The apostle anticipates the dilemma that his Roman readers may be faced with: do they not end up in a vacuum when the grace of Christ transcends the law? Paul introduces this dilemma in the form of two questions in Romans 6:1: What shall we say then? Are we to continue in sin that grace may abound? The NIV renders the last question in a more active sense: Shall we go on sinning so that grace may increase? Such a translation goes too far, however, since Paul already assumes that his readers do not have any desire to go out of their way to continue sinning, and as such he posits the question from a more remote perspective, i.e. do we have to remain in sin? Here Paul conceptualizes sin as a kingdom or as a king. From the perspective of a righteous Jew, all Gentiles are necessarily sinners because they do not want to live under the regime of the Lord. Therefore, the issue in Romans 6:1 is not whether we sin a lot or a little, but whether we necessarily continue to belong to the kingdom of sin (the world outside and over against Israel) unless we migrate over to the kingdom of the law.¹