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It’s a fine thing to talk about living, but dying - is hardly something you want to talk about. In Chinese culture it’s a taboo to mention the word ‘death’. Why? Because death is the greatest fear of all mankind whether one cares to acknowledge it or not. I think one of the reasons is: because we don’t know what exactly happens after physical death, it remains a mystery to many.
And secondly, when you time comes there is no escape.

A hundred year old tombstone reads:

Pause, Stranger, when you pass me by,
As you are now, so once was I.
As I am now, so you will be,
So prepare for death and follow me.

An unknown passerby had read those words and scratched this reply below them:

To follow you I’m not content,
Until I know which way you went.

He was right, the important question about death is: Where are you going?

Someone came up with this saying: “The only constant in this universe is - change.” But in the history of mankind there is one thing that remains unchanged – everyone dies. (Except Enoch and the prophet Elijah.) Death does not show partiality. It comes to both the young and old, some even before birth, it visits men and women, black and white, yellow and chocolate. Heb 9:27 “Just as man is destined to die once and after that to face judgment.”

Confucius said, “We do not know enough about life yet, how can we know about death?”
‘未知生，焉知死？’But if we don’t know the truth about death, we will be living with a shadow hanging over us. We need to settle the question of death before we can truly get on with our living.

What does the bible say about death and living?

Consider these paradoxes of life and death:

You have to be born, lived, in order to die.
Yet, we are all born dead, needing to be born again in order to have true life - eternal life. Truer still, we have to die first in order to truly live.
From the moment we were born, the dying process began.
Some of the living are dead, some of the dead are not truly dead. Having something to die for give us something to live for. (If you have nothing to die for, what are you living for?)
In a battlefield a general said to the soldiers before the battle, “Everyone dies, but not everyone lives!” They had something to die for!

In the light of these paradoxes about death and life, how are we to understand death?

We often say, so and so died of cancer/sickness, of accident, natural disaster, of murder, but in fact we all die because of sin. God said to Adam and Eve,
“In the day that you eat of it, you will die.”(Gen 2:17) The rest is history.
The question is, did they die the day they ate from the forbidden tree?
My answer is yes. God’s words have to remain true, because he is the God of truth. They did die on that fateful day. On that day, ‘they hid from the Lord among the trees of the garden.” The fellowship between God and man is broken. Satan is speaking half-truth when he said, “You will not surely die.”

It is written in Romans 5:12 “When Adam sinned, sin entered the entire human race. Adam’s sin brought death, so death spread to everyone, for everyone sinned.”

Death is unnatural. Death came as a result of sin.

A few more passages would help us understand the meaning of the word death.

Eph 2:1 “As for you, you were dead in your transgressions and sins,” Paul was talking to the Ephesians Christians who were still living. And he said ‘you were dead.’ And-
why did Jesus say to his potential disciples, “Let the dead bury their dead”? The first ‘dead’, I believe was referring to the spiritually dead. The second, the physically dead.

In John 5:24 Jesus said, “I tell you the truth, whoever hears my word and believes him who sent me has eternal life and will not be condemned; he has crossed over from death to life.” Meaning, you were dead before you believe. Spiritually dead.
True death is spiritual death. For if we are made alive in the spirit, though we die (physically), yet shall we live – these are the very words of Christ who said, “ He who believes in me though he dies, yet shall he live.”

Now consider a plucked leave from a tree; is it living or is it dead? It may look alive and well, though it eventually will wither and die, but it is really dead, because it is separated from the life-giving tree. We are all born outside the Garden of Eden. No matter how hard we try, on our own we can never get back to God. We are all separated from the life giver – God himself, because of our sin. When you are separated from the source of life, you are dead.

When Jesus uttered, “it is finished” he had not died physically. It was just moment before he breathed his last. Something had happened before he said those words. We know He came to die for our sins, but when did the ‘death’ occur?
I think Jesus died a spiritual death when he anguished and cried out, “My God, my God, why has thou forsaken me?” as he carried the sins of the world on the cross, he was separated from his heavenly father who has always been one with him.

In our text, Romans 6:1, a question is being posted. To understand what lies behind the question in the right context we must go back to Romans 5:20, where Paul says, “Where sin increased, grace increased all the more.” God has justified me freely by his grace; if I sin again I shall be forgiven again by His grace. As in Paul’s day, we face the same objection today by some people - against the gospel of justification by grace alone, through faith alone.
You may have heard many times the comment; ‘how can it be true that you confessed your sins and are forgiven, then as you walk out of the church you sin again and ask to be forgiven again and amazingly God forgives you again. So if this were true, I might as well go on sinning so that God will have the chance to show his grace to me again and again.’

The answer to the cynical objection, “Shall we go on sinning so that grace may increase?” is an emphatic “By no means!” Paul answered it with another question;
“We died to sin; how can we live in it any longer?” If you think like that, you have totally misunderstood the gospel - the good news that we can be forgiven through faith in Christ.
Let us examine verse 2 again:

“We died to sin; how can we live in it any longer?”
What does it mean – ‘we died to sin’? Who are the ‘we’ who died to sin?
How have we ‘died’ to sin? When did it happen?
What does it mean to have died to sin?

First of all, does it mean that we are dead with regard to sin? That is, we are totally irresponsive and unable to sin? I think not, or else what would be the sense for Paul’s exhortation in verses 12-14: “Therefore do not let sin reign in your mortal body…”

Next, let us look at the tenses. We ‘died’, it is in the past tense – it describes an event, something that happened at a given point in the past. It does not describe a condition.

Here the phrase “how can” must mean ‘how shall we’, a moral inconsistency for the justified believers to continue to live in sin, rather than an impossibility to sin.
It’s like, you’ve just been saved from drowning, how can you jump back into the water?
You can still jump back in, but how can you? Why should you? It doesn’t make sense.
You’ve just vomited the contaminated food, how can you swallow it back? It’s not logical.

We shall let the apostle Paul answer the above questions.

Vs 3,4 “Or don’t you know that all of us who were baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death? We were therefore buried with him through baptism into death in order that, just as Christ was raised from the dead through the glory of the Father, we too may live a new a new life.”

Sometimes a question is the most powerful answer to another question. My son does that to me a lot. Why, even God answered Job’s question with questions, questions that Job was unable to answer. Ok back to Paul’s question.

Firstly, we gathered that
1. Christian baptism is baptism into Christ. And baptism signifies union with Christ. How have we been united with Christ? By faith. In the NT time, faith in Christ is almost always followed by water baptism. Faith and baptism is considered as one event in the NT. There was probably no such thing as an “unbaptized” Christian. Baptism is the visible sign of our faith in Christ, besides signifying the washing of our sins and the giving of the Holy Spirit. Though baptism itself does not secure that union with Christ, it is faith that does it.

If baptism signifies union with Christ, it must mean union with him in all that he is and in all that he’s done - in all phases of his work as a Mediator – between God and man.

Therefore,
2. Baptism into Christ is baptism into His death and resurrection.

Though this passage is not chiefly about baptism, it does present a pictorial symbol of baptism. Just as the baptismal candidate would go down into the water, he would seem to be buried and then to rise again, whether fuller or partially immersed it doesn’t matter, we were not told. If baptism means union with Christ Jesus in his death, then believers died with Christ in His death.

“A Christian, by faith inwardly and by baptism outwardly, has been united to Christ in His death and resurrection.” – John Stott. The Christ that we identified with is the one who died and rose again, the one who came in the flesh, as a true human, the one born without sin through the Virgin Mary by the Holy Spirit. Otherwise he would also be in Adam, spiritually dead in sin, unqualified to be the spotless Lamb of God. He is the one who lived a perfect life yet experienced temptations in all its power and kinds, and resisted to the end, even death. He is not the one who allegedly appeared in the United States, or the one who failed in his mission to be married, or the one buried in Japan, or the one who is merely a god, without the capital G, as in the bibles of the JW. We’ll be amazed how many Christs there are out there in the market.

So what does it mean to have died to sin?
To understand a phrase we must look for the same phrase in the immediate context.
We learnt that it is a fundamental principle of biblical interpretation that the same phrase recurring in the same context bears the same meaning.
The phrase ‘died to sin’ occurred three times in this passage: Verses 2,11 refer to Christians and 10 referring to Christ. So what is the meaning of this ‘death to sin’ which Christ died and which we have died in Him? Death in the bible is always talked of as the just penalty for sin. Rom 6:23 “The wages of sin is death.” Sin and death are always linked together. Death is spiritual in nature as we discovered earlier. It describes our spiritual condition as a rebellious people – separated from God, hostile toward God.
In verse 10 it says: “The death he died, he died to sin once for all; but the life he lives, he lives to God.” From the rest of the Scripture it can only mean that Christ died to sin in the sense that he bore sin’s penalty. The death he died is the wages of sins – our wages.

And by his resurrection, we know that his sacrifice was accepted in God’s sight, it counted. So it must be that we have died to sin in the sense that in Christ we have borne its penalty. We have received the gift of God in Christ Jesus – eternal life.

So let’s now attempt to answer the questions of the who, when, how, what and why.

So who are the ‘we’ who died to sin? “We” are the ones who put their faith in Christ, signified outwardly by baptism. When did it happen? When we believe and are baptized.
How have we ‘died’ to sin? We have died to sin through our union with Christ in his death. What does it mean to have ‘died to sin’? It means that in becoming one with Christ through faith and baptism, we have truly died to the penalty and power of sin just as Christ has died for the penalty of sin, and are thus justified - forgiven, debt settled.

Without faith in Christ, we are all living dead, and will die in our sins. With faith in the one who died for our sins, we have died to sin as our faith unites us with Christ, even his death and resurrection.

What is the purpose? Verse 4 tells us the answer: ‘in order that, just as Christ was raised from the dead through the glory of the Father, we too may live a new life.’

The purpose for the dying is for the living. New living. A new life that is not characterized by sin, but showing forth in increasing measure: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control. A life that Jesus describes as abundant life – free to worship God and free to say no to sin. Before, we had neither the choice nor the power to say no to sin and to live for God.
In Christ we are able - by the power of His Spirit.

In verse 5 it says ‘we will certainly also be united with him in his resurrection.’ What about his resurrection? Verses 8: “Now if we died with Christ, we believe that we will also live with him.” With him who cannot die again – verse 9. If we are living with him who cannot die again, then we cannot die again, we have past from death to life – remember John 5:24? And verse 13. If death no longer has mastery over him (Verse 9), it no longer has mastery over us who are in Christ. As Jesus lives to God (verse 10) we also shall live to God. We are no longer slaves to sin, but slave to God. We have a new master, just as the Israelites was set free from slavery to the Pharaoh to worship God in the promised land.

We must now turn back to verse 6, which speaks of our death in 3 stages.
“For we know that (1.) our old self was crucified with him so that (2.) the body of sin might be done away, (3.) that we should no longer be slaves to sin.
The crucial terms to understand are – ‘old self’ and ‘body of sin.’
The New living translation may help us here:
“Our old sinful selves were crucified with Christ so that sin might lose its power in our lives. We are no longer slaves to sin.”
The old self here refers to the ‘old unregenerate self’, our life before conversion. It is not our old sinful nature – which is still with us. That’s why we struggle with sin. (Romans 7)

This old self was crucified with Christ. It died. “Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation; the old has passed away, behold, the new has come.” – II Cor 5:17
Again in Gal 2:20 “I have been crucified with Christ. It is no longer I who live but Christ who lives in me. And the life I now live I live by faith in the Son of God who loves me and gave himself for me.”

The ‘body of sin’ here means the sinful nature which belongs to the body. John Murray takes it to mean ‘the body as conditioned and controlled by sin.” This is the purpose of the ‘crucifixion of the old self’. The verb translated ‘done away’ means to be defeated and deprived of power, not to become extinct – “kaput”. Otherwise how can we account for the numerous exhortations in the bible that command us not to sin, included in this passage too in verse 12 and 13, and 1 John 1:9 would be unnecessary. The New living translation here is easier to understand. “Our old sinful selves were crucified with Christ so that sin might lose its power in our lives. The sinful nature is still alive and kicking, but it can no longer enslave us to sin.
To summarize the 3 stages, let me quote from John Stott’s commentary:

“First, our old self was crucified with Christ; that is, we were crucified with Christ. We became identified with him by faith and baptism, and so we shared in his death to sin. We were thus crucified with Christ, secondly, in order that our sinful nature might be deprived of its power. And this took place, thirdly, in order that we should not longer be enslaved to sin.”

The question is – how can this be so? How can this crucifixion lead to the sinful nature being deprived of power and our deliverance from bondage to sin? The answer – verse 7: “because anyone who has died has been freed from sin.” We who are in Christ have been freed from the penalty and power of sin, because the wages is paid and the debt settled. (Jesus' last word on the cross was: 'It is finished' - orginal greek word meaning 'paid in full'.)

When John the Baptist saw Jesus coming he said, “Behold the lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world.”
How does Jesus take away our sin? Yes, we know that He died for our sins, the righteous for the unrighteous, but did we die for our sins? To be clear of our debt, we ourselves have to die for our sins, just exactly how does Jesus death result in our being forgiven? He was punished, but I wasn’t. So how can his death count for me?
For the wages of sin is death. To be justified from sin we must receive our wages. Something has to happen for Jesus’ death to be beneficial to us. The answer is; when the two shall become one, so that my sin was actually punished in Christ.

With that we turn to the last portion. In verse 11 we are asked to “count ourselves dead to sin but alive to God.” This is the first step toward victory over sin in Christian living. We are asked to reckon, to consider, to realize, and to live in the light of this truth. The battle is in the mind; the secret of holy living is in knowing the truth as the Spirit guides us. Because the truth will set us free. In many other passages we are asked, “to be transformed in the renewal of our mind”, “to set our mind on things above”, “to prepare our mind for action”, because we are what we think. It is written; “ As a man thinks in his heart, so is he.” We are asked to become in experience what we already are in position – dead to sin (5-7), and alive to God (8-10).
Here in Romans 6, we are asked to meditate upon the truth and the fact that, having been united with Christ in his death and resurrection, we have died to sin and are to live to God. We are not asked to close one eye and pretend that our sinful nature is dead, but to know that our old life, the chapter one of our life has ended, we are now living in chapter two, where in true freedom we can now live for God our new master. And chapter three is yet to come. And we are asked to put in hard effort not to sin but to offer ourselves to God as is fitting for people who have been brought from death to life, who are living under his grace. This will only be possible as we live by the Spirit. (Chapter 8)

So here are the three steps toward victory over sin in Christian living:
The first step – Vs 11, consider, count, ourselves dead to sin and alive to God.
The second step – Vs 12, do not let sin reign in your mortal body so that you obey its evil desires.
The third step – Vs 13, to offer ourselves to God.

Vs 14. Why must we yield ourselves to God and not to sin?
Because we are alive from the dead! Sin is no more our master. Before, sin was my master when I was dead in sin. Because we are not under law but under grace.

In Christ, the penalty for my sin is paid; the demands of the law are met. I have a new status. I cannot possibility go back to the former life which has been crucified with Christ when I put my trust in Him.

You know the nursery rhyme that goes;
Humpty Dumpty sat on the wall
Humpty Dumpty had a great fall,
And all the king’s horses and all the king’s men
Couldn’t put Humpty Dumpty together again.

In Adam we all fell like Humpty Dumpty. Nobody could do anything to restore the image of God in us, until God became a man, lived a perfect life, died our death and rose again in victory, ascended in glory. That is the good news.

We may have come to church services for years, but have we come to Christ and put our faith in Him? Someone once said, “An unexamined life is not worth the living.” Let’s examine ourselves and see if we have lived up to the truth of His words.
How’s our relationship with Christ?
Are we feasting with Him at the table?
Are we living in slavery to sin or in obedience to Christ?
Are we dying to sin and living to God?
By our own strength or in the power of the Holy Spirit?

When I tried to live for God with my own strength I failed miserably. When I surrendered everything to God, every thought life and hidden sin, even sins I still cherished in my heart, I was set free and was filled with His Spirit, and the joy of the Lord became my strength. A new power took over, prayer becomes easy, desire for the other’s good took over selfish thoughts, I was able not to let the ‘bird’- (temptation) build a nest on my head, but it flies by more quickly than before. Without the working of the Holy Spirit in us, no amount of teaching could change our lives or give us adequate assurance that we are indeed loved by God. How can we be filled with the Spirit? That's what every Christian need to find out.