“Or don’t you know that all of us who were baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death?” —ROMANS 6:3

When we are baptized we become united to Jesus Christ in such a way that what is true of Him becomes true of us. We are baptized into His history, His body, His death and into His resurrection life. In Romans, Chapter 5, Paul talks about Christ dying for us, but in Chapter 6, he talks about, “I died with Christ”. To understand what it means to “die with Christ”, we first have to understand what Christ having died for us means.

Romans 6:23 tells us that the wages of sin is death, and Paul says in Romans 3:23, “for all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God.” If the wages of sin is death and we have all sinned, then we stand before God condemned. But God does not leave us facing death. In the next verse, Paul goes on to say that all who believe are “justified freely by his grace through the redemption that came by Christ Jesus. God presented him as a sacrifice of atonement through faith in his blood. He did this to demonstrate his justice…” God is first and foremost a God of justice. To meet the demands of a just God, He took all our sins and imputed them to a sinless Christ, so that when He died on the cross, our sin died with Him.

“What shall we say then?” Paul asks. “Shall we go on sinning so that grace may increase? By no means!” (Romans 6:1). It isn’t just that Christ died for us to pay the penalty for our sin, but that we died in Christ, and are raised with Him to newness of life. “Count yourselves dead to sin but alive to God in Christ Jesus,” Paul says. “Offer yourselves to God, as those who have been brought from death to life” (Romans 6:13).

What happened to Christ on the cross is deemed to have happened to us; that is we are crucified with Christ, buried with Him, and united to Him in His resurrection life. This is where the transforming work of Jesus begins in that our sin nature is increasingly replaced with His righteousness. We are no longer slaves to sin, which leads to death, but to righteousness, which leads to eternal life. To have died with Christ and risen with Him, we are justified, which essentially means ‘it is done’. The price is paid in full and, on the basis of justice, we are reconciled to a Holy God, and enter into a life everlasting.

PRAYER: Dear Heavenly Father, Thank You for the redeeming work of your Son, Jesus Christ. Because of Him, I consider myself dead to sin, and thank You for His resurrected life that indwells me now.

TO REFLECT UPON: How has knowing that my sin died with Christ and is being replaced with His righteousness affected me most?