Know ye not that to whom ye yield yourselves bondmen for obedience, ye are bondmen to him whom ye obey, whether of sin unto death, or of obedience unto righteousness?
Paul points to a fact from ordinary life: whoever you obey owns you. Only two masters are on offer. One road ends in death, the other in righteousness.
The verse opens with a question, not a doctrine. It rests on something anyone can check from daily life.
He appeals to that practical knowledge which is common to us all. We all know that if we obey anyone, we are their servant in practice, even if no one calls us their servant. That is the case also in spiritual things, whether it be serving sin or God. Judged by this standard, we were without question once the slaves of sin.
The verse offers only two options. It never lists a third, in which a person belongs to himself.
Any creature is wise to admit openly that he is under authority. Even the most rebellious, degraded wretch in the world is under authority. So is the most proud, respectable, reputable member of society, however independent and self-sufficient he thinks he is. Their natural characters may be very different. Yet both are without Christ, and both have yielded themselves to the authority of sin. A man may hate the word "yield." But it is in his very nature to yield. No creature can do anything else. If he does not yield to God, he is plainly yielding to sin.
Trying to rule yourself does not bring freedom. It brings a worse owner.
Man is not enough for himself. He is only a creature, and so he must depend on God. If he seeks to be his own master, if he claims to be independent, he only falls further under Satan. Instead of obeying God, he becomes the slave of sin.
The verse says you present yourself. That one word decides where the blame falls.
In this life people buy and sell slaves, and the slave gets no voice in the matter. The slavery spoken of here is not like that, whether it is slavery to sin or to righteousness… Men are sinners by birth through Adam's disobedience. They become slaves of sin by yielding to it. This declares and upholds man's responsibility. He is not responsible for being a sinner, or for having an evil nature. He is responsible for giving in to what that nature demands… He was born a sinner, a child of wrath by nature. He was not born the bondslave of sin. He became that by the exercise of his will — yielding himself to it.
The two halves of the verse do not mirror each other. Sin leads to death, but obedience leads to righteousness — not to life.
Death was the natural and appointed wages of sin, and it came as the judgment of God. We could not say obedience leads to life. If we obey, we are already alive to God through Jesus Christ our Lord. But obedience bears the fruit of practical righteousness. And notice the character of what stands against sin here. It is not righteousness in itself — doing right as conscience or law knows it — but obedience. We are alive to God, and that is, and must always be, obedience. We cannot live to God in any other way than in obedience. So Christ lived. He was the obedient Man — He came to do God's will.
The verse sets obedience against sin. So the standard is not a person's own sense of what is right.
Grace uses this freedom to make him all the more Christ's slave, free from sin to serve the Lord Christ. It was exactly what He did here on earth, always the true and perfect servant… The Christian's righteousness is never doing things because they are right. That is pride, independence, or making a god of self. We do them because they are God's will for us. We must obey to have practical righteousness.
Freedom does not lower the stakes for a Christian. It raises them.
God has called us to freedom, and He equips us with power. That makes the service of sin now deeply solemn. On man's part it is clearly the choice of evil. It is man's will rejecting the grace of God.
- Obedience reveals ownership. Not what you claim, but whom you actually obey, tells you whose servant you are.
- No third master. Self-rule is an illusion; refusing to yield to God is simply yielding to sin.
- You hand yourself over. People are born sinners. They become slaves of sin by their own yielding, and that is why they answer for it.
- The opposite of sin is obedience. Not doing right because it seems right, but doing it because it is God's will, with Christ as the pattern.
- Two wages, two ends. One road runs to death; the other bears its fruit in practical righteousness now.
But thanks [be] to God, that ye were bondmen of sin, but have obeyed from the heart the form of teaching into which ye were instructed.
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