Exegetical and Hermeneutical Commentary of Romans 6:23

For the wages of sin [is] death; but the gift of God [is] eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord.

23. For ] The “for” refers to the last statement. The verse may be paraphrased, “For whereas the wages of sin is death, the gift of God is, as we have now said, eternal life.”

wages ] The Gr. is same word as Luk 3:14; 1Co 9:7 ; 2Co 11:8. It strictly denotes pay for military service; and the metaphor here therefore points not to slavery so much as to the warfare of Rom 6:13 (where see note on weapons). The word is full of pregnant truth. Death, in its most awful sense, is no more than the reward and result of sin; and sin is nothing less than a conflict against God.

gift ] The Gr. is same word as free gift, ch. Rom 5:15. This word here is, so to speak, a paradox. We should have expected one which would have represented life eternal as the issue of holiness, to balance the truth that death is the issue of sin. And in respect of holiness being the necessary preliminary to the future bliss, this would have been entirely true. But St Paul here all the more forcibly presses the thought that salvation is a gift wholly apart from human merit. The eternal Design, the meritorious Sacrifice, the life-giving and love-imparting Spirit, all alike are a Gift absolutely free. The works of sin are the procuring cause of Death; the course of sanctification is not the procuring cause of Life Eternal, but only the training for the enjoyment of what is essentially a Divine gift “in Jesus Christ our Lord.”

through ] Lit., and better, in. The “life eternal” is to be found only “in Him,” by those who “come to Him.” His work is the one meritorious cause; and in His hands also is the actual gift. (Joh 17:2-3).

Fuente: The Cambridge Bible for Schools and Colleges

For the wages of sin – The word translated here wages opsonia properly denotes what is purchased to be eaten with bread, as fish, flesh, vegetables, etc. (Schleusner); and thence, it means the pay of the Roman soldier, because formerly it was the custom to pay the soldier in these things. It means hence, what a man earns or deserves; what is his proper pay, or what he merits. As applied to sin, it means that death is what sin deserves; what will be its proper reward. Death is thus called the wages of sin, not because it is an arbitrary, undeserved appointment, but

(1) Because it is its proper desert. Not a pain will be inflicted on the sinner which he does not deserve. Not a sinner will die who ought not to die. Sinners even in hell will be treated just as they deserve to be treated; and there is not to man a more fearful and terrible consideration than this. No man can conceive a more dreadful doom than for himself to be treated forever just as he deserves to be. But,

(2) This is the wages of sin, because, like the pay of the soldier, it is just what was threatened, Eze 18:4, The soul that sinneth, it shall die. God will not inflict anything more than was threatened, and therefore it is just.

Is death – This stands opposed here to eternal life, and proves that one is just as enduring as the other.

But the gift of God – Not the wages of man; not what is due to him; but the mere gift and mercy of God. The apostle is careful to distinguish, and to specify thai this is not what man deserves, but what is gratuitously conferred on him; Note, Rom 6:15.

Eternal life – The same words which in Rom 6:22 are rendered everlasting life. The phrase is opposed to death; and proves incontestably that that means eternal death. We may remark, therefore,

(1) That the one will be as long as the other.

(2) As there is no doubt about the duration of life, so there can be none about the duration of death. The one will be rich, blessed, everlasting; the other sad, gloomy, lingering, awful, eternal.

(3) If the sinner is lost, he will deserve to die. He will have his reward. He will suffer only what shall be the just due of sin. He will not be a martyr in the cause of injured innocence. He will not have the compassion of the universe in his favor. He will have no one to take his part against God. He will suffer just as much, and just as long, as he ought to suffer. He will suffer as the culprit pines in the dungeon, or as the murderer dies on the gibbet, because this is the proper reward of sin.

(4) They who are saved will be raised to heaven, not because they merit it, but by the rich and sovereign grace of God. All their salvation will be ascribed to him; and they will celebrate his mercy and grace forever.

(5) It becomes us, therefore, to flee from the wrath to come. No man is so foolish and so wicked as he who is willing to reap the proper wages of sin. None so blessed as he who has part in the mercy of God, and who lays hold on eternal life.

Fuente: Albert Barnes’ Notes on the Bible

Rom 6:23

For the wages of sin is death; but the gift of God is eternal life.

The wages of sin and the gift of God

I. The wages of sin is death. Wages here means the rations supplied as pay to a soldier. If sin is your commander, you will have death to eat as your pay. Sin is treated as a person, even as God is, and the more we treat it as a living enemy, the more we are likely to fight against it manfully. Death may be defined as separation. Spiritual death is a present separation from God. Physical death is a separation of body and soul, and the separation of both from this world. Eternal death is final, total separation of body and soul from heaven, and from God forever. Now we are prepared to unravel the sentence.

1. God treats sin as a master. Whosoever committeth sin, is the servant of sin, and his servants ye are to whom ye obey. Now sin is any violation of Gods will which a man does with his eyes open. We can make no scale of sin. The only measure of the sin is the light which it darkens, and the grace which it resists. Bad temper at home–pride and unkindness–want of truth–self-indulgence and sloth–lust and uncleanness–meanness–covetousness, which is idolatry–a cherished scepticism–and all the negatives–no prayer, no love to God, no usefulness–all, and many else, are equally sin.

2. Every sin has its wage; and the devil is the paymaster.

(1) He promises, indeed, very different wages from what he gives. He promises the gay, and the affectionate, and the satisfying. But God has drawn up the compact, and He has shown it to you, The wages of sin is death.

(2) Now the expression implies that there is a deliberate engagement–a title. You have a right to your wages. A servant can claim his wages, and the master must give them: for whosoever sins is doing his employers work.

(3) Let me tell you what it is. First, to destroy your own soul; then to spread a contagion, and hurt others souls, so to increase your masters kingdom, and give him another and another victim! Is that all? No. To insult God–to grieve the Holy Ghost–to rob Christ of a jewel–that is the work which everyone who sins is doing for his employer.

(4) And often it is very hard work. How hard a man of the world is working; and how little he knows of the employer he is working for. And shall not the wages be a proportionate wages?–the more work, the more pay.

(5) The wages generally given are to be paid soon; not all at once, they accumulate. Happy are you if you at once recognise it as your wages, and determine that you will earn no more of them! Happy if you resolve, I will quit the service! For, if not, the wages will go on being paid. Little by little, the separation from the good and the pure will widen. The Bible will be put further and further aside. Gulfs will come in between you and God. And out at that distance, the soul will have got very cold; heavenly things will wither! But there is a great deal unpaid yet. Perhaps there will come a separation unmitigated by any real hope of a reunion: to go out–where? To a land of darkness! No voice in the valley! no arm in the crossing! And, then, separation forever! Separation from that father of yours, that mother, that husband, that wife, that child, that saint, that church, that happy fellowship, that God!

II. the gift of God is eternal life. Here, too, is service–real, severe, lifelong. And wages? Yes; certain wages–wages in a most just degree. But it would not be right to call them so. Wages do not precede the work. But here the wages do precede the work. You do not work to get your wages, but you work because you have them. But they are infinitely disproportioned to the work; rather, all the work is so bad, that it wants to be forgiven, and a part of the wages is that God does forgive. But were it wages, and deserved, it would not be half so happy as now–to be an unearned thing–a gift of the love of God! What would heaven be, were it not a gift? Nevertheless, it is wages. God is just to give it, because deserved by Jesus Christ our Lord. (J. Vaughan, M. A.)

The wages of sin and the gift of God

I. The first fact. St. Paul does not say, The punishment of sin is death, however true that may be. He uses the word wages. These we earn–

1. When we dishonour our bodies.

(1) We do this when we forget them, or withhold from them that on which their health, and vigour, and usefulness depend. We see this on a large scale when we face the terrible effects of preventable disease. Now, is it not a sin to allow bad air, water, drainage, filth, and overcrowding to court these fiends, and bid them come and do their work among us? We say pestilence is the judgment of God, and so it is; but it is His judgment on wilful neglect, blindness, selfishness, and wrong.

(2) When you give way to drunkenness, destroying thereby the high faculties of your manhood; when you yield to lust, surrendering yourselves to the strange woman; when you throw the reins on the neck of pleasure, and chase it wherever it may lead you; when in this way you lay deep and sure the seeds of premature decay, are you not learning by the bitterest experiences that the wages of sin is death? Trifle not with the body. Forget not it was made by Gods hand, and redeemed by Christs blood. Dishonour not that which should be the temple of the Holy Ghost. The sins of the body will bring their awful retribution. It will come as a curse upon yourselves, and, perhaps, upon your children.

2. When we stifle the voice of conscience within us.

(1) Every time you do what you know to be wrong, every time you surrender yourselves to a thought which you know to be evil, you are earning the wages of sin which are death–death to all peace of mind, to all noble feeling, to all nobility of character, to all solid success in life. You go off with companions and give way to drink. Well, what of the morning? You feel that you have lost caste at home, among the friends whose respect you value, and you hate and loathe yourself.

(2) And so it is whenever a duty is sacrificed to a selfish pleasure, whenever there is the least departure from strict integrity, for the consequence must be uneasiness of mind, a load upon the heart which cannot be laughed off or drunk away; for God has ordered it. Let me beg you not to stifle the voice of conscience. It will surely, sooner or later, be heard. If you do not heed its gentle remonstrances, it will thunder condemnation. Say not that you make good resolutions, but that you are too feeble to keep them. Ask God, by His Spirit, to make you a man, and not suffer you to be a miserable weakling. Trust to yourselves, and you are no match for the devil.

3. When we reject the offers of the gospel (Pro 1:24, etc.). There is no sin so awful in its character and so terrible in its results as unbelief. That sin some of you are committing every day, every hour; and its wages are death–death to that peace which a man can only know when he has been cleansed by the blood of Christ; death to that hope of a happy hereafter which a firm trust in his Saviour alone can bring to him, and the death which never dies. What I have as the consequence of my sin, either here or hereafter, I have earned, and must have. I may, by Gods grace, give up my sin, but the wages of sin are shown in my shattered health, and, it may be, by the sickliness of my children. And if the death of the body sees me unsaved, how my misery will be deepened when I am constrained to say, I have earned damnation.

II. The second fact. Poor, lost, unworthy sinners may have eternal life in Christ, and that as a gift from God, and not as something which is to be had in another world, but something which may be had in this. See you not what a grand, brave, and noble thing it is to live in this world knowing that we belong to God, that our bodies are His, our minds His, our souls His, and that, by His grace, we are using them to His glory? Then choose ye this day whom ye will serve. (J. Burbidge.)

Wages?–or gift?

The more important any matter is, the more need there is that we view it in a right light. A human face rich with expression, or a monument of architecture rich with grandeur, or a bit of landscape rich with beauty, cannot have all that is in them set forth in one picture. Even a picture cannot set forth the Christian life: it must be experienced to be known.

I. The wages system of human existence. In all departments work is a marketable article, of which wages is the price. The one balances the other. Wages, as distinguished from other modes of income, is something that stands due though the account is seldom presented: they are paid directly to the man after a period of work is finished. St. Paul says that sin is an employer of labour. It pays wages, is bound by strong law to do so. True it does not pay in full as work is done, but will in the end clear up the debt. This is one system under which men live. Not always is this a matter of definite purpose, but it is of prevailing disposition. Their trust in this system is not always strong–are they likely after all to earn much that is desirable? But things cannot drive them hard under a God who is good. Unhappily they are not apprehending what their decision means–that it is wages and the paymaster sin. Let us remove any ambiguity about the terms of this contract: the wages of sin is death. These wages are openly paid. The installments he pays hint the kind of final recompense to be paid in the end: he now pays in disorders, loss, calamity, disease, discontent, hatred, uneasy forebodings. He cannot hide the character of these payments. God has revealed this as the recompense. This system goes on unchecked because sin is what it is; it rests upon the nature of things, God is the one source of life; if He is forsaken death must be the result. Am I working for so sad a result?

II. The free gift system of human existence. We now pass into a different climate of things. It is as if we had been walking along the northern side of a mountain in the springtime, within the chill shadow of its peaks, where the lingering wind of winter is blowing across the slushy snow, the fields bare–and now had travelled round the mountains into the southerly sunshine. We have removed from the presence of a rigorous employer to that of a most munificent friend; from hard earned wages to generous gift; life instead of death. It seems very evident that the gift system of living is brighter than the wages system of living. There must be some powerful prejudice to make men choose the latter. In other matters between God and men in the world the gift system is actually at work and men do not quarrel with it. Providence not less than grace is pervaded by this system. What do we render for the sunlight; are weal of body or mind, safety, earned? A pure wages system in the world would mean death. Sin pays like sin; God gives like God. He will give life, real, unbounded, happy. It is too great to be earned. And this is a gift from Him whom we have greatly wronged. In Christ the wages system has been broken down. Christ has earned the gift for us. (J. A. Kerr Bath, M. A.)

Wages versus gift

I. Sin and its wages.

1. Sin a service.

(1) Not an independence, as the world thinks.

(2) A service to which wages are attached; each sin has its consequence.

2. These wages are death, and are invariably paid.

II. God and his gift. A gift–

(1) To those who are not earning it, for they are in the service of another.

(2) To those who do not want to earn it, for they have yielded themselves to another service.

(3) To those who cannot earn it, for they cannot atone for one sin, and their very efforts to do so impair Gods one condition (Eph 2:8-9).

(4) Which all may have for the taking (Isa 55:1; Rev 22:17).

2. That gift is eternal.

(1) Christ Himself. Life

(a) From Christ, depending solely on His substitution.

(b) In Christ, ours only by appropriation.

(c) A part of Christ, continued to us only by indwelling.

(2) Eternal life.

(a) Begun when Christ began.

(b) Begun to us when we grasped it.

(c) Continuing till–eternity. (J. H. Rogers, M. A.)

Death and life: the wage and the gift

I. Death is the wages of sin.

1. Death is the natural result of all sin. When man acts according to Gods order he lives; but when he breaks his Makers laws he does that which causes death.

(1) The further a man goes in iniquity, the more dead he becomes to holiness: he loses power to appreciate the beauties of virtue, or to be disgusted with the abominations of vice. You can sin yourself into an utter deadness of conscience, and that is the first wage of your sin.

(2) Death is the separation of the soul from God. Can two walk together except they be agreed? Man may continue to believe in the existence of God, but for all practical purposes God to him is really non-existent.

(3) As there is through sin a death to God, so is there a death to all spiritual things (1Co 2:14).

(4) Inasmuch as in holy things dwells our highest happiness, the sinner becomes an unhappy being; at first by deprivation of the joy which spiritual life brings with it, and afterwards by suffering the misery of spiritual death (Rom 2:9).

2. The killing power of some sins is manifest to all observers.

(1) See how by many diseases and deliriums the drunkard destroys himself; he has only to drink hard enough, and his grave will be digged. The horrors which attend upon the filthy lusts of the flesh I will not dare to mention; but many a body rotting above ground shall be my silent witness.

(2) We have all known that sins of the flesh kill the flesh; and therefore we may infer that sins of the mind kill the mind. Death in any part of our manhood breeds death to the whole.

3. This tendency is in every case the same. Even the Christian cannot fall into sin without its being poison to him. If you sin it destroys your joy, your power in prayer, your confidence towards God. If you have spent evenings in frivolity with worldlings, you have felt the deadening influence of their society.

4. Death is sins due reward, and it must be paid. A master employs a man, and it is due to that man that he should receive his wages. Now, if sin did not entail death and misery, it would be an injustice. It is necessary for the very standing of the universe that sin should be punished. They that sow must reap. The sin which hires you must pay you.

5. This wage of sin is in part received by men now as soldiers receive their rations, day by day. If ye live after the flesh, ye shall die–such a life is a continued dying. She that liveth in pleasure is dead while she liveth. The wrath of God abideth on him that believeth not on the Son of God; it is there already.

6. But then a Roman soldier did not enlist merely for his rations; his chief pay often lay in the share of the booty which he received at the end of the war. Death is the ultimate wage of sin. Sin will perpetuate itself, and so forever kill the soul to God, and goodness, and joy and hope. Being under the ever-growing power of sin, it will become more and more a hopeless thing that you should escape from death which thus settles down upon you.

7. The misery of the misery of sin is that it is earned. If men in the world to come could say, This misery has come upon us arbitrarily, quite apart from its just results, then they would derive some comfort. But when they will be obliged to own that it was their own choice in choosing sin, this will scourge them indeed. Their sin is their bell.

8. It will be the folly of follies to go on working for such a wage. Hitherto they that have worked for sin have found no profit in it (Rom 6:21). Why, then, will you go further in sin?

9. It ought to be the grief of griefs to each of us that we have sinned. Oh, misery, to have wrought so long in a service which brings such terrible wages!

10. It must certainly be a miracle of miracles if any sinner here does not remain forever beneath the power of sin. Sin has this mischief about it, that it strikes a man with spiritual paralysis, and how can such a palsied one ward off a further blow? It makes the man dead; and to what purpose do we appeal to him that is dead? What a miracle, then, when the Divine life comes streaming down into the dead heart I What a blessedness when God interposes and finds a way by which the wage most justly due shall not be paid!

II. Eternal life is the gift of God.

1. Eternal life is imparted by grace through faith.

(1) The dead cannot earn life. Both good works and good feelings are the fruit of the heavenly life which enters the heart, and make us conscious of its entrance by working in us repentance and faith in Christ.

(2) Since we received eternal life we have gone on to grow. Whence has this growth come? Is it not still a free gift?

(3) Yes, and when we get to heaven, and the eternal life shall there be developed as a bud opens into a full-blown rose; then we shall confess that our life was all the free gift of God in Christ.

2. Observe what a wonderful gift this is, the gift of God.

(1) It is called life par excellence, emphatically life, true life, real life, essential life. This does not mean mere existence, but the existence of man as he ought to exist–in union with God, and consequently in holiness, health, and happiness. Man, as God intended him to be, is man enjoying life; man, as sin makes him, is man abiding in death.

(2) Moreover, we have life eternal, too, never ending.

3. It is life in Jesus. We are in everlasting union with the blessed person of the Son of God, and therefore we live.

Conclusion:

1. Let us come and receive this Divine life as a gift in Christ Jesus. If any of you have been working for it, end the foolish labour. Believe and live. Receive it as freely as your lungs take in the air you breathe.

2. If we have accepted it let us abide in it. Let us never be tempted to try the law of merit.

3. If we are now abiding in it, then let us live to its glory. Let us show by our gratitude how greatly we prize this gift. (C. H. Spurgeon.)

Death and life

The Word of God abounds with striking contrasts, which picture the opposite character and portion of the two great classes into which all mankind are divided before God. Poverty and riches, slavery and freedom, darkness and light; but no contrast is so forcible as that between death and life.

I. Death.

1. Its origin. It is the wages of sin. The apostle sets before us what fallen man loves, what he dreads, and the union between the two. Fallen man loves sin and dreads death. Yet the death he dreads is the inevitable consequence of the sin he loves. Sin is discovered under two distinct aspects. It is–

(1) Whatever is not in accordance with the character of God. All deviations from truth and holiness.

(2) Whatever is not in accordance with the law of God. All that goes beyond, and all that falls short of this Divine standard, is sin.

(3) Now death is not, therefore, what men sometimes call it, the debt of nature. It is the righteous recompense by which God shows His displeasure against sin. He has set such a mark upon it as compels every individual to feel and show in his own person the guiltiness of this accursed thing.

2. Its nature. Death is separation. We call it dissolution.

(1) Bodily death is the separation of the soul from the body.

(2) Spiritual death is the separation of the soul from God, in whose favour is life.

(3) Eternal death is the perpetual separation of both body and soul from Gods presence and favour. This is called in Scripture the second death (Rev 20:14).

II. Life.

1. How is it procured?

(1) At the first, life was the gift of God. It was solely of His goodness, and for His glory. And, as at the first creation, so in the new. Life is not the wages of our obedience. It was forfeited by sin; it can never be recovered on the ground of our own merit. Death is rendered to us in justice. Life can only be restored to us in grace. The very God whose honour we have outraged by sin, comes forward to seek and save the lost.

(2) It is a free gift so far as we are concerned, but not so far as Christ was concerned. Before He could obtain life for us, He must taste death for every man (Heb 2:9).

(3) Christ is also the fountain that contains this life. It is treasured up in Him for all who will come to Him for it (1Jn 5:12; Joh 10:14).

2. In what does it consist? It is in all respects the opposite to the death. It is the antidote to spiritual death, for it brings us into union with God. It is the destruction of bodily death; for it secures to the glorified body and soul an everlasting home in Gods presence, where is fulness of joy and pleasure for evermore. (W. Conway, M. A.)

Hard work and bad pay; no work and rich reward

I. Hard work and bad pay.

1. Who are the servants who receive the pay?

(1) All by nature. We are slaves born upon the estate of sin.

(2) But we are servants also by voluntary choice.

(3) The servants of Satan are many. His workshop is the world. Go where you please you find his liveried servants. Unlike other employers he never diminishes the number of his hands, for if any are by grace persuaded to leave his service it goes much against his grain. It matters not to him whether trade be slack or otherwise, he can always find employment for all.

(4) They belong to all ages. Children not in their teens, and lads not out of them, are every day through the medium of our police courts astonishing even a sinful world with their proficiency in guilt; and side by side with them stands the criminal whose locks have grown white in the service of the same relentless master.

(5) They belong to all grades of society. In the sight of God there is not much to choose between Bethnal Green and Belgravia, Westbourne and Whitechapel. Kings, princes, statesmen, and paupers are all equally his servants.

2. The work they have to perform. To be Satans servant is no sinecure.

(1) To one he says, Get rich: and at the word of command the poor wretch at once begins to toil, and laborious toil it is. The miser is a lump of incarnate misery.

(2) To another he gives an order summed up in the word drink, and there is no slavedom more killing both to body and soul than slavedom to the drink. He who enters a drunkards grave has worked hard for the result.

(3) He sets another to obtain pleasure. Men will even in the most lawful pleasures do that which if required of them in an ordinary days work would be the subject of much grumbling. Who does not know by experience that a days pleasuring is more tiring than an equal number of hours work? And how much more is this true with the gay man of the world. Possessed with the evil spirit, he goes hither and thither seeking rest and finding none. The quiet of the home he terms slow, so he launches into a whirlpool of dissipation, and singing Begone, dull care. The pleasure that once enchanted him by frequent indulgence becomes insipid; something stronger, more vicious is needed to stimulate his jaded spirits. He goes from bad to worse, until at last every sinful pleasure has in its turn been tried, and in its turn grown tame. Of all the miserable sights on earth that of an aged rou is the most miserable.

(4) Satan sets a fourth to act the hypocrite, and for this service he pays the highest wages, and right he should, for the work must be tremendous. How great a strain to have always to remember the part he has to act. But whatever the work may be to which the sinner is set it is work without a pause. Satan has no old pensioners permitted to end their days in peaceful idleness.

3. The wages paid them.

(1) The death of the body is but the result of sin. For six thousand years men have been receiving the wages of death. But death here is placed in contrast to eternal life, and means eternal death.

(2) Sin pays some of its wages on account, it gives sometimes an instalment of hell on earth. The wretched debauchee often finds it so. Mark his haggard countenance, his trembling gait, follow him to the hospital–nay, dont–let his end remain secret; terrible are the wages he receives on account. And yet after all this is nothing. Eternity is one long pay day, and the wages paid is death.

II. No work and rich reward.

1. The pivot word is gift. God absolutely refuses to sell salvation. He will give to any, but barter with none.

2. The blessing specified. Eternal life; and this the Lord permits His children to enjoy on earth; for as part of the wages of sin is paid on account in this life, so even in this life foretastes of the gift of God are enjoyed by the saints. Peace with God, quiet trustfulness as to the future, beside a thousand other joys, are some of the clusters of the grapes of Eschol, that refresh the wearied one on his journey to the land where the vine grows. And how about the end, when the gift is received in full?

3. Forget not the channel through whom it flows; it is a gift to thee, because thy Lord paid all. (A. G. Brown.)

The wages question

Men are born to serve. The majority are materially. All are morally. Only a choice of service open to us–the service of sin, or of righteousness. We are keen on the wages question in matters material; much more ought we to be in matters moral. Of these two services mark–

I. The contrast in their beginnings.

1. The service of sin is at first promising.

(1) Its demands are easy. To serve Satan, self, the world, is attractive to human nature. Like prospectuses promising 30 per cent.

(2) And it begins well. At first delightful. Pays dividends at first.

2. The service of righteousness is at first unpromising.

(1) Its demands are high. The opposite of those of sin. Self-control, self-denial, self-sacrifice. Service of virtue and truth. Hence it begins with sorrow, conviction of sin, penitence.

(2) And no wages can be earned therein. An apparently hard service, slow progress. When done all, unprofitable servants, (R.V.) free gift. All we get comes undeserved.

II. The contrast in their issues.

1. The service of sin ends badly.

(1) It issues in death. The wages of sin is death. Sin, when it is finished, bringeth forth death. Death, physical, moral, eternal. Sinner like some decoyed drudge worked to death. Yet the service has a fatal fascination for many.

(2) And death deserved. These wages are earned. Had power of choice, are responsible. Will be paid in full. But sin pays them, not God. Hate it, not Him!

2. The service of righteousness ends blessedly.

(1) It issues in eternal life. Gift of God is eternal life. A service which is its own reward, which ennobles, which confers glory, honour, immortality upon its servants. The servant is taken into partnership, is lifted up to the throne, partakes of the Kings life. It has, if not wages, an exceeding great reward, passing all possible desert.

(2) Which not only consummates, but accompanies it. It is through and in Jesus Christ our Lord, who supplies the working strength. Hence this hard service becomes easy. Hence it does not weaken and wear us out like human and sinful service, but we are renewed day by day. In Him is life. (S. E. Keeble.)

The wages of sin inevitable

Escape is contrary to the laws of God and of Gods universe. It is as impossible as that fire should not burn, or water run up hill. Your sins are killing you by inches; all day long they are sowing in you the seeds of disease and death. There are three parts of you–body, mind, and spirit; and every sin you commit helps to kill one of these three, and in many cases to kill all three together. The bad habits, bad passions, bad methods of thought, in which they have indulged in youth, remain more or less, and make them worse men, sillier men, less useful men, less happy men, sometimes to their lives end; and they, if they be true Christians, know it, and repent of their early sins, and not once for all only, but all their lives long, because they feel that they have weakened and worsened themselves thereby. It stands to reason that it should be so. If a man loses his way and finds it again, he is so much the less forward on his way, surely, by all the time he has spent in getting back into the road. If a child has a violent illness it stops growing, because the life and nourishment which ought to have gone towards its growth are spent in curing the disease. And so, if a man has indulged in bad habits in his youth, he is but too likely (let him do what he will) to be a less good man for it to his lifes end, because the Spirit of God, which ought to have been making him grow in grace, freely and healthily to the stature of a perfect man, to the fulness of the measure of Christ, is striving to conquer old habits and cure old diseases of character, and the man, even though he does enter into life, enters into life halt and maimed. (Canon Kingsley.)

Sin and its wages

We have to notice three words.

I. Sin. Sin is the transgression of the law. Its fundamental idea is deviation from the law, as a standard of excellence or as a rule of conduct. Now, the law supposes a lawgiver, and the possibility of Gods law being disobeyed, i.e., that it has to do with moral agents. Well, then, we have to think of them as failing from some cause or other to do Gods will, which is sin. Sin is set forth under three aspects.

1. As a principle or law (Rom 8:2).

(1) As sin is the rejection of Gods authority, the refusal to let Him reign over us, it follows that by it we set up our own will in opposition to His. See, then, what such autonomy involves.

(a) The basest ingratitude, for who can deny that we owe all our powers and happiness and our very being to God?

(b) An imputation upon Gods character, viz., that He is unworthy to govern us, that His will is unjust, His law unkind.

(c) Rebellion against Him.

(d) Usurpation of His place; and hence idolatry and self-deification.

(2) Why should any creature throw off Gods authority and govern himself? It must be for some object of self-gratification incompatible with obedience to God. Now, Gods law seeks the greatest good of all; and therefore, to set it at nought for the sake of personal indulgence, is to violate the principle of benevolence.

(3) This selfishness may assume a great variety of forms. Many men have as many different ways of enjoying themselves, yet all may be equally selfish. Some are sensual, some are covetous, others ambitious, and not a few are fired with the intellectual passion for fame.

2. As an act or acts. The law, though in principle always one, has nevertheless many particular precepts, and is outraged by the violation of any of those precepts. There are sins of deed, of speech, of deportment, of looks, of motive, desire, imagination, thought, of negation, and omission. All these are the outgrowth of that self-will and selfishness in which sin essentially consists.

3. As state. Hence, we read of men being born in sin, and remaining dead in trespasses and sins. Before we commit any acts of sin, and as the source of all we do commit, we have a sinful nature–a bias to go and to do wrong. The thoroughly sinful soul may be said to live in sin always. Sin is its element and vital air. It lives without God.

II. Death.

1. Spiritual death. The soul is dead when destitute of holiness and happiness; of the disposition to do well, and of the power to enjoy God. It admits of degrees; the more it prevails, the more it grows, and the commission of sin inevitably paves the way for the perpetration of many more; and the final stage is reached when the conscience is seared as with a hot iron, proof against every appeal, and resolutely bent on his own eternal destruction.

2. Eternal death. Let us suppose a man, whose soul is dead through sin, removed out of this world into the next, and what shall we behold concerning him? His case is a million-fold more terrible than before. For–

(1) It is confirmed unalterably forever. Though countless ages roll over his head, he that is unholy must be unholy still; he that is filthy must be filthy still.

(2) Besides, he is still the subject of the law of progress; and therefore, as the ages of his immortality advance, each will leave him worse than it found him.

(3) This development of evil will be incalculably accelerated and aggravated by the absence of everything enjoyed on earth, and which helped either to restrain the malignity of the disposition or to relieve the wretchedness of the feelings.

(4) The positive infliction of punishment as a token of Gods anger at sin.

III. Wages. This word denotes a relation of equity between sin and death. The sinner earns death as his rightful recompense. This connection is–

1. Natural. You have only to study the human mind, its laws of association and of working, to be convinced that sin, when it is finished, must bring forth death.

2. Judicial. The wicked are turned into hell by a just and holy God; and the same reasons which send them there must avail to keep them there. They have no power to make themselves good, and being immortally evil they must be immortally shut out from heaven. Certainly God will not lay upon the wicked more of these terrible wages than they individually deserve. But who shall determine the full and adequate deserts of sin? Conclusion:

1. Christians should not live in sin, but utterly hate and discard it, and earnestly strive to perfect holiness in the fear of the Lord. They have done with it as a state; let them have done with it as a law, and in its individual acts.

2. Here is a message of warning to the ungodly. See for what wages you are working; part are being paid now, but immense arrears are being treasured up in the future. You think you are working for pleasure, for gold, for honour, but lo! it is for death. (T. G. Horton.)

Death the wages of sin

I. What sin is.

1. Original sin. Sin bears date with our very being, and indeed we were sinners before we were born (Eph 2:3). There are some who deny this to be properly sin at all, because nothing can be truly sin which is not voluntary. But original corruption in every infant is voluntary, not indeed in his own person, but in Adam his representative. Pelagians, indeed, tell us that the sons of Adam came to be sinners only by imitation. But, then, what are those first inclinations which dispose us to such bad imitations?

2. Actual sin may be considered–

(1) According to the subject matter of it.

(a) The sin of our words (Mat 12:37).

(b) The sin of our external actions, theft, murder, uncleanness; and to prove which to be sins, no more is required but only to read over the law of God, and where the written letter of the law comes not, men are a law to themselves.

(c) The sin of our desires. Desires are sin, as it were, in its first formation. For as soon as the heart has once conceived this fatal seed, it first quickens and begins to stir in desire; so that the ground and the principal prohibition of the law is, Thou shalt not covet. Indeed, action is only a consummation of desire; and could we imagine an outward action performable without it, it would be rather the shell and outside of a sin than properly a Sin itself.

(2) According to the measure of it; and so also it is distinguished into several degrees, according to which it is either enhanced or lessened in its malignity.

(a) As when a man is engaged in a sinful course by surprise and infirmity.

(b) When a man pursues a course of sin against the reluctancies of an awakened conscience; when salvation waits and knocks at the door of his heart, and he both bolts it out and drives it away; when he fights with the word, and struggles with the Spirit; and, as it were, resolves to perish in spite of mercy itself, and of the means of grace (Isa 1:5; Joh 9:41).

(c) When a man sins in defiance of conscience; so breaking all bonds, so trampling upon all convictions, that he becomes not only untractable, but finally incorrigible. And this is the ne plus ultra of impiety, which shuts the door of mercy and seals the decree of damnation, Now this differs from original sin thus, that that is properly the seed, this the harvest; that merits, this actually procures death. For although as soon as ever the seed be cast in there is a design to reap; yet, for the most part, God does not actually put in the sickle till continuance in sin has made the sinner ripe for destruction.

II. What is included in death which is here allotted for the sinners wages?

1. Death temporal. We must not take it as the separation of the soul from the body, for that is rather the consummation of death, the last blow given to the falling tree.

(1) Look upon those forerunners of death–diseases; they are but some of the wages of sin paid us beforehand. And to the diseases of the body we may add the consuming cares and troubles of the mind, all made necessary by the first sin of man, and which impair the vitals as much as the most visible diseases can do.

(2) To these we may subjoin the miseries which attend our condition; as the shame which makes men a scorn to others and a burden to themselves; which takes off the gloss and air of all other enjoyments, and damps the vigour and vivacity of the spirit. Also the miseries of poverty which leave the necessities and the conveniences of nature unsupplied. Now all these things are so many breaches made upon our happiness and well-being, without which life is not life, but a thin, insipid existence.

2. Death eternal, in comparison of which the other can scarce be called death, but only a transient change; easily borne, or at least quickly past.

(1) It bereaves a man of all the pleasures and comforts which he enjoyed in this world. How will the drunkard, the epicure, and the wanton bear the absence of those things that alone used to please their fancy and to gratify their lust!

(2) It bereaves the soul of the beatific fruition of God (Psa 16:11).

(3) It fills both body and soul with anguish (Luk 16:24).

III. In what respect death is properly called the wages of sin.

1. Because wages presuppose service. And undoubtedly the service of sin is of all others the most laborious. It will engross all a mans industry, drink up all his time; it is a drudgery without intermission, a business without vacation. Such as are the commands of sin, such must be also the service. But the commands of sin are for their number continual, for their vehemence importunate, and for their burden tyrannical.

(1) Take the voluptuous, debauched epicure. What hour of his life is vacant from the slavish injunctions of his vice? Is he not continually spending both his time and his subsistence to gratify his taste? And then, how uneasy are the consequences of his luxury! when he is to grapple with surfeit and indigestion?

(2) The intemperate drinker; is not his life a continual toil? To be sitting up when others sleep, and to go to bed when others rise; to be exposed to quarrels, to have redness of eyes, a weakened body and a besotted mind?

(3) The covetous, scraping usurper: it is a question whether he gathers or keeps his pelf with most anxiety.

2. Because wages do always imply a merit in the work requiring such a compensation. It is but equitable that he who sows should also reap (Gal 6:8).

(1) But to this some make the objection that since our good works cannot merit eternal life, neither can our sins merit eternal death. But to merit, it is required that the action be not due; but every good action being commanded by the law of God is thereby made due, and consequently cannot merit; whereas, a sinful action being altogether undue and not commanded, but prohibited, it becomes properly meritorious; and, according to the malignity of its nature, it merits eternal death.

(2) But some further urge that a sinful action is but of a finite nature, and proceeds from a finite agent; and consequently there is no proportion between that and an eternal punishment. But we answer that the merit of sin is not to be rated either by the act or the agent; but by the proportions of its object, and the greatness of the person against whom it is done. Being committed against an infinite majesty, it rises to the height of an infinite demerit.

(a) Sin is a direct stroke at Gods sovereignty. We read of the kingdom of Satan in contradistinction to the kingdom of God, into which sin translates Gods subjects. No wonder if God punishes sin, which is treason against the King of kings, with death; for it pots the question Who shall reign?

(b) Sin strikes at Gods very being (Psa 14:1). Sin would step not only into Gods throne, but also into His room. Conclusion: Sin plays the bait of a little, contemptible, silly pleasure or profit; but it hides that fatal hook by which that great catcher of souls shall drag them down to his eternal execution. Fools make a mock at sin. Fools they are indeed for doing so. But is it possible for anything that wears the name of reason, to be so much a fool as to mock at death too? In every sin which a man deliberately commits, he takes down a draught of deadly poison. In every lust which he cherishes, he embraces a dagger and opens his bosom to destruction, he who likes the wages, let him go about the work. (R. South, D. D.)

Eternal life

I. Its nature. A life of–

1. Perfect immunity from all the sufferings and dangers to which we are here exposed.

2. Preeminent intellectual enjoyment–Here we know in part, etc.

3. Social happiness.

4. Unspotted holiness.

5. Incessant activity.

6. Endless improvement.

II. The freeness of its disposition.

1. It cannot be purchased.

2. It is not the reward of merit.

3. It is everything; leading to it is the gift of God.

The promises by which the believer is led to expect it–the great change by which he has become entitled to it and qualified for its enjoyment–the Lord Jesus, by whose merit eternal life was purchased–all these are gifts of God.

III. The medium through which it flows.

1. For this end–to put men in possession of eternal life–the Redeemer was given; for this purpose He laboured, suffered, instituted His gospel, and sent forth His ministers.

2. We should, however, do great injustice to this subject, were we not to observe that Christ died–

(1) To procure our pardon, in consequence of which the sentence of the law is reversed, and believers freed from that death to which their crimes had exposed them.

(2) To deliver us from a state of moral death.

(3) To secure our adoption into Gods family, which entitles to this eternal life.

(4) To create in us that holiness of heart and life which makes us meet to be partakers of the inheritance of the saints in light.

(5) To communicate that grace which enables us to lay hold on eternal life. (J. Rigg.)

Eternal life

I. Is not wholly in the future world. This life begins here at the moment of conversion, when the soul passes from death into life. He that hath the Son hath life. The righteous do enter into life, become heirs of life, enjoy ante-pasts of the infinite fulness which is to be hereafter revealed. These foretastes involve freedom from condemnation, communion with God, and growing likeness to Him. The soul is divested of the fear of death, and Christ fills the believer with His joy, and that joy is full. Satisfaction comes from what we are, and not from what we get. I have seen homes of princely wealth which were but brilliantly garnished sepulchres, their luxury a solemn mockery; and I have seen homes of poverty full of the joy of God, the peace of the eternal life begun. It is false to conceive of the Christian life as a joyless way of self-denial trod by us to purchase a bliss beyond.

II. Is the same and is not the same to every saved soul.

1. Heaven is not a sea of bliss in which each of us is to float in equal content. In heaven, as here, there is an infinite variety. What a vast transition from an oyster to the leviathan! There is one glory of the sun, another of the moon, another of the stars. The penitent thief is saved as truly as Paul; but one has built on hay, wood, and stubble, and is scarcely saved; the other receives an entrance abundantly; one gives the tag-end of a godless life to Christ and is saved so as by fire; the other can say, I have fought a good fight. The riches, joys, and capabilities of the celestial life are measured by the service rendered; to every man according to his works, five cities, or ten cities, as the case may be. Secular papers often make merry about the statement that scaffold penitents are received to heaven. It is true that grace does save such. But their heaven is not Pauls heaven.

2. In three respects heaven is the same to all.

(1) In freedom from sin. Harlots and murderers, washed in the cleansing blood, are as free from defilement as angels. The malefactor is made as pure as a babe.

(2) In freedom from physical and mental pain and sorrow. There will be no anxiety, distrust; no pang or grief.

(3) No death. Perpetual freedom from all these is a common blessing to all.

3. It may be objected that if one is wholly happy, according to his capacity, what matters it if there be those of larger capacities than his? A snail is happy, I answer, so is a lark. Is there nothing to choose between them? There is a short radius to a childs circumference of happiness. A man has a thousand-fold larger scope. Is there no preference? The ear of one is satisfied with a rude melody; another man is thrilled to the depths of his being by delicious harmonies. Is there no preference? There is no room for question. What a contrast between one who is a single remove from a laughing idiot, and an angel of God! We are to seek for honour and glory, even an entrance that shall be administered abundantly.

III. Is increasingly glorious forever. Memory shall lose nothing, the mind pervert nothing, and the heart shall repel nothing. All that God has shall be spread out and open to us forever in riches of grace inconceivable in their glory and infinitude. The possibilities of the soul are beyond conception. God reveals Himself to the righteous through the ages, their capacities ever enlarging and the reality forever increasing–joy, power, blessedness, beyond all thought! These all are the gift of God, bought, and given to believers, (Prof. Herrick Johnson.)

Eternal life

I. The gift.

1. Life. Life, eternal life, and life everlasting, are very frequent designations of the salvation of the gospel (Joh 17:1-2). This life consists of–

(1) A right state of affection and feeling toward God, the Father of our spirits, combined with a happy consciousness of His love and favour toward us. Where this life is, there is freedom from guilt.

(2) A renewed state of the affections and will: the law of God is approved, and the love of God is established in the heart, as its supreme and governing motive.

(3) Honour and happiness, the enjoyment of true pleasure, derived from the purest sources of holiness, and love, and fellowship with heaven.

(4) A blessed activity of the soul, engaged in the worship and service of Jehovah. Where these exist, the soul lives, fulfils its proper functions, answers the ends of its creation, and realises its most true and noble bliss. We sometimes call this life integrity, which is wholeness or soundness of being: sometimes rectitude, which is erectness and strength: and sometimes sanctity, which is separatedness from evil and devotedness to God.

2. The epithet, eternal.

(1) This word denotes everlastingness of duration.

(2) But where this is, there must also be uncorruptedness or perfection of nature.

(3) And where this perfection relates to a spiritual creature like man, there must be incessancy of progress, or development.

II. Its gratuitous character.

1. It is the gift of God, inasmuch as–

(1) No man possesses it by nature.

(2) No man could procure it for himself.

2. We are to receive it as such, in simplicity of spirit and with grateful joy. And let us learn not to look at anything in ourselves to justify our expectation of it: and let us not, when we find nothing but demerit in ourselves, be disheartened, but believe that when we were fit only for everlasting punishment, God stepped forward to grant unto us eternal life. This He has done from the impulse of His own amazing generosity and love.

III. The medium of its bestowment.

1. God gives it to us through Jesus Christ, not in an arbitrary manner, but on the ground of what He has done and suffered in our stead.

2. So, we accept it through Christ (1Jn 5:11). Indeed, we may say that Jesus is our eternal life. It is by being found in Him that we have pardon and holiness, happiness and heaven. When we reach the celestial world, we shall find that there as well as here, Christ is all in all. (T. G. Horton.)

Eternal life a gift

1. Men are so accustomed to the exchange of equivalents, that any other course comes with an element of surprise. If the reward be not in the grosser form of money, or in that which money can purchase, still it is true that one earns his wages. These may be the wages that improved faculties would add–the reward of an approving conscience, of a sense of usefulness–perhaps a sense of increased influence for good, by reason of that which has been faithfully and unselfishly done; or in the very highest possible service of philosophic endeavour or Christian duty. In all these there is that feeling of reward expected, because it has been earned. The idea of a gift coming to one suddenly and undeserved he does not entertain, except as a fiction, such as may amuse him as a daydream. And more than all is one surprised to find that he is the recipient of such a gift from one unknown, or one to whom he has stood in the relation of neglect, perhaps of hostility.

2. At the same time it is true that men are receiving gifts from another, where they cannot make any return whatever. Everything that comes to us from the past is a gift. Individual minds have toiled and studied, and we reap the fruits of their patience, skill, and success. We make the lightning to run on our errands, and we take the vapour that lifts the lid of the kettle to propel the mammoth ship across the sea, or the car which carries us over mountains, or sets in motion thousands of factories all over our land. This we received from those to whom it came as an inspiration of Providence, and an operation of intelligent, unwearied power. The institution of society comes to us a grant from the past. We pay for our primary schooling; but for the great thoughts of men who have lived, what returns can we make? What to any of the great philosophers who brought us the laws and principles we possess? How shall we compensate the artist whose gifts quicken our minds to higher perceptions of beauty, or the poet who sings us into the Elysium of thought? There are still higher endowments that come to us from those whom we only know by those impressions made upon us by their chivalric career, and to whom we can make no more return than we by lighting matches can add to the splendour of the distant, brilliant sun. So, if a man should say, I expect only that which I have earned, and demand only that which I have deserved and have properly acquired, and should that prayer be answered, he would, today, be a beggared savage. Thus we see how many of the things which we enjoy have come to us as gifts. And it is the desire of every noble, unselfish mind to carry on to the future their beneficent influence that the coming generation may surpass the present,

3. Turn now to the things which come from God. For these many make no acknowledgments whatever; while He continues to shower His gifts upon them. He gives life through Christ. The life of the present is an undeserved gift. It is not the reward of our deserts. The faculties of mind, all opportunities for enjoyment, and all inspirations of thought and effort–these are not earned by us. No man can stand up and say, I have done so and so, and God owes me that. God gives the sunshine and the shower. They come, not because we deserve them. They come sometimes in the face of protest. He gives the great inspirations of thought to man, and great deliverance to nations from impending calamity. He gives to the individual soul all he possesses, and to society all it has. This argument as to the right of the race to eternal life lies at the basis of our thought this morning. The parallel in natural life is the same. No man has a right to exist in infancy. It is the gift of God; and no man has earned the right to happiness in the present, and to hops in the future. It is the gift of God. Eternal life, however, is the best gift of God. But it is a gift that comes only on certain conditions. Sunshine requires the open eye, but a man may refuse to open his eye; still it is Gods gift. So we do not receive inspiration from any great mind, except as we bring our mind into responsiveness to it. So we do not receive eternal life unless the conditions are accepted with which God invests His gift–humble penitence for sin and faith in Christ. Sin earns wages, but eternal life is the gift of God, as personal life is a bestowment: it crowns and glorifies all others. Here is–

I. A secret of the Christians unrest. Life is not something to be earned. The soul of the Christian who thus views it grows restless and troubled, like Galilees waves, till the feet of the Lord brought them to a level. It is dark, as was the mount, until the Lord rose, in the luminous majesty of His presence, above it.

II. The secret of peace, in simply accepting this Divine gift from the source of infinite compassion and grace. Sometimes this peace may come suddenly, filling the soul with glory; sometimes it may come after long, weary searching for it; sometimes at the end of life; when the light of life has almost gone out, as it flickers in the socket and speech falters, I say, I can do nothing; I take the gift of God! Then comes the peace which passeth all understanding.

III. The burden which rests on him who rejects eternal life. When one comes to us with a great thought or a rare opportunity, and we turn away to a trivial theme, we grieve him. Let us not thus treat God. Here is the gift of eternal life. Shall I put it aside as if it were the merest summer breeze which by my hand I could arrest and push back into the air? I may, as I may put aside sunshine itself, by shutting my eyes to it. The responsibility is mine.

IV. The impulse of Christian service. Freedom and gladness come from other gifts, but here is the supreme one of all. When received by us, what service is too hard, what sacrifice too vast, what worship too exultant! If this consciousness comes into our soul, then no sword or stake can fright us, for our life is interlocked with heaven. The realisation of it dispels our sorrows and forbids our tears.

V. The sweetness of heaven. Gratitude for Gods gift impels every touch of the heavenly harp. It gives the melody to every song, and joy to all the work of heaven. (R. S. Storrs, D. D.)

Life in Christ

A new convert said, I could not sleep, thinking over that passage, Whosoever believeth on the Son hath life; and so I got up, and lighted a candle, and found my Bible, and read it over, Whosoever believeth on the Son hath life. Why, says someone, didnt you know that was in the Bible before? Oh, yes, he replied, I knew it was in the Bible, but I wanted to see it with my own eyes, and then I rested. (T. De Witt Talmage.)

The gift of God

I was out on the Pacific coast, in California, two or three years ago, and I was the guest of a man that had a large vineyard and a large orchard. One day he said to me, Moody, whilst you are my guest, I want you to make yourself perfectly happy, and if there is anything in the orchard or in the vineyard you would like, help yourself. Well, when I wanted an orange, I did not go to an orange tree and pray the oranges to fall into my pocket, but I walked up to a tree, reached out my hand, and took the oranges. He said, Take, and I took. God says, Take, and you do it. God says, There is My Son. The wages of sin is death; the gift of God is eternal life. Who will take it now?

Eternal life the gift of God

A man may as well think of buying light from the sun, or air from the atmosphere, or water from the well spring, or minerals from the earth, or fish from the sea, etc., as think of buying salvation from God with any kind of price. The sun gives his light, the atmosphere its air, the well spring its water, the earth its minerals, the sea its fish; all man has to do is to take them and use them. So God has given salvation to man. All he has to do is to use it, in the use of means, and enjoy it. (J. Bate.)

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Fuente: Biblical Illustrator Edited by Joseph S. Exell

Verse 23. For the wages of sin is death] The second death, everlasting perdition. Every sinner earns this by long, sore, and painful service. O! what pains do men take to get to hell! Early and late they toil at sin; and would not Divine justice be in their debt, if it did not pay them their due wages?

But the gift of God is eternal life] A man may MERIT hell, but he cannot MERIT heaven. The apostle does not say that the wages of righteousness is eternal life: no, but that this eternal life, even to the righteous, is , THE gracious GIFT of GOD. And even this gracious gift comes through Jesus Christ our Lord. He alone has procured it; and it is given to all those who find redemption in his blood. A sinner goes to hell because he deserves it; a righteous man goes to heaven because Christ has died for him, and communicated that grace by which his sin is pardoned and his soul made holy. The word , which we here render wages, signified the daily pay of a Roman soldier. So every sinner has a daily pay, and this pay is death; he has misery because he sins. Sin constitutes hell; the sinner has a hell in his own bosom; all is confusion and disorder where God does not reign: every indulgence of sinful passions increases the disorder, and consequently the misery of a sinner. If men were as much in earnest to get their souls saved as they are to prepare them for perdition, heaven would be highly peopled, and devils would be their own companions. And will not the living lay this to heart?

1. In the preceding chapter we see the connection that subsists between the doctrines of the Gospel and the practice of Christianity. A doctrine is a teaching, instruction, or information concerning some truth that is to be believed, as essential to our salvation. But all teaching that comes from God, necessarily leads to him. That Christ died for our sins and rose again for our justification, is a glorious doctrine of the Gospel. But this is of no use to him who does not die to sin, rise in the likeness of his resurrection, and walk in newness of life: this is the use that should be made of the doctrine. Every doctrine has its use, and the use of it consists in the practice founded on it. We hear there is a free pardon-we go to God and receive it; we hear that we may be made holy-we apply for the sanctifying Spirit; we hear there is a heaven of glory, into which the righteous alone shall enter-we watch and pray, believe, love, and obey, in order that, when he doth appear, we may be found of him in peace, without spot and blameless. Those are the doctrines; these are the uses or practice founded on those doctrines.

2. It is strange that there should be found a person believing the whole Gospel system, and yet living in sin! SALVATION FROM SIN is the long-continued sound, as it is the spirit and design, of the Gospel. Our Christian name, our baptismal covenant, our profession of faith in Christ, and avowed belief in his word, all call us to this: can it be said that we have any louder calls than these? Our self-interest, as it respects the happiness of a godly life, and the glories of eternal blessedness; the pains and wretchedness of a life of sin, leading to the worm that never dies and the fire that is not quenched; second most powerfully the above calls. Reader, lay these things to heart, and: answer this question to God; How shall I escape, if I neglect so great salvation? And then, as thy conscience shall answer, let thy mind and thy hands begin to act.

Fuente: Adam Clarke’s Commentary and Critical Notes on the Bible

q.d. Now therefore compare the office of both these services together, and you shall easily see which master is best to serve and obey; the wages that sin will pay you, in the end is death; but the reward that God will freely bestow upon you (if you be his servants)

is eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord.

Wages; the word properly signifies victuals. The Romans of old paid their soldiers with provision and victuals in recompence of their service; afterward they gave them money, but still the old term was retained, and now it is used to signify any reward or stipend whatsoever.

Is death: by death here we must understand not only temporal, but also and more especially eternal death, as appears by the opposition it hath to eternal life: this is the just and true hire of sin.

The gift of God is eternal life; he doth not say that eternal life is the wages of righteousness, but that it is the gracious or free gift of God. He varies the phrase on purpose, to show that we attain not eternal life by our own merits, our own works or worthiness, but by the gift or grace of God; for which cause he also addeth,

through Jesus Christ our Lord. See Aug. lib. de Gratia et Libero Arbitrio, c. 9. Let the papists (if they can) reconcile this text to their distinction of mortal and venial sins, and to their doctrine of the meritoriousness of good works.

Fuente: English Annotations on the Holy Bible by Matthew Poole

23. For the wages of sin is death;but the gift of God is eternal life through“in”

Jesus Christ our LordThisconcluding verseas pointed as it is briefcontains the marrow,the most fine gold, of the Gospel. As the laborer is worthy of hishire, and feels it to be his duehis own of rightso is death thedue of sin, the wages the sinner has well wrought for, his own. But”eternal life” is in no sense or degree the wages of ourrighteousness; we do nothing whatever to earn or become entitled toit, and never can: it is therefore, in the most absolute sense, “THEGIFT OF GOD.”Grace reigns in the bestowal of it in every case, and that “inJesus Christ our Lord,” as the righteous Channel of it. In viewof this, who that hath tasted that the Lord is gracious can refrainfrom saying, “Unto Him that loved us, and washed us from oursins in His own blood, and hath made us kings and priests unto Godand His Father, to Him be glory and dominion for ever and ever.Amen!” (Rev 1:5; Rev 1:6).

Note, (1) As the mosteffectual refutation of the oft-repeated calumny, that the doctrineof Salvation by grace encourages to continue in sin, is the holy lifeof those who profess it, let such ever feel that the highest servicethey can render to that Grace which is all their hope, is to “yieldthemselves unto God, as those that are alive from the dead, and theirmembers instruments of righteousness unto God” (Rom 6:12;Rom 6:13). By so doing they will”put to silence the ignorance of foolish men,” secure theirown peace, carry out the end of their calling, and give substantialglory to Him that loved them. (2) The fundamental principle of Gospelobedience is as original as it is divinely rational; that “weare set free from the law in order to keep it, and are broughtgraciously under servitude to the law in order to be free”(Rom 6:14; Rom 6:15;Rom 6:18). So long as we know noprinciple of obedience but the terrors of the law, which condemns allthe breakers of it, and knows nothing whatever of grace, either topardon the guilty or to purify the stained, we are shut up under amoral impossibility of genuine and acceptable obedience: whereas whenGrace lifts us out of this state, and through union to a righteousSurety, brings us into a state of conscious reconciliation, andloving surrender of heart to a God of salvation, we immediately feelthe glorious liberty to be holy, and the assurance that “Sinshall not have dominion over us” is as sweet to our renewedtastes and aspirations as the ground of it is felt to be firm,”because we are not under the Law, but under Grace.” (3) Asthis most momentous of all transitions in the history of a man iswholly of God’s free grace, the change should never be thought,spoken, or written of but with lively thanksgiving to Him who soloved us (Ro 6:17). (4)Christians, in the service of God, should emulate their former selvesin the zeal and steadiness with which they served sin, and the lengthto which they went in it (Ro 6:19).(5) To stimulate this holy rivalry, let us often “look back tothe rock whence we were hewn, the hole of the pit whence we weredigged,” in search of the enduring advantages and permanentsatisfactions which the service of Sin yielded; and when we find toour “shame” only gall and wormwood, let us follow a godlesslife to its proper “end,” until, finding ourselves in theterritories of “death,” we are fain to hasten back tosurvey the service of Righteousness, that new Master of allbelievers, and find Him leading us sweetly into abiding “holiness,”and landing us at length in “everlasting life” (Ro6:20-22). (6) Death and life are before all men who hear theGospel: the one, the natural issue and proper reward of sin; theother, the absolutely free “GIFTOF GOD” tosinners, “in Jesus Christ our Lord.” And as the one is theconscious sense of the hopeless loss of all blissfulexistence, so the other is the conscious possession and enjoyment ofall that constitutes a rational creature’s highest “life”for evermore (Ro 6:23). Ye thatread or hear these words, “I call heaven and earth to recordthis day against you, that I have set before you life and death,blessing and cursing, therefore choose life, that both thou and thyseed may live!” (De 30:19).

Fuente: Jamieson, Fausset and Brown’s Commentary Critical and Explanatory on the Whole Bible

For the wages of sin is death,…. By sin, is meant every sin, original sin, actual sin, every kind of sin, lesser and greater: the “death” which sin deserves, is a corporeal death; which is not owing to the original nature and constitution of men; nor merely to the divine appointment; but to sin, and the decree of God, on account of it; which is inflicted on Christless sinners, as a punishment for sin, though not on believers as such, because Christ has took away the sting and curse of it: a death of diseases and afflictions also follows upon sin, as its proper demerit; which are properly punishments to wicked men, and are occasioned by sin in believers: there is a death of the soul, which comes by sin, which lies in an alienation from God, in a loss of the image of God, and in a servitude to sin; and there is an eternal death, the just wages of sin, which lies in a separation of soul and body from God, and in a sense of divine wrath to all eternity; and which is here meant, as is clear from its antithesis, “eternal life”, in the next clause. Now this is “the wages” of sin; sin does in its own nature produce it, and excludes from life; it is the natural issue of it; sin is committed against an infinite God, and righteously deserves such a death; it is its just wages by law. The Greek word , signifies soldiers’ wages; see Lu 3:14 and in

“At which time Simon rose up, and fought for his nation, and spent much of his own substance, and armed the valiant men of his nation and gave them wages,” (1 Maccabees 14:32)

Sin is represented as a king, a mighty monarch, a tyrannical prince; sinners are his subjects and vassals, his servants and soldiers, who fight under him, and for him, and all the wages they must expect from him is death. So the word is interpreted in the Glossary,

, “soldiers’ wages”; and so it is used by the Jewish writers, being adopted into their language; of a king, they say a, that he should not multiply to himself gold and silver more than to pay , which they b interpret by , “the hire of armies”, or the wages of soldiers for a whole year, who go in and out with him all the year; so that it denotes wages due, and paid after a campaign is ended, and service is over; and, as here used, suggests, that when men have been all their days in the service of sin, and have fought under the banners of it, the wages they will earn, and the reward that will be given them, will be death: and it is frequently observed by the Jewish doctors c, that

, “there is no death without sin”: sin is the cause of death, and death the fruit and effect of sin:

but the gift of God is eternal life, through Jesus Christ our Lord. These words, at first sight, look as if the sense of them was, that eternal life is the gift of God through Christ, which is a great and glorious truth of the Gospel; but their standing in opposition to the preceding words require another sense, namely, that God’s gift of grace issues in eternal life, through Christ: wherefore by “the gift of God” is not meant eternal life, but either the gift of a justifying righteousness, or the grace of God in regeneration and sanctification, or both, which issue in eternal life; the one is the saints’ right and title, the other their meetness for it: so that as death is the wages of sin, and is what that issues in, and brings unto, eternal life is the effect of grace, or what the grace of God in justifying and sanctifying his people issues in; even a life free from all sorrow and imperfection; a life of the utmost perfection and pleasure, and which will last for ever: and as the grace of God, which justifies and sanctifies them, is “through Christ”, so is the eternal life itself which it brings unto: this is in Christ, comes through his righteousness, sufferings, and death; is bestowed by him, and will greatly consist in the enjoyment of him. All grace is the gift of God, and is freely given, or otherwise it would not be grace; particularly the justifying righteousness of Christ is the gift of God; and the rather this may be meant here, since the apostle had been treating of it so largely before, and had so often, in the preceding chapter, called it the gift of righteousness, the free gift, and gift by grace, and justification by it, the justification of life, because it entitles to eternal life, as here: it may be said to issue in it; for between justification and glorification there is a sure and close connection; they that are justified by the righteousness of Christ, are certainly glorified, or enjoy eternal life; and though this may be principally intended here, yet is not to be understood to the exclusion of other gifts of grace, which have the same connection and issue: thus, for instance, faith is the gift of God, and not of a man’s self, and he that has it, has eternal life, and shall, Or ever possess it; repentance is a free grace gift, it is a grant from the Lord, and it is unto life and salvation; and on whomsoever the grace of God is bestowed, so as to believe in Christ for righteousness, and truly repent of sin, these shall partake of eternal glory. It may be observed, that there is a just proportion between sin, and the wages of it, yet there is none between eternal life, and the obedience of men; and therefore though the apostle had been pressing so much obedience to God, and to righteousness, he does not make eternal life to be the fruit and effect of obedience, but of the gift of the grace of God.

a Misn. Sanhedrin, c. 2. sect. 4. b Jarchi & Bartenora in ib. Vid. Cohen de Lara, Ir. David, p. 17. c T. Bab. Sabbat, fol. 55. 1. Vajikra Rabba, parash. 37. fol. 176. 3. Midrash Kohelet, fol. 70. 4. Zohar in Gen. fol. 44. 4. Tzeror Hammor, fol. 115. 1.

Fuente: John Gill’s Exposition of the Entire Bible

Wages (). Late Greek for wages of soldier, here of sin. See on Luke 3:14; 1Cor 9:7; 2Cor 11:8. Sin pays its wages in full with no cut. But eternal life is God’s gift (), not wages. Both and are

eternal ().

Fuente: Robertson’s Word Pictures in the New Testament

Wages [] . From oyon cooked meat, and later, generally, provisions. At Athens especially fish. Hence ojywnion is primarily provision – money, and is used of supplies for an army, see 1Co 9:7. The figure of ver. 13 is carried out : Sin, as a Lord to whom they tender weapons and who pays wages.

Death. “Sin pays its serfs by punishing them. Its wages is death, and the death for which its counters are available is the destruction of the weal of the soul” (Morison).

Gift [] . Rev., rightly, free gift (compare ch. 5 15). In sharp contrast with wages.

Fuente: Vincent’s Word Studies in the New Testament

1) “For the wages of sin is death,” (ta gar Opsonia tes hamartias thanatos) “For the wages (full, fair pay) of sin (is, exists in) death;” the final pay-off of inherent sin from Adam exists in death, Rom 5:12; Rom 5:14; Rom 5:17; as declared by James sin finished or mature brings death, even in infants, Jas 1:15; 1Co 15:55-56; Heb 9:27.

2) “But the gift of God,” (to, de Charisma tou theou) “but the Grace-gift (unmerited Charisma) of God; Without moral or ethical obligation the Holy, sinless, loving, merciful, compassionate God Voluntarily, freely, gave his holy Son as a Grace-Gift for redemption, Joh 3:16; Gal 4:4-5.

3) “Is eternal life,” (zoe aionios) “(Is) or exists as or in eternal life;” Joh 17:2-3; Joh 10:27-29; This kind of life, without cessation or end, is freely given to the one Who believes or trusts (once for all, wholly) in Jesus Christ, Joh 3:15; 1Jn 5:11; 1Jn 5:13; 1Jn 5:20.

4) “Through Jesus Christ our Lord,” (en Christo lesou to kurio hemon) “in Christ Jesus, our Lord,” or Master. This eternal life exists in his Son, Jesus Christ, 1Jn 5:11; Joh 17:21; 2Co 5:21; Rom 16:7; Gal 1:22.

ABSOLUTELY FREE

In Mexico those who sell bread often carry it in a large basket on their heads. As a Christian man left his bakery one day, he tucked his Bible under the white cloth, which covered the basket. As he walked along the street, he shouted, “Bread, bread.” “What kind of bread do you have?” asked a woman standing in a door. The baker replied, “I have bread that costs money and bread that is free!” ‘What! You have bread that you give away?” Without replying, the baker opened his basket, took the Bible from it and read this verse, “I am the bread of life: he that cometh to me shall never hunger.”

-W.B.K.

Fuente: Garner-Howes Baptist Commentary

23. For the wages of sin, etc. There are those who think that, Paul, by comparing death to allowances of meat, ( obsoniis ,) points out in a disparaging manner the kind of wretched reward that is allotted to sinners, as this word is taken by the Greeks sometimes for portions allowed to soldiers. But he seems rather indirectly to condemn the blind appetites of those who are ruinously allured by the enticements of sin, as the fish are by the hook. It will however be more simple to render the word “wages,” for surely death is a sufficiently ample reward to the wicked. This verse is a conclusion to the former, and as it were an epilogue to it. He does not, however, in vain repeat the same thing again; but by doubling the terror, he intended to render sin an object of still greater hatred.

But the gift of God. They are mistaken who thus render the sentence, “Eternal life is the gift of God,” as though eternal life were the subject, and the gift of God the predicate; for this does not preserve the contrast. But as he has already taught us, that sin produces nothing but death; so now he subjoins, that this gift of God, even our justification and sanctification, brings to us the happiness of eternal life. Or, if you prefer, it may be thus stated, — “As the cause of death is sin, so righteousness, which we obtain through Christ, restores to us eternal life.”

It may however be hence inferred with certainty, that our salvation is altogether through the grace and mere beneficence of God. He might indeed have used other words — that the wages of righteousness is eternal life; and then the two clauses would correspond: but he knew that it is through God’s gift we obtain it, and not through our own merits; and that it is not one or a single gift; for being clothed with the righteousness of the Son, we are reconciled to God, and we are by the power of the Spirit renewed unto holiness. And he adds, in Christ Jesus, and for this reason, that he might call us away from every conceit respecting our own worthiness.

Fuente: Calvin’s Complete Commentary

(23) The gift of God.The natural antithesis would be wages; but this would here be inappropriate, and therefore the Apostle substitutes the free gift. In spite of your sanctification as Christians, still you will not have earned eternal life; it is the gift of Gods grace.

Fuente: Ellicott’s Commentary for English Readers (Old and New Testaments)

23. Wages of sin The hire which the master Sin pays to his servants is death. And this death, the antithesis of eternal life, and measured in duration by it, is eternal death, death that knows no resurrection. The reverse, eternal life, the result of the service of Jesus Christ our Lord, is not a wages, but a free and bounteous gift. Sin well earns its reward, and so its reward is wages; but our service does not earn heaven so that heaven is a gratuity.

Fuente: Whedon’s Commentary on the Old and New Testaments

‘ For the wages of sin is death, but the free gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord.’

For the only wages that sin paid was death, and what lay beyond. That was the consequence of serving sin. But in contrast God’s free gift to His own was eternal life, a life which was found in Christ Jesus our LORD. Note the contrast between ‘wages’ and ‘free gift’. The one was earned, but the other was freely received without merit. It could not be earned whatever men did. It was abundantly given as a free gift under the reign of God’s unmerited love and favour (Rom 5:21). And it was wholly based on what Christ Jesus our LORD has done for us, and in the provision of His righteousness. Thus the life that he is now describing is a life based on the fact of being ‘accounted as righteous by faith’.

Fuente: Commentary Series on the Bible by Peter Pett

Rom 6:23. For the wages of sin is death The wages of sin does not here signify the wages which are paid for sinning, but the wages which sin pays. This is evident not only from the opposition which is here put between the wages of sin, and the gift of God; namely, that sin rewards men with eternal death for their obedience; but that which God freely gives to those, who, believing in Jesus Christ, labour sincerely after righteousness, is life eternal: but it farther appears by the whole tenor of St. Paul’s discourse, wherein he speaks of sin as a person and a master, who is served and obeyed. And so the wages of sin, being the wages of a person here, must be what it pays. We may observe, that sin pays death to those who are its obedient vassals: but God rewards the obedience of those to whom he is Lord and Master, by the gift of eternal life. Their utmost endeavours and highest performances can never entitle them to it of right; and so it is to them not wages, but a free gift. See Chap. Rom 4:4 and Locke.

Inferences.How groundless and injurious are all charges of licentiousness on the doctrine of justification alone by the free grace of God, through the infinite merit of Christ! Though no good works of our own bear any part in our justification before God, yet they stand in a close and necessary connection with it; and nothing can be more detestable than to continue in sin, that grace may the more abound in pardoning it. For how shall we who are by profession and obligation, and, if true believers, are in fact dead to sin, live any longer therein? This would be a flat contradiction to our baptismal engagement, and to all that was signified by it, and is answerable to it; would be absolutely inconsistent with our character, privilege, and duty as members of Christ, who have communion with him in his death and resurrection, and with all realizing views by faith of deliverance from sin and wrath, and of an advancement to eternal glory through him.How excellent is the effect of regenerating grace! it includes both a mortification of sin, that the old man may be destroyed, and spiritual quickenings to a holy and heavenly life, that we may walk before God with new principles and ends, and according to a new rule in imitation of Christ, and by virtue derived from his death and resurrection to the glory of God. How certainly may we judge whether sin or holiness has the ascendancy in our hearts and lives! Whichever of these we willingly yield ourselves up unto, that is the lord who rules over us. We all once were the servants of iniquity, as appeared by our choosing its works, obeying its dictates, and taking pleasure in violating every bond to holiness: but, blessed be God, true believers are moulded into the spirit of the Gospel, which, under divine influence, has a transforming efficacy upon them; they are set at liberty from the power of sin; they hate and abhor it, and by no means approve of it in any instance whatsoever; and they are become, in their very hearts, servants to God and righteousness. How concerned then should they be to live under a constant sense of what belongs to their state as Christians! They should reckon themselves to be intirely dead to sin, as those who have nothing more to do with it; but alive to God through Jesus Christ our Lord. And how great are their inducements and assistances to quit the service of sin for the service of God! Though they are still under the law as a law of life, they are not under it as a severe and impracticable covenant, nor under its curse; but are taken under the covenant of grace, which contains the strongest encouragements against sin’s recovering its dominion over them; and they are freed from the dreadful lordship of sin. What fruit has any one ever found worth having, in its ways and works, even while he was employed in them? They are matter of the greatest shame, and their just wages are all miseries unto eternal death. But there is a present pleasure in the ways of holiness; and its happy issue is everlasting life, not indeed as the wages of righteousness, but as the mere gift of God’s free grace, through Jesus Christ our Lord.

REFLECTIONS.The riches of the grace which he had displayed in the former chapter, the Apostle clearly foresaw would furnish objections against his doctrine, which he therefore states and obviates. What shall we say then? Is this a licentious doctrine? and shall we continue in sin, that grace may abound? God forbid: the Apostle rejects the thought with abhorrence, as the vilest abuse of this most blessed truth. How shall we that are dead to sin, live any longer therein? under its power and dominion: how inconsistent would it be with our character; how contrary to the obligations of gratitude and duty lying upon us; and how destructive of our peace and hope! Our very baptism represents our profession, and intimates to us the conversation becoming the name that we bear. Know ye not, that so many of us as were baptized into Jesus Christ, into the faith of his name, and obedience to his authority, were baptized into his death? that we should resemble him, dying to sin, as he died for it, and corresponding with his great design in suffering, which was to redeem us from all iniquity. Therefore we are buried with him by baptism into death; partaking of the benefits of his death; and, as a corpse laid in the grave, which ceases from the actions of life, so should we shew an abiding deadness to sin; that like as Christ was raised up from the dead by the glory of the Father, by his almighty power, even so we also should walk in newness of life, quickened by virtue derived from him, our head of vital influence; and having received a new nature, new principles, and new hearts from him, we are bound to shew forth to his praise, in all holy conversation and godliness, the real and universal happy change which is passed upon us to the praise of the glory of his grace. For if we have been planted together in the likeness of his death; engrafted into him, and one with him as the members of his body mystical, sharing in the blessed effects of his death, and experiencing its efficacy in separating our souls from sin, as death separated his body and soul; we shall be also planted in the likeness of his resurrection; quickened by his divine power, and enabled to walk before God in holiness: Knowing this, that our old man, that fallen nature derived from Adam and coeval with our very being, is crucified with him; so that in every genuine believer its condemning guilt is abolished, and its tyrannizing power is at least broken: for we know that Christ died, that the body of sin might be destroyed, that henceforth we should not serve sin; should no longer be the slaves of corruption as before; and that quickly its very being in us might be at an end. For he that is dead is freed from sin: as a man that is dead can have no farther claims laid against him, so if we are crucified with Christ, we are freed from the power and dominion of our former master. Now if we be thus dead with Christ, through an union with this crucified Saviour, and virtue thence derived; we believe and hope that we shall also live with him, quickened to a life of grace here, and shortly to be raised to a life of eternal blessedness and glory to reign with him in heaven.

From these glorious views which the Apostle sets before us of our union and communion with Christ in his death and resurrection, the Apostle proceeds to urge upon the faithful two things: (1.) That they should reckon themselves dead indeed unto sin; not only discharged from its condemning guilt, but delivered from its power and dominion, so as henceforward to have no more fellowship with the unfruitful works of darkness, ceasing from them as a dead man does from the actions of life. (2.) That they should reckon themselves alive unto God through Jesus Christ our Lord; quickened by his grace, as the divine principle, to newness of life, and engaged and inclined to live to his glory as their great end.

This being then the great privilege, dignity, and duty of believers, we are most powerfully urged to walk agreeably thereunto. Let not sin therefore reign in your mortal body, that ye should obey it in the lusts thereof. We are particularly called upon to deny the cravings of bodily appetite, by which the strongest temptations to sin enter; that, however beset, we may not yield obedience to the former lusts, in which we walked in the days of our ignorance. Neither yield ye your members, neither those of your bodies, nor the faculties of your souls, as instruments of unrighteousness unto sin, to war in that hateful cause, under so foul a captain: but yield yourselves unto God, as those that are alive from the dead, and your members as instruments of righteousness unto God, living henceforward for his glory and employing body, soul, and spirit in his blessed service, and to advance his kingdom and interests in the world, fighting under his banners, and faithful unto death.

But some man might object to this, that if this be the case, and we are no more under the law, we may live as we list. The Apostle prevents and refutes the objection: What then? shall we sin, because we are not under the law, but under grace? God forbid: this would be to act in opposition to the whole design of the Gospel salvation, and inconsistently, with all our professions as children of grace. For know ye not, that it is a truth obvious and incontestable, to whom ye yield yourselves servants to obey, his servant ye are to whom ye obey; whether of sin unto death, or of obedience unto righteousness? No man can serve two masters utterly contradictory in their commands. The servants of sin, who willingly surrender themselves to this tyrant’s will, must infallibly reap eternal death as the wages of their work; while the faithful servants of God are servants of obedience unto righteousness, his interests being thus perseveringly served and advanced, and their end is eternal life. According therefore to the service in which we are employed, we shew what master we serve, and to whom we belong. But God be thanked, that though ye were, in times past, the servants of sin, ye do not continue so; but ye have obeyed from the heart that form of doctrine which was delivered unto you; both in heart and conduct now cast into the mould of the glorious Gospel, and bearing all its amiable lineaments, in the most blessed and happy conformity to him who is the great Author of it, Jesus Christ.

Being then made free from sin, by the power of the eternal Spirit through the Gospel effectually operating to destroy the dominion, tyranny, and love of sin, ye became the servants of righteousness; discharged from the hateful servitude of iniquity, and entered into the service of a better Master, which is perfect freedom, the willing subjects of the holy Jesus, your rightful Lord and Sovereign. I speak after the manner of men, representing this matter under the familiar images of masters and servants, because of the infirmity of your flesh, the understanding being still dark, and most easily receiving spiritual ideas, when communicated under the veil of sensible objects. For as, in time past, ye yielded your members, both body and soul, servants to uncleanness and to iniquity unto iniquity, willing slaves to every vile affection, going from evil to worse, and fulfilling all the corrupt desires of the flesh and of the mind; even so now yield your members servants to righteousness unto holiness; let every member of your body and faculty of your soul be as freely, delightfully, constantly, and universally employed in the service of the blessed Jesus your Master, and in the practice of righteousness and true holiness, as by nature they were before engaged in the service of sin.

And surely the strongest obligations now lie upon you thus to walk in holiness: for when ye were the servants of sin, wholly devoted to its service, ye were free from righteousness; not from the obligations to it, which are immutable and eternal; but ye cast off all restraint, were utterly averse to the rule of righteousness, and boasted of liberty, when the most wretched slaves of corruption. And a moment’s reflection will now convince you of the misery of that state in which you lay; for what fruit had ye then in those things, whereof ye are now ashamed? did not the curse of sin follow you close as your shadow? did not the sting of it at times torment and make you miserable in the midst of your enjoyments? did not the very pursuits in which you were engaged involve you in trouble, disappointment, vexation? and were you not always unsatisfied; and did you not feel an aching void, which nothing that you possessed could fill? and with what shame, horror, and remorse, do you now reflect upon your past conduct! for, careless and thoughtless as you then were, you now know, that the end of those things is death eternal, which must have been your miserable lot, if you had not been plucked through divine grace as brands from the burning. But now being made free from sin, and become servants to God, since this blessed exchange of matters, ye have your fruit unto holiness, walking in that good conversation and godliness which brings glory to God, and is most comfortable to your own souls and the blessed end and issue of which to the faithful soul will be everlasting life: For the wages of sin, the accursed master whom ye formerly served, is death, including all miseries, both here and hereafter, of soul and body, and that to eternity: but the gift of God is eternal life, through Jesus Christ our Lord. Let us then examine ourselves, whether we be in the faith, and with deepest self-application consider what the Apostle has here advanced. Our everlasting hopes depend on our experience of these things. We most fatally deceive ourselves, if we talk of grace, and promise ourselves heaven, and live and die the servants of corruption.

Fuente: Commentary on the Holy Bible by Thomas Coke

Rom 6:23 . ] the wages . Comp 1Co 9:7 ; Luk 3:14 . , Theophylact. Comp Photius, 367. See Lobeck, a [1500] Phryn . p. 420. The plural , more usual than the singular, is explained by the various elements that constituted the original natural payments, and by the coins used in the later money wages.

The wages which sin gives stands in reference to Rom 6:13 , where the is presented as a ruler, to whom the subjects tender their members as weapons, for which they receive their allowance!

] as in Rom 6:22 .

. ] Paul does not say here also (“ vile verbum,” Erasmus), but characterizes what God gives for wages as what it is in its specific nature a gift of grace , which is no (Theodoret). To the Apostle, in the connection of his system of faith and doctrine, this was very natural, even without the supposition of any special design (in order it has been suggested to afford no encouragement to pride of virtue or to confiding in one’s own merit).

. . [1501] ] In Christ is the causal basis , that the . is eternal life; a triumphant conclusion as in Rom 5:21 ; comp Rom 8:39 .

[1500] d refers to the note of the commentator or editor named on the particular passage.

[1501] . . . .

Fuente: Heinrich August Wilhelm Meyer’s New Testament Commentary

DISCOURSE: 1850
MANS DESERT, AND GODS MERCY

Rom 6:23. The wages of sin is death; but the gift of God is eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord.

THE distribution of rewards and punishments in the day of judgment will be in perfect agreement with the works of men; the righteous will be exalted to happiness; the wicked be doomed to misery. The Gospel makes no difference with respect to this: it provides relief for the penitent, but rather aggravates than removes the condemnation of the impenitent. But it opens to us an important fact: namely, that the punishment of the ungodly is the proper fruit and deserved recompence of their own works: whereas the reward bestowed upon the godly is a free unmerited gift of God for Christs sake. The Apostle has been shewing, throughout this whole chapter, that the Gospel increases, instead of relaxing, our obligation to good works; and that it will avail for the salvation of those only who have their fruit unto holiness: but in the text he assures us, that they who are saved will be saved by mere grace; whereas they who perish will perish utterly through their own demerit.
In the words before us, we have a short, but accurate, description of,

I.

Mans desert

By death, we must understand everlasting misery
[It is a truth that temporal death was introduced by sin: but that cannot be the whole that is meant by the Apostle in the text, because the death procured by sin stands in direct opposition to the life which is bestowed by God, which is expressly said to be eternal. By death therefore we understand an everlasting banishment from Gods presence, together with a suffering of his vengeance in eternal fire.]
This is the penalty that is due to sin
[It is in vain that people endeavour to soften down the expressions of Scripture upon this subject, and to substitute annihilation for misery. Our blessed Lord, in his account of the judgment-day, declares that he himself, as the Judge of quick and dead, will doom the wicked to a participation of the misery inflicted on the fallen angels, and that their punishment shall be of the very same duration with the happiness of the righteous [Note: Mat 25:41; Mat 25:46. See also Mar 9:43-48.].

Nor is this more than the real desert of sin. The word we translate wages, means provisions [Note: .], which in the earlier part of the Roman empire constituted the only pay of soldiers: and it must be confessed that a soldiers pay, at the best, is but a very moderate compensation for the dangers and fatigues of war: his wages are certainly no higher than justice demands. Thus the penal evil of damnation is no more than a just recompence for the moral evil of sin: it is the wages due to sin.

It is worthy of remark also, that this awful doom is not spoken of as the penalty of many or of great sins, but of sin, of every sin, whether great or small. Every transgression of Gods holy law is sin [Note: 1Jn 3:4.]; and, though all sins are not of equal malignity, there is not any sin which does not deserve Gods wrath and fiery indignation, or against which an everlasting curse is not denounced [Note: Gal 3:10.].

How terrible then is the desert of every man, of the more moral and decent, as well as of the immoral and profane! for all have sinned, and come short of the glory of God; and therefore all are obnoxious to the punishment of sin.]
Let us now turn our thoughts to a more pleasing subject, namely,

II.

Gods mercy

Notwithstanding our ill desert, God has tendered to us everlasting life
[He is not willing that any should perish, hut that all should come to repentance and live. He has opened the gates of heaven, and invited sinners of every description to enter in. Nor has he required any thing to be done in order to purchase an admittance into it: he offers it freely, as a gift to all who will accept it. His invitation is to all who wish for it, to those also who have no money, to come and receive it at his hands without money, and without price [Note: Isa 55:1.]. In this he has strongly marked the different grounds of a sinners condemnation, and a saints acceptance. Misery is awarded to the one, as wages earned; and happiness is conferred upon the other, as a gift bestowed. Indeed our minds must be humbled: and we must be willing to accept salvation as a gift: for, if we carry any price whatever in our hands, we cut ourselves off from all hope of obtaining the desired blessing [Note: Gal 5:2; Gal 5:4.].]

This gift however is bestowed only through the Lord Jesus Christ
[All possibility of regaining happiness by the covenant of works was prevented by the very terms of that covenant: in token of which, the way to the tree of life was obstructed by a fiery sword [Note: Gen 3:24.]. But another, and a better way, is opened to it through the Lord Jesus Christ, by whom we may have boldness, and access with confidence into the presence of our God [Note: Heb 10:19-20.]. Through him, as a Mediator, God can exercise mercy towards us in perfect consistency with his own honour; and through him, as the appointed channel, God will convey to us all the blessings of grace and glory. But then he expects that we come to him through Christ, and receive his blessings from Christ: for, as there is no other way unto the Father but through the Son [Note: Joh 14:6.], so neither is there any way of obtaining from the Father, but by receiving out of the fulness which he has treasured up for us in Christ Jesus [Note: Col 1:19. Joh 1:16.].]

Address

1.

Those who are living in any allowed sin

[We will suppose you are free from any gross immoralities; but that you are neglecting the great concerns of your souls, or attending to them with only a divided heart. Consider then, I beseech you, what you are doing: you are earning wages every day, every hour, every moment: whether you think of it or not, you are earning wages, and the day of reckoning is near at hand, when they shall be paid you by a just and holy God. Every act, every word, every thought is increasing the sum that shall be paid you: and who can calculate the amount of a debt which has been increasing with awful rapidity from the first moment that you began to act? Yes, you have been doing nothing throughout your whole lives, but earning wages that shall be paid you to the full, or, in other words, treasuring up wrath against the day of wrath [Note: Rom 2:5.]. Consider, if the desert of one sin is death, What must be your desert, whose sins are more in number than the sands upon the sea-shore? Reflect on this, while there is an opportunity of cancelling the debt, and while the mercy of God can be extended to you. But remember, that you must not attempt to discharge the smallest part of this debt yourselves: if you take but one single sin upon you, you must suffer death for ever. Go therefore to Christ, and through him unto the Father: go with the guilt of all your sins upon you; cast yourselves entirely upon the mercy of your God; plead nothing but the merits of his dear Son; and look for the mercy of our Lord Jesus Christ unto eternal life [Note: Jude, ver. 21.].]

2.

Those who have obtained mercy, and deliverance from sin

[Numberless are the considerations which should excite your gratitude for the mercies you have received. Consider the greatness of the guilt that has been forgiven you; the riches of the glory which has been conferred upon you; the freeness with which it has been bestowed; and, above all, the means which have been used in order that you might be partakers of these benefits, even the appointment of Gods only-begotten Son to be your dying Saviour, and your living Head. Consider these things, I say, and then judge what ought to be the frame of your minds. What an abhorrence should you have of sin! What gratitude should you feel towards that God who exercised such mercy towards you, and towards that adorable Jesus, through whose mediation alone it could ever have been communicated! Stir up yourselves then to render unto God according to these benefits; and exert yourselves to the uttermost to glorify him with your bodies and your spirits, which are his [Note: 1Co 6:20.].]

Fuente: Charles Simeon’s Horae Homileticae (Old and New Testaments)

REFLECTIONS

Reader! let us both learn from this most blessed Chapter, how to answer the character, of every description, who ventures, from the pride or corruption of his heart, to charge the doctrine of free grace with a tendency to an unholy life. Never, surely, were the motives to an upright and conscientious conversation ever found in the least powerful or persuasive in the soul, until brought home to the soul, in the death of Christ. And the child of God, who is dead with Christ, baptized into Christ, and buried with Christ, in his death; cannot but feel from the Holy Ghost, an implanted conformity to the likeness of Christ, so as to bear part with Christ in his resurrection, and walk in newness of life. And, what dominion shall sin have over that soul in whom the Holy Ghost dwells, that the body of sin might be destroyed, that henceforth we should not serve sin? What shall tend to mortify the deeds of the body, but living in the Spirit, and walking in the Spirit? Blessed Spirit of holiness! give grace thus to live, and walk, that we may manifest to all gainsayers, thy people are dead to sin, and cannot live any longer therein!

But oh! thou precious Lord Jesus! while seeking daily, hourly, grace from the Holy Ghost, to adorn the doctrine of God my Savior, in all things: never, never, for a moment may my soul forget, that the whole, and every part of redemption-work, and redemption glory, is thine. God be thanked that we were the servants of sin. And that the whole Church, both in heaven and earth, are brought out of this prison-state, is all of grace. And do thou, dearest Lord, cause me to, have my redemption by thee, always in remembrance! May my soul be more and more humbled to the dust before thee, that my God and Savior may be more and more exalted. Through life, in death, and forevermore, be it my joy to acknowledge, that there can be no wage mine, but the wages of sin, which is death: and all the Lord bestows, even eternal life, with all its preliminaries can only be the free, the sovereign, the unmerited gift of God, through Jesus Christ our Lord.

Fuente: Hawker’s Poor Man’s Commentary (Old and New Testaments)

23 For the wages of sin is death; but the gift of God is eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord.

Ver. 23. For the wages of sin ] The best largesse or congiary ( ) that sin gives to his soldiers is death of all sorts. This is the just hire of the least sin. a The Jesuits would persuade us, that some sins against which the law thundereth and lighteneth, are so light in their own nature, Ut factores nec sordidos, nec malos, nec impios, nec Deo exosos reddere possint. (Chemnit. de Theol. Jesuitar.) But as there is the same roundness in a little ball as in a great one; so the same disobedience in a small sin as in a greater. Indeed there is no sin little, because no little God to sin against. Every sin hales hell at the very heels of it.

a , Nazianzen

Fuente: John Trapp’s Complete Commentary (Old and New Testaments)

23. ] The ends of the two courses placed pointedly and antithetically, and the inherent difference, that whereas death (see above) is the wages ( . = pay, or ration, of soldiers; compare the similitude in Rom 6:13 , and remarks there) of sin, earned and paid down, eternal life is no , nothing earned, but the free gift of God to His soldiers and servants; and that in (not ‘through,’ true enough, but not implied in , see above on Rom 6:11 ) Christ Jesus our Lord.

Fuente: Henry Alford’s Greek Testament

Rom 6:23 . The introduces the general truth of which what has been said of the Romans in Rom 6:21 f. is an illustration. “All this is normal and natural, for the wages of sin is death,” etc. 1Ma 3:28 ; 1Ma 14:32 . The idea of a warfare (see , Rom 6:13 ) is continued. The soldier’s pay who enlists in the service of sin is death. : but the free gift, etc. The end in God’s service is not of debt, but of grace. Tertullian (quoted in S. and H.) renders here donativum (the largess given by the emperor to soldiers on a New Year’s Day or birthday), keeping on the military association; but Paul could hardly use what is almost a technical expression with himself in a technical sense quite remote from his own. On . . , see on Rom 5:21 .

Fuente: The Expositors Greek Testament by Robertson

wages = rations. Greek. opsonion. Only here, Luk 3:14. 1Co 9:7. 2Co 11:8. In Luk 3:14 the “wages” are the fish ration issued to Roman soldiers. Compare Rom 6:13.

gift. App-184.

eternal. App-151.

Jesus Christ. The texts read “Christ Jesus”. App-98.

Fuente: Companion Bible Notes, Appendices and Graphics

23.] The ends of the two courses placed pointedly and antithetically, and the inherent difference, that whereas death (see above) is the wages (. = pay, or ration, of soldiers; compare the similitude in Rom 6:13, and remarks there) of sin, earned and paid down,-eternal life is no , nothing earned, but the free gift of God to His soldiers and servants;-and that in (not through,-true enough, but not implied in , see above on Rom 6:11) Christ Jesus our Lord.

Fuente: The Greek Testament

Rom 6:23. , ) The mark of the subject.–, wages-gift) Bad works earn their own proper pay; not so, good works; for the former obtain wages, the latter a gift: , wages, in the plural: , a gift, in the singular, with a stronger force.

Fuente: Gnomon of the New Testament

Rom 6:23

Rom 6:23

For the wages of sin is death;-All death comes as the result of sin. Death and suffering of the body come as the result of sin; but the death spoken of here means the spiritual and eternal death in the future. He who sins will receive the wages of sin-eternal death.

but the free gift of God is eternal life-The gift which God in his abundant mercy bestows is eternal life. It is the gift of God. None can give it, none can earn it; he gives it to those who accept it on the condition he prescribes. Those conditions are such as show, and still more cultivate, the trust in God that fits the character for eternal life-for a life with God in his home forever. To fit and prepare mortals for this home is the end of all the teachings and requirements that God has given man. He does not require of us service because he needs it, but because we need the schooling and training that service will give us.

in Christ Jesus our Lord.-[Christ Jesus and his gospel, then, instead of being the ministers of sin, as their opposers so confidently asserted, effectually secure what the law never could accomplish, in obedience, consisting in sanctification and resulting in eternal life.]

Fuente: Old and New Testaments Restoration Commentary

sin

Sin. (See Scofield “Rom 3:23”).

Fuente: Scofield Reference Bible Notes

The Wages and the Gift

For the wages of sin is death; but the free gilt of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord.Rom 6:23.

1. The whole Gospel is summed up in this contrast. What we are by nature; what we should have come to, if we had been let alone; what we shall come to if we let ourselves alone: on the other hand, what we are by grace; what God has done for us, and in whom; and where it is to be sought, and how it may be found: all these things are contained in this brief verse.

2. Paul delights in contrasts. In these words there are three contrasts, and these may be looked at briefly in the light in which modern thought more clearly displays them.

(1) There is a Contrast of CharacterGod and Sin. While in the preceding passage Paul has personified sin and righteousness, he here retains only the personification of sin, and gives us, instead of the personification of righteousness, a personality. This is significant. Although the writers of the New Testament do recognize and assert the existence and the activity of a personality whose being and whose work is wholly evil, yet it would be the contradiction of a theistic position consistent with itself to contrast God and Satan in a passage such as this. The ideal of righteousness is necessarily and eternally personal. But as evil has no ideal, so it is the negation and extinction of personality. As Lotze has truly and nobly argued, God alone is perfect personality; and men become truly and fully personalities as they approach to God. Personality is self-consciousness, self-control, and self-completeness; and good alone can have these marks. Evil constant, consistent, complete, is deception, division, and despair; and the being in whom evil is altogether divorced from good must be impersonal. It may have intelligence, desire, and purpose of a sort, but not such as constitute true personality. Accordingly, although it would be an anachronism to ascribe to Paul any such reasoning, yet it is very significant that here he does not contrast God and Satan, a contrast that would have been rhetorically more complete, but doctrinally less comprehensible.

(2) There is a Contrast of ConnexionWages and Gift. The former term suggests desert, necessity, inevitableness; the latter generosity, spontaneity, initiative. Sins result is according to law: Gods act is of grace. The death in which bad men find their desert is necessary, inevitable, under moral law; but the life wherewith good men are blessed is not the wages of their goodness, but a generous and spontaneous expression of Gods grace. Mans conscience does undoubtedly testify that there is this necessary and inevitable connexion between sin and death; and mans religious consciousness as clearly testifies that it is no necessary, inevitable consequence of his deeds that brings the good man perfection and blessedness. The ethical inquiry of the present century confirms the Apostles conviction of the inevitableness of the consequences of sin. Modern fiction lays stress on hereditary transmission of evil, on the fixity of evil habits, on the certainty of social retribution, and the irresistible and inevitable process of moral deterioration. Then, on the other hand, more cautious thinkers and exponents of the evolutionary process are led to recognize that the higher stages are inexplicable by the lower. Matter does not account for life, nor life for mind. Progress demands at various stages a divine initiative. This is what religious experience lays stress upon. The higher life of perfection and blessedness is not explicable by mans intellectual, emotional, moral faculties and attainments. It is the gift of God. This stage in mans progress demands a divine initiative to explain and account for it. Thus the process of moral deterioration does not demand the divine intervention, does not require for its explanation a personal action; whereas the progress of moral development does demand the divine initiative, is explicable only as the act of God.

(3) There is a Contrast of ConditionLife and Death. This contrast is not merely in the physical sphere; eternal life and eternal death do include physical life and physical death, but their significance is not exhausted thereby. To those who believe that the physical is but preparatory for, symbolical of, the spiritual, there will be no difficulty in realizing and asserting that physical life and physical death are spiritually significant, prophetic, and interpretative. But the physical is only of subordinate significance. The essential characteristics of eternal life and eternal death are spiritual. And here religious thought is richly illustrated, and assuredly confirmed, by biological research. We are learning constantly that the disuse or abuse of any organ results in its deterioration, and finally in its, if not total extinction, yet reduction to impotent, rudimentary form; while the exercise of an organ is the condition of its development. Eternal death may then be regarded as the atrophy or abortion of mans spiritual faculties; while eternal life is their development in perfection by their normal exercise. Thus the thought of the Apostle is no rhetorical conclusion of an argument, but is a truth that is being proved, by the advance of mans knowledge and the growth of his thought, ever more significant and valid.

I

The Wages of Sin is Death

i. Wages

1. The word here rendered wages is the same as is used in Scripture for a soldiers pay. Be content with your wages (Luk 3:14), was the charge of John the Baptist to the soldiers who asked of him their duty. Who goeth a warfare at any time at his own wages? (1Co 9:7), that is, for pay furnished by himself, was St. Pauls question to those who would grudge to a minister of the Gospel his right to live of the Gospel. But, whether in its application to the pay of a soldier or to the wages of a servant, the whole point of the expression lies in this, that certain work done has a right to certain remuneration.

Love wore a threadbare dress of grey

And toiled upon the road all day.

Love wielded pick and carried pack

And bent to heavy loads the back.

Though meagre fed and sorely tasked,

One only wage love ever asked

A childs white face to kiss at night,

A womans smile by candlelight.

This is wagesthe wages of love. The wages of sin, in like manner, will be the remuneration which sin gives for work done in its service.

2. Sin is an employer of labourthe most extensive employer which the world contains. He pays wages, is bound by strong law to pay wages, to every one who works for him. It is true he does not pay in full as the work goes on. He does not clear off the whole debt, as it stands, at the end of the week or month or year. The kind of wages is unfavourable to this. Nevertheless, employer and employed are strictly upon the wages system. Every hour of labour becomes a debt of the master, and is kept record of, and will be recompensed by him in due course if the system holds as between the worker and him. He means to be just; he has no thought of evading the wages law. But he only pays enough, meanwhile, to assert the principle of connexion between his servants and himsmall instalments, petty sums of earnest-money, which are of the nature of wages, and are part of the wagestill all the work is done. Done? Well; when the earthly phase of the bargain has passed, when the sun of mortal life has set and the night of the day of time has come, he then reckons with his workers.

A certain tyrant sent for one of his subjects, and said to him, What is your employment? He said, I am a blacksmith. Go home, and make me a chain of such a length. He went home: it occupied him several months; and he had no wages all the time he was making it. Then he brought it to the monarch, who said, Go and make it twice as long. He brought it up again; and the monarch said, Go and make it longer still. Each time he brought it, there was nothing but the command to make it longer still; and, when he brought it back at last, the monarch said, Take it, and bind him hand and foot with it, and cast him into the furnace of fire. These were the wages of making the chain.1 [Note: D. L. Moody.]

3. But the very instalments Sin pays even nowdo these convey no hint of the kind of recompense he engages to give in the end? What is he openly paying at this hour? When he is generous in his present payments, it is no winsome recompense that goes from his hand; it is disorder, loss, calamity, disease, sorrow, fear, discontent, hatred, treachery, remorse, rapid running down of moral tone. Even when he is least profuse in his present payments, what are his workers receiving?uneasy forebodings of the future, unanswered achings of the soul, mockings of the spirit with the chaff of sense and time, the heart shut dark against the sunshine of Gods fatherliness.

Shall I ever forget a visit which I paid to a drunkards home, a man who had sunk from an honourable position in the State and the Church? There he was, a wreck of his former self. In vain I pleaded with him to give up the drink. No, he said, not if it means bell. I cannot, he added, I have not the power. I am not my own master. As I entreated him to be manly, to put his trust in God, and seek to conquer his passion, his daughter entered the rooma beautiful girl. Man, I said, you are a coward. If you will not give up drink for your own sake, give it up for your childs. I cannot, he answered, I cannot. As I left him I realized the truth of the Apostles words, The wages of sin is death, and resolved, by Gods grace, to speak without fear concerning the power and penalty of evil.1 [Note: C. E. Walters.]

ii. Sin

1. Sin is a word of wide import. We can all assent to the truth of the statement before us, if it be restricted to the case of great excesses of wrongdoing; to the case of the dishonest, the intemperate, the grossly profligate, who reap the fruit of their evil deeds in bodily disease or in civil punishment. Great cause indeed have such persons to say to themselves, In serving Sin, I have served a very just master. For each one of my dishonest acts, for each one of my sinful lusts, Sin, my master, has given me a definite and a very exact equivalent. I squandered my money in riotous living, and I have come to penury. I neglected my health, I despised the warning of the physician, I deemed myself exempted from the common conditions of the bodily frame; and I am now a wreck of what I was, every organ disarranged, and my whole existence a burden and a curse.

2. But, though less obviously, it is not less really true, in reference to cases far short of criminal excess. We see it in the way in which Sin pays in kind. A man neglects prayer, neglects his Bible, neglects the Sunday, once: that is sin; it is a contradiction of the known will of God. He supposes himself free to resume any of these intermitted habits when he will: he is his own master, he thinks, and what he has to-day willed one way, he may to-morrow will the other. But Sin is standing over him, and mocking his vain calculations. He has done a piece of work for Sin to-day, and Sin will pay him his wages in inclining him to do the same to-morrow. To-morrow the voice of inclination will be stronger and the voice of conscience weaker, and thus he will do again as he has done once, and find it far less difficult and at the time feel far less remorseful.

3. Paul does not say, the wages of great sins, or the wages of some sins, or the wages of certain sins; he simply says: The wages of sin, of any sin, of all sins, of the least sin, is death. A single sin, however insignificant it may appear, brings guilt of death; as St. James writes: Whosoever shall keep the whole law, and yet offend in one point, he is guilty of all. The man who has broken one link in the chain of the commandments is guilty of breaking the chain.

I was in the offices of the Southern Pacific Railway in San Francisco, when the General Passenger Agent asked me if I had seen the big trees of California. I informed him that I had seen them as I looked from the car window the day before, and smiling he said, Then you have not seen them, for they must be studied to be appreciated. Calling for his secretary, he stretched out before me a measuring line. On the one side was his affidavit in which he said, I have measured one of the big trees of California. Its circumference is 105 feet, its diameter 35 feet, and the height was to me so amazing that I hesitate here even to suggest it. Then he said to me, How large would you think the seed of a big tree might be? and when I suggested that it ought to be of enormous size, he poured out into the palm of his hand a number of these little seeds, and they were smaller than a lettuce seed. So it is with sin. An evil imagination encouraged, an impure thought harboured, an unholy ambition controlling us, and the work is begun, but the end no human tongue is able to describe.1 [Note: J. W. Chapman.]

iii. Death

1. The wages of sin is death. This is true in every sense in which the word death is used in Scripture.

(1) It is true of natural death. Though not the wages of individual sin in all who undergo it, yet even natural death, the death of the body, is the consequence of sin. But for sin, there would not have been death, at any rate as we are acquainted with it. Every funeral which passes us in our streets, every loss which occurs in our families, should remind us of sin; and, though it be not the punishment of the particular sin of him who dies, yet it should awaken in our hearts the remembrance of sin generally, and of our own individual participation in that universal defilement.

(2) But natural death is the least part of sins wages. Natural death, if that were all, might be for us, as it has been, we believe, for countless thousands, the gate of life. It is otherwise with the second kind of death, spiritual death; the death of the soul. If the life of the soul be union with God, the death of the soul is separation from God.

(3) The full payment is a third kind of death mentioned in Scripture; what is there called the second death (Rev 2:11; Rev 20:6; Rev 20:14; Rev 21:8). It would be presumptuous, as well as most painful, to dilate upon that which is thus described. But many hold that it is the consummation, the certain and inevitable consummation, of a life spent on earth either in sin or without God; the state into which entrance is given by the reunion of a dead soul with its reanimated body; the state of one who would not have God for his Father, and died in that refusal, and whose day of grace has at last issued in darkness.

We know but little of the meaning which must fill this word so full of all that is calamitous. Our minds cannot compass the dark dimensions of the word as they appear to the omniscient Mind who here and elsewhere gives abundant sanction to its use as a vivid figure of speech. For we may need to remember that the death of what is mortal (as we say) is scarcely more than the metaphor of Deathis little else than the most fitting symbol of Death, the most characteristic step in the dreary march of Death, that our ignorance permits us to know. And we see that this death of what is mortal, this mere symbol, is the most terrible thing within our earthly experience. We acknowledge it to be the thing which casts the deepest of all our shadows. We can tell that the gloom of this shadow is a gloom of tears, of unavailing prayers, of bitter partings, of a confronting universe of mysteries and dreads. We can recall the shock which thrills us like an earthquake when it leaps with sudden grasp upon a brother-man at our side. And when it approaches with slowest step, it seems to leave the prints of its feet upon our memories as if it had trodden over them with brandings of fire:the chamber of hushed voices and anxious ministries, the nights of watching, the pain you cannot soothe, the conflict you can only witness, the closed eyes from which the light has gone out, the wending funeral, the stricken home. Such are the marks of death, as it is known even to the living.1 [Note: J. A. Kerr Bain.]

2. To make the antithesis in this verse more striking and evident, St. Paul has left out the verb in each clause of it. Perhaps you may think that if our translators supplied a verb, they might as well have put it in the future tense as in the present. They might have said, The wages of Sin will be Death, not is Death. The gift of God will be Life, not is Life. I suspect they were quite right. They would have destroyed the force of the words, and their connexion with those which precede them, if they had given this form to their version. And what is more, they would have destroyed the connexion between the Apostles language and our own daily experience. St. Paul is not telling us of some time when the Righteous God will call us to account for the sins which we have committed, and will inflict death as the punishment of them. He is contemplating the subject from a point of view altogether different. He says that every man has two masters, either of whom he may serve, but one of whom he must serve. He may be the servant of Sin; then he must take its wages. They are slavery and death. He may be the servant of Righteousness; then he will have all the freedom, energy, life, he is capable of.2 [Note: F. D. Maurice.]

Again and again, in my ministry, I have witnessed the misery which comes to the mere pleasure-seeker, to those who sow their wild oats and reap a terrible harvest. With all the strength God has given me I warn the young men and women who are listening to me, against making pleasure their god. As I speak, there comes to me the memory of one of the worlds victims, whom by Gods grace I was able to help. I happened to be preaching in one of the halls of the West London Mission, when I was impressed by the sad and cynical face of a young man in my congregation. At the close of the service, I made my way to the door, determining, if possible, to speak to him. When I did so, he answered me somewhat rudely. I told him I was glad he was at the service. I didnt come here to listen to you preaching, was the answer. I came because it was raining. Oh, I said, I dont mind why you came. If you knew the kind of fellow I am, said he, you would kick me out of the hall. No, I answered, we do not usually dismiss the congregation in that fashion. The hardened look went. My words had not failed. He came into my private room and told me a pitiable story. The son of godly parents, he had come to London, like so many, determined, above all else, to enjoy himself. He had indulged in pleasure of the lowest kind. He was shattered in mind and body. Dont talk to me about hell, he said, I have been there. And he was only twenty-three years of age.1 [Note: C. E. Walters.]

II

The Free Gift of God is Eternal Life in Christ Jesus our Lord

i. Free Gift

1. God does not give wages. He gives something far better: for who has made God his debtor? When we have done all that is commanded usand when will that be, for any man?at last we must say, We are unprofitable servants: we have done that which it was our duty to do (Luk 17:10). God has a right to our entire obedience: if ever it were entire, still there would be nothing over; no room for claims of merit, or for rewards of extra service.

2. Just in the same way as Paul, who had no other means of support, was compelled, like most of us, to earn a wage if he was to live, so the soul by nature is compelled, for lack of spiritual resource, to serve sin, for its wage of death. Man must serve; his only choice being which of two masters he will serve, Satan or Godsin or righteousnesshe cannot serve both, as is plainly taught throughout this sixth chapter of Romans. And just as the loving gift of the Philippians released Paul from this necessity to work for the tent-makers wage, and set him at liberty to give himself up entirely to the preaching of the Gospel, so acceptance by man of the gift of eternal life in Christ Jesus, which God freely offers to all, alone liberates him from the bondage of serving sin, and, at the same time, gives him strength to serve God, wherever he goes, by preaching the Gospel from the living epistle of a regenerate life.

3. The word used by the Apostle (charisma) means more than gift; every gift is not a charisma; a charisma is a free gift, a gift of grace, a gift in which all merit on the part of the receiver is unthought of, and only the free, spontaneous love of the giver is revealed. And it is so, Paul declares, that the eternal life, the life which is life indeed, comes from God to man. The Gospel was to Paulto borrow a convenient distinctionnot good advice, but good news; it told, first of all, not of something to do, but of something done. No word indicates more clearly the whole drift of Pauls thinking on this matter than the word grace. By grace are we saved; and grace speaks not of the doing of man, but of the giving of God. Salvation is not a hard-won wage paid by the just Overseer of life; it is the bounty of love, the gift of grace.

If there is one truth which God has of late helped me to see for myself it is this. Of course, I have always believed in what we call salvation by grace, as distinguished from salvation by works; but never until the last few months has the truth really lived for me. For years, like so much, alas! of ones theology, it has lainto use the words of a great writerin that dim twilight land that surrounds every living faith; the land not of death, but of the shadow of deaththe land of the unrealized and the inoperative. And now that it is beginning to emerge from the darkness I want others to stand by my side, that, if possible, we may see together the truth that made glad the heart of Paul. I do not speak as a theologian, but as a Christian man to Christian men, eager with them to know the blessedness of eternal life.1 [Note: George Jackson.]

4. Not at the outset of the regenerate life only, and not only when it issues into the heavenly ocean, but all along the course, the life eternal is still the free gift of God. Let us now, to-day, to-morrow, and always, open the lips of surrendering and obedient faith, and drink it in, abundantly, and yet more abundantly. And let us use it for the Giver.

I heard a well-known preacher relate his experience. For long years he had prayed that he might realize abundant life in Christ. He had often agonized and sought this gift from God, but without avail. One day, as he travelled in a railway train, he was thinking about this wonderful gift. It happened that there was, as he journeyed, a great downfall of rain, the rain beating ceaselessly against the carriage windows. He said, I looked out of the window, and as we passed a farmhouse I noticed a number of vessels placed outside to receive the welcome rain. Some were large, others were small; but both large and small received the rain. I said to myself, The gift of life has been outpoured by God. When Jesus ascended on high He granted gifts unto men. I may receive that gift, unworthy as I am, even as the noblest and most saintly may receive it. 1 [Note: C. E. Walters.]

5. What are the advantages of receiving eternal life as a free gift?

(1) One advantage is the Gladness that accompanies it. Why is it that so many of us have so little gladness in our Christian life? Is it not just for this very reason that we have put self instead of God at the centre of it? We have talked and lived as if the whole responsibility of our salvation rested on our own weak shoulders. And since, naturally enough, we doubt our own strength, we are never sure, never at rest; even our joy has the worm of fear busy at the heart of it. I am persuaded that I am able to keep We dare not say that; and as we never knew the Apostles noble faith, He is able to keep, we are without any persuasion at all; and instead of a ringing certainty, we have only a ghastly fear or, at best, a tremulous hope.

You have seen the little engraving that adorns the title-page of Dora Greenwells beautiful books: a hand grasping a cross, and about it this motto, Et teneo et teneor, I both hold and am held. Alas! that so many of us have rent the motto in twain. We remember that we must hold, but we forget that we are also held, held of God. Let us speak no more as if ours were a religion without God; let us remember that when we have not strength even to cling, He still holds us; let us dare to believe that Jesus meant what He said when of His sheep He declared, No one shall snatch them out of my hand.

Let me no more my comfort draw

From my frail hold of Thee,

In this alone rejoice with awe

Thy mighty grasp of me.1 [Note: G. Jackson.]

May nevermore a selfish wish of mine

Grow to a deed, unless a greater care

For others welfare in the incitement share.

O Nature, let my purposes combine,

Henceforth, in conscious unison with thine,

To spread abroad Gods gladness, and declare

In living form what is for ever fair

Meekly to labour in thy great design,

Oh, let my little life be given whole!

If so, by action or by suffering,

Joy to my fellow-creatures I may bring,

Or, in the lowly likeness of my soul,

To beautiful creations countless store

One form of beauty may be added more.2 [Note: George MKnight.]

(2) Another advantage is that it opens the way to Progress. Why is it, again, that we make so little progress in the Christian life? Why is our love, our trust, so dwarfed and stunted? Again, is not the answer the same? Self is at the centre where only God should be. But the soul never grows by the contemplation of itself. Love cannot be forced like some hot-house plant. It must be set in the light and sunshine of love; then it springs up of itself. Trust grows in the presence of the wholly trustworthy. Therefore, Look unto me, and be ye saved, must be the law of all our life.

Lord of the howling wastes of life,

Where evils watch for prey,

And many a sacred gleam of good

In shadow dies away,

Borne on by Thee in paths unknown,

Well may we trust Thy hand alone,

And suffer angels of Thy own

To shield us as they may.

Revealer of a heaven encamped

Whereer Thy servants go,

By ministries of love to each,

That none beside may know,

By wings at many a pass outspread,

By winning joy and warning dread,

We learn the word which Thou hast said,

The truth which Thou wilt show.1 [Note: A. L. Waring.]

ii. God

1. How un-Jewish it is to say that the gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus! The characteristic of the God of Judaism was the fact that He was incommunicable. He was self-existent, self-contained, absolutely self-sufficient. He dwelt in a region apart. His deepest nature had never been revealed to mortal eye; no man could see Him and live. The essential feature of His relation to humanity was the vastness of His distance from it. He could speak to man only through the medium of imperative command; and His communications required to be conveyed through the agency of intermediate intelligences. Such a view of God left no room for a conception which implied the communication of the Divine to the human. It would have repudiated the Pauline idea that God could present a gift of Himself, could make His own creatures the sharers in His essential life. Such a thought was the very antithesis of Judaism; yet it is the leading thought of the passage before us.

2. If eternal life is a gift of God it is not a work of man. According to St. Paul, eternal life is not a refinement; it is a renaissance. It is not the product of discipline, but the issue of birth. It is not an upper standard, but a regenerated order. Nowhere can you find a suggestion of a gradient leading by perceptible stages from the human to the Divine. There is no sloping stair, whose topmost step brings us to the shining tableland, to which our God Himself is moon and sun. The man who has eternal life, and the man who has it not, occupy two different planes, and the passage from one to the other is by a process not of gradual consummation, but of immediate re-creation.

That we can be schooled and cultured into eternal life is certainly the basis and trend of many mens reasoning. Life to them, in all its human range, would be imaged in a column of Aberdeen granite which stands in the museum of the University of Edinburgh. The column is of one unbroken piece, but it is arranged in ascending sections to represent the different processes and stages through which the granite passes, from the quarry to the polished issue. The pedestal is rough, jagged, and primitive, just as it left the quarry, bearing all the marks of the blasting. And then follow layer upon layer, each succeeding one being subjected to a more rigid discipline than its predecessor, until every uncouthness is left behind, and all its wealthy and exquisite veins are discovered in the refined and shining issue. And that, I say, is how many people reason about eternal life. Eternal life is just common life perfected. Common life is the rough-hewn block; eternal life is the same block, chastened and refined. The two do not represent a change of substance, they represent differences effected by labour and culture.1 [Note: J. H. Jowett.]

iii. Eternal Life

There are many words with which we have been so long and so intimately familiar that we never pause to ask ourselves what we mean by them. They form the basis of our reasoning, but, like the foundations of a building, we do not notice their depth or structure; nay, for this very cause that they do underlie our common discourse, we cannot without a special effort gain any true idea of them. Now life is such a word as this. We all use it and argue about it, but can we explain it?

Think for one moment of the infinite chasm between life and nothingness. On this side there is the glow of health, the consciousness of bodily vigour, the full exuberance of strength and spirits: on that a dreary void. On this side there is the keen sense of the countless joys with which the earth is filled, the glad delight in sunshine and beauty, the rich treasures of a creative mind: on that a dreary void. On this side there is a marvellous power of traversing the whole world in a moment, of holding communion with all the noblest and the best of men, of rising with the chorus of angels even to the throne of God: on that still the same dreary void. Whichever way we turn we see within us a crowd of powers and feelings which minister to our happiness and quicken our susceptibility; and the sum of thesethis treasure beyond all treasureswe call life.2 [Note: B. F. Westcott.]

1. The life which we have in Christ is eternal life. That word eternal answers to some idea fixed in each of our souls, and we need not try to define it. It is enough that our own experience teaches us how vain it is to measure hope and joy, fear and sorrow, by days and years, and not by the intensity of their working. And so Holy Scripture tells us of no change, no succession, no time, in the world to come. The sun and moon and starsthe measures of our earthly periodsshall have passed away, and all shall exist at once in the immediate presence of God.

Wherever there is eternal life there is some apprehension of God: perhaps I should have expressed it better had I said there is some appreciation of God, some awareness of His all-encompassing Presence. When our Saviour says, This is life eternal, to know Thee!I do not think the primary content of the word is mental illumination, although that will most assuredly be in the shining train; but it fundamentally refers to the intelligence of sympathy, the correspondence of kinship, if you will, the telepathic communion of spirits, attuned to the same key.1 [Note: J. H. Jowett.]

2. Life eternal is so to be developed hereafter that Scripture speaks of it often as if it began hereafter; but it really begins here, and develops here, and is already abundant (Joh 10:10) here. It is not merely the manifold delights with which the New Jerusalem shall be filledthose streets of gold and songs of angels and deep visions of the universe. If we truly live, these will be ours: but we must gain life first. The sun would shed no gladness on a corpse. Music would wake no echo in the dead. And this is Life Eternal, that we may know the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom He has sentGod has quickened us together with ChristChrist is the Life, and they who are in Him shall live for ever.

There was one who said to me a little while ago, concerning a loved one who had been brought back to him after a long and troubled absence: Even when I am at my desk, and immersed in my labour, theres a singing consciousness at the back of it all that she is in the home again! That singing apprehension of a presence, in absorbing labours and in relaxing hours, is symbolic of the apprehension which is theirs who know the Lord. This is life eternal, to know Thee, to appreciate Thee, to have a singing consciousness that everywhere, in spheres of labour and rest, the Lord is in the house! Because he is at my right hand! That is the apprehension of God. When I walk through the valley of the shadow of death I will fear no ill, for thou art with me. That is the apprehension of God; the singing basal consciousness that the Lover is in the house! It is deep calling unto deep; it is the sympathetic vibration of those who partake of the same nature, and that nature is Divine.1 [Note: J. H. Jowett.]

It will not meet us where the shadows fall

Beside the sea that bounds the Evening Land;

It will not greet us with its first clear call

When Death has borne us to the farther strand.

It is not something yet to be revealed

The everlasting lifetis here and now;

Passing unseen because our eyes are sealed

With blindness for the pride upon our brow.

It calls us mid the traffic of the street,

And calls in vain, because our ears are lent

To these poor babblements of praise that cheat

The soul of heavens truth, with earths content.

It dwells not in innumerable years;

It is the breath of God in timeless things

The strong, divine persistence that inheres

In loves red pulses and in faiths white wings.

It is the power whereby low lives aspire

Unto the doing of a selfless deed,

Unto the slaying of a soft desire,

In service of the high, unworldly creed.

It is the treasure that is ours to hold

Secure, while all things else are turned to dust;

That priceless and imperishable gold

Beyond the scathe of robber and of rust.

It is a clarion when the sun is high,

The touch of greatness in the toil for bread,

The nameless comfort of the Western sky,

The healing silence where we lay our dead.

And if we feel it not amid our strife,

In all our toiling and in all our pain

This rhythmic pulsing of immortal life

Then do we work and suffer here in vain.2 [Note: P. C. Ainsworth, Poems and Sonnets, 9.]

iv. In Christ Jesus our Lord

The free gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord. That is where we are to seek and find the inheritance, in Christ Jesus our Lord. And this is the reasoning of the sacred word, that eternal life is in the Son. The life that was in Jesus was of the eternal order, and of that sort of life the risen Lord is the reservoir and fountain. Get the music of these three great passages: In him was life; I am the life; He that hath the Son hath life. So what we have got to do in order to get our legacy is to get the legator Himself. He that hath the Son hath life. The free gift is in Christ Jesus our Lord. We need trouble about nothing else except to become one with the Lord. Having him we possess all things. If we become one with Him, His life becomes ours.

1. The gift from God of eternal life is not merely through Christ Jesus (as in the Authorized Version), it is in Christ Jesus. What a mystery is this, that we, poor and weak and sinful as we are, can ever be incorporated into Christthat in Him we can, again, be made living souls inspired by Gods Spirit; and more wonderful still that while we are yet on earth this mighty change can be realized. But it is so written for our learning, and let us rejoice with all reverence while we believe that we may live in Christ as very members of His body; that we may claim as ours the righteousness which He has wrought, the sorrow which He has suffered. At the same time, we must remember that there is a fearful contrast to all this. The Christian has eternal life now only so far as he is one with Christ, and to be cut off from Him, to be without Him, to know Him not, that is real deathdeath more terrible than our darkened minds can understand at present.

Is it a matter of indifference whether we say the free gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus or through Christ Jesus? To me, I confess, it makes a fundamental difference in the whole conception of Christianity whether we regard life as something which Christ has won for us apart from Himself, or something which is absolutely bound up with Himself, and realized only in vital fellowship with Him. And I shall hold ten years of life well spent [as one of the Revisers] if I have been enabled to help in any degree in bringing this thought home to English-speaking people in years to come. The phrase represents, if you please, a Hebrew idioma Hebrew mode of conception. What then? It was the mode of conception which God was pleased to choose for conveying His truth to the world. Let it, then, be carefully guarded. Let it be faithfully rendered. Let it be offered to our common people, that they may, by patient reflexion, grasp the fulness of the lesson.1 [Note: B. F. Westcott.]

Christ, the Wisdom and the Power!

From our labours fleeting hour

To that timeless age of bliss

Which shall crown the toil of this,

Grant that all our life may be

Hidden and revealed in Thee.

That our work may be divine

Seek we not our own but Thine;

Lost to self and found in Thee,

Find we sweet Humility,

Zeal by reverent Love refined,

True Devotions single mind.

So in Thee we shall be strong,

Seem the labour light or long;

And, though clouds of self and sin

Darken round us and within,

So not dimly shall we see

Light to lighten all in Thee.2 [Note: S. J. Stone, Poems and Hymns, 262.]

2. What is required of us that we may receive the gift in Christ?

(1) Belief. And what is belief? It is not the suppression of reason. Belief is the exaltation of the noblest hypotheses to the throne of the life. To believe in Christ is to take the sublimest assumptions and make them the principles of our soul. To believe in Christ is to take the highest we know and to allow it to govern all that we do. To believe in Christ is to venture our life on the assumptions of Christ. Do you know anything higher, nobler, more glorious, than the assumptions of Christ? To believe is to accept them, to venture on them, and to venture in the assurance that the highest is always the truest and best. He claims to be able to convert destructive remorse into a constructive penitence. He claims to be able to take the virus out of a poisoning guilt. He claims to be able to put dynamic into feeble and struggling virtue. He claims to be able to weld the complexities of life into unity, and to convert its discords into harmony. He claims to be able to take the alienated and embattled individuals of the race, and out of the scattered and hostile fragments to create a brotherhood. This is what our Saviour claims to do. To believe is to let Him do it, and to offer ones life for the sacred experiment!

(2) Obedience. Belief involves obedience. In these high regions no one can become free without first becoming a slave. But the servitude is not irksome; it is sweetened and glorified by its issue. We must die to self if we would live to God! That is where so many of us fail. We are seeking kinship with the Divine, and we will not surrender ourselves to its blessed ministry.

I lived for myself, I thought for myself,

For myself, and none beside;

Just as if Jesus had never lived,

As if He had never died.

3. And what do belief and obedience bring us?

(1) They bring us power. We share the Divine powerpower over sin, and strength to lead a holy life. HeJesuswas absolutely pure in a world of darkness. In Christ we may conquer sin.

If we study the lives and writings of the highest types of Christian men we shall find that they are characterized by two things. One is the depth of their sense of sin. St. Paul, St. Augustine, the author of The Imitation, John Bunyan, Samuel Rutherford. This note characterizes them all. But there is another. It is their sense of the all-sufficiency of Christ as a Saviour from sin. When, again, we study the life of Christ we find that it is characterized by two thingsHis consciousness of His own sinlessness; and His sense of His power to take away the sin of others.1 [Note: W. Martin.]

(2) They bring us the calm assurance of life everlasting. I am the Resurrection and the Life, said Jesus; he that believeth on me, though he die, yet shall he live; and whosoever liveth and believeth on me shall never die (Joh 11:25). In Jesus, death is robbed of its horror, and the grave of its victory. We fall asleep just as a weary man, who, harassed by business and daily cares, flings himself on the bed at night and sleeps; and as he awakens with new energy to the new life of the morrow, so we, worn-out and tired, or called to a higher service, fall asleep in death, to awaken to the morning of a never-ending day. Ah! how glorious is this truth when, with sad hearts, we stand by the open grave in which we have laid a loved one to rest. Then we are able to say:

And with the morn those angel faces smile

Which I have loved long since, and lost awhile.

If I were told that I must die to-morrow,

That the next sun

Which sinks should bear me past all fear and sorrow

For any one,

All the fight fought, and all the short journey through,

What should I do?

I do not think that I would shrink or falter,

But just go on

Doing my work, nor change, nor seek to alter

Aught that is gone;

But rise and move, and smile, and pray

For one more day.

And lying down at night for a last sleeping,

Say in that ear

Which hearkens ever, Lord, within Thy keeping

How should I fear?

And when to-morrow brings Thee nearer still,

Do Thou Thy will.

I might not sleep for awe, but peaceful, tender,

My soul would lie

All night long; and when the morning splendour

Flashed oer the sky,

I think that I could smile, could calmly say,

Welcome His day.

But if a wondrous band from the blue yonder

Held out a scroll,

Upon which my life was writ, and I with wonder

Beheld unroll

To a long centurys end its mystic clue,

What should I do?

What could I do, O blessed Guide and Master,

Other than this

Still to go on as now, not slower, faster,

Nor fear to miss

The road, although so very long it be,

While led by Thee?

Step by step, feeling Thee close behind me,

Although unseen;

Through thorns, through flowers, whether the tempest hide Thee

Or heavens serene,

Assured Thy faithfulness cannot betray

Thy love decay.

I may not know, my God; no hand revealeth

Thy counsels wise,

Along the path no deepening shadow stealeth,

No voice replies

To all my questioning thought, the time to tell,

And it is well.

Let me keep on, abiding and unfearing

That will always,

Through a long centurys ripening fruition,

Or a short days.

Thou canst not come too soon, and I can wait

If Thou come late.

The Wages and the Gift

Literature

Armstrong (W.), Five-Minute Sermons to Children, 63.

Arnold (T. K.), Sermons preached in a Country Village, 112.

Bain (J. A. Kerr), For Heart and Life, 121.

Bowen (W. E.), Parochial Sermons, 38.

Campbell (R. J.), New Theology Sermons, 112.

Chapman (J. W.), Another Mile, 33.

Grimley (H. N.), The Temple of Humanity, 139.

Jackson (G.), Table-Talk of Jesus, 99.

Kuegele (F.), Country Sermons, i. 262.

Maurice (F. D.), Lincolns Inn Sermons, ii. 194.

Patton (W. J.), Pardon and Assurance, 58.

Smellie (A.), In the Secret Place, 311.

Tyng (S. H.), The Peoples Pulpit, New Ser., iv. 269.

Vaughan (C. J.), Epiphany, Lent, and Easter, 405.

Vaughan (J.), Sermons (Brighton Pulpit), x. No. 802.

Walters (C. Ensor), The Deserted Christ, 61.

Westcott (B. F.), Village Sermons, 250.

Christian World Pulpit, lii. 182 (Antram); lxxviii. 262 (Martin).

Churchmans Pulpit, pt. ii. 332; pt. xxvii. 478, 486, 490, 495, 500; pt. lxxix. 315.

Clergymans Magazine, New Ser., ii. 52 (De Teissier); 3rd Ser., xi. 305 (Irving).

Examiner, April 5, 1906 (Jowett).

Expository Times, v. 428 (Garvie).

Fuente: The Great Texts of the Bible

For the wages: Rom 5:12, Gen 2:17, Gen 3:19, Isa 3:11, Eze 18:4, Eze 18:20, 1Co 6:9, 1Co 6:10, Gal 3:10, Gal 6:7, Gal 6:8, Jam 1:15, Rev 21:8

but the: Rom 2:7, Rom 5:17, Rom 5:21, Joh 3:14-17, Joh 3:36, Joh 4:14, Joh 5:24, Joh 5:39, Joh 5:40, Joh 6:27, Joh 6:32, Joh 6:33, Joh 6:40, Joh 6:50-58, Joh 6:68, Joh 10:28, Joh 17:2, Tit 1:2, 1Pe 1:3, 1Pe 1:4, 1Jo 2:25, 1Jo 5:11, 1Jo 5:12

Reciprocal: Gen 6:17 – shall die Gen 12:13 – Say Num 27:3 – died in his Psa 37:18 – their Psa 133:3 – even life Pro 10:16 – the fruit Pro 12:28 – General Pro 19:6 – and Isa 54:17 – the heritage Zec 3:4 – I have Mat 19:16 – eternal Mat 25:46 – the righteous Mar 10:17 – eternal Mar 10:30 – eternal Luk 12:32 – the kingdom Luk 20:38 – for all Joh 3:15 – eternal Joh 4:15 – give Act 10:43 – through Act 15:11 – that Rom 5:15 – and the gift Rom 6:11 – through Rom 6:21 – for the Rom 8:6 – to be carnally minded Rom 8:13 – ye live Rom 8:32 – how 1Co 15:21 – by man came also 1Co 15:56 – sting 2Co 1:20 – all 2Co 9:15 – his 1Ti 1:16 – believe 2Ti 1:1 – the promise Heb 9:15 – eternal Jam 1:17 – good

Fuente: The Treasury of Scripture Knowledge

THE WAGES OF SIN

The wages of sin is death.

Rom 6:23

The judgment of God once rested, says the Apostle, upon all the world, and that judgment was expressed in death. It is quite clear that the word has for St. Paul a peculiar significance. It was to his mind much more than the separation by one sharp wrench of the spiritual and the physical; it was much more than the entrance through a seemingly dismal portal into destinies invisible and unknown; and it was much more than the casting-off of this mortal body with all its limitations and incapacities, all its frailties and weaknesses, all its temptations and trials.

I. To St. Paul death, as he here represents it, was the culmination of a condition which man had known throughout all the years of his lifethe condition of alienation from God. The wages of sin was the breach of communion with God, and this breach of communion was a veritable death. It was death now; it implied death hereafter. Man because of his sin lived in alienation from the Divine Righteousness, and the culmination of that state of alienation was the loss of everlasting life. Death, as here conceived by the Apostle, was a process rather than a momentary experience. It was a state which enveloped man throughout his mortal career. Just as for the Christian eternal life commences here and now; so for the man estranged from God St. Paul thought of death as having already its beginning. The actual dissolution was the climax of that statethe climax in which all the consequences of estrangement found their full meaning. The idea of death could for St. Paul reach out to the experiences of this present world. It could equally cover the experiences of a life to come. Such a life, if lived apart from God, lived in the awful shadow of His wrath, lived in the darkness of completed spiritual separation, was undeserving of the name. An existence of that kind was really deathdeath in all the fullness of its religious significance. The man who was now without hope of eternal blessedness, though he might have all that this world could give him, though he might come in no misfortune like other folk, though he might be exalted with the Herods or enthroned with the Csars, was dead. The man who lost eternal blessedness, though consciousness might continue so as to enable him to suffer and endure, though his personality might be interminable, though his existence might be prolonged for ever, was dead. Such was the death which had passed unto all men, for that all sinned. Such was the death by which by the trespass of one the many died. Such was the death which hitherto had reigned through the One. Such is the death which is the wages of sin.

II. And yet God spared not His Son the spiritual agonies which were inseparable from death as the wages of sin.Whatever may be the explanation of the atonement which approximates most nearly to the truthwhether we consider it to have consisted in a penalty paid, in a measure vicariously, by the Head of humanity in satisfaction of human indebtedness, or whether we see in it chiefly the overpowering testimony of the Son of God to the real meaning of moral evil, or whether we interpret it as the offering of that perfect penitence of which only perfect righteousness was capable, yet that Christ died as one Who was made sin, as one Who gave Himself a ransom for many, is a doctrine which can only be denied upon a widespread repudiation of the testimony of both Apostles and Evangelists. And it is in this aspect of His death that we find the solution of that mystery at which we just glancedthe mystery of His horror of the Cross, and of His sense of forsakenness as He hung there. It was because death as endured by Him was to stand in that terrible intimacy of relation to human transgression that He shrank from it as from a cup too bitter for Him to drink, and that as He drank it His mind went back to the despairing cry of the Psalmist. Hethe Crown of the human race, in Whom all life had been summed up through the Incarnation, Who was perfectly and completely that which each one of us is only partially and fragmentarily, Who gathered our human existence into His own Divine person, Who was man ideally and representatively, Who was the Son of Man, Who was the Word made fleshmet death as the wages of the sins of those whose nature He took upon Himself in the infinity of His love. Looked at from this point of view we can understand the deep and awful anguish which overcame Him in that garden under the dark shadows of the trees, amid the interrupted moonlight. We can understand, too, in part that cry of exhaustion as He sank closer and closer to the endthat cry which only some caught, of which others heard only the first word and understood to be an appeal to Elijah, the expected forerunner of the Messiah. Sin implied necessary estrangement from God; and this consciousness of necessary estrangement was then upon Him Who bare the sin of manynay, the sin of alland Who in that death of deaths made intercession for the transgressors.

III. Calvary, as the Gospels depict it, was the outcome of sin.To this end, awful enough in its external horrors, yet more awful in its spiritual significance the sins of the world brought Him Who for us men and our salvation came down from heaven. And let us remember with fear and tremblingremember in those hours when sin is pleasant and welcome, when temptation bears us almost unresisting along, when we are disposed to call gross wickedness by soft names, when we are inclined to rebel against the sterner verdicts of good men or the warnings of our own consciencesthat the wages of sin, sin unrepented of, sin for which we have never found or sought forgiveness, sin of which the stain and defilement still remain, is now, as in old days, death. There is such a thing as missing our salvation. There is such a thing as making the Cross of Christ of none effect. There is such a thing as being lost in an ever-deepening estrangement from God. Scripture speaks to us of the fate of the wicked only in figures; but they are figures from which we recoil in dismay. Christ can save us if we will let Him. But He cannot save us against our will. What is our view of sin? What are the eyes with which we look upon our own sins? What are the scales with which we weigh them? Have we ever said to ourselves, said with all the earnestness and solemnity of which we are capablesuch earnestness and solemnity as we might employ to warn ourselves against some impending earthly disasterThe wages of those sins of mine is death; death now and death hereafter? It is not easy to pass these verdicts of self-condemnation. Excuses rise so readily to the lips. But when such self-condemnation tarrieswhen we are inclined to pass some mitigated judgment upon the faults and vices of which we have been guiltylet us go back in thought to all of which this day is commemorative, and remember where and how we have been shown the terrible significance of sin.

IV. The wages of sin! We need never pay them.Shrouded in perplexity as the doctrine of the reconciliation of God and man, through Him Who was both God and Man, may be, yet we know and are sure that God offers us for His sake the free gift of eternal life. The atonement has been made. The expiation has been offered. There is now no condemnation to them that are in Christ Jesus. Death may indeed be to us, apart from Christ,

The power of the night, the press of the storm,

The post of the foe.

But in Christ, with His might to help and sustain us, with His grace to aid our weakness, with the power of His victory to uphold and strengthen us, the night will be night no longer, the storm will have become a calm, the foe will have lost his terrors. The time must indeed come, sooner or later, for each one of useven for the youngest of us it cannot be so very far offwhen

The journey is done, and the summit attained,

And the barriers fall.

But we will not add that a battles to fight before the final recompense is enjoyed. We will rather say that far back in the centuries a battle was fought once for allsuch a battle as the world never before beheld and will never see again, the battle of battles, the battle between salvation and deathand that the triumph, unspeakable and unthinkable, the triumph for ever and ever, was with Him Whose brethren we are, with Him Who was tempted in all points as ourselves, with Him Who was despised and rejected of men, Who poured out His soul unto death and was numbered with the transgressors, with the Son of Man. We may be more than conquerors in Him. Be of good cheer. I have overcome the world. The sting of death is sin, and the power of sin is the law; but thanks be to God Which giveth us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ.

Rev. the Hon. W. E. Bowen.

Illustrations

(1) It has been said that the suffering of a few hours, however severe, would be a small price to pay for the salvation of a world. Yes; but it was not in its physical sufferings that the full bitterness of that death consisted. Those sufferings by themselves appeal to us. We are moved and subdued by some representation of the mere externals of the Passion. Many will call to mind a story told by Canon Liddon, in one of his sermons, of a German nobleman who was converted from a life of religious indifference by a picture of Christ upon the Cross with the words attached to it, This I did for thee; what hast thou done for Me? But it was not in those external miseries, horrible as they were, not in anything that the eye can recall or the imagination conjure up, that the sting of death consisted for the Lord of Glory.

(2) How far death, as we know it, bears in its familiar outward circumstances traces of the results and effects of sin is a speculation with which we may occupy ourselves, but to which it is obvious that there can be no certain answer. That this life would be inadequate, even if prolonged indefinitely; that there is in it an element of incompleteness which needs fulfilment; that art and literature, painting and music, the beauties of the sunset, the roseate hues of early dawn, mountain peak and silver stream, sea and lake, copse and glade, forest and plain; that all these with their several interests and wonders need a life beyond, where they will be found in perfectionthis is a thought which Browning has done so much to impress upon us in his Easter Day. This mortal must always have put on immortality. And yet the one clear call to that other world might have come amidst surroundings of which the beauty would have been realised and acknowledged by all. Death need have come not as the Arch-Fear, but as the friend of friends. But the advent of death is something very different. Death may be accepted with resignation; it may be received with hope and confidence; it may be anticipated with courage; it may be looked forward to with a sense of relief; it may be faced with faith. But death is a dread ordeal. It is accompanied by circumstances which cannot be avoided and the nature of which cannot be forgotten. How far are these circumstances the results, directly or indirectly, of the coming of sin? It is, as I have said, a question without an answer. We can scarcely conceive of death as stripped of certain characteristics; but we cannot, on the other hand, forget that once in the annals of the world death came to One Who was without sin, and that God did not give His Holy One to see corruption.

(SECOND OUTLINE)

THE SENSE OF SIN

Why did Jesus Christ come into the world? We are told in words of unmistakable clearness that this is a true saying and worthy of all men to be received, that Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners. The Bible history starts with the history of the Fall of the human race, and proceeds to work out the need for redemption, and the answer to that need in the coming of Jesus Christ.

I. The reason why men and women are losing hold of the religion of Jesus Christ is thisthat they are losing their sense of sin.They lead a life in which sin is admitted, courted, and caressed. They do not wish to part with it; they do not recognise its burden or realise its guilt. Why should they seek a Saviour from that from which they do not wish to be saved? The life which so many live now who call themselves Christians has no room, no place, for that. It is not the true life, the highest life, the best life. They must live very fast, and give themselves no time to think; they must ask others to pronounce them happy and to give them the sanction of approval which their own conscience refuses to give. It is to the interest of the average man that Christianity should not be true. Sin is an ugly word; punishment is a disagreeable thought; eternal punishment is intolerable. Christianity, it is quite true, has nothing to say to the average man, and the average man is, therefore, labouring to have nothing to say to Christianity. We need not be surprised, while men and women live as they are living now, that they turn away from Christ, and say, We will not have this Man to reign over us. We need not be surprised that they have no difficulty in finding men who persuade them that religion is an affair of the mind and not of the heart, that Christ is a great teacher and nothing else, that His revelation is to the wise and prudent, that we walk by sight and not by faith, that the highest power is criticism, and that the ultimate standard of all truth is the self-consciousness of the individual, and that it does not matter which we believe as long as we are in earnest.

II. What the world needs is to recover the sense of sin, and in recovering the sense of sin it will recover its sense of need for a Saviour, and in finding its Saviour will learn to lay hold once more of that life of faith and that life of obligation which enables a man not merely to imitate an ideal which he imperfectly grasps, but to become himself the son of God, and to rise to the fullness of his being and the greatness of his heritage. It is impossible to study progress unless we first study the mystery of sin. Because if we believe what God has told us, sin represents a wrong attitude towards the world. Our path to perfection lies in following out the Will of God, and, as of old, the sense of that Will is subject to the eclipses which are brought on by desire, by temptation, by disobedience, by the lawlessness which is the Bible conception of sin, which abuses this world instead of using it, and turns the things which should have been to our wealth into an occasion of falling. Have you any real sense of sin? Do you really feel that you need a Saviour? Have you found such a Saviour in Jesus Christ? These are momentous questions, and it is because men turn away from them that they are taking up with a lower life which ought not to be, in which undetected sin warps their whole character and spoils it. It is because men do not feel the need that they allow the foolish cleverness of the age to take away Christ and to disparage religion.

III. Sin is unnatural, and ought not to exist within us.And sin brings nothing with it but misery wherever it is found, and is the enemy of progress and the degradation of the human race. The Bible, of course, is persistent in this estimate of sin. It sets before us in unswerving fidelity the consequences of that fatal choice made by our first parents to follow desire instead of duty, and inclination instead of God. But we have another testimony still, and that is the testimony of human language. In human language we have crystallised for us the testimony of experience, which gathers itself up into a single wordsignificant, eloquent, monitory; capable of giving up its meaning to those who will interrogate it. Sin is the offence, the blow, the bar to civilisation. They were right who first called it by that name; and sin itself, whenever we take the word on our lips, speaks to us of injury. When we speak of faults we speak of those dread flaws and cracks which remain even in the case of forgiven sin; wickedness tells us of its bewitching fascination; evil carries with it a sense of injury; iniquity of a failure in moral rectitude. You will never induce Christian men, if you can judge by the testimony of their language, ever to acquiesce in that estimate of sin which represents it as a tender and graceful defect, inevitable, irresistible, and to a great extent the result of causes which cannot be resisted.

IV. And we may say with reverence that because God knew this He sent His Son into the world to be our Saviour.Christianity is not merely one among the religions of the world, which a progressive criticism is to reduce to the limits which our sublime understanding is willing to accept. Christianity is a necessity; Christianity is a matter which concerns our salvation. Christ is our Saviour, and if He is our Saviour it means that we need His salvation. The wages of sin is death; this is as true of the nation as of the individual. The road to progress is the road of Christianity. The road to ruin is the road of human wilfulness. To each and to all of us Christ makes His great appealWilt thou be made whole? For the gift of God is eternal life, through Jesus Christ.

Rev. Canon Newbolt.

Illustration

Nature in a lower animal and nature in a man are to this extent different things. An animal in following nature follows its impulses and desires, guided by instinct, which controls and regulates him at every turn. And this will be seen more clearly in the case of animals in their natural state before they are brought under the cultivation and training of man. But for a human being to follow nature is to bring all his desires, impulses, and passions under the guidance of reason, and to submit, in its turn, reason to the illumination of the Spirit, which is his point of contact with God. If a man forgets this, and mistakes animalism for nature, see what follows. He loses at once, or very speedily, his position as a man. The passions rebel against the will, and reason feebly protests, and the spirit has been silenced. The will totters on its throne, and you see that most piteous of all sightsa human being degraded beyond the degradation of any other living thing, an ungoverned and ungovernable derelict on the rough tide of the world, a degraded being bitterly conscious of its own degradation, a being endowed with free will enslaved to passion and fettered in its freedom, and powerless to exert the commanding force of the will. If the plea of nature degrades our humanity, so the plea which says, I cannot help it enslaves it under an intolerable bondage. I am free, and I know that I am free, and no one yet, who has not bowed his neck beneath the bonds of deadly habit, has been able to say, when he sinned, that he could not help it, or has felt that it was impossible for him to have acted otherwise than as a puppet in the hands of an invisible player, hid behind the veil of his origin.

(THIRD OUTLINE)

WHAT IS SIN?

The most critical part of the whole subject is this: What is sin? Every ones conscience can answer it, for we all know when we sin; indeed, it would not be sin if we did not, for sin is what is against conscience, only we must take care to remember we are responsible for our consciencefor an enlightened conscience.

I. Sin is any violation of Gods will, or word, which a man does with his eyes open.We can make no scale of sin. All scales of sin are arbitrary and false. The only measure of the sin is the light which it darkens and the grace which it resists. An allowed bad temper at home, pride and unkindness, want of truth, self-indulgence and sloth, lust and uncleanness, meanness, covetousness, which is idolatry, a cherished scepticism, and all the negativesno prayer, no love to God, no usefulness, all, and many else, are equally sin.

II. Every sin has its wage; and the devil is the paymaster.He promises, indeed, very different wages from what he gives. He promises the gay, and the affectionate, and the satisfying. But God has drawn up the compact, and He has shown it to you, and if you enlist in the service of sin, you never can say you have not read it; you have known it from your infancyThe wages of sin is death.

III. Concerning these wages, it will strike you, at once, that the expression implies that there is a deliberate engagementa title, and a true and horrid title it is! You have a right to your wages. A servant can claim his wages, and the master must give them; for whosoever sins is an employed one, though he does not see it; he is doing his employers work. Let me tell you what it is.

(a) First, to destroy your own soul;

(b) Then to spread a contagion, and hurt others souls, so to increase your masters kingdom, and give him another and another victim!

(c) Is that all? No, it is not half. To insult Godto grieve the Holy Ghostto rob Christ of a jewel. That is the work which every one who sins is doing for his employer.

IV. What are the wages?Separation. Even in this life, little by little, the separation from the good and the pure will yet widen. A very small time you will spend upon your knees. Good thoughts will be almost strangers. The Bible will be a thing put farther and farther aside. Gulfs will come in between you and God. They will become deeper. It will be very difficult to keep them back again. And out at that distance, the soul will have got very cold; heavenly things will wither! But it is not over. There is a great deal unpaid yet. Perhaps there will come a separation unmitigated by any real hope of a reuniona separation from the holy, and the loving, and the loved: to go outwhere? To the unknown! to the drear! to a land of darkness! No voice in the valley! no arm in the crossing! And, then, separation for everirretrievable! Separation from that father of yours, that mother, that husband, that wife, that child, that saint, that church, that happy fellowship, that God! Separation! Eternal punishment? Yes. This is the eternal punishmentseparation! I want no more. For the wages of sin is death.

Rev. James Vaughan.

Illustration

We are judged now, and we shall be judged hereafter, according to the honest resistance we have made, and not because we are more or less corrupt from the beginning. I may be fenced about with wickedness from my earliest years; oaths perhaps my first utterances; indecency before my eyes in foul and degrading habitations; my earliest habits immoral; until the mercy of God finds me out and shows me all this is bad and contrary to His will and commandment. I may then, with strong resolution, begin an entirely new course, embracing virtue with my whole heart, and renouncing utterly what I before did ignorantly, and none of those things shall be remembered any more. But if I begin the old practice over again, and deliberately swear, and become intemperate, or filthy, that relapse will be a thousand times farther removed from pardon than the shameful record of former years.

Fuente: Church Pulpit Commentary

:23

Rom 6:23. Wages is from OPSONION which Thayer defines, “a soldier’s pay, allowance.” It denotes, therefore, that a life devoted to the service of sin will earn or merit the wages of death. Not physical death, for all have to go through that, but the second death, designated in Rev 21:8. Eternal life is a gift, because it is impossible for any man to earn such a treasure by his own service.

Fuente: Combined Bible Commentary

Rom 6:23. For. The reason for the results stated in Rom 6:21-22, contrasting the ends of the two courses and the inherent difference.

The wages of sin, that is paid by sin. Possibly a continuation of the figure of military service.

Death, as in Rom 6:21.

But the gift of God. The same word is rendered free gift in chap. Rom 5:15-16. Paul does not say wages here also, but characterizes what God gives for wages, as what it is in its specific nature,a gift of grace….. To the Apostle, in the connection of his system of faith and doctrine, this was very natural, even without the supposition of any special design (Meyer).

In Christ Jesus our Lord. Not simply, through Him. The phrase qualifies the whole clause. In phrases like this there seems to be a propriety in the order Christ Jesus, emphasizing His Messianic (or mediatorial) title. In Him, by virtue of his relation to Deity, God is the giver; in Him, we, as united with Him, having an interest in Him, are recipients (Webster and Wilkinson).

Fuente: A Popular Commentary on the New Testament

The apostle having all along throughout this chapter exhorted us to die daily unto sin, and to live unto God, concludes with a motive drawn from the different rewards and punishments in another world; eternal death will be the punishment of sin and sinners, and eternal life the reward of holiness and holy persons.

Observe, 1. The punishment of sin and sinners; The wages of sin is death.

Where note, The offence committed, sin; the punishment inflicted, death; the justice and proportion between the sin and the punishment, it is a stipend, or wages a metaphor taken from soldiers, who at the end of their service receive their pay and stipend.

Learn hence, That death is the punishment of sin, though not the end of the worker.

Quest. What death is that which is the punishment of sin?

Ans. Both temporal and eternal: The former consists in the separation of the soul and body from the presence of God, and in an imprisonment with devils and damned to all eternity.

Quest. What sin is that which is punished with death?

Ans. Consider sin in its demerit and desert, and so death is the punishment of every sin; consider it in its issue and event, and so it is the punishment only of that sin which is aggravated with impenitency: All sins are venial with respect to the mercy of God, and the repentance of a sinner; but the wages of every sin that reigns in us, and is not forsaken by us, is eternal death.

Observe, 2. The reward promised to holiness, and insured to holy persons; The gift of God is eternal life.

Here note, The happiness of holy persons:

1. In the Lord or Master whom they serve, God or Christ Jesus.

2. Happy in the reward of their services, eternal life.

3. Happy in the manner of their reward,

it is a free gift, not wages; a metaphor taken from kings, who bestow upon such soldiers as have signalized themselves, over and above their stipend, coronets and laurels, as badges of their favour; unto which our apostle alludes, calling eternal life a donative, a freely dispensed favour, which may be considered in our eternal destination thereunto before all time, in our conversion and sanctification in time, which we may call the embryo of eternal life; and in our coronation and glorification, when at the end of time full possession of eternal life shall be given to us: In all which instances heaven appears to be a free gift, not procured by any merit of ours, but by the mediation of Christ our Lord; The gift of God is eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord.

Fuente: Expository Notes with Practical Observations on the New Testament

Rom 6:23. For the wages of sin is death The word , rendered wages, properly signifies the food and pay which generals give to their soldiers for their service. By using this term, the apostle shows what sort of pay the usurper, sin, gives to those who serve under his banners. Further, as the sin here spoken of is that which men commit personally, and which they continue in, the death which is the wages of this kind of sin must be death eternal. It is observable, that although in Scripture the expression, eternal life, is often to be met with, we nowhere find eternal joined with death. Yet the punishment of the wicked is said to be eternal. Mat 25:46; (Macknight;) as also in many other passages. But the gift of God Greek, , the free gift, or gift of grace; is eternal life Or, eternal life is the free gift of God. The apostle does not call everlasting life , the wages which God gives to his servants, because they do not merit it by their services, as the slaves of sin merit death by theirs: but he calls it a free gift, or gift of grace; or, as Estius would render the expression, a donative; because, being freely bestowed, it may be compared to the donatives which the Roman generals, of their own good- will, bestowed on their soldiers as a mark of their favour. We may now see the apostles method thus far: 1st, Bondage to sin, Rom 3:9. 2d, The knowledge of sin by the law, a sense of Gods wrath, inward death, Rom 3:20. 3d, The revelation of the righteousness of God in Christ, through the gospel, Rom 3:21. 4th, The centre of all faith, embracing that righteousness, Rom 3:22. 5th, Justification, whereby God forgives all past sin, and freely accepts the sinner, Rom 3:24. 6th, The gift of the Holy Ghost, a sense of Gods love, new inward life, Rom 5:5; Rom 6:4. 7th, The free service of righteousness, Rom 6:23.

Fuente: Joseph Bensons Commentary on the Old and New Testaments

Vv. 23. For the wages of sin is death; but the gift of God is eternal life in Jesus Christ our Lord.

On the one side, wages, something earned. The word strictly denotes payment in kind, then the payment in money which a general gives his soldiers. And so it is obvious that the complement , of sin, is not here the genitive of the object: the wages paid for sin, but the genitive of the subject: the wages paid by sin. Sin is personified as man’s natural master (Rom 6:12; Rom 6:14; Rom 6:22), and he is represented as paying his subjects with death. This term, according to the apostle, does not seem to denote the annihilation of the sinner. To pay any one is not to put him out of existence; it is rather to make him feel the painful consequences of his sin, to make him reap in the form of corruption what he has sowed in the form of sin (Gal 6:7-8; 2Co 5:10).

In the second proposition the apostle does not speak of wages, but of a gift of grace (). This term is taken here in its most general sense; it comprehends the fulness of salvation. Everything in this work, from the initial justification to the final absolution, including sanctification and preparing for glory, is a free gift, an unmerited favor, like that Christ Himself who has been made unto us righteousness, holiness, and redemption. Hell, says Hodge, is always earned; heaven, never. The apostle closes with the words: in Christ Jesus our Lord; for it is in Him that this entire communication of divine mercy to the faithful takes place. Here, again, for the , by, which was the preposition used in the preceding part (for example,Rom 5:1-2; Rom 5:11; Rom 5:17; Rom 5:21), Paul substitutes the , in, which is more in keeping with the mode of sanctification. After being justified by Him, we are sanctified in Him, in communion of life with Him.

It is commonly thought that this twenty-third verse, as well as the whole passage of which it is a summary, applies to the believer only from the view-point of the second alternative, that of eternal life, and that the unconverted only are referred to by the apostle when he speaks of the service of sin and of its fatal goal, death. But the tenor of Rom 6:15 proves how erroneous this view is. What is the aim of this passage? To reply to the question: Shall we sin because we are under grace? Now this question can only be put in reference to believers. It is to them, therefore, that the reply contained in this whole passage applies. Neither could Paul say in respect of unconverted sinners what we find in Rom 6:21 : those things whereof we are now ashamed. It is therefore certain that he conceives the possibility of a return to the service of sina return which would lead them to eternal death as certainly as other sinners. It follows, even from the relation between the question of Rom 6:15 and the answer, Rom 6:16-23, that such a relapse may arise from a single voluntary concession to the continual solicitations of the old master, sin. A single affirmative answer to the question: Shall I commit an act of sin, since I am under grace? might have the effect of placing the believer again on the inclined plane which leads to the abyss. A striking example of this fact occurs in our very Epistle. In chap. Rom 14:15; Rom 14:20, Paul declares to the man who induces a weak brother to commit an act of sin contrary to his conscience, that thereby he may cause that brother to perish for whom Christ died, and destroy in him the work of God. Such will infallibly be the result, if this sin, not being quickly blotted out by pardon and restoration, becomes consolidated, and remains permanently interposed between him and his God.

Fuente: Godet Commentary (Luke, John, Romans and 1 Corinthians)

For the wages of sin is death; but the free gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord. [If consistency demands that you serve God with your whole heart, so profit and advantage also urges you so to do; for what profit had you when you served sin? In this present you were reaping, in that service, the things at which you may now well blush with shame, since they were preparing you to reap in the future death as a final harvest. But now having been made free from the slavery of sin, and having become a servant of God, your present reward is the blessedness and joy of a clean life, and your future reward is life eternal. And this is obvious, for, following my figure of slaves, masters and wages to the end, the wages which men earn and receive from your former master, sin, is death; but the wages which you can not earn, or deserve, but which God freely gives you for serving him, is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord.]

Fuente: McGarvey and Pendleton Commentaries (New Testament)

23. For the wages of sin is death; but the free gift of God is eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord. We see from the preceding that all sinners are Satans slaves, who may deluge them with the alluring promises of the good things in this life, at the same time flattering them that they will get saved before they die and reach heaven after enjoying all the pleasures of sin. No man can pay what he does not possess. Satan has nothing but sin, misery, disgrace, death and damnation. Hence he invariably, in the end, pays off his servants with his own currency, giving them disappointment, wretchedness and remorse in this life and a burning hell through all eternity. Gods people, when saved to the uttermost, are free as angels, enjoying the glorious liberty of God Himself, qualifying them to do everything good and nothing bad. The greatest desire of the immortal soul is eternal life. This we have in our wonderful Savior, without money and without price; while Satan pays off his poor slaves with death, not simply the fleeting, evanescent death of the body, but that of the soul, which never dieth, though dying on through all eternity.

Fuente: William Godbey’s Commentary on the New Testament

6:23 {11} For the wages of sin [is] death; but the gift of God [is] eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord.

(11) Death is the punishment due to sin, but we are sanctified freely, to everlasting life.

Fuente: Geneva Bible Notes

Paul brought his thoughts on this subject to a summary conclusion in this verse. The principle stated here is applicable to all people, believers and unbelievers. It contrasts the masters, sin and God, with the outcomes, death and eternal life. Paul also distinguished the means whereby death and life come to people. Death is the wage a person earns by his or her working, but eternal life is a gift free to those who rely on the work of Another.

Wages normally maintain life, but these wages result in death. Employers usually pay them out regularly and periodically rather than in a lump sum. Death also comes to the sinner regularly and periodically during the sinner’s lifetime, not just when he or she dies. Furthermore wages are a right.

"Man has rights only in relation to sin, and these rights become his judgment. When he throws himself on God without claim, salvation comes to him." [Note: Theological Dictionary of the New Testament, s.v. "opsonion," by H. W. Heiland, 5 (1967):592.]

Rom 6:15-23 teach truth by way of contrasts. Obedience to sin yields unfruitfulness, shame, and death. Obedience to righteousness results in progressive sanctification and the fullness of eternal life.

In chapter 6 Paul prescribed four steps designed to promote practical sanctification. First, we must "know" certain facts about our union with Christ, specifically that sin no longer possesses the dominating power over the believer that it has over the unbeliever (Rom 6:3-10). Second, we must "reckon" (believe) these facts to be true of us personally (Rom 6:11). Third, we must "present" ourselves to God in dedication as His slaves to perform righteousness (Rom 6:12-14). Fourth, we must obey God (Rom 6:15-23). If we do not, we will find ourselves falling back under the domination of sin in our lives and becoming its slaves once again. Each of these verbs has the force of an active command. Each represents something every believer should do. These are our basic responsibilities in our progressive sanctification regarding our relationship to sin. [Note: See Chafer, Systematic Theology, 2:351-54.]

Fuente: Expository Notes of Dr. Constable (Old and New Testaments)

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