Lessons for Living from the Bible in Everyday English by Dennis Magee

Sin reigned in death in that the wages of sin is death, death of our bodies and eternal separation from God. In our natural state, each human falls into sin and is subject to death, just as Adam sinned and died. For our sake, Christ submitted to the reign of sin and in His death died to sin. But because He was without sin, He broke the judicial link between sin and death. In so doing, He passed forever from the reign of sin in death. In having been raised from the dead, He cannot die again. Sin and death no longer has mastery over Him.

By faith in Christ, we establish a union with Him. Symbolically, we are buried with Christ by being baptized into His death. We should be dead to sin in the sense that it is no longer our master. Just as Christ was raised from the dead the believer is raised to a new quality of life. Our resurrection in the sense of a new birth is already a fact, and continues to exert itself in the believer’s life. We are not sinless as long as we live in our flesh, but we will no longer live lives characterized by sin.

Christians have a call to work at becoming in practice what we already are in our status before God. Dead to sin and not letting it dominate our lives. Our sins past, present and future have been paid for by Christ’s death; His death satisfied God’s requirement for justice. So that just as sin reigned in death, grace reigns through the righteousness imputed to us by our faith in Christ. And so, in our new life, to try to live to please God, we try to be obedient to His commands. When we fail, we confess our sins to God and try to gain victory over them. Recognizing and owning up to our sins is itself a form of obedience.

And so, every Christian needs to recognize their complete dependence on the total sufficiency of Christ’s death to absolve us of our sins. When we realize that, in God’s eyes, we are considered perfectly righteous, and are already forgiven, past, present and future sins, this gives us full confidence that we will be with Him for eternity because of our union with Christ, though we will always struggle with sin. Confident in our own salvation, this frees us for acts of serving others and telling them, by our example, demeanor, attitude, actions and words when appropriate, all that Christ has done for us and can do for them.