Under Grace

What does it mean to be “under grace”? Does this reality somehow cancel out the necessity of obedience? Is an insistence on obedience inconsistent with Paul’s insistence that we are justified by faith alone?

Rom 6:14-15 provides the answer. This is the only place in Romans (unless I’ve missed something) where the exact phrases “under law” and “under grace” occur (but cf. Rom 4:16; 5:20). Several things are clear here. First, being under the mastery of sin is somehow connected with being under law; sin is not master precisely because we are no longer under law. Being under grace thus means that we have been delivered from the mastery of sin.

Second, Paul does not shy away from using the language of “obedience” to describe the life of the person “under grace.” As soon as he’s contrasted the two states ?Eunder law and under grace ?Ehe answers the antinomian objection. And he goes on to explain what it means to be under grace, in v 16: Everyone is a slave; everyone yields obedience to something. Yielding obedience to sin is the state of being a slave of sin (which in v 14 is associated with being “under law”). Yielding obedience to righteousness is what it means to be under grace. The contrast is perhaps even more explicit in v 17: those who were slaves of sins have not become “obedient from the heart to that form of teaching to which you were committed.” In short, the demand for obedience, the expectation of obedience, does not conflict with the fact that we are under grace. On the contrary: Obedience is what life under grace looks like.

What is the relationship between being “under law” and being under the dominion and mastery of sin? The answer appears to be in Rom 5:12-21, where, as I’ve suggested in earlier posts, Paul moves from describing the reign of Death (which comes in with Adam) to describing the reign of Sin (which comes in with the Law). Sin is master over those who “sin in the likeness of the transgression of Adam, that is, those who are under the system of Torah. Once you are delivered from the system of Torah, you are out from law and therefore out from the reign of sin. If you leave the regime of Torah for paganism, you are under the reign of death but not under the reign of sin. Only in the regime of Christ and the Spirit do grace, life, and righteousness reign. That, at least, is how I’m understanding the way Paul uses the terminology in chapter 5.