(Tap footnote to read it. Old Testament quotations are underlined. "Love" with a caret ("^love") is agapé.1"agapé" The Greek words ἀγάπη (agapé, noun), and ἀγαπάω (agapaó; verb) are typically translated "love". However, unlike our English word "love" – which primarily speaks of affection and feelings – agapé centers on choice and behavior. It’s the "love" based on will, choice, behavior, and action; not feelings. (Feelings-based love is the Greek word φιλέω (phileó), which properly means "brotherly love/affection".) Thus, you could hate someone passionately and still treat him with "agapé". Agapé "love" is best understood as the pursuit of what is most beneficial to someone or something, regardless of the cost to yourself or the type of response received from the person or thing. It can also indicate a preference for someone or something over other things. )
Dead to sin, Alive to the Anointed
- Therefore, what will we say? Might we continue in sin so grace might abound?
- May it never be! How will we who died to sin still live in it?
- Or do you not know that as many as were baptized into Jesus the Anointed were baptized into His death?
- Therefore, we were buried with Him through baptism into death, so just as the Anointed was raised from the dead through the glory of the Father, so we might also walk in newness of life.
- For if we have become united with the likeness of His death, we will certainly also be in the likeness of His resurrection,
- knowing this: that our old man was crucified with Him, so the body of sin might be nullified, to enslave us to sin no longer.
- For the man who died has been absolved from sin.
- And if we died with the Anointed, we believe that we will also live with Him,
- *knowing that the Anointed (having been raised from the dead) no longer dies; death no longer has authority over Him.
- For the death that He died, He died to sin once for all; but the life that He lives, He lives to God.
- And you likewise must consider yourselves to be indeed dead to sin, but alive to God in Jesus the Anointed.
- Therefore, don’t let sin reign in your mortal body in order to obey its cravings,
- nor present your parts to sin as tools of unrighteousness, but present yourselves to God as alive from the dead, and your parts as tools of righteousness to God.
- For sin won’t have authority over you, for you aren’t under the law, but under grace.
Sin into death, obedience into righteousness
- What then, should we sin because we aren’t under the law but under grace? May it never be!
- Don’t you *know that whoever you present yourselves to as slaves for obedience, you are slaves to him whom you obey? (Whether of sin into death or of obedience into righteousness.)
- But grace be to God because while you were formerly slaves of sin, yet you became obedient from the heart to the pattern of teaching to which you were delivered,
- and having been freed from sin, you were enslaved to righteousness.
- I speak in human terms because of the weakness of your flesh. For just as you presented your parts as slaves to impurity and to lawlessness resulting in more lawlessness, so now present your parts as slaves to righteousness leading into becoming holy.
- For when you were slaves of sin, you were free from righteousness.
- Therefore, what fruit did you have then on account of the things about which you’re now ashamed? For the end of those things is death.
- But presently – having been freed from sin and having been made slaves to God – you have your fruit for becoming holy, and the end is the life of ages.1“life of ages” is literal, and captures the duration as well as the quality of the life, which the traditional interpretation of “eternal life” doesn’t. The word translated “ages” (αἰώνιον) is the adjective form of the Greek word “αἰών” (aion), which is used – for example – in Matthew 24:3 “what are the signs of your coming and the end of the age?”
- For the wages of sin is death, but God’s gift of grace is the life of ages2“life of ages” see previous note. in Jesus the Anointed, our Lord.
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