Romans (International Critical Commentary) by William Sanday & Arthur C. Headlam

Author:William Sanday & Arthur C. Headlam [Sanday, William]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Published: 2014-09-25T04:00:00+00:00

The Transition From Law to Grace. Analogy of Slavery

6:15-23. Take an illustration from common life—the condition of slavery. The Christian was a slave of sin; his business was uncleanness; his wages, death. But he has been emancipated from this service, only to enter upon another—that of Righteousness.

15Am I told that we should take advantage of our liberty as subjects of Grace and not of Law, to sin? Impossible! 16Are you not aware that to render service and obedience to any one is to be the slave of that person or power to which obedience is rendered? And so it is here. You are either slaves of Sin, and the end before you death; or you are true to your rightful Master, and the end before you righteousness. 17But, thank God, the time is past when you were slaves of Sin; and at your baptism you gave cordial assent to that standard of life and conduct in which you were first instructed and to the guidance of which you were then handed over by your teachers. 18Thus you were emancipated from the service of Sin, and were transferred to the service of Righteousness.

19I am using a figure of speech taken from every-day human relations. If ‘servitude’ seems a poor and harsh metaphor, it is one which the remains of the natural man that still cling about you will at least permit you to understand. Yours must be an undivided service. Devote the members of your body as unreservedly to the service of righteousness for progressive consecration to God, as you once devoted them to Pagan uncleanness and daily increasing licence. 20I exhort you to this. Why? Because while you were slaves to Sin, you were freemen in regard to Righteousness. 21What good then did you get from conduct which you now blush to think of? Much indeed! For the goal to which it leads is death. 22But now that, as Christians, you are emancipated from Sin and enslaved to God, you have something to show for your service—closer and fuller consecration, and your goal, eternal Life! 23For the wages which Sin pays its votaries is Death; while you receive—no wages, but the bountiful gift of God, the eternal Life, which is ours through our union with Jesus Messiah, our Lord.

15-23. The next two sections (6:15-23; 7:1-6) might be described summarily as a description of the Christian’s release, what it is and what it is not. The receiving of Christian Baptism was a great dividing-line across a man’s career. In it he entered into a wholly new relation of self-identification with Christ which was fraught with momentous consequences looking both backwards and forwards. From his sin-stained past he was cut off as it were by death: towards the future he turned radiant with the quickening influence of a new life. St. Paul now more fully expounds the nature of the change. He does so by the help of two illustrations, one from the state of slavery, the other from the state of wedlock.

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