Chapter 6 of Romans tells us that we are dead to sin, but alive to God. Well all I can say is praise the Lord for that!

We see that Paul is being argumentative. He wasn't, you remember, when he was discussing sin. Rather, he was stating facts. He wasn't trying to prove anything. Bu tnow he's using this idiomatic question and being argumentative!

The very fact that Paul is asking this question makes it obvious that he understood justification to mean a declaration of righteousness; that it did not mean to make a person good, but to declare a person good. Justification means that the guilt or the penalty of sin is removed, not the power of sin in this life.

Now he is going to talk about removing the power of sin. If God has declared you to be righteous and has removed the guilt of your sin, then, my friend, you cannot continue in sin. The answer is, “God forbid!”

What did Paul mean by the word baptize in this third verse? I do not think he refers to water baptism primarily. Don’t misunderstand me; I believe in water baptism, and I believe that immersion best sets forth what is taught here. But actually he is talking about identification with Christ.

You see, the translators did not translate the Greek word baptizō, they merely transliterated it. That is, they just spelled the Greek word out in English, because baptizō has so many meanings. In my Greek lexicon there are about twenty meanings for this word.

Actually baptizō could refer to dyeing your hair. In fact, there was a group in Asia Minor who dyed their hair purple; and they belonged to a baptizō group. But here in Romans 6:3 Paul is speaking about identification with Jesus Christ. We were baptized or identified into His death. In 1 Corinthians 12:13 Paul says, “For by one Spirit are we all baptized into one body...” We are identified in the death of Christ, as Paul will explain in the next verse.

“We are buried with him by baptism [identification] into [His] death.” Frankly, I think that immersion is a more accurate type of this identification. I think the Spirit’s baptism is the real baptism. Water is the ritual baptism, but I do think that immersion sets forth the great spiritual truth that is here. This is the reason a child of God should be baptized in water in our day. It is a testimony that he is joined to the living Christ. That is all important.

When Paul says your “old man” is crucified with Him, he doesn’t mean your father; he means your old nature is crucified with Him. “That the body of sin might be destroyed”—the word destroyed is katargeo, meaning “to make of none effect, to be paralyzed or canceled or nullified”—“that henceforth we should not serve sin.” Paul is not saying that the old nature is eradicated. He is saying that since the old man was crucified, the body of sin has been put out of business, so that from now on we should not be in bondage to sin.

We have seen that sanctification is positional. That means we are to know something. We are to know God’s method of making a sinner the kind of person He wants him to be. While justification merely declared him righteous, removed the guilt of sin, it did not change him in his life. It gave him a new nature.

Now he is to know that he was buried with Christ and raised with Him. God wants him to live in the power of the Holy Spirit. The believer is joined to the living Christ. He is to reckon on that fact; he is to count on it. He is to consider it as true. You see, God saved us by faith, and we are to live by faith. Many of us have trusted Him for salvation, but are we trusting Him in our daily living? We are to live by faith.

And I'm going to leave you on that note...Trust Him in our daily living!