Dead to Sin’s Dominion

If we are united to Christ by faith, we have died to the dominion of sin and must no longer live in it. Today, Sinclair Ferguson reflects on a passage in Romans that is essential for understanding our identity as Christians.

This week on Things Unseen, I’ve been talking about some of the passages in Scripture that have shaped my own Christian life. And I’ve said before I want to encourage you not only to think about the particular verses that have influenced me, but to take some time this week, maybe over the weekend, to think about passages that have shaped your own life. It’s a wonderful exercise, and it helps us to see how God’s Word has been at work in us, as Paul puts it in 1 Thessalonians 2. I almost hesitate to mention the fourth passage today because it’s got fourteen verses in it, and it’s not the easiest passage to understand, and I think not many of us read it and immediately think, “Yes, I’ve got it.” I’m not going to read the passage, but it’s in Romans 6:1–14.

And I first became conscious of its importance in a book someone gave me when, I think, I was sixteen. The book actually taught what used to be called the “Higher Life,” and one element in its teaching, which appealed to these verses in Romans 6, was that there was a new level of sanctification possible and it could be experienced by a particular act of faith. I read and reread the book, but to be honest, I just didn’t get it. I felt as though I was being asked to leap onto the top of a table from a standing start, and so I put the book to one side. But a year or so later, when I was in my first year at university, I had an address that touched on Romans 6, and I remember thinking, “I’ve got to give more serious attention to studying this passage,” and so I did. To tell the truth, I don’t think I’ve preached on it all that often considering how important it’s been in my own life, but the truth it teaches has been like background music in my life ever since I was a late teenager.

So, what’s the big deal in Romans 6? Well, just that it is a big deal. The great Welsh preacher, Dr. Martyn Lloyd-Jones, who actually preached on Romans for about fourteen years or so in London, recorded that a well-known individual came to see him once to ask him when he was going to begin a series of expositions on Romans, and he replied, “When I can understand Romans 6.” And a great Scottish churchman, the theologian Thomas Chalmers—who actually was a man of such substance that I think the prime minister of Great Britain was frightened of him—Chalmers thought this was perhaps the most interesting chapter in the whole Bible. So, it is a big deal.

And it’s important because Paul suggests to the Romans that there is something every Christian should know, but he’s suspecting that maybe the Roman Christians don’t understand it. The reason they should know it is because it’s part of the meaning of their baptism.

Now, what is it? It’s that through the work of the Spirit, faith unites us to Jesus Christ. You remember how the New Testament puts it: we not only believe in Christ but into Christ so that we can be said to be now in Christ. And if we’re united to Christ, that means that we are united to Him in His death and resurrection.

“Don’t you know,” he says to the Romans, “that all of us who were baptized were baptized into Christ’s death, and now we’ve been raised up with Him into newness of life? More than that,” he says, “the death Christ died was a death He died to sin”—that is, to the dominion or reign of sin. So, if we are united to Christ, then we, too, have died to the dominion of sin and been raised into newness of life. We’ve been set free.

And that’s why Paul asks this question at the beginning of the chapter: “How can we who died to sin still live in it?” And if that’s the case, then as he said at the end of the passage: “Then don’t let sin, whose reign over you has been broken, reestablish that reign. Don’t let your bodies become instruments or weapons for sin to use. Remember, you’ve died to sin’s dominion. You’ve been raised to a new life in another kingdom altogether, the kingdom of Jesus Christ.”

What I discovered in my studies in those now far-off early days of my Christian life was this: Paul uses a particular form of speech in Romans 6:2. I think we could express it like this. He says, “We, we who are the kind of people, we who belong to the category of people, we whose very identity as a Christian is as follows: we are those who have died to sin—how can such people go on living in sin?”

You’ll maybe allow me to put that in rather grandiose terms that I sometimes use in order to remind myself of the massive transition that takes place when we come to faith in Jesus Christ. I am now someone who is defined like this. This is my new identity. I have died to the dominion of sin. And so, to go on living in sin would be an ontological contradiction, a contradiction of who I really am. It would involve identity amnesia. I would be forgetting what it means to be in Christ.

Now, there’s a lot more than this in Romans 6, and the same teaching is expounded elsewhere in Paul. But here’s one of the contemporary importances of this teaching on union with Christ. I think it’s tremendously important for us to grasp, especially if we are younger people and younger Christians, because we’re now living in a time when identity is top of the agenda. This is an epoch of profound identity crisis in the Western world, so knowing who you really are is a wonderful blessing. If I’m a believer, I am in Christ—that’s my identity. I’m no longer a citizen of the kingdom where sin reigns both over me and in me. I’m a member of a new kingdom, I have a new family, a new citizenship, a new identity altogether. I’m someone who is in Christ, and I belong to Him. Discover that, and it helps to transform life, and it gives us both stability and dignity. And that’s surely what we need today, don’t you think? I hope you’ll join me tomorrow as we think about another passage of Scripture.