The last sentence of chapter five contained a dangerous truth: where sin increased, grace abounded all the more. Paul knows exactly what a certain kind of reader will do with that. And so before the chapter break has been fully processed, he fires the question himself: "What shall we say then? Are we to continue in sin so that grace may increase?" (Romans 6:1).

The answer is not a careful theological hedge. "May it never be! How shall we who died to sin still live in it?" (Romans 6:2). The Greek is as forceful as the English translator can make it — may it never be, the strongest negative in Paul's vocabulary. The question is not merely wrong. It reveals that the person asking it has not understood what happened when they came to Christ.

Paul does not argue the point with a moral principle. He argues it with an event. "Or do you not know that all of us who have been baptized into Christ Jesus have been baptized into His death?" (Romans 6:3).

Baptism is not the transition point for this argument; it is the argument. Paul grounds the impossibility of casual sinning not in willpower or resolve but in what was enacted at baptism — what happened to the person at that moment. "Therefore we have been buried with Him through baptism into death, so that as Christ was raised from the dead through the glory of the Father, so we too might walk in newness of life" (Romans 6:4).

The language is deliberate and irreversible. Buried with Him. Not symbolically rehearsing the idea of death. Not publicly declaring a change of mind. Buried — the old life placed in the ground, under water, united with Christ's own death. Paul is not describing an inner experience that baptism later confirms. He is describing what baptism enacts: the actual union of the person with the death of Christ, so that what happened to Christ in the tomb is, before God, what happened to them.

The sequence follows the resurrection pattern exactly. Christ died, was buried, was raised. The person baptized into Christ dies — through repentance and faith — is buried — in the waters of baptism — and is raised — brought up to walk in newness of life. "For if we have become united with Him in the likeness of His death, certainly we shall also be in the likeness of His resurrection" (Romans 6:5). The union is not one-sided. Going down into the water and coming back up is not a dramatic metaphor. It is the point at which the two stories — Christ's and the sinner's — are joined into one.

What was buried there? "Knowing this, that our old self was crucified with Him, in order that our body of sin might be done away with, so that we would no longer be slaves to sin; for he who has died is freed from sin" (Romans 6:6–7). The old self — the person shaped by sin, answering to sin's demands, living under sin's ownership — that person was nailed to the cross in the union with Christ's death. Not healed. Not improved. Crucified. The freedom from sin's dominion is not the product of moral effort after baptism; it is what the death effected. Death breaks all contracts. The slave who has died cannot be called back to service.

The question in verse one was theologically incoherent. The person who has truly been baptized into Christ has died to sin. You do not ask a dead man to go on serving his former master. You ask someone who is alive, and the person who rose from those waters rose into a new life — not a second chance at the old one.

Paul draws the conclusion: "Even so consider yourselves to be dead to sin, but alive to God in Christ Jesus" (Romans 6:11). This is not a feeling to be generated. It is a fact to be reckoned — calculated, counted on — because it is what is actually true of the person who belongs to Christ. Dead to sin. Alive to God. Those are the terms. The rest of chapter six will show what living on those terms looks like.

But first the question that the resurrection raises for the daily life of the one who was buried and raised with Christ.