Romanschapter 6
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Speaks with:Romans 6×11Galatians 5×6Colossians 3×71 Peter 2×41 Peter 4×3Romans 7×3
Summary
Chapter summary
Shall we continue in sin that grace may abound? God forbid. The believer has died with Christ in baptism and is raised to walk in newness of life. Sin shall not have dominion over you, for ye are not under the law but under grace. Paul commands: yield your members as servants of righteousness. The wages of sin is death; the gift of God, eternal life. Calvin calls this chapter the answer to every antinomian misreading of justification. Union with Christ ends sin's reign.
Context
Epistle · Paul — Romans overview
- A. 1–14 Buried With Him, Raised to Walk in Newness of Life
- B. 15–23 Whose Slave Are You? The Wages and the Free Gift
The outline
A.Buried With Him, Raised to Walk in Newness of Lifevv. 1 to 14
Read vv. 1 to 14 →B.Whose Slave Are You? The Wages and the Free Giftvv. 15 to 23
Read vv. 15 to 23 →
The world behind this chapter
Romans 6The history
Slavery was everywhere in Rome. Perhaps a third of the city's population was enslaved, and the households where these churches met would have contained slaves as members. When Paul says you are slaves of the one you obey, nobody heard a soft metaphor; they heard a description of a life owned by another.
Roman slavery did allow release. A master could free a slave, and freedmen kept obligations to their former household, which is why Paul can speak of being set free from one master and handed over to another rather than being made autonomous.
Baptism in the first century was immersion, and Paul reads its shape as a burial: down under, up again. He is not arguing about the mechanics but using something every believer in the room had personally been through as the picture of what happened to them in Christ.
He apologizes, in effect, for the slavery language — saying he speaks in human terms because of the weakness of their flesh. He knows it is a rough analogy for a relationship that is finally freedom.
What it meant to them
The first hearers were being told that grace does not license sin because grace changed their status. A dead man is not tempted by his old master's orders, and they had died with Christ.
The practical instruction was blunt and physical: do not go on presenting the parts of your body to sin as weapons; present them to God. In a culture where the body's appetites were regarded by many as morally neutral, that was a genuinely new demand.
Sources cited
- F. F. Bruce, Paul: Apostle of the Heart Set Free
- Craig S. Keener, The IVP Bible Background Commentary: New Testament
The text of this chapter
This page carries no textual note on Romans 6. Where this site has examined a place the manuscripts differ, the examination is in the manuscripts room. Every place this site examines →
This page draws on Jamieson, Fausset & Brown, Commentary Critical and Explanatory; John Calvin, Commentaries; John Wesley, Explanatory Notes Upon the New Testament and Matthew Henry, Complete Commentary.