St Paul writes to the Romans:
“What shall we say then? Are we to continue in sin that grace may abound? 2 By no means! How can we who died to sin still live in it? 3 Do you not know that all of us who have been baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death? 4 We were buried therefore with him by baptism into death, in order that, just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, we too might walk in newness of life” (Romans 6:1-4).
In Christianity, there has always been a tension between the spirit and the flesh, the new man and the old man, the life in Christ and the life in the world. Things would be simpler if that tension did not exist in each of us and if we could somehow gain the upper hand. When western society generally followed basic biblical morals, things seemed easier in that corresponding societal and legal restraints and consequences helped sinners from straying too much. That is the right and proper function of the first use of the law.
That outward guidance and at times coercion, however, masked the sinner lurking in all human beings who was sinning in thought, even if not so much in word and deed, as we regularly confess. If one was fortunate, one also had enough familiarity with the Bible to have been given a healthy conscience instilled by its teachings. This biblical foundation could help with knowing which thoughts were leading one astray.
St. Paul was not, however, talking to people in a Christianized society. May of Jewish background had familiarity with the scriptures, but Bibles were not readily available for everyone to read. Those converted from paganism had little or no understanding of biblically based morality. Additionally, neither group had any knowledge of the new life in Christ because it was new!
Two thousand years later, biblical ethics and morality are very much on the wane in western societies, and the hostility to such seems to increase daily. What was once good, is now bad, and vice verse to the point that being versed in vice is apparently virtuous. Fascinating and tragic at the same time, many Christians who view Jesus as being counter-cultural have turned against basic biblical values in order to be part of paganism’s attempts to counter Christianized cultural values.
These dynamics often interact in a legalistic way, and the courts are increasingly occupied by those who wish to take legal action against biblically minded Christians. As important as legal rights and battles may be, none of that has much to do with the new life which only Christ and his gospel can bring. If the law could do the trick, then just about any society or religion or mixture of the two would have a good chance of making sinful human beings good. History, however, shows no examples of that having happened, and even the people of the Old Testament failed miserably time and again. The law cannot cure, but it can and does kill.
So, the only possibility of true life comes from the new life in Christ because only he has been raised from the dead and thus only he has conquered sin, the law, and death. This new life only comes from the pure proclamation of the gospel of Jesus Christ, and that gospel says that there is nothing that we can do either to effect our salvation or to improve ourselves. Instead, preventing ourselves from sinning is about the best that we can do, but even that does nothing for our salvation.
This leaves human beings often feeling very dissatisfied. Restraining sinfulness does nothing for salvation, but not restraining sin, i.e. acting upon it, can undermine one’s salvation. That hardly seems an equal playing field. In a sense, one “is damned if you do, and damned if you don’t.” If it were any other way, then humanity would not need a saviour but merely a helper.
So, which kind of death would we prefer, death according to sin, the law, and the flesh, or death to sin, the law, and the flesh as granted through the new life in accordance with the gospel and baptism of Christ? The choice is not ours to make. Instead, it is God’s alone who has already made it in Christ. If that notion grates, then the sinner in you is alive but sadly very unwell. Who will save us from these bodies of death? None other than the one who died and was raised to save us from our inability to save us from ourselves. That does not happen with a new year, but instead it happens daily by virtue of baptism into Christ’s death and resurrection.
