The Conquering of Sin and the Death of Death

By Robb Brunansky

Published April 8, 2025

As we celebrate Jesus’ resurrection this month, we should consider why His resurrection happened. According to the New Testament there is nothing in Scripture more relevant to the issues, temptations, problems, and sins believers are facing right now than the resurrection of Jesus Christ. Jesus’ resurrection was His victory over sin and death. Christ’s victory, though, was not for Him alone but guarantees our victory as well. His resurrection secures not only our justification but also our sanctification.

How is that Jesus rising from the grave almost 2,000 years ago can give us the victory over sin? The answer to that question is what Romans 6:8-11 is about. We must understand that Jesus’ victory over sin and death through His resurrection guarantees our victory, and we need to know how to appropriate that resurrection power in our lives. Paul gives three basic steps to living by the power of Jesus’ resurrection in the context of our daily lives and battle against sin. 

We must first understand our relationship with Christ.

A believer’s relationship with Christ is one of spiritual union. Whatever happened to Jesus happened to us. And whatever happens to us, happens to Him. God recognizes Jesus’ death and burial as our death and burial, too. This union is the primary concern of the first part of the chapter (Romans 6:1-7). We have died with Christ.

If we are in a relationship with Jesus, then, we are assured that God will not stop halfway (verse 8). His victory is our victory. Jesus died and received resurrection life, and we believe that we die and receive resurrection life in Him. We experience Jesus’ victory over sin and His resurrection life now by faith.

How do we have resurrection life while we are still in a body of flesh that is bent toward sin? To answer this question, Paul wrote that Christ has defeated death and sin by dying and rising again (verses 9-10).

This truth is precisely where our battle against sin almost always goes wrong – when we try to muster willpower from within ourselves to conquer sin. Paul says, ‘No, That’s the wrong way to fight against sin. The only way His resurrection can empower us to conquer sin is to fix our eyes upon Him and see His battle against sin.’

Christ’s resurrection tells us He is no longer subject to death. He has defeated death through His resurrection! He now possesses an indestructible life (Hebrews 7:16). Paul says we need to know this truth. To understand who we are in Christ, we need to know He has won the victory over death.

Paul adds that when Jesus died, He died to sin. Christ’s death assaulted the power of sin. His death defeated sin once for all. Jesus’ death is a unique, sufficient, unrepeatable event in which He destroyed sin’s power.

Additionally, Jesus, in His resurrected, indestructible, glorious life, lives to the glory of God in perfection without any relationship to sin. Through His resurrection, sin is a vanquished foe. Christ now lives in God’s presence where no sin can enter in and dwell, where everything is for the Lord’s glory.

Understand Jesus’ relationship to sin was never like ours. Our relationship to sin is one of committing sins. Jesus relationship to sin was one of bearing the sins His people had committed (2 Corinthians 5:21, 1 Peter 2:24). When Christ died to sin, He accomplished the destruction of His people’s sins. His death was so effective and powerful, that it ended His relationship with sin because He completely dealt with our sins on the cross. It is finished!

Our relationship with Christ is one of union with Him, and Christ has defeated death and sin by virtue of His death and resurrection. When we put those two facts together, we realize what we are in Christ. We are dead to sin but alive to God.

Our relationship with the Lord is through faith, as one of union. What happened to Jesus in His death and resurrection belongs to us. If Christ broke the power of sin in His death and resurrection, then we are no longer under sin’s power if we are in Him. We are to consider ourselves finished with sin and its power to be broken in our lives and alive to God, so we live for Him as free from sin through new, resurrection life.

Being dead to sin and alive to God is independent of what we think about it; it is reality. Like all reality, it does not depend on us but on God. Paul is not telling the Romans to make it so by believing it to be so. He is telling them to accept the truth about what they are in Christ and to think rightly about themselves and their relationship to sin and to God. The Romans needed to come to terms with the fact that Jesus’ death and resurrection had irrevocably changed their relationship with both sin and with God, so they are now dead to sin but alive to God.

Now, if sin has been defeated and if we are alive to God, shouldn’t we just stop sinning altogether? Jesus, by His death and resurrection, has broken sin’s power over us. But we are not yet resurrected as He is. We are still in bodies of flesh that lust after sinful things. That explains why we not only battle sin but so often find ourselves giving in to it.

We deal with this dilemma by looking at Christ and remembering what is ultimately true about us because we see what is true about Him and understand our union with Him through faith. Rather than letting what we feel determine what we believe, we allow God’s Word and the truth about Jesus direct our feelings and guide us into obedience.

If there is one word that goes with Jesus’ resurrection, it is hope. Christ has broken the power of sin over us. His resurrection has completely dealt with our sin. Don’t give up. Remember what we are in Christ. Remember that our relationship with sin has been severed. Hold fast to His promise.

Why was Christ raised from the dead? Jesus was raised to conquer sin and to slay death. He has given us everything we need for life and godliness in His death and resurrection. What a glorious Resurrection Sunday promise!