Dead to Sin but Alive to God; How to Stand and Show Forth Holiness (Romans 6:7–12)

Rom 6:7. For one who has died is freed from sin.

What has been said before he confirms by example: as a dead man shows no movement, so one who has died to sin in the baptismal font should not permit any sinful deed. “Freed,” δεδικαίωται, – justified, released by judicial proceeding. The one justified, the judge says: you are free, nothing binds you.

Rom 6:8. Now if we have died with Christ, we believe that we will also live with him.

What is said here is similar to what is said in verse 5. There it seemed more consistent with the flow of discourse to understand the resurrection of the resurrection, or spiritual rebirth; similarly it seems not amiss here to understand under life with Christ the Lord a new life in His spirit and by His grace. But there all our commentators have referred the Apostle’s discourse to the future glorious resurrection, while here one of them, Blessed Theophylact, sees an indication of spiritual resurrection or revival to new life according to God. He writes: “Above the Apostle said that we should always remain dead to sin, but now he discusses rising to a new life according to God, which we should always have. If through baptism we died with Christ, we believe that we will always have present with us a rising, consisting in a new life; for Christ also, having risen from the dead, lives forever, will never die again.” Agreeing with this interpretation, the word: “we believe” – we will take as: let us believe – see in it an exhortation, advice, and suggestion (Oecumenius). In the words: “we will also live with him” – we will see either an obligation or an encouragement. In the words of Blessed Theophylact is contained the first (we should always have new life), but the second also shows through (we believe that we will always have present a rising). If we have died with Christ, receiving hatred of sin and love for righteousness, then let us believe, let us hold the conviction that we ought to live all the remaining time with Him who has risen, walking in renewed life, corresponding in brightness and purity to the brightness of the risen Lord. Thus the obligation will be expressed; the encouragement will be thus: if we have died with Christ, let us believe that we can also live the rest with Him, live to please Him, walking in His holy will spotlessly – and live thus because we are united with Him, living by His power, poured out from Him into us. That such a thought can also be understood here is justified by the manner of expression: and we believe that we will also live with him – let us cherish the hope that, having shared in His death, we will not be strangers to the power of His resurrection either, or to the firmness and constancy of the spiritual life renewed in us by Him, on account of our unceasing communion with Him, the risen one and no longer dying. Reason for such encouragement can be seen in the preceding exhortation: to always be dead to sin, not to serve it, after the old self in us has been crucified in baptism by the power of the death of Christ. Being aware of this obligation, anyone might falter with doubt: but how can I do this, when I feel the assaults of sin, when the mass of passions is not yet done away with in me? The Apostle, anticipating this, speaks as if: do not be troubled; you have in yourself the power of the risen Lord and by it you will overcome all, you will not yield to sin, you will not die by it, but you will remain alive, always walking with the Lord and by the Lord’s power in renewed life. Confirm this hope in yourself by the fact that Christ, having risen, does not die anymore and death cannot gain power over Him. As He cannot die, so you, united with Him, will not die by sin; as death cannot gain power over Him, so sin will not gain power over you, for Christ is with you.

Rom 6:9. We know that Christ, being raised from the dead, dies no more. Death no longer has dominion over him.

Here is the foundation of the obligation to sinlessness and the encouragement to stand firm in it! The risen Christ does not die anymore; and you should not permit yourself to die by sin. Over the risen Christ death has no power; believe and hope that sin also will not gain power over you, when you are clothed with the power of the Christ the Lord who is not subject to death. Only be faithful to what you received in baptism – preserve hatred of sin and love for righteousness. If you alone remained, then certainly your new life and your safety from sin would not be secure: but when you are with Christ, then be confident, with Him you are as strong as He is strong. For all that is in Him is also yours by His goodness and love for mankind. The first – the exhortation – Blessed Theodoret sees in these words, who writes: “In these words the Apostle has sufficiently shown that he wants to turn believers away from sin.” And the second – the encouragement – suggests itself to the mind, from the thought, on one hand, of the force of the obligation not to sin, and on the other – of the force of our passions.

Rom 6:10. For the death he died, he died to sin once for all, but the life he lives, he lives to God.

To whom should these words be referred? They are usually referred to the Lord Savior, as a reason for the preceding: “dies no more. Died to sin” – is understood: because of sin or for the sake of our sins; for to die to sin, as we are obliged to die, He could not, having no sin. “Once for all” – once and for all; as it is also said in the Letter to the Hebrews, that, appearing “to put away sin by the sacrifice of himself, once for all” (Heb 9:26, 28). From this follows such a conclusion: see how Christ died once and will not die a second time; so you too, dying in baptism to sin, hold yourself in sinlessness and do not permit yourself to die a second time, through falling into sins. Saint Chrysostom says: “What does it mean: ‘to sin’? – It means that He himself was not subject to death, but died for our sin. He died for this purpose, to destroy sin, to cut off its roots, to take away all its power from it. Do you notice how much the Apostle has frightened us? If Christ does not die a second time, then there is no second baptism either; and if there is no second baptism, fear to stumble into sin.”

“He lives to God”, – that is, he lives by divine power; for He always lives in the power of God and the Father (Blessed Theophylact); or “lives as God, constantly, without interruption” (Oecumenius); or “lives eternally, for death has no more power over Him” (Saint Chrysostom). One can also say: “He lives to God”, – to His glory, establishing the kingdom of grace, the foundation of which was laid in His death and for the establishment of which after the resurrection He took up the power “in heaven and on earth.” From this follows a conclusion: and you too, having come alive in baptism to a new life, live to God, dedicating all your thoughts, undertakings, and deeds to Him and not permitting yourself to turn in the slightest toward anything contrary to Him.

But the thought comes to mind, is it not more fitting to refer these words to us, the baptized and those dying and rising in baptism – dying to sin and rising to life for God and according to God. The discourse in the Apostle goes all about the obligation of the baptized to be dead to sin and to live in renewed life. About the death and resurrection of the Lord is spoken only for this reason, to show that by their power there are accomplished in baptism both our moral and spiritual death and our moral and spiritual rising to new life; and to clarify this, what has already been said before is sufficient. The letter of the text does not give a direct indication to whom these words should be referred. Our Slavonic translation also maintains this lack of indication in the indefiniteness of the expression, as both the Greek text requires. Both say: for what has died, has died to sin – once, once for all, and what lives, lives to God. In such an expression these words can very well be referred to us, the baptized. In baptism one thing in us died, another came alive: sin died, or we died to sin; and life for God and according to God came alive, or we came alive to such a life. The force of speech is not in the dying and coming alive, but in: “once for all”, – in the fact that both happened once and for all; once and for all we died to sin, so as to always live thereafter to God. By this is pointed to that decisive hatred of sin and love of righteousness with which the person being baptized enters the font and which is sealed there in him by God’s grace. And the Apostle’s intention is to prove to believers and the baptized the necessity of always maintaining the force of these decisions and conducting their life according to them. Setting forth, however, such a thought, we do not insist on its greater fitness before the former one, but present it as possible.

b) How to stand firm and how to manifest holiness (Rom 6:11–14)

The grace of baptism and mystical union with the Lord has poured new life into us. What must we ourselves contribute for its preservation and for maintaining holiness? First – think that you are dead.

Rom 6:11. So you also must consider yourselves dead to sin but alive to God in Christ Jesus.

“So”. If in the preceding verse the speech refers to the Lord Savior, then it means: as Christ the Lord, so also you. But if the speech refers to us, the baptized, then it means: such is the law for all the baptized, that in them there is accomplished a dying to sin and a coming to life for God, accomplished both by grace and by their own free will. As all the baptized – so also you.

In both cases the result is one: “you also must consider yourselves dead to sin but alive to God”. What it means to be dead to sin and alive to God and how obligatory this is for the baptized has been sufficiently explained above. Now the question: how to fulfill this obligation? – “Consider yourselves dead to sin but alive to God”. The force of speech is in: “consider”. Place it in your mind and in your heart, arrange yourselves in your inner decisions thus, that you are already dead to sin and alive only for God; therefore as for the first permit no movement toward it, so for the second direct all your diligence. As if someone had come to the conviction that he is physically dead, then, whatever happens around him, he would pay no attention to it, and to whatever the people around him might invite him, he would have one answer to everything: I am already dead, I have nothing to do with anything: so, he says, be you in regard to sin; not only movements toward it, but not even attention; it does not exist for you, nor you for it. On the other hand, as any machine, for example a clock that has been wound up, does nothing but show the time; so you do nothing but work toward living according to God and pleasing Him. Only, what the machine does involuntarily, you do voluntarily, with such willing self-compulsion or with the consciousness of such moral necessity of acting thus and not otherwise as exist in a machine without its will.

“In Christ Jesus our Lord” – or for the sake of Christ Jesus – because such are the conditions of salvation in Him, so it is ordained by Him and in Him is our salvation, that it cannot be otherwise and because we, uniting ourselves with Him by faith and grace through the holy mysteries, cannot be otherwise in Him than what we should be, except by appearing dead to sin and alive only to God. Whoever is not such is not Christ’s. Or “in Christ Jesus” – by the power of Christ Jesus. Be confident that you will truly remain such; for Christ the Lord is with you, and He will accomplish this in you, if you remain devoted to Him. On the other hand, however high it is – to be dead to sin and alive “to God,” do not exalt yourself and do not think highly of yourself, for it is not you who have accomplished and accomplish this, but Christ the Lord, with whom you have been united, to union with whom you have been called by His goodness, and through whom you have been led into this union by His grace, and through whom you remain in this union by His help and His protection for this one reason only – that you willingly devote yourself to His all-powerful action in you.

Rom 6:12. Therefore do not let sin reign in your mortal body so that you obey its passions.

The second means on our part in preserving holiness is not to permit sin to reign in us. But how? By not obeying its sinful desires. We died to sin once for all; but by our willing choice – in that we received mortal hatred of sin and love for righteousness. The seat of this decision is in the spirit, in which God’s grace, having come with the gospel, awakened the fear of God, and through it the conscience, which both, by making us feel the bitterness of sinful life and the sweetness of holy and God-pleasing life, gave birth in the spirit to the decision to turn away from the former and to cling to the latter. But meanwhile, while this has been accomplished in the spirit, the soul and the body still remain on the side of sin. Through long dwelling in sin, there has formed in them a habit of acting only in a sinful way; to act in a holy way they do not know how, and not only do they not know how, but they cherish the old sympathy for the sinful. Therefore, when the spirit, having received new decisions, begins to establish new ways of life corresponding to those decisions, it always meets resistance in the soul and body, both because of their unaccustomedness to acting in this way and because of their lack of sympathy for it. They know not the taste of this new life and do not long for it; on the contrary, they long for what is opposite – for that which they have always delighted in before. The spirit demands good thoughts, but the head – the mind with memory and imagination – is filled entirely with sinful representations; therefore it not only does not think good, but presses the unseemly into consciousness. The spirit demands good undertakings, with self-denial, but the will – desires, plans, goals, means – is inclined to self-gratification and cuts off all good through self-pity. The spirit demands good feelings, but the heart does not respond to good and, not being able to find taste in it, remains cold to all that it has not tasted before. The spirit demands vigilance, labor, temperance, chastity, solitude, but the body wants to sleep, to indulge in comforts, to eat abundantly, to indulge passions, and to be everywhere for the gratification of its senses. And here is a host of passions, settled in the midst of the body’s functions and the soul’s faculties, with their opposition and demands. And all this does not merely exist passively in us, that is, opposing only good, but actively – drawing and urging us to sin. The spirit thus faces the task of transforming the soul and body through struggle against their opposition to itself and through overcoming their strivings and passions opposed to it. If we call these opposition and passions the sin living in us, then the spirit faces a struggle with this sin. It has itself died to sin, but the soul and body still live to it; we must make them dead to it too. How? By resisting them in what they want – and by compelling them to do what they do not want. They want what is sinful; do not listen to them, and not only do not listen, but compel them to do the opposite of their desire. – It is about this that the Apostle now speaks. About compelling to good he speaks in the next verse, but about opposing what is sinful he speaks in this one.

“Therefore do not let sin reign”. It reigned before, and whatever it wanted, man was led along as if bound. Now another King has taken the throne within us and has put an end to the reign of sin. According to old habit it may and does present its demands, but each time it receives a refusal from the spirit that has come to hate it. – Why then the precept, when all this arranges itself? It does not arrange itself by any natural necessity, but in virtue of the free decision of the spirit, sheltered and strengthened by God’s grace. A free decision for one thing at the present moment presupposes the possibility of decision for the opposite in the next. It can be strong, like a law of nature, through the strength of the motives supporting it, but it does not attain to natural immutability. The Apostle warns, speaking as if: see, beware; as you have decided, so stand; sin will come again with demands, to seize you; do not permit it, do not allow it to reign in you again.

“In your mortal body”. He mentioned only the body, being silent about the soul, because the chief seat of sin and passions is the body, so that one hardly notices the soul’s passions behind the body’s sinful urges. “Sin acts predominantly in the body and through the body” (Oecumenius). And general opinion has grown so accustomed to judge that, as soon as carnal sinfulness shows itself in someone, there is no mention of the soul, although customarily it is the one who runs everything. And therefore, perhaps, the Apostle did this because it is harder to control the body, accustomed to sinning. Whoever overcomes the body in its sinful compulsions will also deal with the soul. And because of their inseparability it so happens that you cannot refuse the body without refusing the soul. Therefore one can think that by the word: “mortal body” – the Apostle meant generally all the seats in which sin still hovers in us, having brought forth death.

“So that you obey it”. Sin does not bind necessarily, but only proposes itself. We ourselves incline toward its proposals and sin. This inclining is willing obedience to it. Do this and that, sin suggests. We can obey it or not obey it. When we obey, we sin; but this happens not by any necessity, but by our will. Thus the whole matter is in not listening to sin. Let it cry with its demands, let it draw; you do not listen and thus will not give it power to reign in you.

“Its passions”, – that is, of the body. Others read: “obey the passions”. But the thought is the same. Temptation to sin appears in the form of desire. There are representations of sinful objects and deeds without any sympathy for them. There are representations of them with sympathy, without desire for them. The drawing toward sin begins with the appearance of desire for sinful objects and deeds. And this is temptation. The Apostle directly points to desire, because here lies the danger of sin and the consequence of sin, accomplished by deed, of falling again under its power, or of allowing it to reign in you. Do not listen to sin, resisting and suppressing its desires – and thus you will not give sin power to reign in you.

Saint Chrysostom says on this verse: “The Apostle did not say: let not the flesh live, – or – let not the flesh act; but: do not let sin reign. Christ came not to abolish nature, but to correct the will. Moreover, the Apostle wants to show that we are held under the power of vices not violently and by compulsion, but by our own will; therefore he did not say: let not it tyrannize, which would mean compulsion, but: ‘do not let sin reign.’ For it would be absurd for those guided to the Heavenly Kingdom to have sin as king, and for those called to reign with Christ to wish to be captives of sin. Just as if someone, having taken the diadem from his head, wished to be enslaved to a mad, poor woman dressed in rags. – And in what way, according to the Apostle’s understanding, does sin reign? Not by its own power, but by your carelessness. Therefore, having said: ‘do not let sin reign,’ – he explains the very way of this reign, adding the following words: ‘so that you obey its passions.’ There is no honor in yielding to the body the power and everything else, but rather, the utmost slavery and the height of dishonor.” Explaining this, Blessed Theophylact adds: “in what way does sin reign? If we obey it in bodily desires, so that it is not the body that causes harm by its nature, but obedience to sin. Notice the grace of Christ: Adam sinned, although he had a body not subject to death, but we overcome sin in a mortal body”.