Metaphorically Speaking

The sixth chapter of Romans is a hard chapter to wrap our minds around. Every born again child of God knows the difficulty of rightly understanding and then living out our relationship to the law and living under grace. Paul deals with the truth by showing how our justification by faith and our union in Christ makes it a contradiction for a Christian to continue to live in sin. After explaining the truth, Paul restates it and illustrates the point. He says Romans 6:19, “I speak after the manner of men because of the infirmity of your flesh.” In other words, Paul’s going to give us an illustration from life to help us connect the dots of this spiritual reality.

People think in metaphors and illustrations. God created us to think in illustrations. Some functional MRI brain imaging studies done by the University of Arizona show, “when you hear a metaphor such as "she had a rough day," regions of the brain associated with tactile experience are activated. If you hear, "he's so sweet," areas associated with taste are activated. And when you hear action verbs used in a metaphorical context, like "grasp a concept," regions involved in motor perception and planning are activated,”(University of Arizona. (2019, April 2). How the brain finds meaning in metaphor. ScienceDaily).  They studied the brain with an EEG while participants read three synonymous sentences, two literal renderings and the third using a metaphor, and the brain acted much faster when the person read the metaphor.

Because of the weakness of humanity, the latter part of Romans 6 and the first part of chapter 7 are illustrations to restate the doctrine. Paul explains the doctrine, then provides some illustrations to drive the point home. Why? Because our creator knows how He made us. Don’t feel bad if you read something in the Bible and at first don’t understand or if you don’t grasp a doctrine or a concept immediately. Also, don’t give up! One of the keys to Bible study is if there is a difficult verse that you are having trouble grasping, there are often other passages that shed more light in other places. Or, as in our case, there are illustrations and further explanation. So, if you had trouble grasping Romans 6:14 or 6:18, God has given us an illustration to think about it another way.

This is another example of God’s goodness. God could have given us a Bible all in one genre of writing. Explicit truth number one. Truth number two. Truth number three, and therefore and etc. But God has given us a book with different ways of revealing his truth. Some poetry, some history, some parables, but  all unfolding the unified truth revealed by our Creator. You should expect parts of the Scripture to be deep and profound. We are dealing with truths about the Holy God and eternity. But God wants His people to know, so He gave us a book to explain it.