Romans – The Play Part 2: Oneness with Christ — Dead to Sin, Alive to God

And brothers and sisters, I’m just going to close with the simplest illustration you’ve ever heard in your life.

There was this fellow—and he really is embodied as an existing creature. There was this creature walking around the earth. And behind him was a slave. And when he went this way, the slave went with him. When he went that way, the slave went with him. Willingly or unwillingly, he went with him. And this master, sin, was very attached to his slave. His slave was in total obedience to him. The slave knew that. Sometimes, and sometimes didn’t, but sin was always his master.

One day, Sin was walking along with this slave beside him. And Sin looked up and saw a cross. And he knew something had radically changed. And he looked around for his slave, and there was a grave. And on the tombstone, it said:

“The slave has died and is now freed by death.”

And Sin stood over the grave and said, “Get out of there. Come on. I own you. You’re mine. I haven’t paid you fully. Well… I guess I have. You’ve died. Get up out of the grave. Come follow me.”

Nothing. The most final act there is, legally, empirically, any way you want to look at it, legislatively, executively, judicially, the most final act there is, is death.

Death separates everybody. You never see a tax collector getting money from a corpse. You never see a witness brought in who is dead. There’s no way to talk about the finality of death.
When a person dies, that’s it. You will sometimes hear about his estate being brought into court, but he’s not brought into court. When death comes, death causes the end of all relationships between that person and everything.

Let me tell you a story that’s not well-known.

Louis XIV had a wife he didn’t like, but he put up with her. He was Europe’s most famous monarch, probably Europe’s most colorful and most powerful, certainly one of the wealthiest who ever was. Anyway, she finally died. He did not remarry—at least they did not think he did.

But in fact, he secretly married a woman named Maintenon. Well, later he died. Later, she died.

Fifty years later, it was known that he had remarried. And the woman had been hated in her lifetime, but fifty years later, the French Revolution came. Now, I do not know why they did not dig up Louis XIV, but they found Madame Maintenon’s grave, and they dug her up in the middle of the fierceness of the French Revolution. They pulled her corpse out of there. And they hung it. And they took sticks and beat on it. She was that hated.

And I have imagined that corpse. They were beating on that corpse. Do you think Madame Maintenon knew this? That corpse was totally without response.