Monday, December 16, 2013

Shall we go on sinning because we are under the grace of God?

Romans 6:14 NIV
For sin shall no longer be your master, because you are not under the law, but under grace.

Romans 6:14 appears to be a conclusive assertion in answer to a pointed question that was posed in 6:1,
"Shall we go on sinning so that grace may increase?"
The long chain of reasoning in the first fourteen verses of Romans 6 can be listed and paraphrased as follows:

- we have died to sin, we cannot live in sin anymore,
- we were baptized into the death of the Messiah Yeshua (Iesous), being buried with the Messiah in death so that we may live a new life just as the Messiah was raised from death by the glory of God the Father.
- if we have been united with the Messiah in a death like his death, we will certainly (one day) be united with Him in a resurrection like his resurrection.
- our old self was crucified with Him so that our sinful body might be done away with, so that we should be slaves to sin no more.
- anyone who has died (with the Messiah) has been freed from sin
- if we have died with the Messiah, we will also live with him, since the Messiah was raised by God, he cannot die again.
- the Messiah died to sin once for all. The life he now lives, he lives to God.
- in the same way, we should COUNT OURSELVES dead to sin, alive to God in union with the Messiah Yeshua.
- As such, we shall not allow sin to reign in our body, making us obey its evil desire.
- We shall not offer any of our members to sin, as instruments of wickedness. Instead, we shall offer ourselves to God, as instrument of righteousness, as people who have been raised from death to life.

Conclusion in Rom 6:14-
Sin shall no longer be our master, because we are not under the law (by every written letter of code), but under grace (by the spirit of God).

This assertion is reiterated in Rom. 7:6 NIV
"But now, by dying to what once bound us, we have been released from the law so that we serve in the new way of the Spirit (kainoteti pneumatos), and not in the old way of the written code (palaioteti grammatos)".