Romans 6:15–23 (ESV)✞: Slaves to Righteousness
Passage
In the last passage Paul called out that we’re no longer enslaved to sin because of God’s Grace. The ESV calls that section, “Dead to Sin, Alive to God,” and the NIV calls it “Dead to Sin, Alive in Christ.” Both work for me (and could lead into an interesting discussion of the Trinity, were that the subject of this passage – but it’s not).
Given that we’re no longer slaves to sin, as we once were, in this passage Paul now brings out the opposite of that: we’re now slaves to righteousness.
Paul now comes back to a topic he’d previously covered, with a slightly different nuance (but with the exact same response):
15 What then? Are we to sin because we are not under law but under grace? By no means!
Paul already addressed a variant of this question: “Should we sin more, so that God’s Grace would increase?” His answer was a resounding no. Now he gets to a variant of the question that’s closer to my own sinful heart’s response: “Since we’re under Grace, does that mean I can just keep sinning?” Again, his answer is a resounding no!
But his rationalisation might seem odd to us:
16 Do you not know that if you present yourselves to anyone as obedient slaves, you are slaves of the one whom you obey, either of sin, which leads to death, or of obedience, which leads to righteousness?
Paul takes it for granted that we are always going to be slaves to something; we’re either going to obey the slavery of sin or we’re going to obey the slavery of righteousness. It’s one or the other.
I, however, come from an individualistic society. I’ve been taught my whole life that I’m my own person! That nobody can tell me what to do! And if I really think about it I realise that that’s not true at all, of course people (and governments) tell me what to do—all the time—but that’s just a necessary evil! The North American’s idea of “freedom” is “no more rules, and nobody telling me what to do or controlling me.” I’m sure most North Americans who believe in an afterlife are thinking it’s going to be something like that; we’ll finally be “free” of anyone telling us what to do!
And I’ll be honest, I very much disliked this passage of Scripture when I first encountered it I had the reaction that I’m sure was1 typical for 20th Century North Americans: “But why do I have to be a slave at all?!? It’s great that I no longer have to be a slave to sin, I like hearing that, but can’t I just be free? Do I have to be a ‘slave’ to righteousness?”
Of course, you can’t read very much of the Bible before you come across passages where you see that that viewpoint is untenable for the Christian. God is God and I’m but a man; Christianity is all about submission to God! In order to be saved I need to come to terms with who He is, and who I am in relation to Him, and accept His Grace (since I could never have saved myself by myself), and then submit to Him as God.
The more I read about God in His Word the more I see that this is a good thing, and I can enjoy the relationship I have with Him, and revel in how good and loving and gracious He is, but the part of me that was born and raised in North America in the 20th and 21st Centuries sometimes still chafes at the idea that I have to submit to Him. (Paul’s rhetorical “do you not know” seems especially biting to postmodern, North American ears; we really don’t know!)
Paul, however, will have none of it. The definition of “freedom” in which it means “I don’t have to do anything I don’t want to do” would be nonsense to Paul; you can be a slave to sin, or you can be a slave to righteousness. It’s one or the other – take your pick! In fact, the fact that the Christian has been saved by Grace is exactly what enables us to make that choice in the first place:
17 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, 18 and, having been set free from sin, have become slaves of righteousness.
As we’ve already covered in Romans, especially in the last passage, we’re no longer slaves to sin. We can “present ourselves” as slaves to sin again, if we choose to do so, but we’ve been set free from sin, so we actually have the ability not to enslave ourselves to sin, too.
This, frankly, is what Paul means by “freedom.” He means the freedom not to sin. Freedom doesn’t mean “the lack of a master,” it means having the ability to choose the master you’re going to submit to! The unsaved person doesn’t have that choice: they’re slaves to sin. The saved person now has the ability to choose: what am I going to do in this situation? Am I going to submit to my desire to sin, or am I going to submit to my desire to serve God faithfully?
Paul even admits he’s phrasing it this way to get our attention and to help us to understand the larger point:
19 I am speaking in human terms, because of your natural limitations. For just as you once presented your members as slaves to impurity and to lawlessness leading to more lawlessness, so now present your members as slaves to righteousness leading to sanctification.
So Paul probably didn’t walk around all the time thinking in terms of being “a slave to righteousness,” just as I don’t, but it gets the point across very well: you can serve sin or you can serve God.
And maybe a good way to think of this is by thinking about the outcome of each kind of “slavery:”
20 For when you were slaves of sin, you were free in regard to righteousness. 21 But what fruit were you getting at that time from the things of which you are now ashamed? For the end of those things is death. 22 But now that you have been set free from sin and have become slaves of God, the fruit you get leads to sanctification and its end, eternal life.
I said before that “freedom” (for the Christian) really means “the freedom to choose not to sin,” and in verse 20 Paul turns that on its head: those who are slaves to sin are “free” from being righteous. Honestly, I think he’s being a bit tongue in cheek by phrasing it that way, but it’s also true: those who are enslaved to sin at least have the consolation that they don’t have to serve God! They may not recognise themselves as being enslaved to sin—I’m sure very few people in the history of the world have ever viewed themselves in that light (other than Christians ourselves)—but they are quite happy not to have to serve God. They’re “free” from that!
But what does it get them? What “fruit” do they receive from that “freedom” from submitting to God? Death. The Christian, on the other hand—the one who has now been set free from slavery to sin—gets the “fruit” of sanctification2 and eternal life.
And why is this all true? Paul utters one of those phrases that every Christian knows by heart:
23 For the wages of sin is death, but the free gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord.
This is a concept Paul has already covered—at great length—but this is a beautiful, succinct presentation of it. If Christianity were a religion, we’d expect Paul to say that the wages of sin is death and the wages of obedience to God is eternal life, but Christianity is not a religion. Christianity is not about how I earn favour with God, it’s about how Christ is the answer to having a relationship with God.
Death is something we earn by our sin. Eternal life is something the believer is given in Christ. I earned death, just like everyone else, but I have received eternal life instead. Thanks be to God!
Thoughts
I’m learning to get better at looking for the Bible’s comparisons, which don’t often work like we expect them to; usually, in my world, comparisons are always made like-to-like, so that’s what I always expect to see. We expect to see things like, “my job pays this much, but your job pays that much.” Like-to-like; two jobs, both paying money, and all that’s being compared is the amount.
When the Bible compares things it’s often doing it very differently; we’re expected to see that the two things are not alike. This idea that death is the “wages” of sin while Grace is the “gift” if God is just one example, though maybe the most famous one.
What I need to do is get better at thinking Biblically when I see comparisons being made in the Scriptures, because I wonder how often I’m not seeing the nuances – how often I’m oversimplifying what I’m reading, and therefore missing the point.
Footnotes
- Yes, I was saved way back in the 1900s… ↩
- This is a technical term, but in a nutshell, there are two related but different terms Paul uses: Justification is a one-time act. I am now justified before God; He views me as sinlessly perfect because of the work of Christ. Sanctification, on the other hand, is an ongoing activity, whereby the Holy Spirit makes me more and more like God. I won’t ever be fully sinless until I’m resurrected into a new body, but as time goes by, even in this sinful one, I will continue to be sanctified. So I am justified, and I am being sanctified. Up until now, because Paul has been talking about how we are saved by faith not by works, he’s been more focused on justification, but as he gets into how we should live as Christians I have a feeling we’ll be seeing more talk of sanctification. ↩
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