"Indicative" Tagged Sermons
Every command in Ephesians 5-6’s household instructions depends on a prior indicative, what God has already done in Christ, rather than the other way around. Christ’s own coming is itself a new act of obedience, God himself obeying on his people’s behalf. New obedience follows from that gift; it doesn’t earn it.
Romans 6:14 offers no license for antinomianism: the command to resist sin only makes sense after the prior fact that grace, not law, already rules the believer. Indicative always precedes imperative in Paul’s argument. Christ’s own resurrection life, pictured as a house believers now inhabit, is what actually does the work the command describes.