“For we know that our old self was crucified with him so that the body ruled by sin might be rendered powerless so that we may no longer be enslaved to sin, since a person who has died is freed from sin. Now if we died with Christ, we believe that we will also live with him, because we know that Christ, having been raised from the dead, will not die again. Death no longer rules over him. For the death he died, he died to sin once for all time; but the life he lives, he lives to God. So, you too consider yourselves dead to sin and alive to God in Christ Jesus.” (CSB – Read the chapter)

As you read through Romans 6, Paul repeats himself. He makes one basic point and then drives it into our heads almost relentlessly. The reason for this is simple: This stuff is crucial to understand if we are going to properly understand the Gospel. And the point he makes is one we have talked about before. Apart from Christ, we are slaves to sin. In Christ, we are free. Let’s explore this with Paul here a little further.

I don’t plan out very closely which passage we are going to talk about on which day. Rather, we are just walking through the text one step at a time. In God’s timing, though, things have a tendency to occasionally line up nicely. How appropriate it is that we are talking about what Jesus accomplished in freeing us from the power of sin by His sacrificial death on the very week we are preparing to celebrate the cross and the empty tomb. God’s good like that.

We talked last week about the fact that apart from Christ we are slaves to sin. We did this through the lens of unpacking the potent symbolism of baptism. When we are baptized (really baptized, and not merely sprinkled), we are declaring that by putting our faith in Christ and aligning our lives with His we are spiritual participants in everything He did and accomplished both on the cross and in the resurrection.

In these next few verses, Paul is diving deeper into how this all works. Let’s take this a verse at a time. In Christ, our old self was crucified along with Him. This is a spiritual transaction, of course, and not a physical one. That was the whole point of Jesus’ sacrificial death. He did it physically so that we can simply participate spiritually, thus maintaining our lives. He laid down His life so that we don’t have to. Just because this action is spiritual and symbolic, though, doesn’t mean it’s not real. As Paul put it in Galatians 2:20, “I have been crucified with Christ, and I no longer live, but Christ lives in me. I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me.”

Thus Paul writes here, “For we know that our old self, was crucified with him…” And the reason this happened, the reason God allows for this transaction and credits it to our account is “so that the body ruled by sin might be rendered powerless so that we may no longer be enslaved to sin.” Jesus’ death broke the power of sin by paying the price demanded of it to satisfy the wrath and justice of God. The grace of God is that this breaking is extended beyond just Jesus to everyone and anyone who places their faith in Him. Now, in Him, sin’s power over us is broken. We are no longer beholden to it to do its will. In fact, our wills are changed completely.

“Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation; the old has passed away, and see, the new has come!” We are new, and what is new is that we are freed entirely from sin. We can finally not sin. This is v. 7: “…since a person who has died is freed from sin.” You can’t have any power over someone who is dead. In Christ, we die with Him, so sin loses its hold on us. We are free.

Next, Paul shifts gears to the life that we now have in Christ. It’s not simply that we can live now. We have eternal life in Christ. Sin’s power wasn’t the only power that was broken over us when we aligned our lives with His. So was the power of death. Death has long held incredible power over humanity. Death was the one great enemy we couldn’t conquer. Nothing we have ever done has ever had any impact on it. We tell stories about overcoming and defeating it, and these have come in all sorts of different forms. But they have always remained firmly within the realm of fiction.

And then Jesus came walking back out of the tomb.

And because He lives, so also do we who are hidden in Him. “Now if we died with Christ, we believe that we will also live with him.” This only makes sense. If our lives are aligned with His such that we are spiritual participants in His sin-defeating death, then it is merely a matter of course that we should also participate in His death-defeating, life-giving resurrection. If we are fully in Him, then we are in Him both in His death and in His life “because we know that Christ, having been raised from the dead, will not die again. Death no longer rules over him.”

Death has no power over Him any longer. He died, so death won its apparent victory, but then He rose again, snatching His real victory from the jaws of defeat. Death can only claim it’s victims once. Then judgment comes. The author of Hebrews made this clear. “And just as it is appointed for people to die once – and after this, judgment – so also Christ, having been offered once to bear the sins of many, will appear a second time, not to bear sin, but to bring salvation to those who are waiting for him.”

Indeed, look at v. 10 here: “For the death he died, he died to sin once for all time.” No more sacrifices must now be offered. The author of Hebrews seconded this as well earlier in that same passage. “For Christ did not enter a sanctuary made with hands (only a model of the true one) but into heaven itself, so that he might now appear in the presence of God for us. He did not do this to offer himself many times, as the high priest enters the sanctuary yearly with the blood of another. Otherwise he would have had to suffer many times since the foundation of the world. But now he has appeared one time, at the end of the ages, for the removal of sin by the sacrifice of himself.”

So, Jesus died to pay the price for all sin. When He rose, though, He rose to a new life that wholly belonged to God. Neither sin nor death had any power of Him any longer. “But the life he lives, he lives to God.” And if we are in Him, then we are participants in this life just as we are participants in His death. Sin’s power is broken and life is all that remains.

This is an existentially significant truth. In accepting this, we don’t just start to act differently than we did before, although we certainly do that much. We have to begin thinking about ourselves differently. Think back to what Paul wrote to the Corinthian believers. In Christ we are new creations. The old is gone. The new has come. If we don’t accept His help (because we can’t do it on our own) to begin thinking about ourselves differently, we’ll never live in a manner consistent with our confession. “So, you too consider yourselves dead to sin and alive to God in Christ Jesus.”

If you are in Christ, you are not the same as you were before placing your life in His hands. Don’t think about yourself in those old ways. You are not powerless before temptation and sin. You have the power of Christ flowing through you by virtue of the fact that He lives in you through the indwelling of His Holy Spirit. You don’t have to bow to sin’s demands any longer. That was the old you. That you is gone. You are a new you. Think like it. Live like it. This is what Jesus did for you.