Romans 6:5-10

Coram Deo Reformed Baptist Church iconCoram Deo Reformed Baptist Church

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verses 5 through 10. Not too long this time.
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I kept going off on tangents about things, but I took most of them out, so you don't have to worry about that.
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So starting in verse 5, For if we have been united with him in a death like his, we shall certainly be united with him in a resurrection like his.
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We know that our old self was crucified with him in order that the body of sin might be brought to nothing, so that we would no longer be enslaved to sin.
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For one who has died has been set free from sin.
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Now if we have died with Christ, we believe that we will also live with him.
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We know that Christ, being raised from the dead, will never die again.
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Death no longer has dominion over him. For the death he died, he died to sin once for all.
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For the life he lives, he lives to God. As our former selves, we were enslaved to sin, as it says in verses 5 and 6.
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For if we have been united with him in a death like his, we shall certainly be united with him in a resurrection like his.
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We know that our old self was crucified with him in order that the body of sin might be brought to nothing, so that we would no longer be enslaved to sin.
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Along with Christ in his crucifixion, he took with him something else, something that Paul calls the old man.
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He's not referencing an old man. He's referencing the old self, the old you, the old him.
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That person died on the cross along with Christ.
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Galatians 2 20 says, I have been crucified with Christ. It is no longer
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I who live, but Christ who lives in me. The life I now live in the flesh,
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I live by faith in the Son of God who loved me and gave himself for me.
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In his referring to the body of sin, there are a couple of different ways to look at his reference for the body of sin.
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One being that mass of sin or that record of sin that testified against you before God, being set upon the cross, being pulled away from you.
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It no longer exists and has been stricken from the record, they say.
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Another way to look at that, that people reference that, is as Paul references it later on, as a body of sin, your flesh.
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Not that a Christian no longer has a body. It would be difficult to do things in the world if you didn't, but in a reference to sanctification, that body is, while your spirit is a new creation, your body is constantly becoming a new creation through the power of the
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Holy Spirit. Your mind, your flesh, that enslavement to sin is gone.
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It's being renewed. Colossians 2 11 through 15 says, in him also you were circumcised with a circumcision made without hands by putting off the body of flesh.
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By the circumcision of Christ, having been buried with him in baptism, in which you were also raised with him through life, or I'm sorry, through faith in the power, in the powerful working of God, who raised him from the dead.
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And you, who were dead in your trespasses and the uncircumcision of your flesh,
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God made alive together with him, having forgiven us all our trespasses by canceling the record of debt that stood against us with its legal demands.
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This he set aside, nailing it to the cross. He disarmed the rulers and authorities and put them to open shame by triumphing over them.
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It logically concludes that if we are connected to Adam and his federal headship as human beings, and therefore are connected to his work and the consequence of it that we've discussed previously, if Christ is our new federal head and we, his people, are connected to him and his work and the consequences of his work, that if we are connected to him in his death, then we are also connected to him in his life, his resurrection.
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For one who has died has been set free from sin. When a person has a debt, be it monetary or a moral debt, that debt has to be paid.
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Historically, if a person had monetary debt and they couldn't pay it, they went to debtor's prison where they would work the debt off or they stay there until they can secure the funds for it to be paid.
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Regardless of the circumstances, the person had to pay the debt to be absolved of the responsibility and the guilt of it.
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Sometimes it's difficult for us to identify with things historically, like debtor's prison.
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We don't have those anymore. Things that no longer happen, we can intellectually give assent to.
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We can recognize it. We can understand it, but we can't necessarily identify with it.
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We don't have anything to compare it to in our own lives. Give an example, right?
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I can talk about idols all day long, but unless you have something to compare that to, it really doesn't click.
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You can understand what an idol is, what Scripture says an idol is, but there's a difference in understanding it intellectually and having something to connect it to, right?
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One of those for me was our trip to Tennessee to the
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Parthenon there, right? Understand that there are temples to, you know, gods and stuff like the false gods in the ancient world that people went into and sacrificed animals to and left offerings and things like that, but without having seen one, you don't really get the scope of it, and while visiting the
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Parthenon in Tennessee, which is a scale replication of the one in Greece, yet having the statues in it gave depth and a different understanding to what was going on.
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We have a reference. Our reference for temple is church, right?
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Or pictures of the temple in Jerusalem of Solomon's Temple, renderings of it, but visiting a place that is a replication of a pagan temple gives you a different understanding of idols and of pagan worship.
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One thing that does exist that we can reference today, everyone can identify with debt.
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Everyone, be it a monetary debt or, as I said before, a moral debt to someone, you can identify with owing that, whether it's someone saying, hey, remember that favor you owe me, or a good friend that you've wronged, or a debt collector constantly calling your phone.
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You understand that debt is an overbearing master. Sin, likewise, in the same way, is overbearing.
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The unregenerate don't see it. They don't recognize that, but as saints we do.
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We remember that sin, remember that sin and the overbearingness of the weight of it when it was shown to us by the
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Holy Spirit, when that person had that conversation with us, or when we read it in Scripture, or when we watched a video of someone sharing the gospel, or when the gospel was shared with us, when we recognize our sin and worried for as long as you may have worried about how you were going to pay off that debt, but unlike earthly debt, sin is a debt that cannot be worked off.
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It has to be paid, and it has to be paid with life. In the
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Old Testament, they had the sacrifices, sacrificial system which points to Christ, the sacrifice, but with sin debt there's no amount of time that you can spend in prison.
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There's no sacrifice that you can make.
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There's no deal that can be made. You can't do any of that. The only way out of the obligation is death.
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Matthew Poole says this in his commentary, not only in respect of the guilt thereof, which since the marginal reading of the word seems to respect, but also in regard of the service of it.
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This agrees best with the context. Look, as he that is dead is freed and discharged from the authority of those who had dominion over him in his lifetime.
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So it is with those that are dead to sin.
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In going through this study for this
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Sunday, I listened to several sermons, as I do every time, and one in particular from Sinclair Ferguson caught my ear.
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I remembered something that he talked about. So all credit of this illustration goes to him.
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The illustration that he gave is that a long, long time ago, sometimes in Scotland, you would see a notice and the notice would say, so -and -so justified at 830 this morning.
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What does that mean? It means they died. No one in a position of authority or any other position had any claim to that person.
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Be it a debt that they owed or something they needed to do, they were justified from it.
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They were gone. Now, I know it doesn't sound as wonderful because I don't have his accent, but it is a good illustration nonetheless.
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Verse 8, Now if we have died with Christ, we believe that we also or that we will also live with him.
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We are under the headship of Christ and are united to him in the works he did also apply, as did the work of our former head,
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Adam. Therefore, we can logically conclude that if our old selves have died and that we are new creatures, that we also share in Christ's life and in the manner of that life.
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2 Timothy 2 11 also says, The saying is trustworthy, for if we have died with him, we will also live with him.
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Verse 9, We know that Christ being raised from the dead will never die again.
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Death no longer has dominion over him. Christ himself was never under the curse of death.
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He never sinned. He was perfectly obedient.
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Our sin was imputed to him and he died our death, the death that we deserve.
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He perfectly fulfilled the law. Once the debt was paid, death no longer had any sway over him.
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And unlike the resurrection of those that Christ and the Apostles rose from the dead, who had to then die again, there are some quite unique stories about Lazarus from church history.
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Christ was raised to eternal life, as are we.
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Not necessarily in the same physical manner in which he ascended to heaven, but eternal life nonetheless.
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Acts 2 24 says, God raised him up, losing the pangs of death because it was not possible for him to be held by it.
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Christ is incapable of death. Verse 10 says,
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For the death he died, he died to sin once for all. The life he lives, he lives to God.
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So Christ, having been totally obedient and undeserving of death, died our death and suffered our punishment.
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He died to sin, and having been raised to eternal life to never die again, that one death that he suffered is sufficient.
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It is sufficient for all his elect, for all time.
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A common question that we would get is, how is one person's death sufficient to cover everybody?
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It's because of his infinite value. He's the
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God -man, the sinless one, and the life he lives now, having been raised, he lives to God, or that is to say, he lives eternally.
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Matthew Henry's commentary says this, Baptism teaches the necessity of dying to sin, and being, as it were, buried from all ungodly and unholy pursuits, and of rising to walk with God in newness of life, unholy professors may have had the outward sign of a death unto sin, a new birth unto righteousness, but they never passed from the family of Satan to that of God.
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The corrupt nature, called the old man, because derived from our first father
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Adam, is crucified with Christ in every true believer by the grace derived from the cross.
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It is weakened and in a dying state, though yet struggles for life, and even for victory, but the whole body of sin, we've talked about earlier, whatever is not according to the holy law of God must be done away, so that the believer may no more be a slave to sin, but live to Christ unhappiness in his service.
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Since we are dead to sin and alive in Christ, we should strive to live in accordance with that fact, examine ourselves, make sure that we are, in fact, regenerate.
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This is part of the purpose of the church. We'll discuss that as we go forward in Romans, the work of the
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Holy Spirit, slavery to sin, slavery to Christ, but as you go through the week, examine yourself.
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Make sure that you're living in accordance with what the Scripture says.
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You're living in accordance with Christ's life.
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That's not to say be legalistic, but make sure that the things that you're doing, you're doing for God, and recognize when you're not.
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If we don't examine each other, we don't examine ourselves, how can we even begin to examine each other, and if we're not going to examine each other, then why do we gather?
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Part of the reason why we gather together is the church has said that we can call each other out when we sin. Not the whole reason, but that's part of the reason.
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So that we're together with like -minded people, that we can make sure that we stay on that straight and narrow path.
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This is also why, coincidentally, Christian enjoyed it more when he was walking with a companion rather than by himself in Pilgrim's Progress, if you've read that.
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Anyway, I did write an entirely other section to this, but then
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I realized actually that goes better with next week's Sermon, so we're gonna hold off on that. So you'll join me in reflection and some music.