Bible Commentaries
Romans 6

Verse 11

A Good Reckoning

Even so reckon ye also yourselves to be dead unto sin, but alive unto God in Christ Jesus.— Romans 6:11.

1. St. Paul’s object in this chapter is to exhibit the inconsistency of sin with the Christian faith and position. We are, he says, planted together with Christ, or engrafted into Him, and as little as the shoot can bear fruit different from the stalk, so little can we, if faithful to our position, live differently from Christ. We are baptized into His death that we may pass with Him through death into a new life. As interment is the evidence of death, so baptism, in Paul’s view, is the outward symbol that we are done with the old life and have entered on the new. When a person is buried, that means that death has taken place; when a person is baptized, that means that death to sin, with Christ and in Christ, has taken place. Paul asserts that in every genuine Christian there is a process going forward parallel to that which our Lord Himself passed through. The outward appearance of Christ’s experience may be wholly different from that of His followers, but essentially and inwardly they are precisely the same. For us, as for Him, death to sin results in resurrection to newness of life. We can get to life, Paul would say, only through a genuine death, a death not indeed of the body, but a death as real and generally much more painful.

2. Now, though this is a style of teaching very common with Paul, there are some minds to which it always seems nearly mystical. They are baffled when they strive to bring it into connexion with their own experience. They think Paul speaks as if the process of sanctification worked with mechanical certainty, whereas they find that after believing in Christ they are by no means dead to sin. They cannot make Paul’s teaching square with their own experience; it seems to them that the decisive severance from sin which he has in view does never in reality occur. This disagreement is merely superficial. Paul, in describing the process by which the sinner passed into life, was, of course, compelled to describe the ideal process, and not the actual experience of any single believer. That ideal process may never be actually realized by any one, but it is more or less nearly approached by all. The professor of surgery in describing the actual history of a gunshot wound, from the moment of its infliction, on through treatment and convalescence to perfect health, may describe a process from which each patient finds his own case to differ in certain particulars, but the description remains on that very account a sufficient guide in essentials for all cases; and Paul sufficiently indicates in this very chapter that there is nothing mechanical in his view of salvation. When he says, “Reckon ye yourselves to be dead unto sin … let not sin reign in your mortal body … yield not your members as instruments of unrighteousness unto sin,” and so forth, he sufficiently shows that our salvation is in his view not finished and not complete by one act of faith, but is only slowly and painfully accomplished by the constant renewal of spiritual desire and spiritual energy. He appeals to what we all know to be the spring and source of character, the human will.

“Give me first a death in which there is no life, and then a life in which there is no death.” He who uttered these words was not a Christian as we count Christian, but he understood the great law which regulates human and Christian life better than many of us Christians do. There is only one kind of perfect human life, and that is the life which is exemplified in Jesus Christ; and to this life there is only one possible path, and that is through a genuine death. The grub cannot pass to the higher life of the dragon-fly without first sickening and becoming dead to all the life it has been familiar with in the water, and we, in order to enter the true eternal life of man, must die to what we have been most familiar with in the old life. 1 [Note: Marcus Dods.]

I

Dead to Sin

1. To be dead to an object is to be as incapable of being touched, influenced, or affected by it as if we were really dead. Thus some people are dead to the pleasures of the world—that is, earthly pleasures have no attraction for them; or they are dead to ambition—that is, the honours and dignities of the world are to their minds nothing better than children’s toys. And in this way, too, men are often dead to what is good—to truth, to justice, to honour, to duty; they are as insensible to their claims as a dead man would be. And so it is with regard to sin. To be dead to sin is to be insensible to all its temptations; it is to be in that state in which the motions of sin within and the allurements to sin without have no power; it is to be dead to all sinful appetites, passions, desires, thoughts; dead to all sinful objects and aims—in a word, it is to have ceased from sin, as one who is dead has ceased from all living acts.

Being dead to sin must obviously be the opposite of being dead in sin. The latter must undeniably be a state of entire sinfulness—a state in which the soul is dead to all good through the power of sin over it. But right over against this, to be dead to sin must be to be indifferent to its attractiveness—beyond the reach of its influence—as fully removed from its influences as the dead are from the objects of sense in this world. As he who is dead in the natural sense has nothing more to do with earthly things, so he who is dead to sin has nothing to do any more with sin’s attractions or with sinning itself. 1 [Note: C. G. Finney.]

2. More particularly, St. Paul’s expression, “dead to sin,” suggests such ideas as these—

(1) We are dead to sin in the sense of being beyond its power to inflict penalty on us. He that is dead is freed from sin in that sense. If a servant has come to a settlement with his master there remains no longer any bond between them. Now the wages of sin is death, and our wages have been paid in the death of Christ. That is, roughly, Paul’s theology. The law has no claim upon a man who has suffered its extreme penalty, and this the old legal phraseology of Scotland brought out when it spoke of criminals being justified in the Grassmarket, when they were hung there. By death they cleared scores with the law. Thus we have by the death of Christ the removal of our guilt.

(2) To be dead to sin means, further, that we are irresponsive to the appeals of sin. How still, how unmoved, how irresponsive the dead are! Let the master shout at his slave’s dead body; not one finger stirs to obey his orders. Let him bring his lash across the upturned face; not a muscle quivers. Was the dead man vain and fond of applause? the acclaims of a world bring no smile of pleasure to his face now. Was he mean, greedy, grasping? tell him of the most promising investments; he has no ear, no heart for them. Fill the dead hand with gold; the fingers will not close upon it. Set round the dead the things that but a few hours ago made his eye glitter and his pulses quicken; now he is beyond them all—dead to them. The soldier who a few months ago sprang forward at the sound of the bugle now lies stiff on the field, and knows no difference between the charge and the retire. The most passionate kiss that love presses on the face of the dead wins no acknowledgment, no returning embrace. As a wild Bechuana said: “Soon I shall be dead, and they will bury me in my field; my flocks will come to pasture above me, but I shall no longer hear them, and I shall not come forth from my tomb to take them and carry them with me to my sepulchre.” Such is the image of our life in the midst of the world since we believed in Christ; such is the insensibility of the true Christian, of the man who avails himself of his position; such is his insensibility to the temptations that charmed him in his former years, to all that constituted the very essence of his old life. The man who was led by his appetites, and could not walk the streets without sinning, sets the Cross of Christ before him, and finds he can as little sin as if he were a corpse. The man who lowered his character and lost his self-respect to make a larger profit than was legitimate, carries with him the remembrance of Christ’s death, and can as little overreach or swindle as the miser who was buried a century ago. He is dead to the old life; it is a thing of the past; it is not in that direction he looks for happiness, nor from it that appeals have any effect.

It is in Christ Himself that we see what complete death to sin means. To the most subtle and enticing allurements that this world, and the varying exigencies of a most complicated life in this world, could present, He was simply dead. How vain to offer Him, after He was risen, any prizes of this world! How absolutely irrelevant and pointless any such offer or any such temptations appear! How insignificant, how paltry, how past and done with, do all the gaieties, the affections, the dangers, the prizes of this life seem in the light of that new life. And it is that new life, it is that risen life of Christ, we are to share in now; and we are to learn to be, and actually to be, as superior to temptation, as dead to sin, as He was. We are to keep impressing on ourselves that we belong to another world—“Reckon ye yourselves to be dead to sin.” We are to keep impressing on ourselves that it is not in the ways of this world that we are to attain our ends, that we have an inheritance above, and it is through real sympathy with Christ Himself that we can alone reach this position. 1 [Note: Marcus Dods.]

(3) Again, to be dead to sin implies not only a complete but a final severance from it. Death is a state from which no one returns to the old life. When death comes there is at once and for ever an end of what has been. So must it be with our severance from sin; so, one is tempted to say, it was with Paul himself, who realized his position in Christ. But so it is not always. There are animals which hibernate, and for months seem to be dead; there are animals which become torpid, and for all practical purposes are dead for a season; they do no mischief, they cease to be a terror to their natural prey, they entirely abandon their customary haunts and habits; but when the warmth of spring penetrates to their temporary burying-place there is a revival of their old instincts, energies, and habits.

With many persons the abandonment of sin is a mere hibernation, not a death. For awhile they seem to have lost all taste for their old ways; temptations which before were irresistible now flit past them and attract no notice, cause no movement; for awhile, in the ardour of a newly conceived idea of life, the man is impregnable to all that would lead him from it. He is wrapped up in his new and strong resolve, and while that lasts he is insensible to the storms that would drive him from his path. Or something has made the world cold, distasteful to a man; his love of it has got a chill; his investments have not turned out well; his prospects in life have become contracted or have been blighted, and he withdraws from his former keen engagement in this world’s affairs. Or there comes to the man of pleasure or to the sensualist higher and better impulses; the Spirit of Christ inwardly solicits him and strives with him, or some outward event warns and admonishes him, and for the present he becomes dead to the solicitations of appetite. Or a young person comes under the influence of some older and stronger character, of some one who does live a consecrated, unselfish, Christlike life; the influence is commanding while it lasts, but when it is removed it becomes apparent that it was merely a mesmeric state, which had produced not a real death, not a final separation from old weaknesses and habits. And so with all those temporary abandonments of sin; they are mere swoons or fits, or sleeps, or states of torpor; the soul of sin lives on securely underneath the insensible lethargic surface, and, when the period of slumber passes and the cause of insensibility has exhausted itself, will return again with renewed and stronger life to all its old habits and ways—a most melancholy, most discouraging, but most common spectacle.

II

Alive to God

1. This is the other aspect of our participation in Christ, and it is even more important than the death to sin. To die to sin is but the necessary preliminary to the new life. By itself it is incomplete and ineffective. It is not death that can ever be in any form a desirable state, but only life, fulness of life, and it is because death of this kind promises fuller life that we pass through it. Some persons, however, are dead to sin, but they are dead to everything else. Religion, instead of enlivening and enlarging and inspiring them, seems to have benumbed and deadened them all round; they would be larger and better men if they had no religion at all. For all the active good they do they might as well be in the grave. The poor man who needs help would as soon think of knocking at a tombstone as of knocking at their door; active beneficence on their part would startle us as if the sheeted dead had come to our aid. Where there is fulness of life there is activity, joy, love, intensity; not coldness, selfish caution, parsimony, retirement, and seclusion from the woes, the wounds, the joys, the interests of men. And where there is life it will appear; burying the seed beneath the clod, the life that is in it will work its way through, and show what it is. The body of Christ could not be held under the power of death, and if the spirit of life that was in Him be really in us, that life will break through all that overlies it and will appear.

Do not try to live neither for sin nor for God. Engage at once in the spiritual and heavenly life, the life that is for God. To be dead is to be miserable, nay, it is worse, it is on the road to dissolution, and the reason why Christian society is so unattractive, so feeble, so disappointing, is that so many of us are content to be dead to the old sins, but without any activities that make room for themselves in the world around us, and carry a blessing with them. Take note that if you do not fill your life with Christian activities, and your heart with Christian joys, they will soon be filled and flooded with the old life; commit yourself quickly to the new life, making its joys, its hopes, its privileges, its views, its ways yours; give yourself fairly, speedily, and in very truth to the risen life, to that life that is in thorough sympathy with Christ. Be strenuous and abundant in expressions of this risen and heavenly life, or there is small hope for you. Do not make it needful that men should feel your pulse, or hold a mirror to your mouth to see if you be really alive; but let it be seen by the brightness of your vision, by the activity of your step, by the force and helpfulness of your hand, that you have a more abundant life. 1 [Note: Marcus Dods.]

2. When is a man alive to God?

(1) When he fully recognizes the signs of the presence of God. That man is “alive to God” who habitually realizes the divine presence, to whom God is not a theory by which he can conveniently account for the universe, or a name for certain human conceptions of nature and its working, or a principle which deserves investigation when life’s hard work is over, or an invention of priestcraft to terrify and scare the soul, or a philosophic concept, the presence or absence of which has little to do with life or happiness, but the great and only reality, the prime and principal element of all his thoughts. He has learned from nobler sources than the pure reason, or the trembling conscience, or the widespread activities of power, his estimate of the character of God. He has been to the Cross of Christ and there comprehended the righteousness and the love of God, and he has gone back into the great region of conscience, of reason, and of nature, with the lesson he has learned there, and can compel the cold impassive laws to murmur to him of pity, and teach conscience to be at peace with a higher revelation than that of law: and while his reason exults in God, who is one and not two, he spreads out the ineffable love over the universal wisdom; he feels that the justice and the mercy of God are two manifestations of the same God; he adores the compassion and exults in the grace of God, while he bows before His unsullied and eternal Majesty.

(2) Again, a man is alive to God when the sense of the divine presence awakens all his energies and engages all his faculties. Conscious of the divine presence, he renders to Him into whose presence he is brought the appropriate homage of his entire being. Then every place is a temple, every act is a sacrifice, every sin the pollution of a sacred place, the defilement of a holy day. No praise that he can render can ever equal the demand of conscience, nor will his actual obedience ever realise the ideal he has formed of consecration to Him. It is morally impossible for one who is alive unto God to imagine that he is doing too much to express his sense of reverence, gratitude, or obligation. He can hold back no faculty, no affection, no treasure, saying, “This is mine and may be appropriated to my own ends.” The “faculty” is God’s own gift—nay, rather, God’s own power working through the human will; the “affection” is a divine incentive meant to reveal the God of love, and must not be made a rival to Him who gave the power to love and the object to be loved; while on every one of his “treasures” he has learned to write, “Holiness unto the Lord”—“bought with a price.” In one word, self is subdued to Him, and human will is lost in God’s.

(3) If a man is alive unto God, he will not only realize the divine presence, and feel the claim made by the divine Being upon every faculty of his nature, but he will find his highest desires gratified. “In thy presence is fulness of joy.” If we are alive unto God, we shall find that we are following the bent of our true nature. We shall fear an inward contradiction and antagonism of our nature to God far more than the crucifixion of our passions. He that drinketh of the water given him by Christ shall never thirst after those draughts of carnal pleasure to be found in the broken cisterns of human invention, and it shall be in him a well of water springing up to everlasting life.

A lady came to me in Japan last summer, and said, “I am a missionary here, and have come to make a sad confession to you. I have come to tell you this—that though I came out from America to teach the people here in Japan, I have never had a single hour of joy in my Christian life. And,” she said, “I feel so ashamed of it. Can you tell me the secret of joy? Can you tell me how to get some gladness into my life? I feel that I cannot commend the religion of Jesus Christ to people, while I have a joyless experience.” I said, “I do not know any secret of joy like this—I am alive in the risen, victorious, indissoluble life of my risen Lord. The glory of that Easter morning is mine. Why, I cannot think of that for five minutes without being glad, without saying good-bye to sorrow and sighing.” 1 [Note: J. Gregory Mantle.]

That manly Christian, that stalwart teacher, Dr. Dale, of Birmingham, tells us that, towards the end of his life, he began to ask God to forgive something for which he had never asked forgiveness before. He asked God to forgive him for the sin of gloom. He felt that his face had been gloomy, and that his voice had been gloomy; and he wanted forgiveness for the gloom that had overshadowed his life. You remember what happened. On one Easter morning, as he was getting ready for the Easter Day Services, there flashed upon him, with a new meaning, the thought—Jesus Christ is alive! He walked up and down his study, and said, “Jesus Christ is alive!” And, in the glory of that risen life, he went to preach; and his sun nevermore went down. In the gladness of that resurrection vision, in the glory of that Easter morning, he lived, and his congregation sang every Sabbath morning the Easter hymn, “Christ the Lord is risen to-day, Hallelujah.”

Buried with Christ, and raised with Him too,

What is there left for me to do?

Simply to cease from struggling and strife,

Simply to walk in newness of life.

Glory be to God.

III

In Christ Jesus

St. Paul describes both the death to sin and the life to God as “in Christ Jesus.” In Christ’s death we died—in Christ’s resurrection we rose again to newness of life. It is by contemplating Christ as dying in our room, and as thereby suffering the punishment due to our sins, that we come to reckon ourselves as dead unto sin—to look upon all sin as that with which we should now have nothing to do—which belongs to a former condition of things that has passed away—the gulf of death having intervened—and which, whenever doubts appear, should be looked upon with surprise and alarm as a message from the dead, to be immediately dismissed. It is by thus looking upon Christ, as dying that we might live, and as rising again for our justification, that we should be led to reckon ourselves as exempted from death and all its consequences—as restored to the enjoyment of that life, which we had forfeited, with all its privileges—and as thus bound by the most solemn obligations to devote it to Him who looked upon us in our low and lost estate, and who sent forth His only-begotten Son to die in our room.

1. The death to sin is in Christ Jesus. By the cross of Christ, says the Apostle, “the world is crucified unto me and I unto the world”; “I am crucified with Christ”; “If we be dead with him, we shall also live with him.” We are “buried with him by baptism into death.” The thought often recurs that our faith in Him nails our own hands to the cursed tree, closes and films our eye on worldly pageant and glory, crowns us with thorns, exposes us to contumely and shame, makes us the butt of devilish malice, taunts our agony with a cup which we cannot drink, buries us away out of sight of the world, rolls a stone to the door of our sepulchre, shuts us up in darkness, makes us see to the uttermost the misery, the shame, the cowardice, the miscreant humour, the curses, the consequences, the wages of sin. If we have taken up this thought, not only into our intellects, but into our entire spiritual nature so that it has entered into the very essence of our being, that “Christ died for our sins,” then we are dead. We have gone through the shame and humiliation of His death.

As we become alive to what the death of Christ really is and means, how it prepares the only way by which a new life could enter our race, and a new spirit be given to transgressors; by which God could justify the ungodly, and still be just: as all this, and very much more than this, is partially felt by the simplest mind when it “closes with Christ” (as the old divines expressively said), it is not difficult to understand that faith in Christ, that union to Christ, involves dying with Christ to sin; that it involves our being crucified and buried with Christ; that it is the mortification of sin, the sharing of His agony, and the participation of the soul in His death. “They that are Christ’s have crucified the flesh with its affections and lusts.” A true and deep faith in Christ, a recognition by mind and heart of the work of Christ, is such an intuition of law, such a sense of God, such a revelation of the evil of sin, such a burning of the heart against self and the flesh, and the world and the devil, that the Apostle was justified in saying, that through faith in Christ our Lord, Roman Christians might reckon themselves dead unto sin. 1 [Note: H. R. Reynolds.]

When Jesus Christ died, every member of His body died too. That follows logically. His hands, His feet, His head, were all dead. Hence, if you are a member of Jesus Christ spiritually, when Jesus Christ died you died too. That is what St. Paul is arguing. It is because of your union with Him, as a living newborn soul, that you look back upon His death and say, “I have died.” A friend of mine, who is a missionary, had once witnessed a public flogging, and he turned to his wife and said: “That man committed a theft with his hands. How was it then that his back was flogged?” She saw what he was aiming at, and said: “I think, John, it is the union that does it.” Precisely. How is it that you suffer with Jesus Christ, the Head? It is the union that does it. And in Jesus Christ’s death, I who have thought that I was alive, if I will begin where St. Paul begins, will say, “I died too.” That is the first great fundamental point. Our old man was crucified when Christ was crucified. 2 [Note: H. C. Lees.]

2. The life to God is in Christ Jesus. This is more obvious, for—

(1) Christ is the revelation of the Father, the organ and chief minister of God; the highest manifestation of the righteousness, of the mercy, of the wisdom and truth of God. By faith in Him we have the highest opportunities for the recognition of the character and nature of God. Christ is not a rival to the God of nature and providence; if He were so, if the Christian consciousness had made of Him a second God, if the Catholic Church had suffered the Gnostic schism in the Divine manifestation and attributes to have stolen into its creed, if the Arian delusion had not been driven off from the Church by deeper views of both God and man, the language of the text would have been very perplexing. As it is, Christ is no rival to God. The Divine element in the Christ is the eternal Son of God; the whole of the Divine nature manifests itself to us under the aspect of the eternal Son. God is manifest therefore in the flesh. The Word that is God has been incarnate, and “we have beheld his glory, the glory of the only-begotten of the Father, full of grace and truth.” It is by faith in the Lord Jesus Christ that we are alive to God, because it is in Him that we can “see the Father,” and because “no man knoweth the Son but the Father; and no man knoweth the Father but the Son, and he to whom the Son will reveal him.”

(2) Faith in Christ is, further, a resurrection with Christ from the death to sin. The illustrations which Paul draws from the resurrection of Christ to throw light on our divine life are very numerous. The new life of the soul is a resurrection-life, charged with all the associations and aspirations which would be possessed by one who had passed, through dying, from death to life.

(3) The life to God flows out of the life of God in the soul. It cannot be that the life of the soul will be characterized by deep perceptions of God, that the delighting in God, resting in God, hoping in God, will be the characteristics of the human spirit, unless God Himself create within us the new life by His Holy Spirit. This Holy Spirit is the dispensation of the exalted Christ. The new germ of life in our humanity is planted there by the risen Jesus. The new vision of God is the work of Him who is the life of our life, the strength of our heart, and our portion for ever.

IV

Reckoning

When the Apostle bids us reckon ourselves to be dead to sin and alive to God, of course he is telling us to reckon ourselves to be what we really are—not something different from what we are. It is not that we are to suppose or imagine ourselves to be dead to sin in some figurative or fictitious sense, but that being so, we are to recognize the truth, and make it a conviction. If we are not dead to sin and alive to God, there would be absolutely no meaning at all in this precept and no possible effect from it.

You could not say to a blind man, “Reckon yourself to be one possessed of sight”; or to a paralysed man, “Reckon yourself to have the use of your limbs”; or to an ignorant man, “Reckon yourself to be learned.” A man must possess sight before he can consider himself able to see, and he must have the use of his limbs in order to count on being able to move, and he must have wealth or knowledge if he is to reckon on using either. It would be not only ineffectual and senseless, but a cruel mockery to call upon any one to exercise gifts or powers which they did not possess, or were incapable of exercising.

Why am I authorized to reckon on these glorious facts? Simply because God does it. God reckons me to have died with Christ, and I am going to reckon myself to be where God reckons me. God reckons me to be living in Christ, and I am going to reckon myself to be living in Christ. The word in the Book of Genesis about Abraham is this—not “Abraham believed God,” but “Abraham amened God.” He staggered not at the promise, through unbelief, but said “Amen” to it. It seems akin to madness for you to reckon yourself dead to the foul things in your life that have mastered you a hundred times, so that you continue under an overwhelming sense of defeat. Say “Amen” to God. Then God will honour your faith and make victory real in your life, and your Amen to God will please Him as Abraham’s did, for God was so pleased with Abraham’s Amen that He counted it to him for righteousness. 1 [Note: J. Gregory Mantle.]

1. It is an exercise of the Imagination. The imagination is the faculty by means of which we perceive the facts of life and apply them to our lives. “Reckon yourselves dead,” “reckon yourselves alive”; in other words, be convinced of it, and you will be it. It is a significant anticipation of the method adopted by those who call themselves Christian Scientists in their attempts to heal the body. It is what is called “Auto-suggestion,” namely, a strong, purposeful denial of one set of experiences and phenomena, and an equally strong affirmation of others, and the anticipation that the series thus denied will wither, as a plant withers when deprived of water.

There is little doubt that the principle of auto-suggestion is rapidly being recognized on the physical plane in the sphere of the influence of mind over body. On this plane the principle works both ways—both for disease and for health; the mind, dwelling constantly on particular symptoms of disease, renders the body liable to be affected by that disease. In an obituary notice in the Lancet of a great nerve doctor, who died from paralysis, this is practically acknowledged, for we read: “It is remarkable that he wrote much about diseases of the nervous system, thus giving another example of the curious coincidence that not infrequently medical men die of the diseases to which they have given special attention.” It certainly tells for health. In spite of many failures, and premises that, in my opinion, are erroneous, and an exaggeration of the matter-denying philosophy of Berkeley, the so-called Christian Scientists may fairly claim to have established the principle that the sphere of causes is the mind. Their council to their disciples is: “Ally yourself in thought with the resistless Divine life within you as the one true fact of your being. Obliterate the obstructions of doubt and fear, that the Divine force within may have scope to work; ‘reckon yourself dead’ to all the illusions of the false self; ‘reckon yourself alive’ to all the elements of health and power, and strength, and perfection, and this mental process will result in change throughout the whole physical frame.” And it certainly does, and in numerous instances, to some of which I am able to testify from personal observation, the result is the cure of disease. It is almost a matter of surprise, considering the training of the man in the strictest sect of the Pharisees, to note the strong grasp of spiritual intuition with which this truth—known to the Easterns 2000 years b.c.—is adopted by St. Paul, and applied to the Divinely ordered method of spiritual growth. “Reckon yourself dead to sin—reckon yourself alive to God.” The road to a true and noble life, he would say, is the intense, purposeful focusing of your mental faculties upon all that is high, noble, pure, Divine, and the deliberate, persistent ignoring, denying, all that contradicts it. The seed of action is impulse. Meet the impulses within you on their own ground—where you find them. They are all in the mental region—think yourself into God—reckon yourself alive to God. 1 [Note: Canon B. Wilberforce.]

There is a pathetic story of a slave who was put up for auction at a slave-mart. A kind-hearted man in the crowd paid the price and gave him his freedom; but the iron of slavery had entered his soul, and he could not divest himself of the mental habit of a slave. He failed to imagine the change in his position, and so he went back to his squalid hut, took up the hoe, and resumed his old place in the slave-gang. He could not imagine anything so good, and until he could, he was not free. There are thousands like him, slaves because the imagination is enslaved, in bondage to habit, to vice; and they might be free if only it could be brought home to the imagination. It is not money that delivers: it is the imagination. 2 [Note: W. G. Stooke.]

2. But, more biblically and more accurately, it is an exercise of Faith. It will be observed that the starting-point in these verses is not something at which we are to aim, but a fact which has already happened, and which is stated to us on authority. Over and over again it is repeated that we have died; that we are dead; that we died when Christ died; and that we died with Him. This is a matter of revelation and of fact for every Christian Upon this is built a primary duty—the duty of believing it, because Scripture says that it is true. It is a subject for faith. Why is it that we do not get the better of our sins? Why do the best of us make so little progress in practical obedience? Why are some living in a constant succession of failures, so that they seem never to improve? Why are others living to the present world, or living in sin? There is one cause of this common to every case alike— want of faith. We do not advance because we want faith; we lead careless, ungodly, sinful lives, because we want faith. We do not believe in Christ’s work. We languidly believe in what He once did for us—that He died for our sins upon the Cross, and rose again; and we believe in what He is ready and willing to do for us—that He is ready to help us now if we seek Him; but we do not believe in what He has done in us—in that great and real work which He did once actually accomplish upon our individual nature; we do not believe that we are now, or ever were, truly dead to sin; we have not faith in this great fact; and this is what St. Paul bids us believe—believe now, and believe at all times. Let us reckon by faith that in Christ Jesus we are both dead to sin and alive to God.

(1) Let us reckon on the fact. For in that He died to sin we died to sin. Notice the use of the word with by St. Paul. In Romans 6:6, “Crucified with him”; in Romans 6:8, “Dead with him”; in Romans 6:4, “Buried with him”; in Romans 6:8, “Live with him.” Crucified with Him, dead with Him, buried with Him, living with Him; identification in crucifixion, in death, in burial, in resurrection. And if we are to rest our faith unwaveringly, without any hesitancy, upon this great fact, we must remind ourselves once again that it is gloriously true that “our old man,” that is, our fallen, unregenerate nature, not as God created it, but as sin defaced and defiled it, “our old man” was crucified with Christ, that the “body of sin”—so called because every part of our being has been corrupted by sin—might be done away or abolished.

(2) Let us reckon on the fellowship. Notice how the Apostle insists upon that, in this chapter. He says, “Therefore we are buried with him by baptism into death; that like as Christ was raised up from the dead by the glory of the Father, even so we also should walk in newness of life. For if we have been planted together in the likeness of his death, we shall be also in the likeness of his resurrection.” “If we be dead with Christ” ( Romans 6:8), “we believe that we shall also live with him: knowing that Christ being raised from the dead dieth no more; death hath no more dominion over him. For in that he died, he died unto sin once; but in that he liveth, he liveth unto God. Even so reckon ye also yourselves to be dead.” What a wonderful argument that is at the close of chapter 5., that magnificent contrast between the first Adam and the last Adam! Every living soul is identified either with the first Adam or with the last Adam.

(3) Let us reckon on the continuity of the death and life. “In that he died, he died unto sin once for all” (notice the addition of these two words, “for all,” in the margin of the Revised Version), “but in that he liveth, he liveth unto God.” Is there not need to emphasize the continuity of this resurrection life?

I have been disheartened, at times, when I have gone back to some place where there has been a gracious visitation of the Spirit of God, and many men and women have, by faith, identified themselves with Christ, in His death and risen life. It has been a great discouragement to me to find that they have gone back; and that, when I have gone to the place again, they have had to renew this great act of identification with Him. 1 [Note: J. Gregory Mantle.]

An old divine says: “A sheep and a sow may each fall into the same quagmire; but the sow will wallow in it, whilst the sheep will bleat piteously, until she is extricated and cleansed.” Such is the difference between the ungodly and the children of God. “Whosoever abideth in him sinneth not”; that is, sin can never become his normal and habitual State. 2 [Note: F. B. Meyer.]

A Good Reckoning

Literature

Bishop (J. W.), The Christian Year, 205.

Cunningham (W.), Sermons, 251.

Drummond (H.), Stones rolled away, 62.

Hickey (F. P.), Short Sermons, 2nd Ser., 134.

Keble (J.), Sermons for the Christian Year. Easter to Ascension Day, 138.

Kuegele (F.), Country Sermons, New Ser., iii. 63.

Maturin (W.), The Blessedness of the Dead in Christ, 317.

Meyer (F. B.), Christian Living, 45.

Rogers (J. H.), The “Verily, Verilys” of Christ, 53.

Temple (F.), Sermons preached in Rugby School Chapel, 1st Ser., 306.

Thompson (R. E.), Nature, the Mirror of Grace, 19.

Tyng (S. H.), The People’s Pulpit, New Ser., ii. 197.

Wilberforce (B.), Feeling after Him, 29.

Wilberforce (B.), New (?) Theology, 203.

British Congregationalist, Jan.–June 1910, 538 (Jowett).

Christian World Pulpit, x. 169 (Bainton); xxxvi. 252 (Dods); lxxiv. 205 (Stooke).

Churchman’s Pulpit (Good Friday and Easter Even), vii. 172 (Temple); (Easter Day and Season), vii. 198 (Keble); (Sixth Sunday after Trinity), x. 385, 389 (Reynolds), 391 (How).

Keswick Week, 1908, 51 (Lees), 68 (Mantle).

Plain Sermons by Contributors to the “Tracts for the Times,” vii. 111.

Verse 23

The Wages and the Gift

For the wages of sin is death; but the free gilt of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord.— Romans 6:23.

1. The whole Gospel is summed up in this contrast. What we are by nature; what we should have come to, if we had been let alone; what we shall come to if we let ourselves alone: on the other hand, what we are by grace; what God has done for us, and in whom; and where it is to be sought, and how it may be found: all these things are contained in this brief verse.

2. Paul delights in contrasts. In these words there are three contrasts, and these may be looked at briefly in the light in which modern thought more clearly displays them.

(1) There is a Contrast of Character—God and Sin. While in the preceding passage Paul has personified sin and righteousness, he here retains only the personification of sin, and gives us, instead of the personification of righteousness, a personality. This is significant. Although the writers of the New Testament do recognize and assert the existence and the activity of a personality whose being and whose work is wholly evil, yet it would be the contradiction of a theistic position consistent with itself to contrast God and Satan in a passage such as this. The ideal of righteousness is necessarily and eternally personal. But as evil has no ideal, so it is the negation and extinction of personality. As Lotze has truly and nobly argued, God alone is perfect personality; and men become truly and fully personalities as they approach to God. Personality is self-consciousness, self-control, and self-completeness; and good alone can have these marks. Evil constant, consistent, complete, is deception, division, and despair; and the being in whom evil is altogether divorced from good must be impersonal. It may have intelligence, desire, and purpose of a sort, but not such as constitute true personality. Accordingly, although it would be an anachronism to ascribe to Paul any such reasoning, yet it is very significant that here he does not contrast God and Satan, a contrast that would have been rhetorically more complete, but doctrinally less comprehensible.

(2) There is a Contrast of Connexion—Wages and Gift. The former term suggests desert, necessity, inevitableness; the latter generosity, spontaneity, initiative. Sin’s result is according to law: God’s act is of grace. The death in which bad men find their desert is necessary, inevitable, under moral law; but the life wherewith good men are blessed is not the wages of their goodness, but a generous and spontaneous expression of God’s grace. Man’s conscience does undoubtedly testify that there is this necessary and inevitable connexion between sin and death; and man’s religious consciousness as clearly testifies that it is no necessary, inevitable consequence of his deeds that brings the good man perfection and blessedness. The ethical inquiry of the present century confirms the Apostle’s conviction of the inevitableness of the consequences of sin. Modern fiction lays stress on hereditary transmission of evil, on the fixity of evil habits, on the certainty of social retribution, and the irresistible and inevitable process of moral deterioration. Then, on the other hand, more cautious thinkers and exponents of the evolutionary process are led to recognize that the higher stages are inexplicable by the lower. Matter does not account for life, nor life for mind. Progress demands at various stages a divine initiative. This is what religious experience lays stress upon. The higher life of perfection and blessedness is not explicable by man’s intellectual, emotional, moral faculties and attainments. It is the gift of God. This stage in man’s progress demands a divine initiative to explain and account for it. Thus the process of moral deterioration does not demand the divine intervention, does not require for its explanation a personal action; whereas the progress of moral development does demand the divine initiative, is explicable only as the act of God.

(3) There is a Contrast of Condition—Life and Death. This contrast is not merely in the physical sphere; eternal life and eternal death do include physical life and physical death, but their significance is not exhausted thereby. To those who believe that the physical is but preparatory for, symbolical of, the spiritual, there will be no difficulty in realizing and asserting that physical life and physical death are spiritually significant, prophetic, and interpretative. But the physical is only of subordinate significance. The essential characteristics of eternal life and eternal death are spiritual. And here religious thought is richly illustrated, and assuredly confirmed, by biological research. We are learning constantly that the disuse or abuse of any organ results in its deterioration, and finally in its, if not total extinction, yet reduction to impotent, rudimentary form; while the exercise of an organ is the condition of its development. Eternal death may then be regarded as the atrophy or abortion of man’s spiritual faculties; while eternal life is their development in perfection by their normal exercise. Thus the thought of the Apostle is no rhetorical conclusion of an argument, but is a truth that is being proved, by the advance of man’s knowledge and the growth of his thought, ever more significant and valid.

I

The Wages of Sin is Death

i. Wages

1. The word here rendered “wages” is the same as is used in Scripture for a soldier’s pay. “Be content with your wages” ( Luke 3:14), was the charge of John the Baptist to the soldiers who asked of him their duty. “Who goeth a warfare at any time at his own wages?” ( 1 Corinthians 9:7), that is, for pay furnished by himself, was St. Paul’s question to those who would grudge to a minister of the Gospel his right to “live of the Gospel.” But, whether in its application to the pay of a soldier or to the wages of a servant, the whole point of the expression lies in this, that certain work done has a right to certain remuneration.

Love wore a threadbare dress of grey

And toiled upon the road all day.

Love wielded pick and carried pack

And bent to heavy loads the back.

Though meagre fed and sorely tasked,

One only wage love ever asked—

A child’s white face to kiss at night,

A woman’s smile by candlelight.

This is wages—the wages of love. The wages of sin, in like manner, will be the remuneration which sin gives for work done in its service.

2. Sin is an employer of labour—the most extensive employer which the world contains. He pays wages, is bound by strong law to pay wages, to every one who works for him. It is true he does not pay in full as the work goes on. He does not clear off the whole debt, as it stands, at the end of the week or month or year. The kind of wages is unfavourable to this. Nevertheless, employer and employed are strictly upon the wages system. Every hour of labour becomes a debt of the master, and is kept record of, and will be recompensed by him in due course if the system holds as between the worker and him. He means to be just; he has no thought of evading the wages law. But he only pays enough, meanwhile, to assert the principle of connexion between his servants and him—small instalments, petty sums of earnest-money, which are of the nature of wages, and are part of the wages—till all the work is done. Done? Well; when the earthly phase of the bargain has passed, when the sun of mortal life has set and the night of the day of time has come, he then reckons with his workers.

A certain tyrant sent for one of his subjects, and said to him, “What is your employment?” He said, “I am a blacksmith.” “Go home, and make me a chain of such a length.” He went home: it occupied him several months; and he had no wages all the time he was making it. Then he brought it to the monarch, who said, “Go and make it twice as long.” He brought it up again; and the monarch said, “Go and make it longer still.” Each time he brought it, there was nothing but the command to make it longer still; and, when he brought it back at last, the monarch said, “Take it, and bind him hand and foot with it, and cast him into the furnace of fire.” These were the wages of making the chain. 1 [Note: D. L. Moody.]

3. But the very instalments Sin pays even now—do these convey no hint of the kind of recompense he engages to give in the end? What is he openly paying at this hour? When he is generous in his present payments, it is no winsome recompense that goes from his hand; it is disorder, loss, calamity, disease, sorrow, fear, discontent, hatred, treachery, remorse, rapid running down of moral tone. Even when he is least profuse in his present payments, what are his workers receiving?—uneasy forebodings of the future, unanswered achings of the soul, mockings of the spirit with the chaff of sense and time, the heart shut dark against the sunshine of God’s fatherliness.

Shall I ever forget a visit which I paid to a drunkard’s home, a man who had sunk from an honourable position in the State and the Church? There he was, a wreck of his former self. In vain I pleaded with him to give up the drink. “No,” he said, “not if it means bell.” “I cannot,” he added, “I have not the power. I am not my own master.” As I entreated him to be manly, to put his trust in God, and seek to conquer his passion, his daughter entered the room—a beautiful girl. “Man,” I said, “you are a coward. If you will not give up drink for your own sake, give it up for your child’s.” “I cannot,” he answered, “I cannot.” As I left him I realized the truth of the Apostle’s words, “The wages of sin is death,” and resolved, by God’s grace, to speak without fear concerning the power and penalty of evil. 1 [Note: C. E. Walters.]

ii. Sin

1. Sin is a word of wide import. We can all assent to the truth of the statement before us, if it be restricted to the case of great excesses of wrongdoing; to the case of the dishonest, the intemperate, the grossly profligate, who reap the fruit of their evil deeds in bodily disease or in civil punishment. Great cause indeed have such persons to say to themselves, “In serving Sin, I have served a very just master.” For each one of my dishonest acts, for each one of my sinful lusts, Sin, my master, has given me a definite and a very exact equivalent. I squandered my money in riotous living, and I have come to penury. I neglected my health, I despised the warning of the physician, I deemed myself exempted from the common conditions of the bodily frame; and I am now a wreck of what I was, every organ disarranged, and my whole existence a burden and a curse.

2. But, though less obviously, it is not less really true, in reference to cases far short of criminal excess. We see it in the way in which Sin pays in kind. A man neglects prayer, neglects his Bible, neglects the Sunday, once: that is sin; it is a contradiction of the known will of God. He supposes himself free to resume any of these intermitted habits when he will: he is his own master, he thinks, and what he has to-day willed one way, he may to-morrow will the other. But Sin is standing over him, and mocking his vain calculations. He has done a piece of work for Sin to-day, and Sin will pay him his wages in inclining him to do the same to-morrow. To-morrow the voice of inclination will be stronger and the voice of conscience weaker, and thus he will do again as he has done once, and find it far less difficult and at the time feel far less remorseful.

3. Paul does not say, the wages of great sins, or the wages of some sins, or the wages of certain sins; he simply says: “ The wages of sin,” of any sin, of all sins, of the least sin, “ is death.” A single sin, however insignificant it may appear, brings guilt of death; as St. James writes: “Whosoever shall keep the whole law, and yet offend in one point, he is guilty of all.” The man who has broken one link in the chain of the commandments is guilty of breaking the chain.

I was in the offices of the Southern Pacific Railway in San Francisco, when the General Passenger Agent asked me if I had seen the big trees of California. I informed him that I had seen them as I looked from the car window the day before, and smiling he said, “Then you have not seen them, for they must be studied to be appreciated.” Calling for his secretary, he stretched out before me a measuring line. On the one side was his affidavit in which he said, “I have measured one of the big trees of California. Its circumference is 105 feet, its diameter 35 feet, and the height was to me so amazing that I hesitate here even to suggest it.” Then he said to me, “How large would you think the seed of a big tree might be?” and when I suggested that it ought to be of enormous size, he poured out into the palm of his hand a number of these little seeds, and they were smaller than a lettuce seed. So it is with sin. An evil imagination encouraged, an impure thought harboured, an unholy ambition controlling us, and the work is begun, but the end no human tongue is able to describe. 1 [Note: J. W. Chapman.]

iii. Death

1. “The wages of sin is death.” This is true in every sense in which the word death is used in Scripture.

(1) It is true of natural death. Though not the wages of individual sin in all who undergo it, yet even natural death, the death of the body, is the consequence of sin. But for sin, there would not have been death, at any rate as we are acquainted with it. Every funeral which passes us in our streets, every loss which occurs in our families, should remind us of sin; and, though it be not the punishment of the particular sin of him who dies, yet it should awaken in our hearts the remembrance of sin generally, and of our own individual participation in that universal defilement.

(2) But natural death is the least part of sin’s wages. Natural death, if that were all, might be for us, as it has been, we believe, for countless thousands, the gate of life. It is otherwise with the second kind of death, spiritual death; the death of the soul. If the life of the soul be union with God, the death of the soul is separation from God.

(3) The full payment is a third kind of death mentioned in Scripture; what is there called the second death ( Revelation 2:11; Revelation 20:6; Revelation 20:14; Revelation 21:8). It would be presumptuous, as well as most painful, to dilate upon that which is thus described. But many hold that it is the consummation, the certain and inevitable consummation, of a life spent on earth either in sin or without God; the state into which entrance is given by the reunion of a dead soul with its reanimated body; the state of one who would not have God for his Father, and died in that refusal, and whose day of grace has at last issued in darkness.

We know but little of the meaning which must fill this word so full of all that is calamitous. Our minds cannot compass the dark dimensions of the word as they appear to the omniscient Mind who here and elsewhere gives abundant sanction to its use as a vivid figure of speech. For we may need to remember that the death of what is mortal (as we say) is scarcely more than the metaphor of Death—is little else than the most fitting symbol of Death, the most characteristic step in the dreary march of Death, that our ignorance permits us to know. And we see that this death of what is mortal, this mere symbol, is the most terrible thing within our earthly experience. We acknowledge it to be the thing which casts the deepest of all our shadows. We can tell that the gloom of this shadow is a gloom of tears, of unavailing prayers, of bitter partings, of a confronting universe of mysteries and dreads. We can recall the shock which thrills us like an earthquake when it leaps with sudden grasp upon a brother-man at our side. And when it approaches with slowest step, it seems to leave the prints of its feet upon our memories as if it had trodden over them with brandings of fire:—the chamber of hushed voices and anxious ministries, the nights of watching, the pain you cannot soothe, the conflict you can only witness, the closed eyes from which the light has gone out, the wending funeral, the stricken home. Such are the marks of death, as it is known even to the living. 1 [Note: J. A. Kerr Bain.]

2. To make the antithesis in this verse more striking and evident, St. Paul has left out the verb in each clause of it. Perhaps you may think that if our translators supplied a verb, they might as well have put it in the future tense as in the present. They might have said, “The wages of Sin will be Death,” not “is Death.” “The gift of God will be Life,” not “is Life.” I suspect they were quite right. They would have destroyed the force of the words, and their connexion with those which precede them, if they had given this form to their version. And what is more, they would have destroyed the connexion between the Apostle’s language and our own daily experience. St. Paul is not telling us of some time when the Righteous God will call us to account for the sins which we have committed, and will inflict death as the punishment of them. He is contemplating the subject from a point of view altogether different. He says that every man has two masters, either of whom he may serve, but one of whom he must serve. He may be the servant of Sin; then he must take its wages. They are slavery and death. He may be the servant of Righteousness; then he will have all the freedom, energy, life, he is capable of. 2 [Note: F. D. Maurice.]

Again and again, in my ministry, I have witnessed the misery which comes to the mere pleasure-seeker, to those who sow their wild oats and reap a terrible harvest. With all the strength God has given me I warn the young men and women who are listening to me, against making pleasure their god. As I speak, there comes to me the memory of one of the world’s victims, whom by God’s grace I was able to help. I happened to be preaching in one of the halls of the West London Mission, when I was impressed by the sad and cynical face of a young man in my congregation. At the close of the service, I made my way to the door, determining, if possible, to speak to him. When I did so, he answered me somewhat rudely. I told him I was glad he was at the service. “I didn’t come here to listen to you preaching,” was the answer. “I came because it was raining.” “Oh,” I said, “I don’t mind why you came.” “If you knew the kind of fellow I am,” said he, “you would kick me out of the hall.” “No,” I answered, “we do not usually dismiss the congregation in that fashion.” The hardened look went. My words had not failed. He came into my private room and told me a pitiable story. The son of godly parents, he had come to London, like so many, determined, above all else, to enjoy himself. He had indulged in pleasure of the lowest kind. He was shattered in mind and body. “Don’t talk to me about hell,” he said, “I have been there.” And he was only twenty-three years of age. 1 [Note: C. E. Walters.]

II

The Free Gift of God is Eternal Life in Christ Jesus our Lord

i. Free Gift

1. God does not give wages. He gives something far better: for who has made God his debtor? When we have done all that is commanded us—and when will that be, for any man?—at last we must say, We are unprofitable servants: we have done that which it was our duty to do ( Luke 17:10). God has a right to our entire obedience: if ever it were entire, still there would be nothing over; no room for claims of merit, or for rewards of extra service.

2. Just in the same way as Paul, who had no other means of support, was compelled, like most of us, to earn a wage if he was to live, so the soul by nature is compelled, for lack of spiritual resource, to serve sin, for its wage of death. Man must serve; his only choice being which of two masters he will serve, Satan or God—sin or righteousness—he cannot serve both, as is plainly taught throughout this sixth chapter of Romans. And just as the loving gift of the Philippians released Paul from this necessity to work for the tent-maker’s wage, and set him at liberty to give himself up entirely to the preaching of the Gospel, so acceptance by man of the gift of eternal life in Christ Jesus, which God freely offers to all, alone liberates him from the bondage of serving sin, and, at the same time, gives him strength to serve God, wherever he goes, by preaching the Gospel from the living epistle of a regenerate life.

3. The word used by the Apostle ( charisma) means more than “gift”; every gift is not a charisma; a charisma is a “free gift,” a “gift of grace,” a gift in which all merit on the part of the receiver is unthought of, and only the free, spontaneous love of the giver is revealed. And it is so, Paul declares, that the eternal life, “the life which is life indeed,” comes from God to man. The Gospel was to Paul—to borrow a convenient distinction—not good advice, but good news; it told, first of all, not of something to do, but of something done. No word indicates more clearly the whole drift of Paul’s thinking on this matter than the word “grace.” By “grace” are we saved; and “grace” speaks not of the doing of man, but of the giving of God. Salvation is not a hard-won wage paid by the just Overseer of life; it is the bounty of love, the gift of grace.

If there is one truth which God has of late helped me to see for myself it is this. Of course, I have always believed in what we call salvation by grace, as distinguished from salvation by works; but never until the last few months has the truth really lived for me. For years, like so much, alas! of one’s theology, it has lain—to use the words of a great writer—in that “dim twilight land that surrounds every living faith; the land not of death, but of the shadow of death—the land of the unrealized and the inoperative.” And now that it is beginning to emerge from the darkness I want others to stand by my side, that, if possible, we may see together the truth that made glad the heart of Paul. I do not speak as a theologian, but as a Christian man to Christian men, eager with them to know the blessedness of eternal life. 1 [Note: George Jackson.]

4. Not at the outset of the regenerate life only, and not only when it issues into the heavenly ocean, but all along the course, the life eternal is still “the free gift of God.” Let us now, to-day, to-morrow, and always, open the lips of surrendering and obedient faith, and drink it in, abundantly, and yet more abundantly. And let us use it for the Giver.

I heard a well-known preacher relate his experience. For long years he had prayed that he might realize abundant life in Christ. He had often agonized and sought this gift from God, but without avail. One day, as he travelled in a railway train, he was thinking about this wonderful gift. It happened that there was, as he journeyed, a great downfall of rain, the rain beating ceaselessly against the carriage windows. He said, “I looked out of the window, and as we passed a farmhouse I noticed a number of vessels placed outside to receive the welcome rain. Some were large, others were small; but both large and small received the rain. I said to myself, ‘The gift of life has been outpoured by God. When Jesus ascended on high He granted gifts unto men. I may receive that gift, unworthy as I am, even as the noblest and most saintly may receive it.’ ” 1 [Note: C. E. Walters.]

5. What are the advantages of receiving eternal life as a free gift?

(1) One advantage is the Gladness that accompanies it. Why is it that so many of us have so little gladness in our Christian life? Is it not just for this very reason that we have put self instead of God at the centre of it? We have talked and lived as if the whole responsibility of our salvation rested on our own weak shoulders. And since, naturally enough, we doubt our own strength, we are never sure, never at rest; even our joy has the worm of fear busy at the heart of it. “I am persuaded that I am able to keep——” We dare not say that; and as we never knew the Apostle’s noble faith, “He is able to keep,” we are without any “persuasion” at all; and instead of a ringing certainty, we have only a ghastly fear or, at best, a tremulous hope.

You have seen the little engraving that adorns the title-page of Dora Greenwell’s beautiful books: a hand grasping a cross, and about it this motto, Et teneo et teneor, “I both hold and am held.” Alas! that so many of us have rent the motto in twain. We remember that we must hold, but we forget that we are also held, held of God. Let us speak no more as if ours were a religion without God; let us remember that when we have not strength even to cling, He still holds us; let us dare to believe that Jesus meant what He said when of His sheep He declared, “No one shall snatch them out of my hand.”

Let me no more my comfort draw

From my frail hold of Thee,

In this alone rejoice with awe

Thy mighty grasp of me. 1 [Note: G. Jackson.]

May nevermore a selfish wish of mine

Grow to a deed, unless a greater care

For others’ welfare in the incitement share.

O Nature, let my purposes combine,

Henceforth, in conscious unison with thine,—

To spread abroad God’s gladness, and declare

In living form what is for ever fair—

Meekly to labour in thy great design,

Oh, let my little life be given whole!

If so, by action or by suffering,

Joy to my fellow-creatures I may bring,

Or, in the lowly likeness of my soul,

To beautiful creation’s countless store

One form of beauty may be added more. 2 [Note: George M‘Knight.]

(2) Another advantage is that it opens the way to Progress. Why is it, again, that we make so little progress in the Christian life? Why is our love, our trust, so dwarfed and stunted? Again, is not the answer the same? Self is at the centre where only God should be. But the soul never grows by the contemplation of itself. Love cannot be forced like some hot-house plant. It must be set in the light and sunshine of love; then it springs up of itself. Trust grows in the presence of the wholly trustworthy. Therefore, “Look unto me, and be ye saved,” must be the law of all our life.

Lord of the howling wastes of life,

Where evils watch for prey,

And many a sacred gleam of good

In shadow dies away,

Borne on by Thee in paths unknown,

Well may we trust Thy hand alone,

And suffer angels of Thy own

To shield us as they may.

Revealer of a heaven encamped

Where’er Thy servants go,

By ministries of love to each,

That none beside may know,—

By wings at many a pass outspread,

By winning joy and warning dread,

We learn the word which Thou hast said,

The truth which Thou wilt show. 1 [Note: A. L. Waring.]

ii. God

1. How un-Jewish it is to say that the gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus! The characteristic of the God of Judaism was the fact that He was incommunicable. He was self-existent, self-contained, absolutely self-sufficient. He dwelt in a region apart. His deepest nature had never been revealed to mortal eye; no man could see Him and live. The essential feature of His relation to humanity was the vastness of His distance from it. He could speak to man only through the medium of imperative command; and His communications required to be conveyed through the agency of intermediate intelligences. Such a view of God left no room for a conception which implied the communication of the Divine to the human. It would have repudiated the Pauline idea that God could present a gift of Himself, could make His own creatures the sharers in His essential life. Such a thought was the very antithesis of Judaism; yet it is the leading thought of the passage before us.

2. If eternal life is a gift of God it is not a work of man. According to St. Paul, eternal life is not a refinement; it is a renaissance. It is not the product of discipline, but the issue of birth. It is not an upper standard, but a regenerated order. Nowhere can you find a suggestion of a gradient leading by perceptible stages from the human to the Divine. There is no sloping stair, whose topmost step brings us to “the shining tableland, to which our God Himself is moon and sun.” The man who has eternal life, and the man who has it not, occupy two different planes, and the passage from one to the other is by a process not of gradual consummation, but of immediate re-creation.

That we can be schooled and cultured into eternal life is certainly the basis and trend of many men’s reasoning. Life to them, in all its human range, would be imaged in a column of Aberdeen granite which stands in the museum of the University of Edinburgh. The column is of one unbroken piece, but it is arranged in ascending sections to represent the different processes and stages through which the granite passes, from the quarry to the polished issue. The pedestal is rough, jagged, and primitive, just as it left the quarry, bearing all the marks of the blasting. And then follow layer upon layer, each succeeding one being subjected to a more rigid discipline than its predecessor, until every uncouthness is left behind, and all its wealthy and exquisite veins are discovered in the refined and shining issue. And that, I say, is how many people reason about eternal life. Eternal life is just common life perfected. Common life is the rough-hewn block; eternal life is the same block, chastened and refined. The two do not represent a change of substance, they represent differences effected by labour and culture. 1 [Note: J. H. Jowett.]

iii. Eternal Life

There are many words with which we have been so long and so intimately familiar that we never pause to ask ourselves what we mean by them. They form the basis of our reasoning, but, like the foundations of a building, we do not notice their depth or structure; nay, for this very cause that they do underlie our common discourse, we cannot without a special effort gain any true idea of them. Now “life” is such a word as this. We all use it and argue about it, but can we explain it?

Think for one moment of the infinite chasm between life and nothingness. On this side there is the glow of health, the consciousness of bodily vigour, the full exuberance of strength and spirits: on that a dreary void. On this side there is the keen sense of the countless joys with which the earth is filled, the glad delight in sunshine and beauty, the rich treasures of a creative mind: on that a dreary void. On this side there is a marvellous power of traversing the whole world in a moment, of holding communion with all the noblest and the best of men, of rising with the chorus of angels even to the throne of God: on that still the same dreary void. Whichever way we turn we see within us a crowd of powers and feelings which minister to our happiness and quicken our susceptibility; and the sum of these—this treasure beyond all treasures—we call “life.” 2 [Note: B. F. Westcott.]

1. The life which we have in Christ is eternal life. That word “eternal” answers to some idea fixed in each of our souls, and we need not try to define it. It is enough that our own experience teaches us how vain it is to measure hope and joy, fear and sorrow, by days and years, and not by the intensity of their working. And so Holy Scripture tells us of no change, no succession, no time, in the world to come. The sun and moon and stars—the measures of our earthly periods—shall have passed away, and all shall exist at once in the immediate presence of God.

Wherever there is eternal life there is some apprehension of God: perhaps I should have expressed it better had I said there is some appreciation of God, some “awareness” of His all-encompassing Presence. When our Saviour says, “This is life eternal, to know Thee!”—I do not think the primary content of the word is mental illumination, although that will most assuredly be in the shining train; but it fundamentally refers to the intelligence of sympathy, the correspondence of kinship, if you will, the telepathic communion of spirits, attuned to the same key. 1 [Note: J. H. Jowett.]

2. Life eternal is so to be developed hereafter that Scripture speaks of it often as if it began hereafter; but it really begins here, and develops here, and is already “abundant” ( John 10:10) here. It is not merely the manifold delights with which the New Jerusalem shall be filled—those streets of gold and songs of angels and deep visions of the universe. If we truly live, these will be ours: but we must gain life first. The sun would shed no gladness on a corpse. Music would wake no echo in the dead. And this is Life Eternal, that we may know the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom He has sent—God has quickened us together with Christ—Christ is the Life, and they who are in Him shall live for ever.

There was one who said to me a little while ago, concerning a loved one who had been brought back to him after a long and troubled absence: “Even when I am at my desk, and immersed in my labour, there’s a singing consciousness at the back of it all that she is in the home again!” That singing apprehension of a presence, in absorbing labours and in relaxing hours, is symbolic of the apprehension which is theirs who know the Lord. “This is life eternal, to know Thee,” to appreciate Thee, to have a singing consciousness that everywhere, in spheres of labour and rest, the Lord is in the house! “Because he is at my right hand!” That is the apprehension of God. “When I walk through the valley of the shadow of death I will fear no ill, for thou art with me.” That is the apprehension of God; the singing basal consciousness that the Lover is in the house! It is “deep calling unto deep”; it is the sympathetic vibration of those who partake of the same nature, and that nature is Divine. 1 [Note: J. H. Jowett.]

It will not meet us where the shadows fall

Beside the sea that bounds the Evening Land;

It will not greet us with its first clear call

When Death has borne us to the farther strand.

It is not something yet to be revealed—

The everlasting life—’tis here and now;

Passing unseen because our eyes are sealed

With blindness for the pride upon our brow.

It calls us ’mid the traffic of the street,

And calls in vain, because our ears are lent

To these poor babblements of praise that cheat

The soul of heaven’s truth, with earth’s content.

It dwells not in innumerable years;

It is the breath of God in timeless things—

The strong, divine persistence that inheres

In love’s red pulses and in faith’s white wings.

It is the power whereby low lives aspire

Unto the doing of a selfless deed,

Unto the slaying of a soft desire,

In service of the high, unworldly creed.

It is the treasure that is ours to hold

Secure, while all things else are turned to dust;

That priceless and imperishable gold

Beyond the scathe of robber and of rust.

It is a clarion when the sun is high,

The touch of greatness in the toil for bread,

The nameless comfort of the Western sky,

The healing silence where we lay our dead.

And if we feel it not amid our strife,

In all our toiling and in all our pain—

This rhythmic pulsing of immortal life—

Then do we work and suffer here in vain. 2 [Note: P. C. Ainsworth, Poems and Sonnets, 9.]

iv. In Christ Jesus our Lord

“The free gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord.” That is where we are to seek and find the inheritance, “in Christ Jesus our Lord.” And this is the reasoning of the sacred word, that eternal life is in the Son. The life that was in Jesus was of the eternal order, and of that sort of life the risen Lord is the reservoir and fountain. Get the music of these three great passages: “In him was life”; “I am the life”; “He that hath the Son hath life.” So what we have got to do in order to get our legacy is to get the legator Himself. “He that hath the Son hath life.” The “free gift” is “in Christ Jesus our Lord.” We need trouble about nothing else except to become one with the Lord. “Having him we possess all things.” If we become one with Him, His life becomes ours.

1. The gift from God of eternal life is not merely through Christ Jesus (as in the Authorized Version), it is in Christ Jesus. What a mystery is this, that we, poor and weak and sinful as we are, can ever be incorporated into Christ—that in Him we can, again, be made living souls inspired by God’s Spirit; and more wonderful still that while we are yet on earth this mighty change can be realized. But it is so written for our learning, and let us rejoice with all reverence while we believe that we may live in Christ as very members of His body; that we may claim as ours the righteousness which He has wrought, the sorrow which He has suffered. At the same time, we must remember that there is a fearful contrast to all this. The Christian has eternal life now only so far as he is one with Christ, and to be cut off from Him, to be without Him, to know Him not, that is real death—death more terrible than our darkened minds can understand at present.

Is it a matter of indifference whether we say “the free gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus” or “through Christ Jesus”? To me, I confess, it makes a fundamental difference in the whole conception of Christianity whether we regard life as something which Christ has won for us apart from Himself, or something which is absolutely bound up with Himself, and realized only in vital fellowship with Him. And I shall hold ten years of life well spent [as one of the Revisers] if I have been enabled to help in any degree in bringing this thought home to English-speaking people in years to come. The phrase represents, if you please, a Hebrew idiom—a Hebrew mode of conception. What then? It was the mode of conception which God was pleased to choose for conveying His truth to the world. Let it, then, be carefully guarded. Let it be faithfully rendered. Let it be offered to our common people, that they may, by patient reflexion, grasp the fulness of the lesson. 1 [Note: B. F. Westcott.]

Christ, the Wisdom and the Power!

From our labour’s fleeting hour

To that timeless age of bliss

Which shall crown the toil of this,

Grant that all our life may be

Hidden and revealed “in Thee.”

That our work may be divine

Seek we not our own but Thine;

Lost to self and found “in Thee,”

Find we sweet Humility,

Zeal by reverent Love refined,

True Devotion’s single mind.

So “in Thee” we shall be strong,

Seem the labour light or long;

And, though clouds of self and sin

Darken round us and within,

So not dimly shall we see

Light to lighten all “in Thee.” 2 [Note: S. J. Stone, Poems and Hymns, 262.]

2. What is required of us that we may receive the gift in Christ?

(1) Belief. And what is belief? It is not the suppression of reason. Belief is the exaltation of the noblest hypotheses to the throne of the life. To believe in Christ is to take the sublimest assumptions and make them the principles of our soul. To believe in Christ is to take the highest we know and to allow it to govern all that we do. To believe in Christ is to venture our life on the assumptions of Christ. Do you know anything higher, nobler, more glorious, than the assumptions of Christ? To believe is to accept them, to venture on them, and to venture in the assurance that the highest is always the truest and best. He claims to be able to convert destructive remorse into a constructive penitence. He claims to be able to take the virus out of a poisoning guilt. He claims to be able to put dynamic into feeble and struggling virtue. He claims to be able to weld the complexities of life into unity, and to convert its discords into harmony. He claims to be able to take the alienated and embattled individuals of the race, and out of the scattered and hostile fragments to create a brotherhood. This is what our Saviour claims to do. To believe is to let Him do it, and to offer one’s life for the sacred experiment!

(2) Obedience. Belief involves obedience. In these high regions no one can become free without first becoming a slave. But the servitude is not irksome; it is sweetened and glorified by its issue. We must die to self if we would live to God! That is where so many of us fail. We are seeking kinship with the Divine, and we will not surrender ourselves to its blessed ministry.

I lived for myself, I thought for myself,

For myself, and none beside;

Just as if Jesus had never lived,

As if He had never died.

3. And what do belief and obedience bring us?

(1) They bring us power. We share the Divine power—power over sin, and strength to lead a holy life. He—Jesus—was absolutely pure in a world of darkness. In Christ we may conquer sin.

If we study the lives and writings of the highest types of Christian men we shall find that they are characterized by two things. One is the depth of their sense of sin. St. Paul, St. Augustine, the author of “The Imitation,” John Bunyan, Samuel Rutherford. This note characterizes them all. But there is another. It is their sense of the all-sufficiency of Christ as a Saviour from sin. When, again, we study the life of Christ we find that it is characterized by two things—His consciousness of His own sinlessness; and His sense of His power to take away the sin of others. 1 [Note: W. Martin.]

(2) They bring us the calm assurance of life everlasting. “I am the Resurrection and the Life,” said Jesus; “he that believeth on me, though he die, yet shall he live; and whosoever liveth and believeth on me shall never die” ( John 11:25). In Jesus, death is robbed of its horror, and the grave of its victory. We fall asleep just as a weary man, who, harassed by business and daily cares, flings himself on the bed at night and sleeps; and as he awakens with new energy to the new life of the morrow, so we, worn-out and tired, or called to a higher service, fall asleep in death, to awaken to the morning of a never-ending day. Ah! how glorious is this truth when, with sad hearts, we stand by the open grave in which we have laid a loved one to rest. Then we are able to say:—

And with the morn those angel faces smile

Which I have loved long since, and lost awhile.

If I were told that I must die to-morrow,

That the next sun

Which sinks should bear me past all fear and sorrow

For any one,

All the fight fought, and all the short journey through,

What should I do?

I do not think that I would shrink or falter,

But just go on

Doing my work, nor change, nor seek to alter

Aught that is gone;

But rise and move, and smile, and pray

For one more day.

And lying down at night for a last sleeping,

Say in that ear

Which hearkens ever, “Lord, within Thy keeping

How should I fear?

And when to-morrow brings Thee nearer still,

Do Thou Thy will.”

I might not sleep for awe, but peaceful, tender,

My soul would lie

All night long; and when the morning splendour

Flashed o’er the sky,

I think that I could smile, could calmly say,

“Welcome His day.”

But if a wondrous band from the blue yonder

Held out a scroll,

Upon which my life was writ, and I with wonder

Beheld unroll

To a long century’s end its mystic clue,

What should I do?

What could I do, O blessed Guide and Master,

Other than this—

Still to go on as now, not slower, faster,

Nor fear to miss

The road, although so very long it be,

While led by Thee?

Step by step, feeling Thee close behind me,

Although unseen;

Through thorns, through flowers, whether the tempest hide Thee

Or heaven’s serene,

Assured Thy faithfulness cannot betray—

Thy love decay.

I may not know, my God; no hand revealeth

Thy counsels wise,

Along the path no deepening shadow stealeth,

No voice replies

To all my questioning thought, the time to tell,

And it is well.

Let me keep on, abiding and unfearing

That will always,

Through a long century’s ripening fruition,

Or a short day’s.

Thou canst not come too soon, and I can wait

If Thou come late.

The Wages and the Gift

Literature

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Chapman (J. W.), Another Mile, 33.

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