[Sidenote: Ver. 20.] =For when you were slaves of your (τῆς) sin, you were freemen as to righteousness,= God's Righteousness (τῇ δικαιοσύνῃ). It had nothing to do with you, whether to give you peace or to receive your tribute of love and loyalty in reply. Practically, Christ was not your Atonement, and so not your Master; you stood, in a dismal independence, outside His claims. To you, your lips were your own; your time was your own; your will was your own. You belonged to self; that is to say, you were the slaves of your sin. Will you go back? Will the word "freedom" (he plays with it, as it were, to prove them) make you wish yourselves back where you were before you had endorsed by faith your purchase by the blood of Christ? Nay, for what was that "freedom," seen in its results, its results upon yourselves? [Sidenote: Ver. 21.] =What fruit, therefore,= (the "_therefore_" of the logic of facts,) =used you to have then,= in those old days, =from things over which you are ashamed now?= Ashamed indeed; =for the end,= the issue, as the fruit is the tree's "end," =the end of those things is--death;= perdition of all true life, here and hereafter too. [Sidenote: Ver. 22.] =But now,= in the blessed actual state of your case, as by faith you have entered into Christ, into His work and into His life, =now liberated from sin and enslaved to God, you have your fruit,= you possess indeed, at last, the true issues of being for which you were made, all contributing =to sanctification,= to that separation to God's will in practice which is the development of your separation to that will in critical fact, when you met your Redeemer in self-renouncing faith. Yes, this fruit you have indeed; =and as its end,= as that for which it is produced, to which it always and for ever tends, you have =life eternal.= [Sidenote: Ver. 23.] =For the pay of sin,= sin's military stipend (ὀψώνια), punctually given to the being which has joined its war against the will of God, =is death; but the free gift of God is life eternal, in Jesus Christ our Lord.=
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"Is life worth living?" Yes, infinitely well worth, for the living man who has surrendered to "the Lord that bought him." Outside that ennobling captivity, that invigorating while most genuine bondservice, the life of man is at best complicated and tired with a bewildered quest, and gives results at best abortive, matched with the ideal purposes of such a being. We "present ourselves to God," for His ends, as implements, vassals, willing bondmen; and lo, our own end is attained. Our life has settled, after its long friction, into gear. Our root, after hopeless explorations in the dust, has struck at last the stratum where the immortal water makes all things live, and grow, and put forth fruit for heaven. The heart, once dissipated between itself and the world, is now "united" to the will, to the love, of God; and understands itself, and the world, as never before; and is able to deny self and to serve others in a new and surprising freedom. The man, made willing to be nothing but the tool and bondman of God, "_has his fruit_" at last; bears the true product of his now re-created being, pleasant to the Master's eye, and fostered by His air and sun. And this "_fruit_" issues, as acts issue in habit, in the glad experience of a life really sanctified, really separated in ever deeper inward reality, to a holy will. And the "_end_" of the whole glad possession, is "_life eternal_."
Those great words here signify, surely, the coming bliss of the sons of the resurrection, when at last in their whole perfected being they will "live" all through, with a joy and energy as inexhaustible as its Fountain, and unencumbered at last and for ever by the conditions of our mortality. To that vast future, vast in its scope yet all concentrated round the fact that "we shall be like HIM, for we shall see HIM as HE is," the Apostle here looks onward. He will say more of it, and more largely, later, in the eighth chapter. But as with other themes so with this he preludes with a few glorious chords the great strain soon to come. He takes the Lord's slave by the hand, amidst his present tasks and burthens, (dear tasks and burthens, because the Master's, but still full of the conditions of earth,) and he points upward--not to a coming _manumission_ in glory; the man would be dismayed to foresee that; he wants to "serve for ever";--but to a scene of service in which the last remainders of hindrance to its action will be gone, and a perfected being will for ever, perfectly, be not its own, and so will perfectly live in God. And this, so he says to his fellow-servant, to you and to me, is "_the gift of God_"; a grant as free, as generous, as ever King gave vassal here below. And it is to be enjoyed as such, by a being which, living wholly for Him, will freely and purely exult to live wholly on Him, in the heavenly places.