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Paul's object in this chapter is to exhibit the inconsistency of sin with the Christian faith and position. We are, he says, planted together with Christ, and baptized into His death that we may pass with Him into a new life. There is only one kind of perfect human life, the life exemplified in Jesus Christ; and to this there is only one possible path, viz., death. The grub cannot pass to the higher life of the dragonfly without first sickening and becoming dead to all the life it has been familiar with, and we, in order to enter the true life of man, must die to the old.

I. WHAT IS IT TO BE DEAD TO SIN?

1. To be beyond its power to inflict penalty upon us. If a servant has come to a settlement with his master there remains no longer any bond between them. Now the wages of sin is death, and our wages have been paid in the death of Christ. The law has no claim upon a man who has suffered its extreme penalty, and this the old legal phraseology of Scotland brought out when it spoke of criminals being justified in the Grassmarket, when they were hung there. By death they cleared scores with the law. Thus we have by the death of Christ the removal of our guilt.

2. To be irresponsive to the appeals of sin. How unmoved, how irresponsive the dead are! Let the master shout at his slave's dead body; not one finger stirs to obey his orders. Was the dead man vain and fond of applause? the acclaims of a world bring no smile of pleasure to his face now. Was he mean and greedy? Fill the dead hand with gold; the fingers will not close upon it. The soldier who a few months before sprang forward at the sound of the bugle, now knows no difference between the charge and the retire. The most passionate kiss that love presses on the face of the dead wins no acknowledgment, no returning embrace. Such is the insensibility of the true Christian who avails himself of his position. The man who was led by his appetites, and could not walk the streets without sinning, sets the Cross of Christ before him, and finds he can as little sin as if he were a corpse.

3. Not only a complete but a final severance from sin. Death is a state from which no one returns to the old life. So it was with Paul himself, who realised his position in Christ.

(1) There are animals which hibernate, and for all practical purposes are dead for a season; they cease to be a terror to their natural prey, they entirely abandon their haunts and habits; but when the warmth of spring penetrates to their temporary burying place there is a revival of their old instincts, energies, and habits. With many persons the abandonment of sin is a mere hibernation. For a while they seem to have lost all taste for their old ways, and, in the ardour of a newly conceived idea of life, the man is impregnable to all that would lead him from it. He is wrapped up in his new and strong resolve, and while that lasts he is insensible to the storms that would drive him from his path. Or something has made the world distasteful; his prospects have been blighted, and he withdraws from his former keen engagement in this world's affairs. Or there comes to the man of pleasure higher and better impulses; the Spirit of Christ strives with him, or some outward event warns him, and for the present he becomes dead to the solicitations of appetite. Or a young person comes under the influence of someone who does live a consecrated, unselfish, Christ-like life, and the influence is commanding while it lasts. All those temporary abandonments of sin are mere sleeps, or states of torpor; the soul of sin lives on securely underneath the lethargic surface, and, when the period of slumber passes and the cause of insensibility has exhausted itself, will return again with renewed and stronger life to all its old habits and ways.

(2) Men sometimes commit suicide. They see that things have gone so far wrong as to be irretrievable. To go into hiding and wait for a better time is in vain; carefully weighing probabilities, they conclude that their severance from the world must now be final. This requires a clear judgment and a strong will. The same deliberate and decisive finality of action is required of us. Less than this will not do. We cannot get into a new life in any other way than by dying to the old. Yet how many of us stand, like Nero, with the dagger at our throat but with a hand far too nervous to drive it home. It is this great act of will that marks the second birth.

II. WHAT IS MEANT BY LIVING TO GOD? This aspect of our participation with Christ is more important.

1. To die to sin is but a necessary preliminary. By itself it is incomplete and ineffective. Death can never form a desirable state, but only life, and it is because death of this kind promises fuller life that we pass through it.

2. Some persons, however, are dead to sin, but they are dead to everything else. Religion, instead of enlivening and enlarging them, seems to benumb and deaden them. For all the active good they do they might as well be in the grave. The poor man who needs help would as soon think of knocking at a tombstone as of knocking at their door; active beneficence on their part would startle us as if the sheeted dead had come to our aid. Where there is fulness of life there is activity, joy, love, intensity; not coldness, selfish caution, parsimony, and seclusion from the woes, the joys, the interests of men.

3. And where there is life it will appear; burying the seed beneath the clod, the life that is in it will work its way through, and show what it is. The body of Christ could not be held under the power of death, and if the Spirit of life that was in Him be really in us, that life will break through all that overlies it. And if you do not fill your life with Christian activities, and your heart with Christian joys, they will soon be filled and flooded with the old life. Do not make it needful that men should feel your pulse, or hold a mirror to your mouth to see if you be really alive; but let it be seen by the brightness of your vision, by the activity of your step, by the force and helpfulness of your hand, that you have a more abundant life.

4. This life, like Christ's resurrection life, is real. Our Lord took pains to prove that His risen body was not a phantom. Our risen life must be equally substantial. From the first some have had a name to live while really dead. Their appearance of newness does not bear scrutiny; they are airy nothings, pithless, pretentious, disappointing appearances; they imitate the conduct of those who have real life, or they are lifted up and carried along by the crowd around them, but when left to act in their own strength they are found to be powerless — dead. All about them is unreal; the religious expressions they use are borrowed, learned as a foreign tongue, so that you can readily detect the accent. Their prayers are forced; their whole religious life is a makeup; not an actual, constant, self-supporting, free life. Strive to be true, to stand upon your feet, to act upon convictions of your own, to speak as you feel, without being an echo of other persons. Be sure that in yourself there is a true, risen life.

(Marcus Dods, D. D.)

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KJV: Likewise reckon ye also yourselves to be dead indeed unto sin, but alive unto God through Jesus Christ our Lord.

WEB: Thus consider yourselves also to be dead to sin, but alive to God in Christ Jesus our Lord.