Leviticus, Livers, and the Wages of Sin - Part 2

Part 2

In part 1 I shared how taking a class on Hebrew poetry prompted me to revisit Romans 6. I explored how parallel poetry revealed the relationship between souls and livers. 

Let my soul not enter into their council;

Let not my liver be united with their assembly (Gen 49:6 paraphrase)

In part 2 I will share how contrasting parallelism provided a launching pad straight into the wages of sin.

For Yahweh knows the way of the righteous,

But the way of the wicked will perish. (Ps 1:6)

For the past 5 years as I've been studying ancient sacrifice, the two books I have become the most intimate with are Romans and Leviticus. Romans because what the heck is a living sacrifice, and Leviticus because how am I supposed to offer my body as a living sacrifice today if I don't know what a dead sacrifice looked like for my ancient brothers and sisters? But until I took that class on Hebrew poetry, I’d never noticed how much Paul uses this same mirroring technique. And of course he would, being a Jew who had studied Hebrew under Rabbi Gamaliel. Paul uses parallel poetry. A lot. And Romans 6 is one of his finest, and it contains what is, in my opinion, one of the most misused verses in the Bible:

The wages of sin is death

but the free gift of God is eternal life

As a rather obvious piece of parallelism I’m still astonished that I had never noticed the stark contrasts.

Death and life. 

On the one hand wages. 

On the other hand, a free gift. 

And sin is more than mildly contrasted, it is dead set opposed to God. 

Throughout the preceding verses, Paul has been gradually building the contrast between these opposing masters; sin and God. The many mirrors within these verses had been hiding in plain sight, but now they came to life, jumping off the page.

count yourselves dead to sin 

but alive to God (v11)

Do not offer any part of yourself to sin as an instrument of wickedness, 

but rather offer yourselves to God as those who have been brought from death to life, 

and offer every part of yourself to him as an instrument of righteousness.(v13)

sin shall no longer be your master, 

because you are not under the law, 

but under grace. (v14)

when you offer yourselves to someone as obedient slaves, 

you are slaves of the one you obey—

whether you are slaves to sin, which leads to death, 

or to obedience, which leads to righteousness (v16)

You have been set free from sin 

you have become slaves to righteousness. (v18)

you used to offer yourselves as slaves to impurity and to ever-increasing wickedness

so now offer yourselves as slaves to righteousness leading to holiness. (v19)

What benefit did you reap at that time from the things you are now ashamed of? Those things result in death! 

But now that you have been set free from sin and have become slaves of God,

the benefit you reap leads to holiness, and the result is eternal life. (vv21-22)

And now… those two little lines that had been hiding in plain sight:

For the wages of sin is death, 

but the free gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord.

I hope my creative use of colour, combined with our new appreciation for Hebrew poetry, has provided some help in highlighting the contrasts. I quoted Origen a few weeks ago, but I think he deserves another opportunity.

“Death is the wage due to those who fight under King Sin. But God does not give his soldiers a wage, as if they have something owing to them. Rather, he gives them the gift of grace, which is eternal life in Christ.” (Origen, AD 185-254, Commentary on the Epistle to the Romans) 

Throughout more recent church history, commentators have continued to see sin as a tyrannical ruler who loves to pay his subjects poisonous wages 

the wages that sin will pay you, in the end is death (Matthew Poole's Commentary, 1685)

the apostle shows what sort of pay the usurper, sin, gives to those who serve under his banners (Benson Commentary, 1839)

the third contrast, which concerns the terms of service on which the two slave-owners operate… Thus sin pays wages (John Stott, The Message of Romans, 1994)

Growing up I was taught the gospel. But strangely, the particular presentation of the gospel given to me relied more on Romans than the four Gospels. The ‘gospel’ went something like this:

Everyone is a sinner, for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God. The punishment for sinning is death, for the wages of sin is death. If you don’t want God to condemn you to eternal death, you are required to repent. 

It’s not uncommon to see isolated verses ripped out of Romans and crafted into that narrative. The problem is, after reading Romans 6 in context, that is not at all what Paul is saying. I actually think Paul would be horrified that we have twisted his careful comparisons, and are attributing the murderous hand to God. Paul is not tainting God with that brush, in the very next chapter Paul portrays sin as the evil master with a penchant for killing; “for sin, taking an opportunity through the commandment, deceived me, and through it, killed me” (7:11). Unfortunately, as the following quote demonstrates, “the wages of sin” has been often abused, violently removed from its context, leaving it isolated, disfigured and unrecognisable:

What is the just punishment for our rebellion against God? The Bible’s answer is death. God gave us life. To take his gift and reject the giver is treason. It is a capital offence. “The wages of sin is death” as Paul says in Romans 6. [1]

Sadly, you don’t have to search very hard to find the gospel presented like that. Many have misused Romans to create a similar narrative. If you want to say that God kills you for sinning, or if you must say that the punishment for sin is death, pleeeeeaaase don’t use Romans 6:23 as your prooftext. In my opinion, Romans 6 sits alongside Isaiah and the psalms as a profound example of contrasting parallelism, and to present one line without its counterpart, would be to do injustice to Paul and unrighteousness to the Bible. 

For sin pays its wage--death; 

but God's free gift is eternal life 

in union with Christ Jesus our Lord. 

(Good News Translation)

Footnotes:

[1] The Gospel Coalition - In My Place Condemned He Stood: Penal Substitutionary Atonement, 01/11/2022 - ​Rory Shiner

Additional Bibliography:

Biays, Paul M., "Parallelism in Romans" (1967). Fort Hays Studies Series. 26.

https://scholars.fhsu.edu/fort_hays_studies_series/26