One of my favorite Brendan Frazer movies is Bedazzled. In it Brendan plays Elliot Richards, a socially incompetent technical advisor working at a call-center. He has had a crush on one of his co-workers, Allison Gardner, for nearly four years, but Allison barely notices Elliot exists. The plot begins when Elliot meets up with a beautiful young woman, played by Elizabeth Hurley, who introduces herself as the devil and offers Elliot wishes in exchange for his soul. The first one Elliot wastes on a Big Mac and Coke. Satan takes him to McDonald’s places the order and then has Elliot pay for the meal, because, “there is no such thing as a free lunch.” Elliot is finally convinced and agrees to the Devils terms and he quickly wishes to be rich and powerful with Allison as his wife. Satan makes him a Colombian drug lord whose wife despises him. Satan points out that he never wished for Alison to love him. The rest of the wishes go about as good as that one.
In the movie Elliot’s main problem is that he is a slave to his desire for Allison. He lets that cloud his judgment and it nearly costs him his life and his soul, and he is never happy. It takes Elliot 6 of his 7 wishes to figure out that he can’t win in this deal he has made with the Devil. Now we know it is a bad idea to make a deal with the Devil and Elliot is skeptical in the beginning but the Devil assures him he has nothing to loose and everything to gain and so Elliot signs up and makes a deal with the Devil. What Elliot fails to realize is that part of the reason his wishes fail miserably is because Elliot’s wishes are all about what he wants and don’t take into account what Allison, the object of his desire, wants. The same is true of sin in our own lives. It is seductive, it tells us we can have whatever we want, it clouds our judgment and can cost us our lives.
Towards the end of the movie Elliot is in danger of spending eternity in damnation and needs a way to get out of the deal, to break the contract he has made with the devil.
One of the great things when we accept Jesus Christ as our savior is that we are no longer under the law and we are justified through grace and made righteous in God’s sight not by what we have done but by the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ our Lord. The temptation for us once we are saved is that we can then live however we want secure in the knowledge that we are forgiven. But Paul addresses that in our scripture today. In verse 1 Paul asks the very question, “Shall we go on sinning so that grace may increase?” and he answers it “By no means! We died to sin; how can we live in it any longer?” And again in verse 15 Paul asks the same question in a slightly different form. “What then? Shall we sin because we are not under law but under grace? By no means!”
Richard Hays, professor of New Testament at Duke University, says “By no means” is the equivalent of a strong “Hell no!” In essence what Paul is asking is, should one remain in a situation that is spiritually corrosive and generally speaking, way bad, so that grace might be more abundant? And then he answers No way! Why? Because Christians, through their union with Jesus Christ, have died to sin and been raised to new life, which means not only a new status but a whole new way of living.
Now you might be wondering what all this has to do with selling your soul, and thinking you would never do that. You might be thinking if Satan appeared introduced himself to me and said, “I will grant you 7 wishes if you give me your soul” that you would never do that. But the truth is that we had sold our soul to the devil and we may even still be owned by him because we have been or are still slaves to sin.
Now we might not think that we are slaves or that slavery is even an appropriate comparison to our predicament but it is. We aren’t wearing leg irons or chains; our lives are mostly not restricted. But never the less we were and still might be slaves to sin, sold out to it by our own selfish desires.
Slavery is both unreal and even offensive until we fully understand Paul’s use of the concept in Romans 6. But, we can’t understand that concept until we become aware of the back story hidden behind Paul’s use of slavery and freedom.
When Paul uses terms such as slavery and bondage to sin, he is drawing upon the experience of the ancient exodus, when the people of God were delivered from slavery into the freedom of the promised land. Everything Paul writes about the experience of freedom in Jesus Christ is grounded in this exodus story. To perceive this underlying structure beneath the story of sin and redemption is like looking into one of those Magic Eye photos the moment a whole world that was once invisible becomes apparent.
Just as the people of God were delivered from slavery through the waters of the Red Sea, so Christians after believing in Jesus Christ demonstrate through the waters of baptism having been delivered from bondage to sin into eternal life (6:4). As the people of God, freed from slavery, began a new life under the covenant and tutelage of the Law, so Christians proclaim through baptism a new life of “sanctification,” under the tutelage of the Holy Spirit and the teaching of Christ, the end of which is life eternal (6:22).
Sanctification means “to set apart” and was used in the Hebrew Scripture to describe the sanctity or “set apartness” of the vessels of the tabernacle. They were “set apart” for use only in the tabernacle. They were thus “holy” vessels, set apart vessels. When it is written that we are now sanctified it means that we have been set apart for God’s divine purposes and we are not to be used for any other purpose. We are not to be used as instruments of evil, or wrongdoing. Those who’s lives are characterized by wrongdoing, intemperate living, selfish lifestyles, are slaves. Slaves to their own nature. Slaves to sin. They have sold their soul to the Devil to sin and at one time all of us have been owned by him.
But Paul calls on us to recognize that we can escape that deal, that slavery, that we can be set free or better come under new ownership for our lives are not our own, for those of us who have accepted Jesus, believed in Him, they belong to God and not to sin.
So the question is: Whose servant are we going to be? God’s? Or sin’s?
Interestingly, and perhaps confusing for those who cherish individual freedom, Paul has a radically different notion of freedom than most. We might sum it up this way: We are set free to be servants of God. Commenting on this notion of Christian freedom, N.T. Wright says “freedom from the slavery to sin involves a new kind of ‘liberated slavery,’ obedience to God who loves us and seeks out our true freedom, our true humanness.” Paul makes the provocative argument that slavery is a fact of human life. The question is to whom will one be enslaved: to sin with all its self-serving and self-destructive habits that lead ultimately to death ... or to God, with habits of life that display the grace of Christ and lead one to eternal life?
You see our souls have been sold, we are given ownership over them, that is our free well, and we are allowed to sell them to what we want. We all have chosen to sell them to sin, to enter into the slavery of sin, and it’s wages are death, eternal separation from God. But even though we choose sin and death, God still pursues us, and paid the price to liberate us to become His children, His workmanship. All we have to do is accept it, believe that Jesus Christ died to save us and we can have our soul purchased back by God and receive eternal life. But the choice is ours which will you choose.
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