You Are Slaves of the One You Obey

“Do you not know that if you present yourselves to anyone as obedient slaves, you are slaves of the one whom you obey, either of sin, which leads to death, or of obedience, which leads to righteousness?” -Romans 6:16

When Paul said By no means! in response to his rhetorical question as to whether or not Christians should continue in sin, he wasn’t emphatically denouncing the proposition and moving on. He was denouncing the absurd proposition with a commonplace axiom, what we might think of as a Proverb.

παριστάναι ἑαυτόν τινι δοῦλον (To whom you present yourself, you are their slave!)

The word slave is a translation of the Greek word δούλους (doulos) and means one who is solely committed to another, their subject.

We might imagine the days of the monarchy when someone would say Long live King Alfred! Or God save King Alfred! (substitute any monarch’s name here). Or even when a nobleman would respond to a king’s request with, As the King commands! These were idioms of allegiance. People would make the statement as a public declaration of their subjection to the monarch. 

So it is with all of us. If we subject ourselves to sin, it will lead to death (The wages of sin is death Cf. v. 23). If we subject ourselves to obedience (to the Law; to the Lord), it leads to righteousness.

To be clear, this is not to be understood in terms of earning favor with the Lord; But, rather it is to be understood as our response to having been imputed with righteousness as God’s unmerited favor toward us.

As Bob Dylan reminded us in his music, You’ve Gotta Serve Somebody. It might be the devil or it might be the Lord, but you’ve gotta serve somebody. The question is: do we want to be slaves to sin which only always leads to death, or slaves to Jesus who liberates us from death and gives us righteousness and life?