive; but if the husband dies, she is free from the law, so that she is not an adulteress if she goes with another man.

⁴ In the same way, my dear family, you too died to the law through the body of the Messiah, so that you could belong to someone else—to the one who was raised from the dead, in fact—so that we could bear fruit for God. ⁵ For when we were living a mortal human life, the passions of sins which were through the law were at work in our limbs and organs, causing us to bear fruit for death. ⁶ But now we have been cut loose from the law; we have died to the thing in which we were held tightly. The aim is that we should now be enslaved in the new life of the spirit, not in the old life of the letter.

When the law arrived: Sinai looks back to the fall

⁷ What then shall we say? That the law is sin? Certainly not! But I would not have known sin except through the law. I would not have known covetousness if the law had not said, “You shall not covet.” ⁸ But sin grabbed its opportunity through the commandment, and produced all kinds of covetousness within me.

Apart from the law, sin is dead. ⁹ I was once alive apart from the law; but when the commandment came, sin sprang to life ¹⁰ and I died. The commandment which pointed to life turned out, in my case, to bring death. ¹¹ For sin grabbed its opportunity through the commandment. It deceived me, and, through it, killed me.

¹² So, then, the law is holy; and the commandment is holy, upright and good.

Looking back on life under the law

¹³ Was it that good thing, then, that brought death to me? Certainly not! On the contrary; it was sin, in order that it might appear as sin, working through the good thing and producing death in me. This was in order that sin might become very sinful indeed, through the commandment.

¹⁴ We know, you see, that the law is spiritual. I, however, am made of flesh, sold as a slave under sin’s authority. ¹⁵ I don’t understand what I do. I don’t do what I want, you see, but I do what I hate. ¹⁶ So if I do what I don’t want to do, I am agreeing that the law is good.

¹⁷ But now it is no longer I that do it; it’s sin, living within me. ¹⁸ I know, you see, that no good thing lives in me, that is, in my human flesh. For I can will the good, but I can’t perform it. ¹⁹ For I don’t do the good thing I want to do, but I end up doing the evil thing I don’t want to do. ²⁰ So if I do what I don’t want to do, it’s no longer “I” doing it; it’s sin, living inside me.

The double “law” and the miserable “I”

²¹ This, then, is what I find about the law: when I want to do what is right, evil lies close at hand! ²² I delight in God’s law, you see, according to my inmost self; ²³ but I see another “law” in my limbs and organs, fighting a battle against the law of my mind, and taking me off into captivity in the law of sin which is in my limbs and organs.

²⁴ What a miserable person I am! Who is going to rescue me from the body of this death? ²⁵ Thank God—through Jesus our Messiah and Lord! So then, left to my own self I am enslaved to God’s law with my mind, but to sin’s law with my human flesh.