Romans 6:12-13

“ Let not sin therefore reign in your mortal body, that ye should obey its lusts.Neither yield ye your members to sin as instruments of unrighteousness: but yield yourselves unto God, as those that have become alive from the dead, and your members as instruments of righteousness for God. ”

In Christ all is done. In the believer all is doing and can be done only with the concurrence of his will. Hence the following exhortation which is connected by therefore.

It might have been thought from certain previous expressions, that Paul did not admit the existence of sin any longer in the believer; but he far from giving himself up to such exaggerations. The very word: “Let not sin reign,” assumes that it is still there. But it ought no longer to be there as sovereign: for it has lost its powerful instrument and auxiliary, the body; the latter has become in Christ the instrument of God. These two aspects of the sanctification of the body, its liberation from sin and its consecration to God correspond respectively to Romans 6:6-7 and Romans 6:8-10, and are developed, the former in Romans 6:12-13 a, and the latter in Romans 6:13 b

The imperative μὴ βασιλευέτω, let it not reign, is addressed grammatically to sin, but in meaning to the believer himself; for it is he who has the task of bringing this reign to an end. The exhortation thus placed as the sequel of what precedes, reminds us of the passage Colossians 3:5: “Ye are dead (Romans 6:3); mortify therefore (Romans 6:5) your members, which are upon the earth.” It is because we are dead to sin in Christ that we can mortify it in ourselves in daily life. The present imperative, with the negative μή, implies the notion of a state which existed till now, but which must terminate.

We must not, as some do, give to the ἐν, in, the meaning of by, as if the apostle meant that the body was the means by which sin exercises its dominion over us. The natural meaning is: “ in your mortal body.” The body is the domain, as it were, in which the dominion of sin is exercised, in this sense, that when once the will has been subjugated by sin, it gives the body of which it disposes over to sin, and this master uses it for his pleasure.

The epithet θνητῷ, mortal, must bear a logical relation to the idea of the passage. The object of this term has been understood very variously. Calvin regards it as expressive of contempt, as if Paul meant to say that man's whole bodily nature hastens to death, and ought not consequently to be pampered. Philippi thinks that the epithet refers rather to the fact of sin having killed the body, and having thus manifested its malignant character. Flatt thinks that Paul alludes to the transient character of bodily pleasures. Chrysostom and Grotius find in the word the idea of the brevity of the toils, which weigh on the Christian here below. According to Tholuck, Paul means to indicate how evil lusts are inseparable from the present state of the body, which is destined by and by to be glorified. According to Lange and Schaff, the sanctification of the mortal body here below is mentioned as serving to prepare for its glorification above. It seems to us that this epithet may be explained more naturally: It is not the part destined to die which should rule the believer's personality; the higher life awakened in him should penetrate him wholly, and rule that body even which is to change its nature. It is obvious that in the last proposition of the verse, the Received reading: to obey it in its lusts, does not yield a simple meaning. To obey sin in its lusts is an artificial and forced expression. The Greco-Latin reading: to obey it, is rather superfluous; what would this regimen add to the idea expressed by the previous words: “Let not sin reign in your body”? The Alexandrine reading: to obey its lusts (αὐτοῦ, the body's), so far as the meaning is concerned, is preferable to both the others; and it has the advantage besides, as we shall show, of explaining easily how they arose. The lusts of the body are its instincts and appetites, which, acting on the soul, determine within it the passionate and disorderly motions of sin. The term ἐπιθυμία, lust (from ἐπί, upon, toward, and θυμός, the heart, feeling, passion), denotes the violence with which, under the dominion of bodily appetite, the soul is carried to the external objects, which can satisfy the desires excited within it. Although, then, it is still sin, the egoistical instinct of the soul, which reigns in the body and directs its use, it thus happens that the appetites of the latter become the masters of conduct; for they present themselves to the soul as the means of satisfying the ardent desire of enjoyment with which it is consumed. In this way the beginning and end of the verse harmonize, the reign of sin over the body, and the supremacy of the body over the person himself. But this relation of ideas was not understood by the copyists. As at the beginning of the verse sin was the subject of the verb reign, it seemed to them that the obedience spoken of in the following words was meant to be rendered to it also, and they added (as in the Byz.) the pronoun αὐτῇ, it (sin), which necessitated the adding also of the preposition ἐν, in, before the word ταῖς ἐπιθυμίαις, the lusts. Such is the origin of the Received reading. Or, again, they rejected all this final clause, which did not seem to be in keeping with the beginning; and thus was formed the Greco-Latin reading.