ROMANS vi. 14--vii. 6
At the point we have now reached, the Apostle's thought pauses for a moment, to resume.[94] He has brought us to self-surrender. We have seen the sacred obligations of our divine and wonderful liberty. We have had the miserable question, "_Shall we cling to sin?_" answered by an explanation of the rightness and the bliss of giving over our accepted persons, in the fullest liberty of will, to God, in Christ. Now he pauses, to illustrate and enforce. And two human relations present themselves for the purpose; the one to shew the absoluteness of the surrender, the other its living results. The first is Slavery, the second is Wedlock.
[Sidenote: Ver. 14.] =For sin shall not have dominion over you;= sin shall not put in its claim upon you, the claim which the Lord has met in your Justification; =for you are not brought[95] under law, but under grace.= The whole previous argument explains this sentence. He refers to our acceptance. He goes back to the justification of the guilty, "without the deeds of law," by the act of free grace; and briefly restates it thus, that he may take up afresh the position that this glorious liberation means not licence but divine order. Sin shall be no more your tyrant-creditor, holding up the broken law in evidence that it has right to lead you off to a pestilential prison, and to death. Your dying Saviour has met your creditor in full for you, and in Him you have entire discharge in that eternal court where the terrible plea once stood against you. Your dealings as debtors are now not with the enemy who cried for your death, but with the Friend who has bought you out of his power.
[Sidenote: Ver. 15.] =What then? are we to sin, because we are not= brought =under law, but under grace?= Shall our life be a life of licence, because we are thus wonderfully free? The question assuredly is one which, like that of ver. 1, and like those suggested in iii. 8, 31, had often been asked of St Paul, by the bitter opponent, or by the false follower. And again it illustrates and defines, by the direction of its error, the line of truth from which it flew off. It helps to do what we remarked above,[96] to assure us that when St Paul taught "Justification by faith, without deeds of law," he meant what he said, without reserve; he taught that great side of truth wholly, and without a compromise. He called the sinner, "just as he was, and waiting not to rid his soul of one dark blot," to receive at once, and without fee, the acceptance of God for Another's blessed sake. Bitter must have been the moral pain of seeing, from the first, this holy freedom distorted into an unhallowed leave to sin.[97] But he will not meet it by an impatient compromise, or untimely confusion. It shall be answered by a fresh collocation; the liberty shall be seen in its relation to the Liberator; and behold, the perfect freedom is a perfect service, willing but absolute, a slavery joyfully accepted, with open eyes and open heart, and then lived out as the most real of obligations by a being who has entirely seen that he is not his own.
=Away with the thought.= [Sidenote: Ver. 16.] =Do you not know that the party to whom you present,= surrender, =yourselves bondservants,= slaves, =so as to obey= him,--=bondservants you are,= not the less for the freewill of the surrender, =of the party whom you obey;= no longer merely contractors with him, who may bargain, or retire, but his bondservants out and out; =whether of sin, to death, or of obedience, to righteousness?= (As if their _assent_ (ὑπακοὴ) to Christ, their _Amen_ to His terms of peace, acceptance, righteousness, were personified; they were now the bondsmen of this their own act and deed, which had put them, as it were, into Christ's hands for all things.) [Sidenote: Ver. 17.] =Now (δὲ) thanks be to our (τῷ) God, that you were bondmen of sin,= in legal claim, and under moral sway; yes, every one of you was this, whatever forms the bondage took upon its surface; =but you obeyed from the heart the mould of teaching to which you were handed over.[98]= They had been sin's slaves. Verbally, not really, he "_thanks God_" for that fact of the past. Really, not verbally, he "_thanks God_" for the pastness of the fact, and for the bright contrast to it in the regenerated present. They had now been "_handed over_," by their Lord's transaction about them, to another ownership, and they had accepted the transfer, "_from the heart_." It was done by Another for them, but they had said their humble, thankful _fiat_ as He did it. And what was the new ownership thus accepted? We shall find soon (ver. 22), as we might expect, that it is the mastery of God. But the bold, vivid introductory imagery has already called it (ver. 16) the slavery of "_Obedience_." Just below (vers. 19, 20) it is the slavery of "_Righteousness_," that is, if we read the word aright in its whole context, of "the Righteousness of God," His acceptance of the sinner as His own in Christ. And here, in a phrase most unlikely of all, whose personification strikes life into the most abstract aspects of the message of the grace of God, the believer is one who has been transferred to the possession of "_a mould of Teaching_." The apostolic Doctrine, the mighty Message, the living Creed of life, the Teaching of the acceptance of the guilty for the sake of Him who was their Sacrifice, and is now their Peace and Life--this truth has, as it were, grasped them as its vassals, to form them, to mould them, for its issues. It is indeed their "_tenet_." It _holds them_; a thought far different from what is too often meant when we say of a doctrine that "we _hold it_." Justification by their Lord's merit, union with their Lord's life; this was a doctrine, reasoned, ordered, verified. But it was a doctrine warm and tenacious with the love of the Father and of the Son. And it had laid hold of them with a mastery which swayed thought, affection, and will; ruling their whole view of self and of God. [Sidenote: Ver. 18.] =Now (δὲ), liberated from your (τῆς) sin, you were enslaved to the Righteousness= of God.[99] Here is the point of the argument. It is a point of steel, for all is fact; but the steel is steeped in love, and carries life and joy into the heart it penetrates. They are not for one moment their own. Their acceptance has magnificently emancipated them from their tyrant-enemy. But it has absolutely bound them to their Friend and King. Their glad consent to be accepted has carried with it a consent to belong. And if that consent was at the moment rather implied than explicit, virtual rather than articulately conscious, they have now only to understand their blessed slavery better to give the more joyful thanksgivings to Him who has thus claimed them altogether as His own.