The Wages of Sin
20 For when you were servants of sin, you were free from righteousness. 21 What fruit then did you have at that time in the things of which you are now ashamed? For the end of those things is death. 22 But now, being made free from sin and having become servants of God, you have your fruit of sanctification and the result of eternal life. 23 For the wages of sin is death, but the free gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord.
The two services are audited by their fruit, and the chapter closes on the difference between a wage and a gift.
For when you were servants of sin, you were free from righteousness.
The sentence is dry to the point of irony: the old life did have a freedom — freedom from righteousness, the one liberty nobody should want. Then the audit question: what fruit then did you have at that time in the things of which you are now ashamed?
The appeal is to the readers' own memory, and to a shame the letter treats as healthy evidence of the change — things now blushed at, honestly named as fruitless. The audit's finding: for the end of those things is death. Not their punishment merely; their end — where the road itself goes, its built-in terminus.
Against it, the other service's yield: but now, being made free from sin and having become servants of God, you have your fruit of sanctification and the result of eternal life Romans 6:22. The contrast is total — fruit now, holiness in progress, and the end of that road, life.
And then the summary that may be quoted more than any other sentence in the letter: for the wages of sin is death, but the free gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord Romans 6:23.
The two nouns are the whole theology of the chapter. Wages — a soldier's pay, earned, owed, disbursed on schedule. Sin is an employer that pays exactly what is due, and the currency is death; nobody in its service is cheated of that. Free gift — the same word chapter 5 built on Romans 5:15: unearned by definition, impossible to invoice.
The asymmetry is the gospel. Death is deserved; life is not — there is no parallel clause reading the wages of righteousness is life, because the letter has spent six chapters closing that account Romans 4:4–5. What sin pays, God gives. And the gift's address is the phrase the chapter has stamped on every paragraph: in Christ Jesus our Lord — the union in which the death happened, the life flows, and the whole transaction stands Romans 6:11.
settled What this mark means