Ver. 13.
And do not present[92] your limbs, your bodies in the detail of their faculties, as implements (ὅπλα) of unrighteousness, to sin, to sin regarded as the holder and employer of the implements. But present[93] yourselves, your whole being, centre and circle, to God, as men living after death, in His Son's risen life, and your limbs, hand, foot, and head, with all their faculties, as implements of righteousness for God.
"O blissful self-surrender!" The idea of it, sometimes cloudy, sometimes radiant, has floated before the human soul in every age of history. The spiritual fact that the creature, as such, can never find its true centre in itself, but only in the Creator, has expressed itself in many various forms of aspiration and endeavour, now nearly touching the glorious truth of the matter, now wandering into cravings after a blank loss of personality, or however an eternal coma of absorption into an Infinite practically impersonal; or again, affecting a submission which terminates in itself, an islam, a self-surrender into whose void no blessing falls from the God who receives it. Far different is the "self-presentation" of the Gospel. It is done in the fulness of personal consciousness and choice. It is done with revealed reasons of infinite truth and beauty to warrant its rightness. And it is a placing of the surrendered self into Hands which will both foster its true development as only its Maker can, as He fills it with His presence, and will use it, in the bliss of an eternal serviceableness, for His beloved will.
[84] Not that the imagery of the limb appears here, explicitly. But it does appear below, xii. 5, and in the contemporary passage 1 Cor. vi. 15; and more fully in the Epistles of the First Captivity.
[85] Οἵτινες: the paraphrase is perhaps a slight exaggeration of the force of the pronoun.
[86] Ὅσοι ἐβαπτίσθημεν: we give a paraphrase, not a translation, to shew the meaning practically.
[87] We thus paraphrase a difficult sentence. It seems to us that the ὁμοίωμα τοῦ θανάτου Αὐτοῦ must refer to the baptismal rite. If so, our paraphrase as a whole will be justified.—As to the "plunge" and "emergence," we would only say, without entering further on an agitated question, that it seems to us clear that baptism was at first, theoretically, an entire immersion, but that, also primevally, the theory was allowed to be modified in practice; the pouring of water in such cases representing the ideal immersion. As early as "the Teaching of the Twelve Apostles," cent. i. (ch. vii.), there are signs of this.
[88] More literally, perhaps, "shall also come to life with Him." If we read this aright, it points to the prospect future at the moment of the atoning Death, when, ideally, we died. It does not therefore mean, practically, that we do not live with Him now, as we certainly do (see just below, ver. 11). But it is as if to say, "we believe that our share in His risen Life surely follows, now and always, our share in His atoning Death."
[89] The words τῷ Κυρίῳ ἡμῶν are to be omitted from the text.
[90] Μὲ βασιλευέτω: possibly the present imperative may imply, "do not go on letting it reign."