Sin, Death, and Christ: Some Thoughts

It is implied or even expressed in the teachings and beliefs of Christians in certain quarters that true and spirit-filled Christians find themselves exempt or healed from distresses and sufferings, whether financial, emotional, or physical. They suggest or outright teach that God supplies all need – and more! – in order to prosper his true and holy people. For real Christians then “need” need not exist, because God wants to rain prosperity down on them like an ever-rolling stream. In this conception God becomes the consummate celestial trust fund.

Reading Romans 5 and 6, especially the transition from the one to the other, provides a radically different truth of the work of Christ. Saint Paul makes manifest the pervasiveness and dominance of sin. And more, he makes clear the pervasiveness and dominance of death as sin’s subordinate. He puts the matter most succinctly: “…sin established its reign by way of death…” (Romans 5:21; REB.) Therefore, it is sin’s death that grips and overmasters us all, so that we vainly curse or despairingly stoop our way through life under the shadow of death’s inexorable doom.

Yet Christ came to save us. Thanks be to God! However, we mistake the work of Christ if we conclude or expect that this salvific work wipes away all our tears and exempts us from suffering and death. Ah, were it so…. But it is not – not yet. First we must know death.

The great grace of Christ is that in him the death we must know becomes his death, not sin’s. We die, but we die in Christ. “Have you forgotten that when we were baptized into union with Christ we were baptized into his death?” (Romans 6:3; REB.) Death is conquered by being wrested from sin by Christ, who overmasters sin and death even as he submits to sin’s death. Thus he makes death his own, thereby transforming the character of death. Death remains for us; it is not done away. Yet it is radically transformed in and by Christ – in and by his death and resurrection – from an instrument of doom to the most blessed instrument of hope and life!