For when you were slaves of sin, you were free in regard to righteousness.
Video Notes:
We were slaves to sin. So, we weren’t doing anything righteous and we were free from the impulse to do righteous things.
Romans 3:10 No one is righteous.
Yes, non-believers may want to “do good” or “lead good lives”, but they do so according to their own desires, for their own ends, and according to their own standards of what is good. They may or may not be things which our outwardly good according to God’s standards, but they aren’t being done out of love and obedience to God and thus aren’t truly righteous.
So, we were free from righteousness both in the sense that we did not do truly righteous deeds and in the sense that we were not righteous people.
It’s a strange sense of freedom in the text and maybe to you as a Christian of being free from God and His ways. In the same way, hell is a continuation of this freedom, but in its fullness.
