Romans chapter 6, beginning with verse 15, we read, what then, shall we sin, because we are not under law but under grace? Certainly not. Do you not know that to whom you present yourself slaves to obey, you are that one slaves whom you obey, whether of sin leading to death or of obedience leading to righteousness? But God be thanked that though you were slaves of sin, yet you obeyed from the heart that form of doctrine to which you were delivered. And having been set free from sin, you became slaves of righteousness. I speak in human terms because of the weakness of your flesh. For just as you presented your members as slaves of uncleanness and of lawlessness leading to more lawlessness, so now present your members as slaves of righteousness for holiness. For when you were slaves of sin, you were free in regard to righteousness. What fruit did you have then in the things of which you are now ashamed? For the end of those things is death. But now, having been set free from sin and having become slaves of God, you have your fruit to holiness and the end, everlasting life. For the wages of sin is death, but the gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus, our Lord. Amen. We'll end our reading there at the end of Romans chapter six. Let's ask for God's help in prayer. Our gracious God and heavenly Father, We come to you today with sorrow in our hearts for the loss, the departure, from our point of view, of our brother Robert Mettler. We thank you for his long life. We thank you for a long life that in many ways was characterized by service. We thank you for his zeal for the Lord, for his love for the church, for the ways that he invested in his family. And Lord, we thank you for all that you enabled him to contribute for your grace in his life from His birth clear through to the end. And Lord, we thank you now that we have this opportunity to remember him, to give you thanks for him, and to consider what truth, what comfort there is in your word for us who remain. Lord, open our minds, open our hearts to receive the message that you have for us today. In Jesus' name, amen. The wages of sin is death, but the gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord. That well-known verse 23 is why we read from the book of Romans on this occasion. I think the contrast that it brings out there is helpful to direct our thoughts and hopefully to comfort our hearts as well. But you can tell in the very form of the verse that this is the end of an argument. It's a conclusion based on what has come before. Paul is not announcing something new at this particular stage in the book of Romans. He's just summarizing. He's bringing to a resounding conclusion an argument, a line of thought that he had been developing for some time. You notice that in the way that it's expressed, for the wages of sin. That's a word of conclusion, of pulling together threads that he had been mentioning. Now, those threads are found in terms of a great contrast. There's a great contrast between life and Death, it is a contrast we can't help but be familiar with. It forces itself into our attention and into our experience by the reality that people who we knew, with whom we lived, then die. They're not here anymore. You can't interact with them however much you might want to do so. So the great fact of life and death is brought before us almost daily by experience. It's certainly something that we can never put completely on the back burner and leave for another time. It clamors for our attention. Well, of course, the Apostle Paul is familiar with that contrast, and he draws on that familiar contrast to then also say, well, what is associated with these different states? There's death, there's life, clearly those are opposites, but there are also other things that are opposites. There are things that go along with, there are things that lead up to life and death that are associated. And in the book of Romans, he has particularly drawn an association. He has particularly set out a connection between sin and death on the one hand, or then between righteousness and life on the other. Now part of Paul's approach to everything is he never just takes the surface level, he never stops with what's obvious, he always goes beyond. He always pushes things to the maximum. He wants to deal with matters in ultimate terms. And you see that even in our verse. He's not just talking about life and death, life in this world and then death, life in this world comes to an end and that's it. When he makes the contrast, he makes it very clear. The wages of sin is death, but the gift of God is eternal life. in Christ Jesus our Lord. So not just what we're familiar with in terms of people are alive and then they're not, but he wants to push it out to something further, something bigger, something more ultimate. He wants to contrast death with eternal life. So let's think about that for a little bit. And let's start with the first part of the contrast. The wages of sin is death. Paul has been asserting that the reason there is death, the reason there's such a phenomenon as death is because of sin. And as he reaches an ending point in his line of thought, He encapsulates that by saying the wages of sin is death. But there are really three words there that we need to make sure that we understand. One is sin, one is wages, and one is death. Because to say the wages of sin is death tells you they're connected, but unless you understand the words, you don't understand how they're connected. Well, let's start with the idea of sin. What is sin? What is Paul talking about when he talks about sin? Well, of course, there's multiple perspectives from which you can consider sin. If we were to turn to 1 John, we would find that sin is defined as transgression, transgression of the law. In other words, God has commandments. When we don't keep those commandments, when we don't do what they tell us to do, or when we do what they tell us not to do, another word for that not doing what we should or doing what we shouldn't, another word for that is sin. That sees sin with reference to the law of God, and it sees sin specifically as breaking the law of God. There's another point of view from which to look at sin, which Paul brings out in Romans chapter three and verse 23, where he says, for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God. Now that doesn't contradict the perspective of sin as transgression, it just flushes it out. It gives us another way to look at the same phenomenon of sin. Well, what's the idea there? All have sinned, there's nobody who has not sinned, And what is involved in sinning? What does that mean? What does that look like? It means falling short of the glory of God. So in that sense, you could take sin as missing the mark. You could use the analogy of an archer shooting arrows at a target from a bow, and he misses the target completely. He hits the backstop or worse, he hits somewhere not even close to where the target was. The idea there is that God had a plan, a purpose, For us, God had a calling for us to live up to, to embrace. And we didn't. And when we missed, it wasn't a minor matter. It wasn't like not winning your track meet or coming in first in swimming or something like that, where you did your best, but somebody else did better. The point is you went completely off track. You did not. hit the target. You were not there. And the target was the glory of God. God had a glorious plan for us. And you remember, of course, that's true in biblical terms, according to the way God created and set up and designed the world. The first humans were given a mandate. They were given a commission. Their calling was to represent God in the way that they behaved to the whole of the visible creation. But they didn't. They fell short. And that's been the history of their descendants ever since. God has called us to behave with the dignity consonant to human beings made in the image of God. But we fall short. We miss the mark. We don't live up to the glory that God conferred upon us. Or there's another way to think about sin that Paul brings up in the context. He thinks about sin as slavery. He thinks about sin as being bound. That's what he was talking about in verses 15 and following. If we've been set free from sin, How ridiculous to continue in it. Imagine that you had been a slave. Imagine that your decisions were not yours to make. You were obligated to do what someone else told you to do all the time around the clock for nothing. And then you're set free, you're emancipated. Do you remain? Do you continue to act in that way? Well, what insanity it would be to embrace a life of slavery when you had the option of freedom ahead of you. But that is what we do when we continue to sin. That is what we do when we choose not to aim at the mark, when we choose to transgress God's law. And there's still one more way that Paul brings out the reality of sin, this one also coming from the passage that we read, and that is to speak about it as unfruitful. He asks that question, verse 21, what fruit did you have then in the things of which you are now ashamed? For the end of those things is death. In other words, here the comparison is to seed. You plant seed and what do you get? Well, if the seed germinates, if it survives and is successful, you get whatever it was that you planted. Well, when we're talking about the seeds of sin, what is it that you get? What harvest results? What plant grows up? Well, says Paul, it is death. Because sin is the transgression of the law, because sin is falling short of the glory of God, because sin is slavery, because sin is barren, therefore, the outcome of it is not life, is not joy, is not righteousness, is not any good thing, but the outcome of it is death. And that's the point that Paul is emphasizing when he says, for the wages of sin is death. But you see, he's changed the metaphor again. Now, sin is the employer. who hires human beings and rewards them for their labor, for their effort in his particular area of endeavor. And what are the wages? What is it that sin acquires for itself? What is it that sin earns? Well, sin earns death. That's an important reality to come to terms with in Heidelberg Catechism that Robert interrogated me about. One of the questions is, what must you know in order to live and die happily in the comfort of the gospel? It's the understanding there. And one of the things that we must know is the greatness of our sin and misery. And one of the ways we come to know that sin is serious is by seeing what the results, what the outcomes of sin are. The outcomes of sin are not joy and peace and fun. The outcome of sin, the wages of sin is death. The death of the body, more serious even than that. The death of the soul, the everlasting perishing from the presence of God. Those things are connected because where there is sin, Death always follows unless God intervenes. There's no other exception. There's no other way to get around or overcome the reality of the connection between sin and death. There's one way, there's only one way, and that is through the intervention of God. So you have the first part of the contrast, the wages of sin is death. And then Paul says, but the gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord. You see what he's doing. He's giving you the other half. Now here again, he's been talking about that. He's talked about how Sin entered into the world through one man, through the first man, Adam, and death by sin. Well, he's also talked about how the Lord Jesus brought righteousness into this world, how he brought everlasting life. Here again, Romans 6.23 has the character of a conclusion. He's weaving together threads and he's telling you, what does it all amount to? Well, the negative side, the preliminary side, the wages of sin is death. A bitter truth, but a necessary one to come to terms with. But the other side is God's intervention. The gift of God. Now notice the contrast here. The relationship that death has to sin is that of wages. Sin earns death. Sin acquires death by its own effort. But where does eternal life come from? There is no effort. There is no work that you can do to come to eternal life. Eternal life is a gift or it is nothing at all. There is no way to come to eternal life apart from a gift, something that is freely received, something that is not worked for, something that is not earned, something that is not deserved. Now, we don't necessarily like to think of it in those terms. There are people who would love to think that they are going to acquire eternal life by virtue of their own efforts, because they worked really hard, because they were better than the people around them. But eternal life is a gift. There is no alternative. And it's the gift of God. Only God can bestow that. Only God can separate the connection between sin and death in order to bring about eternal life. And notice that contrast. Paul is not just talking about physical life and death. He's not talking about a get out of death free card where we don't have to experience illness and breathing our last and being buried. That's not Paul's primary focus. He will deal with that in some passages. He'll talk about resurrection, and it's in the resurrection of the last day, as we read from John, that the Lord Jesus will deal with this aspect of death, the aspect of death that we're faced with today as we go to the cemetery in a few minutes to bury Robert Mettler, to leave him in the ground until the great day of resurrection. But Paul has more in mind than just that. That's why he adds eternal life. Eternal is not just never-ending. If you were living in rough conditions and that were never gonna change, you might call that eternal, but it wouldn't be in a good way. You wouldn't like to think of that as eternal life, that I'll be imprisoned and miserable forever. That doesn't sound like good news. And Paul is talking about a gift of God in Christ Jesus, our Lord. He's talking about the best thing that God can give. So what he has in mind with eternal life is a life of communion with God, a life where not just the wages of sin, the death is done away with, but the sin itself is done away with. Because for Paul, sin is worse than its consequences. Its consequences are no joke. but being set free, quote unquote, to go on sinning for Paul would not have been a favor, would not have been a kindness at all. He thinks of sin as uncleanness, lawlessness, and he doesn't like those things. He likes righteousness. and holiness. So what Paul is talking about when he says eternal life is a life of communion with God, is a life of sharing God's likeness to the degree that we also are holy and righteous. We're not struggling against sin. The struggle with sin is over. Now, Romans chapter 7, we'll talk about the complexities of that. Those who believe in Jesus are started on that path, but they're far from perfect. They still do many things they wish they wouldn't do. They still don't do many things they wish they would do. Paul knows that the actual process of the Christian life is a continual challenge. You can read on into chapter seven if you want to hear about that. But here, he's just laying before us the contrast What will ultimately be clear and manifest to everyone, the wages of sin is death. That's one half. The gift of God is eternal life. What a difference that will be. But he specifies, because Paul isn't dealing with abstract principles. Paul isn't dealing with some way that is always open to everyone to save themselves by turning away from these principles and embracing these other principles. Paul is dealing with a question of historic fact. He's dealing with the reality that Christ Jesus lived, died, rose again. If that history is not true, then Paul himself would tell you that none of what he says has any meaning. None of what he says has any value. And so where is the gift of God? Where is this eternal life to be found? Well, Paul tells you that too, in Christ Jesus, our Lord. Eternal life is a gift, not something we earn. And it is a gift that is received only in and through Christ Jesus, apart from recognizing Jesus Christ, that historical person, Jesus of Nazareth, as the risen Lord. There is no eternal life. There are no bypass. There are no substitute approaches. This is where it's found. Eternal life is in Christ Jesus, or it's nowhere at all. Let's pray together. Our gracious God and heavenly Father, thank you for the clarity, the forcefulness of your word. Thank you that although the wages, what sin has earned is death, that you did not leave us there, but that you intervened, that apart from any expectation, apart from any claim we could have laid, you freely determined to give a gift, a gift of surpassing value, a gift of eternal life. in Christ Jesus. O Lord, we look to our Lord, our Savior Jesus Christ today to comfort us in sorrow, to give us clarity about today and tomorrow and the days to come, to be our gracious Lord in life and in death. We would belong to him and to no other. We would do his will and no one else's. We would trust him and lean upon him and receive from this wonderful gift of eternal life. In his name, we pray these things. Amen.