management by extraction

Week 44  Romans 6

I’m not sure why Paul asked the question but there it is: shall we go on sinning so that grace may increase? I sit thinking about it. It’s an odd one.
I have my doubts that it’s theoretical…I don’t think it’s a random question Paul just happened to ask out-of-the-blue. I sounds to me like some people in the church had developed a Sin Management Theory that Paul thought was cock-eyed.
I tried to kind of reverse-engineer what Paul said about this skewed theory and it looked like this:
A) The world was a system that contained Amount-X of grace
B) In a steady-state system the quantity of grace would remain Amount-X
C) But if Amount-Y of sin was introduced into the system grace would react to that input and compensate for the imbalance
D) So then grace’s value would jump to (let’s say) Amount-X+Y .
At the practical & personal level the theory said:
Grace is good…
I can boost the amount of grace by sinning…
And since more grace is better then I should sin.
I’m not absolutely sure this is a completely accurate picture of the Sin Management Theory that Paul was talking about. Besides…I think the underlying question he was getting at was: what-do-I-do-about-sin?
In Rome some people figured you could manage sin by balancing it within the system. But Paul’s view was that it was best to just get it out of the system – Management by Extraction.

Note: quote from Romans 6:1 (NIV)