This week’s passage opens by asking an excellent question. If justification comes purely as a free gift and our good works don’t contribute to it, why can’t we just sin as much as we want? After all, if God is glorified when he shows mercy, why not give him even more opportunities to show mercy? (Romans 6:1) I hope deep down we all want the answer to that question to be ‘no’. We know that Christians are meant to love God, so it shouldn’t feel right to think that the Gospel is a green light for sin.
But we should also hope for more from the Gospel. If, as Paul has been saying, the fundamental problems of the world stem from our sin, then a Gospel which saves us from the punishment sin deserves, while still leaving us fundamentally unchanged, would be a very superficial solution to those problems.
What we’re going to see in the next few chapters of Romans is that the Gospel saves us at a much deeper level than that. It not only rescues us from the penalty of sin, it also free us from its power.
Ed