Verse 15 puts a new question. It is no longer, as in verse 1, “Shall we continue in sin that grace may exceed?” This is the primary objection to grace for Christians just delivered from the ruin of the first man. Moral relaxation is dreaded, if where sin abounded, grace still more exceeded. It was met by counter questions which prove that grace does not merely help by motive against sin, but delivers the believer from it by that most decisive and ultimate weapon, even death. How shall we that died to sin live any longer in it? Know ye not that so many of us as were baptized unto Jesus Christ were baptized unto his death? Therefore we were buried with Him by baptism unto death.... He that died is justified from sin. Likewise reckon ye also yourselves to be dead indeed unto sin, but alive unto God through Jesus Christ our Lord. Let not sin therefore reign. Such is the apostle's argument in answer to the first question.
“What then? are we to sin because we are not under law but under grace? Let it not be.” (Ver. 15.) Thus his second question is not answered by our death with Christ. That we cannot live longer in sin is conclusively set aside by the fact that we died to sin with Christ and therefore are not to abide in it. All this sinful first Adam life is closed to us, both for the future in resurrection and for the present in the part we have with Christ for our souls. Christ dead and risen is the pattern for faith; His death is the principle of present deliverance from the reign of sin. But do we not need a mighty spring to move, and cheer, and strengthen us along the way of the Lord? Unquestionably we do; and this is none other than grace. Nothing else could keep the believer from yielding his members as implements of unrighteousness to sin, nothing else could enable him to act consistently with that surrender of himself, once for all, to God and of his members as implements of righteousness to God, which is characteristic of the Christian. And we are under grace, the power for holiness, as the Jew was under law, the strength of the sin he was so slow to feel and confess. And therefore sin, which for the present has absolutely governed the chosen nation, shall not lord it over the Christian. May we then sin because we are not under law that condemns, but under God's free unmerited favor that imputes no sin, but justifies and saves? Far be it from us. Is it thus we would or could use our liberty? What could be more base? If I am by Christ thus freed, for what, for whom, shall I use my freedom? “Know ye not that to what ye yield yourselves bondmen to obey, ye are bondmen to what ye obey, whether of sin unto death or of obedience unto righteousness? “ (Ver. 16.)
This again is another characteristic of Christianity. Christ makes the soul, once the slave of sill, to be free, and calls it to stand fast in His liberty, never again to be held in a yoke of bondage. For there is no middle ground or other alternative. But grace uses this liberty to be so much the more His bondman, free from sin to serve the Lord Christ. It was precisely what He did here below, evermore the true and perfect servant. Into this love always leads. With Him we have communion in this, and in order to express its absoluteness we, however free from our old slavery, are said to be bondmen of Jesus, His will and work, or, as suits the argument here, “of obedience unto righteousness.” The Christian's righteousness is never doing things because they are right, which is pride, independence, or deification of self, but because they are God's will for us. We must obey in order to practical righteousness. How complete the change from all we were! “But thanks to God that ye were bondmen of sin, but ye obeyed from [the] heart [the] form of teaching into which ye were delivered.” (Ver. 17.)
Man does not suffice for himself; for he is but a creature and therefore necessarily dependent on God. If he seeks to be his own master, if he affects independence, he only falls the more thoroughly under Satan; and, instead of obeying God, he becomes the slave of sin. From this servitude redemption delivers the believer, but only to bind him heartily (and so much the more because under grace, not law) to do as the Christian form of teaching instructs us; for obedience is always according to, and measured by, the relationship in which we stand. Legal obedience, if practicable, is not that which grace produces, which is in unison with the truth in Christ—that mold, as it were, into which the believer is cast.
Such then is the character and effect of Christian deliverance and the vital connection which we shall see more fully afterward between redemption by Christ and life in Him. “Being made free from sin ye became enslaved to righteousness.” (Ver. 18.) Two masters no man can serve. Freed from sin, we are now indissolubly bound to righteousness. Grace is the only power for righteousness. The law defined and demanded that measure and form of righteousness which God could not but exact from man in the flesh. But grace, under which the Christian is, makes good in his practice what we have been taught since Christ is revealed. Thus the very fact that God does not impute iniquity to the believer encourages and fortifies him in willing self-surrender to the Lord, instead of simply provoking sin and condemning the sinner as law did and could do nothing else. Under grace we are free, but withal servants. Freed from sin, we become bondmen to righteousness. Such is the effect of our hearty obedience of the gospel.
As the first question of our chapter, then, is met by the great fact of God's judgment of the old man and deliverance of the Christian by the death and resurrection of Christ, as he confesses his own death with Christ (witnessed in baptism from the starting-point of Christianity), so the second is an appeal to his motives as set free according to the liberty of grace. Is he going to use it for sinning? No! as the power of sin is the law (1 Cor. 15), grace is the power of holiness and makes him who is under it a more devoted bondman of righteousness to the God who imputes no sin, than the law even asked, but never obtained, with all its rewards and penalties: why this is will appear fully and definitely in chapter vii., where the special question of man under law, even though converted and indeed only as converted, is brought to issue.