Romans 6:10

This is expanded in Romans 6:10. ὃ γὰρ ἀπέθανε, τῇ ἁμαρτίᾳ ἀπέθανεν ἐφάπαξ · the ὃ is ‘cognate' accus. Winer, p. 209. “The death that He died, He died to sin once for all.” The dative τῇ ἁμαρτίᾳ must be grammatically the same here as in Romans 6:2; Romans 6:11, but the interpretation required seems different. While He lived, Christ had undoubtedly relations to sin, though sin was foreign to His will and conscience (2 Corinthians 5:21); but after He died these relations ceased; sin could never make Him its victim again as at the Cross. Similarly while we lived (i.e., before we died with Christ), we also had relations to sin; and these relations likewise, different as they were from His, must cease with that death. The difference in the reference of the dative is no doubt an objection to this interpretation, and accordingly the attempt has been made to give the same meaning to dying to sin in Christ's case as in ours, and indeed to make our dying to sin the effect and reproduction of His. “The language of the Apostle seems to imply that there was something in the mind of Christ in dying for us that was the moral equivalent [italics ours] to that death to sin which takes place in us when we believe in Him, something in its very nature fitted to produce hte change in us.” Somerville, St. Paul's Conception of Christ, p. 100 f. He died, in short, rather than sin laid down His life rather than violate the will of God; in this sense, which is an ethical one, and points to an experience which can be reproduced in others under His influence, He died to sin. “His death on the Cross was the final triumph of His holiness, over all those desires of the flesh that furnish to man unregenerate the motive power of His life.” But though this gives an ethical meaning to the words in both cases, it does not give exactly the same ethical meaning; a certain disparity remains. It is more in the line of all Paul's thoughts to say with Holtzmann (N. T. Theol., ii., 118), that Christ by dying paid to sin that tribute to which in virtue of a Divine sentence (κρίμα, Romans 5:16) it could lay claim, and that those therefore who share His death are like Himself absolved from all claims of sin for the future. For ἐφάπαξ, see Hebrews 7:27; Hebrews 9:12; Hebrews 10:10. The very idea of death is that of a summary, decisive. never-to-be-repeated end. ὃ δὲ ζῇ κ. τ. λ. “The lite that He lives He lives to God”.