Biblion Bible Commentary
Read the introduction to Romans · About this commentary
Shall We Continue in Sin?
Romans 6:1-4
1 What shall we say then? Shall we continue in sin, that grace may abound? · WEB
The slander returns as a question, and the answer is not a rule but a death certificate — baptism read as burial.
What shall we say then? Shall we continue in sin, that grace may abound?
The question is the one Paul flagged as slander in chapter 3 Romans 3:8, now generated honestly by his own last sentence: if grace super-abounds where sin abounds Romans 5:20, why not supply it with raw material? Any gospel of real grace attracts this question — a message that never provokes it has already smuggled wages back in Romans 4:4. Paul treats the objection as serious enough to spend a chapter on and absurd enough to gasp at first: May it never be!
And the refutation is not a warning, a threat, or a balancing rule. It is a fact about the believer that makes the proposal incoherent: we who died to sin, how could we live in it any longer? Romans 6:2.
Died. The question assumes the person could go on as before with grace as a subsidy; the answer says the person in question no longer exists. Continuing in sin is not forbidden to the justified so much as it is nonsensical for them — like proposing that a man go on living in a country he has died out of.
Verses 3 and 4 locate the death: don't you know that all of us who were baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death? We were buried therefore with him through baptism into death.
Baptism is read as a funeral. Union with Christ — the doctrine under the whole two-Adam argument Romans 5:19 — means his history becomes the believer's: his death counted as theirs, his burial theirs, and the immersion enacting exactly that. Buried is the word that certifies death; nobody is buried on suspicion.
And the purpose clause turns the grave forward: that just as Christ was raised from the dead through the glory of the Father, so we also might walk in newness of life Romans 6:4.
The symmetry is complete: his death, our death; his rising, our walking — the resurrection already operative in the justified as a new manner of life, before it is a promise about their bodies Romans 8:11. Grace, it turns out, does not lower the standard of holiness. It relocates the person — and the relocation, not a regulation, is the answer to the slander.
settled What this mark means