Have you ever seen a zombie movie? I haven’t; I’m not into horror movies, I’ve never thought that fear was fun. But zombies are the monster du jour. Space invaders, werewolves and vampires are all old hat. What’s the fascination with graves opening and corpses in various stages of decomposition rising up and going out to terrorize the townspeople?
And what on earth do all those suddenly revived corpses really want? And why are people so scared anyway? What can the dead do to harm us? What could the dead possibly want with the living?
Do we imagine somehow that they will steal our life away, that if they touch us we too, will somehow become “dead”? Is that what they want, to trade places with us, and put us underground instead?
But if they are walking around, moving around, shouldn’t they be less scary, rather than more? I mean, if the dead get up and walk, doesn’t that mean they’re not dead anymore and we can throw our hats in the air and set off firecrackers and sing Hallelujah and start making plans to live forever?
Or is there something in us that makes us know that, once we have died, whatever lies on the other side is a radical departure from what’s on this, and that those few who come back, for however short or long a time, are changed. I wonder how Lazarus felt when he emerged from the tomb that day... Was he more afraid of death after that, or less? Did the people around him see a change, did they sense a strangeness, an “otherness” about him? I think no matter what happened he must always have been a little different, a little other-worldly. It’s not the sort of experience you just shrug off. But did Lazarus actually catch a glimpse of what Christ promises us, did he get a taste of paradise? If he did, it must have been hard to return to the world.
That’s why Paul asks why on earth any of us would want to go on sinning, once we have experienced God’s goodness. Apparently a lot of people were accusing Paul of encouraging people to go off immediately and break all the commandments just to give God an opportunity to replay his starring role. “Should we continue in sin,” Paul asks, “in order that grace may abound?”
Well of course the answer is a horrified “no.” Paul puts it as strongly as possible: the Thursday morning Bible study has already learned the Greek phrase, “me genoito”, which your translation renders “By no means!” but really is much stronger - “Heaven forbid!” Or “Not on your life!” Or “Don’t even think it!” Absolutely not we shouldn’t continue to sin.
But why not? Is our free pass into the Presence going to wear out, after all, like a ticket that gets punched every time you go through the turnstile and gets canceled after the 10th time through? Will God get tired of forgiving us?
Interestingly enough, Paul doesn’t even suggest that. Instead, he challenges his hearers: “How can we who died to sin go on living in it?” That’s a pretty strange idea, isn’t it, “died to sin”. And there’s been a lot of controversy over the centuries about exactly what Paul meant.
In the early years after my conversion it was explained to me in the following way. When we die, our five senses will cease to operate. We will no longer be able to touch, taste, see, smell, or hear. We will lose all ability to feel or to respond to the world around us. In just the same way, so the idea goes, to die to sin means that we become insensitive to it. For example, if you see a cat stretched out limp in the sun, you can’t tell from a distance whether it’s alive or dead. But if you touch it with your foot, you’ll know immediately. If it’s alive, it will react. It will jump up and most likely run away. On the other hand, if it’s dead, it won’t move. Well, according to this popular view, having died to sin, we are supposedly just as unresponsive to temptation as a corpse is to a physical stimulus. And the reason for this, we are assured from v. 6, is that our old nature was in some way crucified with Christ. For he bore not only our guilt but our fallen nature. It was nailed to the cross and killed, and our task (however much evidence we may have to the contrary, is to reckon it dead. And there an awful lot of scholars who hold this view. This is what one of them says: “A dead man cannot sin. And you are dead... Be in relation to all sin as impassive, as insensible, as immovable, as is he who has already died. Another fellow wrote, “This ‘death’ has presumably made the Christian as insensible to sin as a dead man is to the objects of the world of sense.” And J. B. Phillips says that “a dead man can safely be said to be ‘immune to the power of sin,’” and that we are to look upon ourselves as “dead to the appeal and power of sin.”
Wouldn’t that be great if it were literally true? What tempts you? What’s your addiction, your self-indulgence? It can be anything from power tools to hot fudge sundaes, as destructive as cigarettes or as harmless as jigsaw puzzles - but it’s something that you really feel you ought to give up but keep backsliding with. Wouldn’t it be great if the next time temptation reared its ugly head you could look at it and feel no desire at all? Wouldn’t it be great if the next time someone waved a plate of fresh-out-of-the-oven chocolate chip cookies under your nose you could say “no thanks, I’d rather have celery sticks?”
And that’s not the only objection to this unfortunately very popular view. It’s also incompatible with the meaning of the death of Christ. Paul says that we die to sin the same way Christ died to sin. So the explanation of our death to sin has to be true for both Christ and Christians. When Paul said that Christ “died to sin once for all” what did he mean? It can’t mean that at some point Jesus became unresponsive to sin, since that would imply that previously he had been responsive to it, which is both untrue and slanderous. Now I’m not suggesting that his temptations weren’t real. They were. But I cannot believe, and Scripture nowhere even so much as hints, that our Lord Jesus Christ was ever so alive to sin that he needed to die on the cross to get rid of it. Whatever it was that Christ died to, it was not temptation, which is just another word for “responsiveness to the lure of sin.”
Another thing that’s wrong with this view is that it doesn’t fit Paul’s concluding admonitions. If our fallen nature, that is our natural tendency to do and think things that are displeasing to God, to has effectively died, or we have died to it, so that we are no longer responsive to temptation, it wouldn’t be necessary for him to warn us not to let sin ‘reign’ in our body, lest we obey its ‘passions;’ Paul wouldn’t bother urging us not to ‘present our members’[v. 13] to sin. And later in chapter 13 he wouldn’t have wasted time and space telling us to put aside the ‘deeds of darkness’ and to ‘make no provision for the flesh, to gratify its desires.’ [Rom 13:14] How could he have written these things if our fallen nature were dead and had no desires, or if we had a 'sanctified disposition' from which the inclination to sin had been removed?
And then again, as we’ve already seen, this theory is simply incompatible with Christian experience. It is important to realize that Paul is not referring in these verses to a minority of exceptionally holy Christians. He is describing all Christians, everyone who has believed and been baptized into Christ. So, whatever the “death to sin” may be, it is common to all Christian people. But seriously, folks, can anyone really believe that all God’s people are “dead to sin” in the sense of being unresponsive to it? Everything we know from our own lives, and everything we read, including Scripture and the lives of the saints, tells us that it cannot be true. Far from being dead, lifeless, departed and gone, our fallen nature is so alive and active that we have to be urged over and over not to obey its desires, and are given to the Holy Spirit to subdue and control them.
A real danger with this theory is that it can easily lead to disillusion or self-deception. If we struggle to ‘reckon ourselves’ to be ‘dead to sin’ (i.e., unresponsive to it), when we know full well that we on the contrary are all too alive to it, we feel torn between Scripture and experience, and may then be tempted to doubt either God’s Word or our salvation, or, in order to maintain our theory, lie either to ourselves or to the world about our experience.
So what do we do with this “died to sin” business? Is it just a dramatic exaggeration? Or is there something else going on here?
If we answer this question by looking at Scripture, by turning to biblical teaching about death instead of contemplating the properties of dead people, Death is represented far more in legal than in physical terms. It isn’t so much about lying motionless but rather being under a sentence.
And once we’ve made that mental shift, the meaning of verse 10, “The death he died, he died to sin, once for all” becomes much clearer. Since Christ bore sin’s condemnation, namely death, has no more claim or demand on him. In other words, once you’re dead you’re done. They aren’t going to bother with a second execution. The warden releases the body. And somehow the way that they keep the records, the way the database works, is that miraculously everybody who has the same last name - that is Christ or Christian - is also listed as dead and the sentence is complete and the bodies are released.
So having effectively died, by becoming identified with Christ, and been released, why on earth would you want to go back inside?
Well, the analogy isn’t perfect, of course. Instead of like a prison break, it’s more like being in the federal witness protection program. After switching allegiance and cooperating with the good guys, you get a new name, and a new identity, and someone somewhere fakes your death so the villains who are looking for you give up and go home, honor satisfied. You’re off the books.
But part of you misses the old ways, the old friends, the old habits and hangouts, even the thrill and power of living outside the law. And it can be hard, struggling to build new habits; part of you still answers to the old name. And part of you forgets how dangerous it was. So Paul reminds you. You’re dead. Stay dead. Don’t give ‘em a handle on you again. Don’t give in, don’t go back, don’t waste what Christ did for you.
And don’t go chasing the townspeople down the street, either. Be patient. They don’t understand about the living dead - the ones who died with Christ, who live in Christ. They don’t know that they’re not trying to take their life away, and make them be dead like you. You’re trying to take their death away, and make them be alive like you.
The night of the living dead may have been in black and white, but the day of the living dead is in living color.
