For having spoken of the Christian as enslaved to righteousness, the apostle hastens to excuse his language. He had shown the impossibility of a middle place, maintaining the absoluteness of the surrender to God, which is made good in the heart and ways of the believer; he had characterized the new relation as one of bondage to righteousness. This required explanation; for in truth it is real, and the only real, liberty of heart; yet is the bond none the less firm and thorough. “I speak after a human sort on account of the weakness of your flesh; for as ye yielded your members in bondage to uncleanness and to lawlessness unto lawlessness, so now yield your members to righteousness unto holiness.” (Ver. 19.) Their former estate manifested its corruption and willfulness increasingly. Evil ripens and waxes worse and worse. Willing service issues not only in a just appreciation of our relative place to God and man, but in an ever deepening sense of separation to God. To this the saints are exhorted. The life is exercised and progress is looked for. Righteousness is here the practical maintenance of our responsibility according to the relation in which we now stand to God (our mere creature-place as of the first Adam being closed by death). Holiness is the intrinsic delight of the new life in good and its abhorrence of evil, according to God as revealed in Christ.
“For when ye were bondmen of sin, ye were free to righteousness. What fruit had ye then at that time? [Things] of which ye are now ashamed. For the end of those things [is] death.” (Ver. 20, 21.) There seems to be a grave but cutting irony in this allusion to their old condition, when the only freedom they knew was in respect to righteousness. They were slaves of sin and had nothing to do with righteousness. And what was the result? Nothing to boast of certainly: how much to fill these representatives with shame! And what is the end of those things? Death.
Here then we stand on the ground of motives which test the heart. It is no longer, as at the beginning of the chapter, a great fact which is true of the Christian because he has a part with Christ in His death, and so is dead to sin and lives to God. It is an appeal to his appreciation of the grace of God which has freed him from his slavery to sin. To what account and use then is he going to turn his freedom? What was the fruit of his old life when he was free enough in relation to righteousness? Nothing, as far as he was concerned, but a source of present shame, save death the end.
How admirable is the wisdom of the inspired word! The sense of grace thus corrects the otherwise inevitable effect of the light of God, cast on the past and the present and the future: for if it were possible that a soul should be awakened to a just sense of its sinfulness and then left with earnest desires to serve God, to a new life, battling with its own evil, how occupied with self must be the whole of its experience! Alas! so it is too deeply as well as extensively among real children of God, who imperfectly know the blessed consequences for them of the work of Christ. They are not redeemed to be put under law, but contrariwise under grace. Saved by grace, they stand in grace. And this is the strongest motive to the renewed mind, the most fatal snare to the hypocritical professor, the ready objection of the natural mind, which sees the latter without being able to estimate the former.
“But now freed from sin, and made bondmen to God, ye have your fruit unto holiness, and the end life eternal.” Observe the relation of grace. It is not slaves to the law, but bondservice to God. Man in flesh was tried by the ten words; but they were too weighty for his weakness, and only riveted a chain of judgment on his guilt. But now, emancipated by the death and resurrection of Christ, received by faith, having the life of Hint risen from the dead as well as redemption—the forgiveness of sins, we are freed from sin and enslaved to God. Hence follows not a mere test by certain commands, but subjection to Himself who speaks to us by all His word. Every part of scripture has His authority to our souls: only we must learn by the Spirit its just application; and this, holding fast our association with Christ, no longer as in the first Adam. It is clear that this both gives a more intimate relation to God, and opens a boundless sphere in which Our obedience is to be exercised.
Nor is it only subjection to God, which takes the place of the Jewish position under law; but, thus walking, we have our “fruit unto holiness, and the end life eternal.” Such is the pathway here, and such its crown in glory by and by. There is growth in the value of good and its issue in the attracted separation of the heart from evil to God; and the end is suited to the way, though surely according to the personal dignity of Christ, and that which alone meets the character and counsels of God.
“For the wages of sin [is] death; but the free gift of God life eternal in Christ Jesus our Lord.” This is a summary of the general truth; it is the result on man's side and on God's. He does not limit it to transgression, though of course its wages are no less; he takes man, the Gentile sinner, as well as the Jewish transgressor. Both were sinners; and the wages of sin is death. But the blessing is quite as rich and free: eternal life is the need of the Jew no less than of the Gentile: it is God's free gift, and thus equally open to either or both. Let it be carefully noted that the Holy Spirit, by the structure of the phrase, carefully avoids intimating that the wages of sin are limited to death; for in truth judgment remains, and is appointed to man no less than death. Together they are the full wages of sin. Nor would it be safe to affirm that even eternal life exhausts the free gift of God; for, as we shall find in chapter viii., no less than in many scriptures more, He gives the Holy Ghost to be the portion of the believer, not to speak of the relation of son and the accompanying inheritance. Boundless indeed is His grace to us in Christ Jesus our Lord.