Dr. Sproul recovers verse 4 discussing being buried with Christ in baptism and then moves into a discussion of the “man” with the believer to reckon himself as being dead to sin with our bodies being instruments of righteousness. A definition of regeneration is provided while explaining the believer being supernaturally changed.

We will continue with our study of Paul’s letter to the Romans. We are in now chapter 6, and I am going to read Romans 6:4–11. I would be foolish to go any further than that. I would like to ask the congregation to stand for the reading of the Word:

Therefore we were buried with Him through baptism into death, that just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, even so we also should walk in newness of life.

For if we have been united together in the likeness of His death, certainly we also shall be in the likeness of His resurrection, knowing this, that our old man was crucified with Him, that the body of sin might be done away with, that we should no longer be slaves of sin. For he who has died has been freed from sin. Now if we died with Christ, we believe that we shall also live with Him, knowing that Christ, having been raised from the dead, dies no more. Death no longer has dominion over Him. For the death that He died, He died to sin once for all; but the life that He lives, He lives to God. Likewise you also, reckon yourselves to be dead indeed to sin, but alive to God in Christ Jesus our Lord.

The Word of God for the people of God. Thanks be to God. Please be seated. Let us pray.

Again, Father, as we continue to study this weightiest of all of Paul’s epistles, we beg for Your help because these things, in many cases, are deeper than that which we can penetrate with the weakness of our own minds. So please condescend to help us in our frailty, for we ask it in Jesus’ name. Amen.

Justified Unto Holiness

Many people think that the toughest chapter to interpret in Romans is chapter eleven. I will face that obstacle when we get to it. But for me, the hardest portion of this whole epistle is this section of chapter six.

I do not know how many times I have lectured on Romans and taught on this book, but every time I get to this text, I really want to hurry and get to the end of it so that I can turn my attention to the next chapter. This text is hard. The reason it is hard is because of the language that Paul uses here that makes it difficult to discern what he means and whether he is speaking physically, figuratively, or mystically. I sometimes find myself changing views in the middle of my study of it. But this is one of the advantages of doing expository preaching. You have to deal with what comes next, and this is what comes next, and there is no way I can find to detour around it. So, I am going to ask you to bear with me as we look at this difficult part.

Chapter 6 began, as we saw last week, with the rhetorical question, “Shall we continue in sin that grace may abound?” We saw that Paul answered that question not only with denial but with abhorrence, saying, “God forbid.”

Paul’s great concern in this chapter is for us to know that those who have been justified, have been justified unto holiness. We have not been justified by our holiness or through our holiness, but we are justified for the purpose that we might grow into conformity to the image of Christ. So, we are not justified by our sanctification; we are justified in order that we may progress in our sanctification.

Raised in Union with Christ

Last Sunday, we looked at the threat of antinomianism and saw this conclusion already in verse four: “Therefore we were buried with Him through baptism into death, that just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, even so we also should walk in newness of life.” I mentioned in our study last week that our baptism symbolizes, among other things, our union with Jesus, our participation with Him in His death and resurrection.

Before I go on, if we are going to make any sense of what Paul is teaching here in the sixth chapter of this epistle, it is absolutely central to look at how strongly Paul articulates the idea of our mystical union with Christ. By the Holy Spirit, every person who believes in Christ is then joined to Christ spiritually. If I am a believer, I am now in Christ, Christ is in me, and the invisible church is made up of all of those who are in Christ Jesus, all who participate in this mystical union between us and Christ.

In this text, Paul takes this idea of our mystical union a little further. He tells us in a spiritual sense that not only are our sins imputed to Christ in His death on the cross, the benefits of His resurrection transferred to us, and the benefits of His righteousness imputed to us by legal transaction, but it goes beyond that to our real spiritual union with our Savior. In a spiritual sense, we died with Christ on Calvary. When He went to the cross, He went not for Himself, but for His sheep. He did a work that we could not possibly do for ourselves. But it was our sin that He was carrying in His death. So, when He died, He did not simply die for us, but we, by virtue of this spiritual union, died with Him.

“Therefore,” Paul says, “we were buried with Him through baptism into death, that just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, even so we also should walk in newness of life.” In a very real sense, we who are in Christ share in the power of His resurrection, not merely after we die and go to heaven, but right now we share in the power of His resurrection because everyone who is justified—everyone who believes savingly in Jesus Christ—is someone who has been raised already from spiritual death.

Spiritual Resurrection

We looked earlier at our understanding of original sin that was passed to us from Adam. When we described our condition of original sin, we used the biblical metaphors of death and slavery. By nature, we are born into this world biologically alive but spiritually dead on arrival. We have no inclination whatsoever in our souls towards the things of God—no interest, no passion, no love, no inclination. We are dead.

Because we are spiritually dead and children of darkness, we are slaves to the sinful impulses and lusts that drive our behavior. We are not just participants in sin—that is far too weak a description. What the Bible teaches us again and again is that we are slaves to sin. Sin is not only in our nature, beloved, but it is our master.

The great Augustine used the metaphor of Satan riding a horse, saying that if you are the horse, before you are converted, you have one rider, and it is Satan. He has the bit in your teeth. He is in control of the reins. When he turns your head in this direction, that is the direction you go. When he says “Whoa,” you stop, and when he says, “Giddy up,” you go, because he is your master, and you are his slave.

Augustine then went on to say that when you are converted by the power of the Holy Ghost, it is not like Satan is dismissed back to the stables and the only one now riding you, the horse, is Jesus. No, Satan gives up the reins reluctantly. He will do everything he can to get that bit back in your mouth and recover you toward his covey of slaves, as it were. He hates to lose a slave. Throughout the whole of the Christian life, we have to fight against the enticements and the seductions of Satan, who is furious that we have left his design.

But something radically new has happened in conversion. We have gone through a spiritual resurrection. Earlier this evening, a new member of our church talked to me about his conversion and said to me, “It was like having a whole new life.” What does the Bible say? “Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation; old things have passed away; behold, all things have become new” (2 Cor. 5:17). That is because the Spirit of God has raised our souls from the dead.

Regeneration

Paul elaborates on this idea of spiritual resurrection in his letter to the Ephesians, particularly in chapter 2, where he says, “And you hath he quickened” (Eph. 1:2, KJV). Some translations read, “And you who He made alive, who were dead in trespasses and sins, in which you once walked according to the course of this world, according to the prince of the power of the air . . . in the lusts of the flesh” (Eph. 2:1–3). That is Paul’s description of spiritual death and slavery.

But as Paul addresses the Ephesians, he says, “You’ve been quickened,” or, “You have been made alive.” What is he referring to? He is referring to regeneration. I want to talk just for a few minutes about regeneration because the idea of regeneration, I believe, lies beneath everything that Paul is teaching here in the sixth chapter of Romans. We who are justified are people who have been changed, and we have been changed supernaturally.

Every now and then, I find something Martin Luther said that I disagree with, and here is one of them. Luther, in extolling the wonders of spiritual rebirth or regeneration, said, “Regeneration is the greatest miracle of all.” I quibble with the Reformer there. I do not think regeneration is a miracle, because regeneration is invisible. A tight definition of miracle in the biblical sense is something that happens in the external, perceivable world that only God can bring to pass, such as bringing life out of death or something out of nothing. But regeneration is hidden. It takes place in the soul of a human being, so you cannot see it. Now, regeneration is every bit as supernatural as any outward miracle, and that is what Luther was getting at. Regeneration is not something you can do for yourself.

How much influence did you have in your own birth, in your own conception? None, when we are talking biologically. When it comes to spiritual rebirth, if anything, you have even less of an influence. Only God has the power to raise a human soul from spiritual death to spiritual life. So, we define regeneration as that work of God the Holy Spirit that happens supernaturally and immediately in the soul of a human being.

Well, what do we mean by “immediately”? We mean by that “without the use of any means.” In other words, regeneration happens with no intermediary devices. The Spirit works directly, and He works monergistically. That is to say, He is the only One operating in this endeavor. Regeneration or rebirth is not a joint venture between you and God. God—and God alone—can raise a spiritually dead soul to spiritual life. The flesh, which is all you are before you are converted, can do nothing.

Born of the Spirit

Remember when Jesus had the conversation at night with Nicodemus? Nicodemus came with his flattering comments. “Good teacher, we know that You are a teacher sent from God, or You would not be able to do the works that You do.” Nicodemus demonstrated sound thinking up that point.

Then Jesus stopped Nicodemus short and said to this teacher of Israel, “Unless one is born again, he cannot see the kingdom of God. . . . Unless one is born of water and the Spirit he cannot enter the kingdom of God” (John 3:3, 5). He cannot see it and he cannot enter it because, as Jesus then said, “That which is born of the flesh is flesh” (John 3:6). The flesh cannot produce the spirit. As Jesus later said, “The flesh profits nothing” (John 6:63).

One of my favorite quotations from Luther is when Luther had to remind Erasmus in their debate that this “nothing” is not “a little something.” When you are born, you are flesh, 100 percent, and the flesh is at enmity with God. The flesh is spiritually dead. The flesh is enslaved. Unless God the Holy Spirit changes your flesh and gives you spirit, you will stay flesh forever.

Of course, Jesus’ statements baffled Nicodemus. He asked: “How can these things be? Is a man to crawl a second time into his mother’s womb that he can be born?” Jesus said: “Are you the teacher of Israel”—are you a theologian—“and yet you do not understand these things?” (John 6:10). Jesus was essentially saying: “This should be Theology 101. You should have known ages ago about your helpless condition in the flesh apart from the supernatural intervention of God.”

Why am I talking about this? I am talking about this for this reason: You cannot cause yourself to be born again. Billy Graham once wrote a book called How to Be Born Again; it was a how-to manual. But there is nothing you can do to be born again; God does it all, not 99 percent, but 100 percent. Only God can raise somebody from the dead, both physically and spiritually.

Paul is saying in Romans 6 that you have been raised from the dead. You have a new genesis. Gennaō means “to be,” “to become,” or “to happen.” Regeneration means that there is a new or second of the original genesis. You had a genesis when you were born; now you have a new genesis, a regeneration, a rebirth—only this time it is a spiritual birth wrought by the supernatural work of God the Holy Spirit.

Stop and think for a moment. Think of the blessings you have received in your lifetime. Think of how many times you have grumbled about what you did not get. Think of how many times you have been lacking in contentment, dissatisfied with the hand God has dealt you. Then look around the world and see the vast multitudes who have no idea what it means to be born of the Spirit.

If you are living in a hovel, if you are living through constant chronic pain and illness but have received the supernatural work of regeneration in your soul, then you have no reason to do anything but praise God for the rest of eternity because you have received the pearl of great price. You have been raised from the dead already. You are already going to live into eternity because the sting of death has been removed from you, because what God has regenerated, death cannot destroy.

Newness of Life

Paul continues, “ . . . even so we also should walk in newness of life.” We have newness of life. Our lives have been changed. That is why I spent so much time last week talking about the pernicious doctrine in the Lordship Salvation Controversy that talks about how people can have Jesus as Savior and not as Lord. It is a defective doctrine of regeneration in which people believe that you can be reborn and yet be unchanged.

How can someone who is dead be made alive and not be different? How can someone be in slavery, be released from those bonds, and yet not be changed? The biggest change you will ever go through in this world takes place when you are reborn. You have changed from spiritual death to spiritual life, from bondage to freedom: “Where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is liberty” (2 Cor. 3:17).

Paul is essentially saying, “Consider what has happened to you. You died with Christ. You have been raised in the power of His resurrection.” In a sense, there is a strange combination here of the imperative and the indicative: Since this is the way you are, then behave that way. Live like people who have a new life, because if you are regenerate, you have a new life, and if you are justified, you are a new creation. So now, after God has rescued us from death, He expects us to live for Him for the rest of our days.

Body of Sin

“For if we have been united together in the likeness of His death, certainly we also shall be in the likeness of His resurrection, knowing this, that our old man was crucified with Him.” What does Paul mean by the “old man”? He is talking about the former human nature, the nature that we brought into this world wherein the constituent nature of our humanity was dead in sin. That old person with a singular disposition toward sin, whose heart was of stone, that is the one who was crucified with Christ.

Christ has not just died for your sins, but He has died for your sinfulness. He did not just die for your sin legally, bearing your guilt, but He died to kill your original sin, to kill your moral inability. Your dead, corrupt, fallen nature was crucified with Christ on the cross. My old man received the curse of God on Calvary. Do you see how difficult this text is? It boggles my mind to think about what Paul is articulating here.

“Our old man was crucified with Him, that the body of sin might be done away with.” I put question marks in my Bible. I do not know if you do that, but I have lots of them. There is one here next to “body of sin.” What does Paul mean here? What is this body of sin that he is describing? Is he describing our physical body with the Greek word there, which is sōma? He is not using the term that he usually uses to describe our corrupt nature, our flesh, our sarx. But he is talking about our physical body here, the body of sin.

Let me tell you what Paul does not mean. Paul does not equate sin with physicality. We have a tendency never to have gotten rid of our Greek roots, and we tend to think of sins simply in terms of physical appetites and physical acts of disobedience, gluttony, sex, drunkenness, and things along those lines that immediately involve our body. We think that sin is just contained in our physical extremities. But no, we have a mind of flesh. Sin is something that is in our thoughts. Sin is something that is deeply rooted in our souls. You cannot bifurcate the human person and say the physical part is sinful and the spiritual part is good the way Plato did. No, Paul is not saying that this physical body of sin is done away with.

Paul may be referring to a mass of sin. When we talk about a body of literature, we mean the whole corpus that may involve several books, several volumes—a heap of things, a mass of them. Maybe Paul is simply saying that we must understand that this mass of sin, what Augustine called this “mass of perdition” that describes our fallen condition, is crucified with Christ and done away with. Maybe that is it. Later, in Romans 7:24, he cries out. “Who will deliver me from this body of death?” He uses a similar expression there: “body of sin,” “body of death.”

I have read one theory a few times. It is not too widely known, and it is just a theory. But I am told that one of the penalties for murder in some sectors of the ancient world was that if you murdered somebody and they found the corpse, they would take that decaying corpse and as your punishment would tie that fetid corpse onto your body, and you would have to walk around with this corpse hanging on your back while it was decaying and rotting. Can you imagine anything ghastlier than being tied to a dead body?

The idea that some take here is that Paul is speaking of that practice. This sin nature that we brought into this world is like a putrid, decaying, corrupted corpse, a body of death that we still have to carry around with us until we go to heaven. Even though we have been reborn, even though we have been let out of prison and slavery, we still sin, and we still fall.

However, that does not mean that we are unchanged. We are changed, and the old man is dying daily. He dies the death by inches. But each day we live in the grace of God, the new man that has been raised with Christ is being strengthened and growing, and the old man is dying more and more. In a very spiritual way, the old man died already on the cross, but yet at the same time, he is still kicking and screaming, and we have to deal with him through our life’s end.

I am not completely sure what Paul means by “this body of sin,” but most likely, he is just talking about the mass of sin with which we have to deal, and which may be done away with. The purpose, however, is clear: We should no longer be slaves of sin.

No Longer Slaves to Sin

It is one thing to be a sinner; it is another thing to be a slave of sin. We all sin, but if we have been born of the Spirit, we are no longer slaves to that sin. We can no longer say to God, “I can’t help it. I’m dominated by the power of sin.” If you are still in that condition of slavery to sin, then you are not regenerate.

That does not mean that we do not have besetting sins, sins that cause us to fail over and over again. We are called to resist those sins, and the greatest Christians have to fight them all of their spiritual lives. But in the final analysis, we have been set free, and we now have the power of God at our disposal to have victory over any given sin.

Let me say something that may surprise you: I believe that it is possible for a Christian, after conversion, to live a perfect life. I hope you are looking at me quizzically, as you are, saying: “Did I just hear him say what I think I heard him say? Did he say that he believes that a Christian can live a perfect Christian life after conversion?” I said it. But let me qualify it before you go for the matches and burn me at the stake. I think it is hypothetically possible that you could live the rest of your days without sin, but I think the odds against it are astronomical. It is virtually certain that you will continue to struggle with sin. Why? Because there is so much weakness left in us and so many opportunities for sin that bombard us. However, if you consider each particular sin that you are confronted with, at the moment of that temptation, the God who has raised you from spiritual death has given you the grace then and there to resist that sin. So, no longer do we sin under compulsion as slaves. We have been set free, but our liberty is extremely weak.

It is a new thing for us, and this power of the resurrection is not something we are accustomed to. Our comfort zone is still back in the graveyard of spiritual death. But we really have been set free by the power of the Holy Ghost. That we can achieve perfection is something I will teach strenuously against when we get to chapter 7, but let us wait for those problems.

Death No Longer Has Dominion

“For he who has died has been freed from sin.” If you go to the cemetery, the people there are not struggling with temptation. The battle is over. As for the saints, they are in heaven, and they are not exposed to sin at all. Once you die, the battle is over. So, Paul essentially says: “You died. Consider yourself dead. For he who has died has been freed from sin.” He continues, “Now if we died with Christ, we believe that we shall also live with Him, knowing that Christ, having been raised from the dead, dies no more.”

Jesus died once. He would not even have died that once unless He was willing to receive in His own person the imputation of our sin, since death had absolutely no claim over Him because He was sinless. But He died. The Father never says to Jesus: “Run your death by Me again. Let’s do it every Sunday in the Mass.” No, one time: “Once for all.” His work is finished on the cross.

“Death no longer has dominion over Him.” How long did death have dominion over Him? Not very long. One of my favorite texts in the New Testament is when it says that God raised Him up from death “because it was not possible that He should be held by it” (Acts 2:24). Death crushes Him on the cross, and He is only vulnerable to that death because of the imputation of sin, but after He pays the price for our sin, death is now powerless. The dominion of death is gone. Death could have tried with all of its power to hold Christ in the tomb, but it would have been an exercise in futility. Indeed, it was an exercise in futility.

This is what really amazes me about how we think as people: We talk about the resurrection of Christ and nonbelievers say it is impossible, because we determine possibilities on the basis of probabilities, upon what we observe and experiment on within this world. We have never seen anyone come out of the grave, and with the multitudes of examples of people dying and staying dead, we come to the conclusion that we have explored the full measure of the realm of possibility.

You might say that someone coming back from the grave is impossible. But that is not the way the Bible looks at it. The Bible says it was impossible for death to hold Him. It could not maintain dominion over Christ. It is a small thing, a minor thing, an easy thing for God to raise His Son from the dead. Christ’s resurrection from the dead is no greater in power and scope than your conception as a human soul was in the womb of your mother—that is, by the power of God and only by the power of God. That same power could burst into that tomb—well, I am getting ahead of myself. Easter is not until Sunday. But it is here in this text: “Death no longer has dominion over Him.”

“For the death that He died, He died to sin once for all; but the life that He lives, He lives to God.” The life that He lives and the life that He gives is not over in a moment. It is not like a vapor that passes away. The Christ who is alive lives forever. Death is no longer a threat to Him.

Reckon Yourself Dead to Sin

Christ died once for all, and “the life that He lives, He lives to God. Likewise you also, reckon yourselves to be dead indeed to sin, but alive to God in Christ Jesus our Lord.”

Notice that Paul is making application of our union with Christ and His death and resurrection. He tells us that just as our Savior has defeated death and sin, not just for Himself but for us, we are to “reckon.” What does that mean? Remember the old western movies. Someone says, “You think it’s going to rain today, partner?” He says, “I reckon.” It means, “I think so.” It has to do with thinking, judging, or esteeming. Paul is saying: “Consider yourself”—that is, “deem yourself” or “think of yourself as being dead to sin. Think of yourself, reckon to yourself the life that is yours in the power of the gospel and the Spirit of God, because now you are made alive by Christ and for Christ and unto Christ. So, your life belongs to Him. Consider the old man dead.”

The old man is ancient history. The old man is over. It may be something like D-Day, when the war was over and no one knew it. Indeed, there was still the Battle of the Bulge to come. But you have been made alive in Christ Jesus, and you need to think of yourself in those terms. Let us pray.

Our Father and our God, help us to reckon ourselves as free from death and free from sin, that we might become slaves to Christ in bondage to Him and to His Spirit, that we may consider ourselves dead to sin and alive to Him. Amen.

This transcript has been lightly edited for readability.