Sold Into Freedom

On the walls of the theatre at Delphi, and along the polygonal wall beneath Apollo's temple, the stone is crowded with the names of slaves — some thirteen hundred inscriptions, carved between roughly two centuries before Christ and one after, each recording the same strange transaction: a slave set free by being sold to the god himself.¹ The fiction did real work: once a slave had been handed to Apollo, no former owner could reach across a divine claim and drag the freed one back. Freedom, in that world, was a change of owner — into the keeping of one no earthly hand could overrule, the record cut in stone past all undoing.

Paul is reaching for something like this, at incomparable cost. He has just pressed grace until an objection rears up — if our sin only makes grace abound, why not sin the more? — and he answers with a death: “How can we who died to sin still live in it?” (Romans 6:2). We hear “died to sin” and picture a campaign of gritted teeth. Paul means something done to us, once, from outside ourselves: we were baptized into Christ's death, “buried therefore with him” (Romans 6:4), our old self nailed up in the body of Another. As he says elsewhere, “I have been crucified with Christ” (Galatians 2:20) — and the logic is stark: a dead man belongs to no one; the master's claim ends at the grave. “One who has died has been set free from sin” (Romans 6:7).

But a claim merely cancelled would leave only a corpse. The wonder is the rest of the sentence — we do not only die with him, we rise with him, “so that … we too might walk in newness of life” (Romans 6:4). This is the pattern God has worked since he reached into Egypt and bought a nation of slaves to be his own — “I will take you to be my people” (Exodus 6:7) — leading them out through the water to belong to the One who bought them. What Israel walked as shadow, the church shares as substance: we are joined to his sufferings and resurrection, and resurrection follows death — the shape now of our whole new life.

See what this does to the fear that grace breeds laziness. It cannot, because we have been bought, and now we belong elsewhere. “You were bought with a price” (1 Corinthians 6:20) — and the price was the cross, where the death he died “he died to sin, once for all” (Romans 6:10). That once-for-all death is the hinge of everything, and it turns only because we are in him. Outside that union we would be onlookers at a rescue; inside it, his death is our death and his risen life is ours.

So sin still comes to the door of a life it used to own, and its old habits still feel like home. But it no longer holds the deed. There is no such thing as a masterless life, Tim Keller reminds us; freedom was never the absence of a master but belonging to the One whose service is life.² The command, when it comes, only asks us to reckon as real what God has already made real of us: “Consider yourselves dead to sin and alive to God in Christ Jesus” (Romans 6:11). Our freedom is not carved on a wall at Delphi but into the wounds a risen Man still carries. We belong to Another, and his service is perfect freedom.