NEWNESS OF LIFE. In the new life we have been given, the power of sin is broken. It no longer has the power to control us or manipulate us into doing its bidding. The nature that loves sin is buried, and we become new creatures in Christ Jesus. Old things are passed away, and all things have become new. Thank God, the power of sin is broken!
A new nature has been given to us. It is the divine nature that can enjoy God, the things of God, the same things that God enjoys. To be alive to God means we look at events in life, situations in the world, and people the way God does. In our baptism, we testify to the fact that we have a new life with Christ. The symbolism of baptism is a powerful, visual statement that I am dead to what I was because when Christ died, I died. Then, when He was buried, the person that I was has been buried with Him. When He rose from the dead, I rose from the dead with Him. The life I live now is one that is alive to God. We can see ourselves alive to the new life - and unresponsive to the old life!
There is new freedom in this new life that is empowered by the new nature. We are free to live for God. We are free from the dominion of sin. We are free to obey God. We are free to present ourselves to God. We are free to yield ourselves to be used as instruments of righteousness. We are free to enjoy fellowship with God and to do His will. We no longer are powerless over the old motives and desires of our past life. God has given us a new start and the Holy Spirit helps us to experience in a practical way what God has declared us to be.
V.4. This is not baptism by the Holy Spirit into the Body of Christ. This is not an act of bringing about the death of the old man. This is a testimony that we are on new ground apart from Adam's family who was our representative head. Now our new life is based on a new representative (federal) Head, our risen Lord Jesus Christ. We were unto His death baptized. Now we are walking about in a new life. This is not just the way we live or the manner of living we choose. This is a new kind of life. People in the Bible times who were raised from the dead did not have a new kind of life. They got their old life back again.
V.5. The newness of life we live because we are joined to Christ in His risen life, is because we have been made to grow together with Him. A graft into a tree gets its life from the same place as the tree itself. We have been crucified with Christ in the reality of His death. Now, we have received the reality of His life, which, in baptism, we testify to. That is why believers do not continue in sin. We have this new life. Paul said, "To me to live is Christ." We live in the effects of what Christ did when He bore our sins in His own body on the tree."
V.6. Now our old body of sin is annulled. Our old man, as we were in Adam our federal head in the past, has been crucified with Christ, and we have put off the old man. Yet he exists, so those things that were our manner of life before, we put off and put on the new man, which is "created in Christ Jesus unto good works." Our spirit has experienced "the redemption that is in Christ Jesus," but our bodies have not. Our inward man has been made new by the Holy Spirit but not our bodies. So, we have an ongoing "war against the flesh."
V.7. These truths have to do with what we are, not of what we have done. We have been crucified with Christ. We have been buried with Him by baptism into death. We have been raised to walk in the newness of life. Our relationship to sin is clearly stated, "We have died to sin." Our relationship with God also is plain, "We are alive to God." Now, we walk in faith, believing what God has said.
We are in Christ. Therefore, our relationship to sin is the same as that of our Lord Jesus Christ. His death for sin happened once. It is not something that has to be redone. Our response is to consider that as a real fact. The power of sin has been annulled. We are declared righteous, freed from sin, justified from sin. This is not a gradual working out of efforts on our part or even on God's part. This is a fact that God Himself has accomplished and declares done.
When we as believers reckon or acknowledge that this is true, life then becomes what God intended. We "walk in the light." We are "children of light." We are "light in the Lord." The realization of the glory of this fact is a liberty that cannot be described because we are now freed to love and serve the Lord empowered by the Holy Spirit. Our joy is not in what we may be able to accomplish from day to day, but in what has been accomplished for us by God and is reckoned by Him to be done forever.