Biblion Bible Commentary
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The Wages of Sin
Romans 6:20-23
20 For when you were servants of sin, you were free from righteousness. · WEB
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.
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