NOTES for Rom 6:23

Continuing his reflections on sin and righteousness, Paul again and again draws his readers' attention to the fact that the difference between the world where sin reigns and the Kingdom, where sin no longer has a place, is absolute. The apostle also turns to the image of the two ways, traditional for the Torah and for the Bible as a whole, immediately emphasizing that in this case he is reasoning "in human terms" (vv. 16-21).

The qualification is entirely natural: after all, it makes sense to speak about choosing a way as the Torah speaks about it only in relation to the pre-Christian world, when this choice remains precisely and only the choice of a way. For a particular person, of course, it was absolutely important, since it determined that person's eternal destiny, but that time was still only a time of self-determination in our fallen world. The Kingdom still lay ahead; its history had not yet begun. It was only being revealed from afar as part of that plan for the world which God would accomplish through the Messiah-Christ whom He sent. Now the matter was no longer the choice of a way into the Kingdom, but the choice of the Kingdom itself, which had come into the world.

With such a choice, the very thought of the possibility of "sinning under grace" (v. 15) was not so much inadmissible as simply absurd. Such a thought could occur only to those who did not understand at all what the Kingdom is and what had changed in the world after the coming of the Savior. Grace, it appears, seemed to them to be a special gift of God that could magically neutralize the consequences of all the sins they had committed, so that now, as it seemed to them, they could sin as much as they wanted and with complete impunity. The thought that the authority of the Torah no longer applied to them was apparently understood by them to mean that now everything was permitted to them.

But the apostle, it appears, has something completely different in mind. He says that now the choice is not between two ways, but between the life of the Kingdom in all its fullness, on the one hand, and death, as the opposite of the Kingdom, on the other (v. 23). The choice of righteousness now means precisely the choice of the Kingdom, and those who have chosen it are being sanctified even now, and when they reach the fullness of the Kingdom, they receive eternal life (v. 22). And they are freed from the authority of the Torah not because one can sin in the Kingdom without regard for the commandment, but because now, having been sanctified, they are by definition already free from the sin with which they previously had to struggle.