Wages of Sin

The wages of sin is death (Romans 6:23). We hear that, and translate it into: “We do sinful acts; God punishes us with death; the ‘wage’ sin pays is death.”

As Lloyd Gaston hints in Paul and the Torah, that doesn’t fit the way Paul uses the word “sin,” especially in Romans 5-6. There sin is Sin, a dominating power, a lord, with a host of slaves who have devoted the members of their body to his service. 

When they have served Master Sin well, he pays out the wages, Death. 

So Paul means what he says, exactly what he says, no interpolation necessary: The wage that Sin pays is death.

Sin is doing the payroll, and if we want to earn something else, something like life, we need a new employer, a new Lord. But the only way to find a new line of work, ironically, is to die; we escape the employment of Sin by dying the liberating death of baptism (Romans 6:1-7). 

God deprives Sin of his employees by using Sin’s wages against him, defeating the one with power of death by death.