This is applied in the two chapters that follow. There are two things that might make insuperable difficulty: the one is the obstacle of sin in the nature to practical holiness; the other is the provocation and condemnation of the law. Now the doctrine which we saw asserted in the latter part of chapter 5 is applied to both. First, as to practical holiness, it is not merely that Christ has died for my sins, but that even in the initiatory act of baptism the truth set forth there is that I am dead. It is not, as in Ephesians 2, dead in sins, which would be nothing to the purpose. This is all perfectly true—true of a Jew as of a pagan—true of any unrenewed man that never heard of a Saviour. But what is testified by Christian baptism is Christ’s death. “Know ye not, that so many of us as were baptized unto Jesus Christ were baptized unto His death?” Thereby is identification with His death. “Therefore we are buried with him by baptism into death; that like as Christ was raised up from the dead by the glory of the Father, even so we also should walk in newness of life.” The man who, being baptized in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ, or Christian baptism, would assert any license to sin because it is in his nature, as if it were therefore an inevitable necessity, denies the real and evident meaning of his baptism. That act denoted not even the washing away of our sins by the blood of Jesus, which would not apply to the case, nor in any adequate way meet the question of nature. What baptism sets forth is more than that, and is justly found, not in Romans 3, but in Romans 6. There is no inconsistency in Ananias’s word to the Apostle Paul—“wash away thy sins, calling upon the name of the Lord.” There is water as well as blood, and to that, not to this, the washing here refers. But there is more, which Paul afterward insisted on. That was said to Paul, rather than what was taught by Paul. What the Apostle had given him in fullness was the great truth, however fundamental it may be, that I am entitled, and even called on in the name of the Lord Jesus, to know that I am dead to sin; not that I must die, but that I am dead—that my baptism means nothing less than this, and is shorn of its most emphatic point if limited merely to Christ’s dying for my sins. It is not so alone; but in His death, unto which I am baptized, I am dead to sin. And “How shall we that are dead to sin live any longer therein?” Hence, then, we find that the whole chapter is founded on this truth. “Shall we sin,” says he, proceeding yet farther (vs. 15), “because we are not under the law, but under grace?” This were indeed to deny the value of His death, and of that newness of life we have in Him risen, and a return to bondage of the worst description.