Dead With Christ

“Do you not know that as many of us as were baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into His death?” As we mentioned last time, Paul asks this question because he is working on the deeper question of how we can live in sin when we have died with Christ. He asks us if we realize that when we were placed into Christ by the Holy Spirit we were placed into His death. Our victory is fundamentally rooted in the fact that we died with Christ, but it is also necessary that we know that so that we count it as true and live accordingly.

Paul walks us through the logic of his argument in Romans 6. Death with Christ leads to resurrection with Christ. It isn’t just death to the old, it is death to the old AND a new life on the other side of the resurrection. But that resurrection is not just the actual future resurrection, it is a resurrection to new life now. Consider verse 4. “Therefore we were buried with Him through baptism into death, that just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, even so we also should walk in newness of life.” (See Adrian Warnock's blog here: Adrian's Blog: Resurrection Empowered Life - Dying to Live)

This also is the point in verses 5-11. If we have been in the likeness of His death, we will also be in the likeness of His resurrection. Verse 8 tells us that if we died with Christ, we believe that we shall also live with Him. Verse 10 says that the death He died, He died to sin, but the life He lives, He lives to God. Therefore (verse 11) we are to reckon ourselves dead to sin and alive to God in Christ.
Christ, of course, did not sin, but He was tempted in all points like we are. He died to all of that on the cross. On the other side of the cross, death no longer has dominion. The temptations were over. In that same way we are to count it as so that we died also so that we can walk in newness of life, that we should no longer be slaves to sin and that we might be alive to God.