Deleted Scenes: Romans 6:15-23 Wages And The Gift

“The wages of sin is death, but the gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord.” That’s Romans 6:23, one of the most quoted and well known passages in the book. It’s one of those verses that holds entire worlds within its words. It’s a verse that encapsulates the whole Gospel. I didn’t go into detail about it on Sunday so I want to reflect on it a bit more here.

Obviously, the idea of wages is that you receive what you deserve. In return for certain work, you are paid what has been agreed upon ahead of time. It might be stingy or it might be generous, but there’s a direct correlation between work and pay. I’ve talked about my first real job before, which was at a Dairy Queen in Calgary, Alberta. That’s why one of my nicknames as a teenager was C-Dilly- C because it’s the first letter of my name, Dilly because of the dilly bar at Dairy Queen. I know, it’s a ridiculously cool nickname, try not to let your jealousy show. My wage at Dairy Queen was $5.90 an hour. That was also the minimum wage in Alberta at the time. The premier of Alberta had said there was no need to raise the minimum wage because nobody was making it in the very prosperous province. Is that right, Mr. Premier? I was scheduled for two shifts a week. Those shifts would be half an hour shorter than the amount that would mandate a break. The thought of me sitting there for 15 minutes sipping my free Dr. Pepper (the only real benefit offered) was just too much for my superiors to handle. But again, according to the labor laws, they were well within their rights. In any case, I’d come home with these paychecks for about $100 for two weeks of work. Those were the wages. That was the predetermined return for the work I had done.

Paul says the wages of sin is death. That is the pre-determined, just return for the work we’ve done. That’s the case back in Genesis 3, where the result of Adam and Eve’s sin is an immediate severing of their relationship with God, followed ultimately by physical death. If I were to try to explain the logic of this (sin = death), this is what I’d say. The essence of sin is a rejection of God’s rule in our lives. It’s saying to God, “I want to do things my own way, I don’t want to live the way you’ve called me to live”. Now, God is the source of life. It’s His breath in our lungs. He is the one who holds all things together. All life is ultimately a gift from Him. Bringing those things together, when we cut ourselves off from God through sin, we are cutting ourselves off from the source of life. Death, in all its dimensions, is the logical consequence. The wages of sin is death. That’s the paycheque we receive for all the works we do in rejecting God.

The wages of sin is death, but the gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord. Eternal life is a gift. My kids joined me in watching the slam dunk contest at the NBA All-Star game this past weekend. The winner (for the third straight year) was a guy named Mac McClung. Mac McClung is almost exactly my size- the same approximate height and weight. However, Mac McClung can jump so high that his eyes are actually above the 10 foot NBA rim. He jumps over cars. He jumps over 7 foot players. I have never seen anyone jump as high as Mac McClung. I could work all my life on increasing my vertical leap and I would never jump as high as him. It is a gift, pure and simple. He has been given physical tools that very few humans have. Now, of course, he has to do something with that gift. If he sat on a couch eating potato chips and watching re-runs of Full House all day, those gifts would probably not do him a whole lot of good (there’s something important there about the relationship between grace and the works we do in response). But the ability to jump higher than almost any human can? That’s a gift, straight up.

Life is a gift. It is not deserved, it is not worked for, it is grace given by a good God who is determined to bless His image-bearers. That phrase “eternal life” does include our forever home with Him in the new heavens and new earth. However, it can also be translated as “life of the age to come”, and that is a life that we already glimpse and taste now. As Paul says in Romans, we have new life in Christ now. We get to glimpse the Kingdom of God now. We get signs and anticipations of that forever reality even now before Christ returns, including His presence in us and the fruit that the Holy Spirit bears through us. And again, all this is a gift, straight up.

Praise God that while death is the just payment for sin, He has given us a gift that is undeserved. Let that fact sink in and prompt you to love Him more. Let it encourage you to share the good news that people don’t need to take home a death paycheque. They can receive the gift of life instead.