Deliverance from slavery has two basic options—redemption (when you are purchased via a ransom and then set free by your gracious redeemer) and death (when your existence moves outside the reach of your taskmaster).
The Scriptures speak of deliverance from slavery in both ways. For His part, Christ came to give His life a ransom for many (Mark 10:45), and then our Redeemer gave us spiritual freedom (Galatians 5:1) to do the right thing, no longer a slave to sin.
For our part, we must die to sin. Powerfully motivated by godly sorrow, genuine repentance necessitates death to sin and its slavery. Repentance vehemently desires and zealously hungers and thirsts to be cut off from a life of sin. It insists upon no longer being a slave of sin. The only way for this to occur is through death, “for he who died has been freed from sin” (Romans 6:8).
Because the resurrected and glorified Christ exists outside the reach of death’s greedy grasp, it no longer has dominion over Him. We who are made alive together with Him and have been raised up together and made to sit together in the heavenly places in Him (Ephesians 2:5-6) now have an existence which delivers us from sin. It no longer has dominion over us. We can no longer be slaves of sin. Our death to sin through repentance and baptism makes such glorious freedom possible.
