Biblion Bible Commentary
Read the introduction to Romans · About this commentary
Alive to God in Christ Jesus
Romans 6:8-11
8 But if we died with Christ, we believe that we will also live with him, · WEB
Christ's death was once and his life is unending, and the believer's first commanded act in the letter is a piece of accounting.
But if we died with Christ, we believe that we will also live with him, knowing that Christ, being raised from the dead, dies no more. Death no longer has dominion over him!
The ground of the believer's future is the quality of Christ's present, and the paragraph states it with a shout: death no longer has dominion over him. Death had dominion once — the letter does not flinch from saying so; he was genuinely under it for three days — but the dominion is finished, and finished permanently: dies no more. The resurrection was not a resuscitation into mortal life, subject to a second dying; it was an exit from death's jurisdiction altogether.
Verse 10 gives both sides of his position with the adverbs that carry the theology: for the death that he died, he died to sin one time; but the life that he lives, he lives to God.
One time — the once-for-all that settles the past. His death dealt with sin conclusively; nothing about it repeats or needs to. And the life is aimed: to God — unending and entirely Godward.
Then verse 11, and it is worth noticing what kind of sentence it is: thus consider yourselves also to be dead to sin, but alive to God in Christ Jesus our Lord.
This is the first imperative in the entire letter. Ten and a half chapters from the greeting, after every doctrine of sin, wrath, faith, justification and union — the first thing the readers are actually commanded to do. And the command is consider: the accounting verb, the same word by which God counted Abraham righteous Romans 4:3, now handed to the believer for use on himself.
The order is the letter's whole ethic in miniature. The facts come first — died with Christ, alive in him — established by God's act, true regardless of the believer's mood on any given morning. The command is to count those facts as facts: to do the bookkeeping, to reckon oneself what union with Christ has actually made one. Not to feel dead to sin, not to try to become dead to sin — to consider it so, because it is so. Everything the next verses command about the body's members Romans 6:13 flows from this arithmetic done daily.
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