st the claim of sin. We have died to it once and for
all. Therefore, and only therefore, we can hope to share the deathless
glory of Christ's resurrection. He died once, and passed henceforth
altogether out of death's control. For the death that He died was to
make an end with sin, and that was done once for all. Henceforth there
is nothing left but life, and that life in the eternal God. This
therefore is the view we are to take of ourselves as now included in
Christ: we are, in regard to sin, dead men who are no longer responsive
to its impulses or alive to its interests: and therefore, in regard to
God, we are alive in Christ to whom we are united.

And (ver. 12) the practical duty which follows from this is plain.
Christians must not acknowledge a tyrant whose strength and power is
gone for ever, by letting sin still reign in the lower part of their
nature--the body still subject to physical death--and so bring their
higher nature into an unnatural subjection to its appetites: they must
{210} not leave the limbs of their redeemed selves at the disposal of
the dethroned king Sin, to be used as weapons for the warfare of
iniquity. No: they must correspond to the privileges of the new life
in God into which they have passed, by making an offering of
themselves[7] to God, with all the free will which befits those who
were dead and are alive again; and an offering also of their limbs, now
restored to their own control, as weapons for God's warfare of
righteousness. Sin shall no longer be their lord. That despotism
belonged to the days when they were under the law. Now it is not the
law they are under, but the sovereignty of the divine goodwill.

What shall we say then? Shall we continue in sin, that grace may
abound? God forbid. We who died to sin, how shall we any longer live
therein? Or are ye ignorant that all we who were baptized into Christ
Jesus were baptized into his death? We were buried therefore with him
through baptism into death: that like as Christ was raised from the
dead through the glory of the Father, so we also might walk in newness
of life. For if we have become united with the likeness of his death,
we shall be also with the likeness of his resurrection; knowing this,
that our old man was crucified with _him_, that the body of {211} sin
might be done away, that so we should no longer be in bondage to sin;
for he that hath died is justified from sin. But if we died with
Christ, we b