Romans 6
Romans 6 — Commentary and Meaning
The short answer
Romans 6 opens with a question Paul imagines his readers asking: if God's grace covers sin, why not keep sinning so grace can keep flowing? His answer is blunt—"May it never be!"—and the reason he gives is baptism. Those who were baptized into Jesus, Paul says, were baptized "into his death." Going under the water was a kind of burial; coming up out of it was a share in his resurrection, so that "we also might walk in newness of life."
This is why the chapter is less a set of rules than a statement of identity. Paul isn't telling his readers to become something new; he's telling them they already are something new. The old self was crucified with Christ. Sin's claim on them has been broken the way death's claim on Jesus was broken. So his instruction in verse 11—consider yourselves "dead to sin, but alive to God"—is really a call to live out what baptism has already made true.
The second half of the chapter works this out with a vivid picture: slavery. Everyone serves something, Paul argues. You can present yourself to sin, which pays wages—and "the wages of sin is death"—or you can present yourself to God, whose free gift is "eternal life in Christ Jesus." There is no neutral ground.
Read this way, Romans 6 is Paul's fullest explanation of what baptism actually does. It isn't a private religious moment or a mere symbol. It plunges a person into Jesus' story—his death and his rising—and confers a new identity and a new allegiance. That's why the question "shall we keep sinning?" answers itself. People who have died to something don't go on living in it.
What scholars say
In these two passages, N. T. Wright answers the question of what baptism actually accomplishes: he describes it as being plunged into Jesus' death so as to share his new life, publicly marked with God's own name, and brought into the community shaped by Jesus' death and resurrection—pointing to Romans 6 as where Paul spells this out.
“Jesus himself linked baptism to his own death; part of the meaning of baptism is to commit us, through plunging into water, to dying with Jesus and coming to share his new life. (Paul spells this out in Romans 6, but many other passages imply it, including the present one.) Baptism is the public, physical and visible way in which someone is marked out, branded almost, with the holy ‘name’. As Jesus was given, by the angel, the name ‘Jesus’, signifying his real identity and the task that lay before him, so now, with his work complete, we suddenly discover that the ‘name’ which we are all to share is the new ‘name’ of the living God – the father, the son and the holy spirit .”
“This is the one place in all Paul’s letters where he talks about the ‘new birth’, which is familiar to many people from the third chapter of John’s gospel, but which, apart from the present passage, hardly occurs at all in other early Christian writings. The main thing he says about it here is that it’s God’s free gift, and that it involves being made clean from everything which had previously polluted us. The reference to ‘washing’ is almost certainly intended, and most early Christians would have heard it like this, as a reference to baptism itself. As we know from Romans 6 and Colossians 3, Paul saw baptism as the moment when someone was brought into the community marked by the death and resurrection of Jesus. From 1 Corinthians 12 we learn that it is intimately connected, as well, with the gift of the holy spirit . These two seem to come together in the present passage, brief though the reference is.”
What it means for you
The practical force of Romans 6 comes from its direction of travel. Paul doesn't say "try harder and you'll become a new person." He says "you are a new person—now live like it." For anyone stuck in cycles of failure and guilt, that reframing matters: change begins not with willpower but with remembering who you already are.
It also offers a daily practice. Paul's word "consider" (or "reckon") invites a deliberate act of memory—counting yourself dead to sin and alive to God, then choosing, in ordinary decisions, whom you will serve. Freedom, in this chapter, isn't the absence of a master; it's belonging to the right one.
Romans 6 in context
Romans 6 sits at a hinge in Paul's letter. Chapters 1–5 argue that all people—Jew and Gentile alike—are justified by God's grace through faith in Jesus, climaxing in chapter 5 with the claim that where sin abounded, grace abounded more. Chapter 6 answers the obvious objection: doesn't that make sin harmless? Paul responds with baptism and the believer's union with Christ's death and resurrection. Chapter 7 will then probe the law and the divided self, and chapter 8 will complete the arc with life in the Spirit.
Passages we cover in this chapter