Romans 6:16

“ Know ye not, that in respect of Him to whom ye devote yourselves as servants to obey, ye are henceforth His servants who owe Him obedience; whether it be sin unto death, or obedience unto righteousness? ”

The question of Romans 6:15 arose from an entirely erroneous way of understanding the relation between the moral will of man and the acts in which it is manifested. It seemed, according to the objection, that an act of liberty is merely an isolated fact in human life, and that an act of God's grace is enough to annul it, so that not a trace of it shall remain. Thus it is that a superficial Pelagianism understands moral liberty. After the doing of each act, it can return to the state in which it was before, exactly as if nothing had passed. But a more serious study of human life proves, on the contrary, that every act of will, whether in the direction of good or of evil, as it passes into reality, creates or strengthens a tendency which drags man with increasing force, till it becomes altogether irresistible. Every free act, then, to a certain degree determines the future. It is this psychological law which the apostle here applies to the two principles: of sin on the one hand, and grace on the other. He calls attention to the fact that he is appealing to an experiment which every one can make: Know ye not that?...? Jesus had already expressed this law when He uttered the maxim: “Whosoever committeth sin is the servant [of sin],” John 8:34.

The words: him to whom ye devote yourselves as servants, refer to the first steps taken in one or other of the two opposite directions. At this point, man still enjoys a certain degree of moral liberty in relation to the principle which tends to master his will; he therefore devotes himself, as the apostle says. But in proportion as he yields himself to this principle by certain acts of compliance, he falls more and more under its sway: ye are the servants of him whom ye obey. These last words characterize the more advanced state of things, in which, the bond of dependence once formed, the will has lost all power of resistance, and exists only to satisfy the master of its choice. The words: ᾧ ὑπακούετε, whom ye obey, are strictly speaking a pleonasm; for this idea was already contained in the expression: δοῦλοί ἐστε, ye are servants; but yet they are not superfluous. They signify: “to whom obedience is now the order of the day, whether ye will or not.” A man does not put himself at the service of a master to do nothing for him. In other words, absolute liberty cannot be the condition of man. We are made, not to create our guiding principle, but simply to adhere to one or other of the higher moral powers which solicit us. Every concession freely made to either is a precedent which binds us to it, and of which it will avail itself to exact more. Thus there is gradually and freely established the condition of dependence spoken of by the apostle, and which issues, on the one side, in the absolute incapacity of doing evil (1Jn 3:9), the state of true liberty: on the other, in the total incapacity either to will or to do good (Matthew 12:32), the state of final perdition. Since Paul is not speaking as a philosophical moralist, but as an apostle, he immediately applies this truth to the two positive principles which he is here contrasting with one another namely, as he says in the second part of the verse, sin and obedience. Of the two disjunctive particles ἤτοι (whether certainly) and ἤ (or), the first is somewhat more emphatic, as if the apostle meant to rely more strongly on the first alternative: Whether certainly of sin unto death, or, if this result do not suit you, of obedience unto righteousness.”

Sin is put first, as the master to whom we are naturally subject from infancy. It is its yoke which faith has broken; and consequently the Christian ought ever to remember that should he make any one concession to this principle, he would thereby begin to place himself anew under its dominion, and on the way which might guide him back to the goal of his previous life: death. The word death here cannot denote physical death, for the servants of righteousness die as well as the servants of sin. We are no longer in that part of the Epistle which treats of condemnation, and in which death appeared as a doom pronounced on the first sin, consequently as death strictly so called. It is the contrast between sin and holiness which prevails in this part, chap. 6-8. The matter in question, therefore, is death in the sense of moral corruption, and consequently of separation from God here and hereafter; such is the abyss which sin digs ever more deeply, every time that man, nay, that the believer, even gives himself over to it.

Why, in opposition to sin, does the apostle say in the second alternative: of obedience, and not: of holiness; and why, in opposition to: unto death, does he say: unto righteousness, and not: unto life? Obedience is frequently understood in this passage as obedience to good or to God, in a general way. Obedience in this sense is certainly opposed to sin; and if Paul were giving a course of morals, instead of an exposition of the Gospel, this meaning would be the most natural. But in the following verse there can be no doubt that the verb obey denotes the act of faith in the teaching of the Gospel. We have already seen, Romans 1:5, that the apostle calls faith an obedience. It is the same Romans 15:18, where he designates the faith of the Gentiles by the name of obedience. Faith is always an act of docility to a divine manifestation, and so an obedience. Thus, then, it is faith in the gospel which the apostle here designates by the word obedience; and he can perfectly contrast it with sin in this sense, because it is faith which terminates the revolt of sin and establishes the reign of holiness. Every time the gospel is preached to the sinner, he is challenged to decide between the obedience (of faith) or the carnal independence of sin. Man does not escape from his state of sin by the simple moral contemplation of good and evil, and their respective effects, but solely by the efficacy of faith.

The words: unto righteousness, have been applied by some

Meyer, for example to the sentence of justification which will be passed on the sanctified Christian at the last day. This interpretation has been adopted from the contrast between this term and the preceding: unto death. But we have just seen the term righteousness used, Romans 6:13, in the sense of moral righteousness; and this is also the most suitable meaning here, where the object is to point out the holy consequences which will flow from the principle of faith. The antithesis to the term death also finds a simple explanation with this meaning. As death, the fruit of sin, is separation from God; so righteousness, the fruit of faith, is spiritual communion with God. The former contains the idea of moral corruption, as the way, and the latter includes the idea of life, as the goal. If it were wished to render the contrast completely, we should have to say: “whether of sin, unto unrighteousness which is death, or of obedience, unto righteousness which is life. ” By expressing himself as he does, Paul wishes, on the one hand, to inspire a horror of sin, whose fruit is death; on the other, to bring into relief the essentially moral character of faith, the fruit of which is righteousness.