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The great object of this chapter is to establish the alliance between a sinner's acceptance through Christ and his holiness. And here there is a practical direction given for carrying this alliance into effect.

1. Now, if these phrases be taken in their personal sense they would mean that we are mortified to the pleasures and temptations of sin, and alive to nothing but the excellencies of God's character, and a sense of our obligations to Him; or in other words, we are to reckon ourselves holy in order that we may become holy. It were a strange receipt for curing a man of his dishonesty, to bid him reckon of himself that he is an honest man. How, by the simple act of counting myself what I really am not, can I be transferred to that which I choose to imagine of myself? How can I reckon that to be true which I know to be false? We have heard much of the power of imagination; but this is giving it an empire that exceeds all which was before known.

2. Now you free the passage of these difficulties by taking the phrases forensically. To be dead unto sin is to be in the condition of one on whom death, the sentence of sin, has already been inflicted — if not in his own person, in that of his representative. To be alive unto God is to live in the favour of God — to which we have been admitted through Christ. To reckon that Christ died for the one purpose, and that He brought in an everlasting righteousness for the other, is to reckon, not on a matter of fancy, but on a matter proposed on the evidence of God's own testimony to faith. And when, instead of looking downwardly on the dark and ambiguous tablet of our own character, we look upwardly to the Saviour, we rest on the completeness of a finished expiation and perfect obedience, and transfer our reckoning from a ground where conscience gives us the lie, to a ground where God, who cannot lie, meets us with the assurances of His truth.

3. But it may be said, might not this be an untruth also? The apostle says to his converts, "Reckon yourselves dead unto sin" — but is it competent to address any one individual at random, to reckon himself in this blessed condition? Might not he, in so reckoning, be as deluded as in the other reckoning? I answer, It is nowhere said that Christ died so for me in particular, as that the benefits of His atonement are mine in possession; but it is everywhere said that He so died for me in particular, as that the benefits of His atonement are mine in offer. They are mine if I will. Such terms as "whosoever," and "all," and "any," and "ho, everyone," bring the gospel redemption specifically to my door; and there it stands for acceptance as mine in offer, and ready to become mine in possession on my giving credit to the word of the testimony. The terms of the gospel message are so constructed that I have just as good a warrant for reckoning myself dead unto sin, as if I had been singled out by name.

4. And what is more. You will not acquire a virtuous character by imagining that you have it. But there is another way in which it may be acquired. Not by any false reckoning about your actual character; but by a true reckoning about your actual condition. It is not by imagining I am a saint that I will become so; but by reflecting on the condemnation due to me as a sinner — on the way in which it has been averted from my person — on the passage by which, without suffering to myself, I have been borne across the region of vindictive justice, and conclusively placed on the fair and favoured shore of acceptance with God. The sense and the reckoning of all this may transform me from the sinner that I am into the saint that I am not. How shall I, now that I have been made alive again, continue in that hateful thing, of whose malignant tendencies in itself, and of whose utter irreconcilableness to the will and character of God, I have, in the death of my Representative and my Surety, obtained so striking a demonstration?

5. Mark, then, the apostle's receipt for holiness. It is not that you reckon yourself pure, but that you reckon yourself pardoned. And how it should fall with the efficacy of a charm on a sinner's ear, when told that the first stepping stone towards that character of heaven after which he has been so hopelessly labouring, is to assure himself that all the guilt of his past ungodliness is now done away — that the ransom of iniquity is paid, and that by Christ's death the penalties of that law he so oft has broken shall never reach him. It is this which brings home to the believer's heart the malignity of sin; it is this which opens to him the gate of heaven, and, disclosing to his view the glories of that upper region, teaches him that it is indeed a land of sacredness; it is this which inclines his footsteps along the path to immortality, which the death of Christ alone has rendered accessible; it is this which conforms his character to that of the celestial spirits who are there before him; for the will of Christ, whom he now loves, is that he should be like unto him; and the grateful wish and grateful endeavour of the disciple, draw forth from his labouring bosom that prayer of faith, which is sure to rise with acceptance, and is sure to be answered with power.

(T. Chalmers, D. D.)

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KJV: Likewise reckon ye also yourselves to be dead indeed unto sin, but alive unto God through Jesus Christ our Lord.

WEB: Thus consider yourselves also to be dead to sin, but alive to God in Christ Jesus our Lord.