6:21-23 The pleasure and profit of sin do not deserve to be called fruit. Sinners are but ploughing iniquity, sowing vanity, and reaping the same. Shame came into the world with sin, and is still the certain effect of it. The end of sin is death. Though the way may seem pleasant and inviting, yet it will be bitterness in the latter end. From this condemnation the believer is set at liberty, when made free from sin. If the fruit is unto holiness, if there is an active principle of true and growing grace, the end will be everlasting life; a very happy end! Though the way is up-hill, though it is narrow, thorny, and beset, yet everlasting life at the end of it is sure. The gift of God is eternal life. And this gift is through Jesus Christ our Lord. Christ purchased it, prepared it, prepares us for it, preserves us to it; he is the All in all in our salvation.

21. What fruit had ye then in those things whereof ye are now ashamed? for the end of those things is death—What permanent advantage, and what abiding satisfaction, have those things yielded? The apostle answers his own question:—"Abiding satisfaction, did I ask? They have left only a sense of 'shame.' Permanent advantage? 'The end of them is death.'" By saying they were "now ashamed," he makes it plain that he is not referring to that disgust at themselves, and remorse of conscience by which those who are the most helplessly "sold under sin" are often stung to the quick; but that ingenuous feeling of self-reproach, which pierces and weighs down the children of God, as they think of the dishonor which their past life did to His name, the ingratitude it displayed, the violence it did to their own conscience, its deadening and degrading effects, and the death—"the second death"—to which it was dragging them down, when mere Grace arrested them. (On the sense of "death" here, see on [2207]Ro 5:12-21, Note 3, and [2208]Ro 6:16: see also Re 21:8—The change proposed in the pointing of this verse: "What fruit had ye then? things whereof ye are now ashamed" [Luther, Tholuck, De Wette, Philippi, Alford, &c.], seems unnatural and uncalled for. The ordinary pointing has at least powerful support [Chrysostom, Calvin, Beza, Grotius, Bengel, Stuart, Fritzsche]).