We Died. Romans 6:1-2 In saving us for Himself, it is plain that the first part of our salvation is the fact that God had to be satisfied legally and able to act toward us in grace in a way that does not compromise His justice. Christ's suffering and death for us have borne the wrath of righteous demands and taken our guilt and condemnation away from us. God can "be just and the justifier" of those who believe in Jesus. We rejoice in our standing in Christ by His grace. Christ died to sin; Christians died with Christ; therefore, Christians have died to sin.
Sanctification results from justification, which is the subject at the beginning of this chapter. We have died to sin (past salvation from the consequences of sin) and are justified. Sanctification is the moral position in which we are intended to live (present salvation from the power of sin). When our Lord Jesus Christ comes and takes us to Himself at the rapture or death, we will experience salvation from the presence of sin.
Sin does not have dominion over those who are freed from sin’s slavery. Sanctification is moral righteousness, which is a growth process in life. The righteousness of Christ has been imputed to us and secures our standing before the holy God. The righteousness of Christ is imparted to us when we walk in fellowship with God. Imparted righteousness is our state before Him. We are to practice the righteousness imparted to us by having communion daily with our Lord Jesus Christ so we can live out what is in us.
V.1. So now should we keep sinning so that grace may keep on abounding? Because we are free from the restraints of the law, shall we use our freedom for our own purposes even to commit sin? NO! This is the fact that we have been taught. In Christ, we have already died to sin. We have died! Christ died for us and so we have been made free from the claims of Adam's sin. The actions of grace on our behalf mean there is no work we can do to add anything to the grace of God. For those who are not saved, they may think (or say) the more sinning they do, the more grace they will receive. For believers who are conscious of the tendency to sin that is in them, they often want legal rules of "do's" and "don'ts" to live by. Some even think they are free to commit any sin they want because God's grace takes care of that. That is not evidence of a new creation.
V.2. The fact being taught here is that something has taken place already. We have already died to sin. That is a past act and fact. It is not something that is going on now. We are not to remain in sin because when we shared in Christ's death, we died to sin. He is our new federal head who took our place as representative. We do not sin so that more grace can be seen. Those who have died to sin cannot continue to live in sin. Our union with Christ’s death is also union with His resurrection life and dominion over sin. We are new in Christ and are to live in that newness by the grace of God. The past is past, but the completeness of this new age hasn’t fully come yet, so we might occasionally sin because our fleshly bodies still struggle against our new spiritual life.
What has really happened is our relationship to sin is over. We have died to sin, not for sin. We can't be living in sin and have died to sin at the same time. That is impossible. This whole teaching has to do with our new relationship with God as a new creation in Christ Jesus; not with our practice of the new life. We have died to the world. We died, and now our "life is hidden with Christ in God." It is plain that the subject is our standing in Christ is a permanent fact, not the state of my Christian life as a believer. We died to sin in Christ's death; this is a fact. We did not die to sin by practice and experience. We are not sinless perfect people by our experiences.
There are many repeated references to our actual identification with Christ in His death in these first verses of Romans 6. Believers are risen with Christ to life because we died with Christ to sin. It is important to differentiate our relationship to sin, from the presence of sin. The presence of sin in our bodies makes it hard to realize we have died to sin, but we know it is true because God says it, and we believe it and live in the good of it by faith.