(Exodus 14:15-31; Romans 6:1-14)
Moses and Aaron contended with Pharaoh and his magicians for the freedom of Israel, announcing the plagues God would send in judgment unless Pharaoh let Israel go free. After the last and worst, the angel of death that killed every firstborn son in Egypt, Pharaoh let them go. But God did not lead Israel by the normal route out of Egypt—instead, he led them down to the seashore and told them to make camp there. Pharaoh pursued them with his army and came upon them in that place, and the people of Israel panicked; but God stood between Israel and the army of Egypt, and he opened a road through the sea. He brought his people out on dry ground through the water, and then he allowed the Egyptians to follow them—and once they were out in the midst of the sea, he threw them into a panic, and then he released the water, and they were drowned.
The people of Israel passed through the water from Egypt, where they were slaves to Pharaoh, into the wilderness, where they were free to follow and serve God. They passed out of the land of death and into the land of life; the sea was the boundary between the two. Was it the water that delivered the Israelites? No, God delivered the Israelites. Indeed, he had already delivered them by this point; the passage through the Red Sea was simply the exclamation point, the final blow to Pharaoh, the act that sealed their deliverance and made the finality of God’s work obvious to everyone—even to hard-headed, hard-hearted Pharaoh. Israel through the centuries would look back to the passage through the Red Sea not because there was anything magical about the Red Sea, but because it was a sign and a symbol that encapsulated God’s great work of deliverance.
This was the physical reality of the Exodus, when God freed his people from slavery in Egypt; and it’s the story Paul is retelling in a theological, spiritual way as he explains the new Exodus, in which Jesus Christ has freed his people from slavery to sin. It might seem odd that he would do so here, but he does so for a profoundly important reason. He has said in chapter 5 that the law only served to make sin worse, but that the grace of God only increased all the more in response; but to that, the skeptic might well ask, “If that’s the case, why shouldn’t we just go ahead and sin, then? If the law can’t handle sin, how is grace going to make it better?”
D. Martyn Lloyd Jones, one of the great 20th-century gospel preachers, had this to say about this in his commentary on Romans 6:
The true preaching of the gospel of salvation by grace alone always leads to the possibility of this charge being brought against it. There is no better test as to whether a man is really preaching the New Testament gospel of salvation than this, that some people might misunderstand it and misinterpret it to mean that it really amounts to this, that because you are saved by grace alone it does not matter at all what you do; you can go on sinning as much as you like because it will redound all the more to the glory of grace. If my preaching and presentation of the gospel of salvation does not expose it to that misunderstanding, then it is not the gospel.
This is because, as Paul lays out in this chapter, the gospel deals with sin at a deeper level than the law, at a deeper level than mere obedience; and so people who look no deeper than to ask what they have to do in order to get the reward they want will tend to find in the gospel an excuse to sin. But Paul says, no, the gospel is about much more than just having a list of things to do and not do—the gospel tells us that we have a whole new life, that we live in a whole new world, and everything is different. We have passed through the water, out of the land of slavery and death and into the land of life.
Now, it isn’t the water of baptism that saves us, any more than it was the water of the Red Sea that saved the Israelites; Paul is using the word “baptism” here to represent the whole of God’s work of conversion and salvation in our lives, much as we might say “White House” to refer to the President and the whole administration. We don’t believe the actual house makes any decisions, and Paul doesn’t believe that the water transforms us. The water, however, is a sign and a symbol of God’s transforming work, and even if it doesn’t bring about salvation by itself, it matters, because God has chosen to use it.
The key is the truth signified in baptism: by the power of the Holy Spirit, we have been united with Christ in his death and resurrection, and therefore we no longer live under the power of sin; as Paul says in Colossians, we have been transferred from the dominion of darkness into the kingdom of Jesus Christ, in whom our sins have been forgiven, by whom we have been redeemed. Our old selves died when Christ was crucified, and were buried with him in his tomb—but when he got up, they didn’t; when he rose from the dead, he brought us with him, alive in him, sharing in his resurrection life. If you can look at your life and see a point in time when you came to faith, that is the point at which you first experienced your salvation in Christ, but that isn’t the point when your salvation was accomplished; when he died and rose again, you were saved then.
This, then, is how the gospel of grace is an answer to human sin—it changes our reality at the ground level. God has transformed us at the very core through the work of Christ. We are all born slaves to sin, under its power, completely convinced that we are who sin tells us we are—convinced, indeed, that we want to be slaves, that our slavery is really freedom. In Christ, those false selves are put to death, and we are raised again to life as new people over whom sin has no power, because the power of sin is the power of death, and the life of Christ has overcome death. We have crossed out of sin’s kingdom; we still have one foot in this world, but our true life is in the incoming kingdom of God.
Thus, Paul says, live like what you are. “Sin will not reign over you, since you are not under law but under grace”; therefore “do not let sin reign over you.” You are dead to sin and alive to God in Christ Jesus; therefore “consider yourselves dead to sin and alive to God in Christ Jesus.” Live as what you are—and when you don’t, face up to it squarely and admit it. The world loves to make excuses for sin, which mostly seem to boil down to this in the end: “It isn’t fair to expect me to be any better or to live up to your standards, because I’m only human.” As Christians, we can’t say that. We have been united with Christ, and we are no longer “only human” in that sense—we live in the power and presence of God. By faith in Jesus, we have a better life than that; we just need to learn to walk by faith, to live by grace, as those who have been made new in him.