In a very similar fashion to the book of Galatians, Paul begins to explain his theological premise “in human terms” and use an experience from their everyday context:
I am using an example from everyday life because of your human limitations. Just as you used to offer yourselves as slaves to impurity and to ever-increasing wickedness, so now offer yourselves as slaves to righteousness leading to holiness. When you were slaves to sin, you were free from the control of righteousness. What benefit did you reap at that time from the things you are now ashamed of? Those things result in death! But now that you have been set free from sin and have become slaves of God, the benefit you reap leads to holiness, and the result is eternal life. For the wages of sin is death, but the gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord.
Paul realizes the limitations of his metaphor (is slavery really the best way to understand our relationship with God?), and yet he also understands the metaphor’s ability to speak in the context of first-century Rome. We could certainly expand on this idea, but it would be beyond the scope of our work. Suffice it to say most scholars estimate that one out of every three people in the Roman empire were under some form of slavery.
Paul says when we live under fear and insecurity and the constant awareness of not “measuring up,” it is like being a slave to a horrible taskmaster. He asks, what benefit did you reap at that time…? Those things result in death! Paul continues to use this idea of working and wages, an idea started in chapter four, and it will culminate in Paul’s discussion here. It is in this very context our famous prooftext appears (“For the wages of sin is death…”). It becomes clear how often we rip that verse completely out of context and use it for purposes never intended by Paul.
Paul’s case is that when we live according to the lie of sin, the only thing we get in return is death. The paycheck earned at the end of a hard workday in the world of sin is paid from the Order of Death. But Paul has just finished saying we died to that old way of thinking! We don’t work for that old slave driver anymore! We have been raised to walk in a fresh, new light and with a new understanding — God desires to give us a gift, not a paycheck. This free gift is eternal life! This gift is accessible to all.
To make sure we understand that this slave nature — this old slave driver called Sin — has been put to death, Paul uses an additional example from their context:
Do you not know, brothers and sisters—for I am speaking to those who know the law—that the law has authority over someone only as long as that person lives? For example, by law a married woman is bound to her husband as long as he is alive, but if her husband dies, she is released from the law that binds her to him. So then, if she has sexual relations with another man while her husband is still alive, she is called an adulteress. But if her husband dies, she is released from that law and is not an adulteress if she marries another man.
So, my brothers and sisters, you also died to the law through the body of Christ, that you might belong to another, to him who was raised from the dead, in order that we might bear fruit for God. For when we were in the realm of the flesh, the sinful passions aroused by the law were at work in us, so that we bore fruit for death. But now, by dying to what once bound us, we have been released from the law so that we serve in the new way of the Spirit, and not in the old way of the written code.
Paul says when a woman is married, she is bound to her husband legally, but when that husband dies, she is no longer legally bound. In very similar fashion to the taskmaster analogy, Paul says that old “husband” we were married to is dead. We are not bound to him anymore; we are free to marry a new husband. Of course, how silly it would be to try to be married to two husbands — one who is alive and another who is dead!
It is this old way of thinking — a way of thinking that says we have to work for our justification — which led to our sinful behavior. It’s an understanding built on fear. Whether we are a bunch of pagans who are afraid we might not experience all life has to offer, so we build ourselves up to be gods; whether we are “good people” who recognize a certain standard for morality; or whether we are deeply religious people who have been entrusted with the Law — if we think we are in need of meeting some standard of righteousness, it is this very standard that bears witness against us, reminding us we are not enough. It is this fear that drives us to a pervasive sinfulness (or at least an awareness of it).
But we have to let that way of thinking die.
Again, it will be important for us to realize that when Paul says these Jews (clearly Paul’s audience, again made obvious by the reference in the first line above) “died to the Law,” he is not saying they stopped observing the Law. What he is saying is that they stopped trying to find their justification in observing the Law, which was Paul’s argument back in chapter three. It’s the only interpretation consistent with Paul’s current argument, New Testament application, and Pauline theology as seen in the other letters.
But of course, as Paul usually does, he’s anticipated our question and is headed there next.
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