We have, as the song says, "climbed every mountain" in chapters 1-7 to get to this summit. Now we enter upon the higher plane of life which the Gospel opens up to the believer.
"There is therefore now no condemnation to those who are in Christ Jesus."
The 'therefore' refers back to the section heading 7:5-6 over most of chapters 7 and 8. Paul picks up the threads again from 7:6 - "but now we are discharged from the Law, dead to that which held us captive." That is why there is no condemnation - because we are discharged from the Law; there is no Law now to condemn. By the death of Jesus, our 'first husband', we have been discharged from it. With Him, we have died out from under it: its jurisdiction over us is ended. Let the Law thunder from Sinai's height till it splits the mountains with its roaring, we may turn a deaf ear to it all: we are in Christ Jesus; and in Him we are taken right out of the realm where the Law has any say. It can neither condemn us nor deceive us any longer. Our righteousness now owes nothing to the Law or to the keeping of it. The only righteousness we have - or need or want - is a righteousness which is ours because Christ dwells in our heart by faith; so living a Christian life is not a matter of living up to the Law's demands, but of appropriating Christ's righteousness by faith, and yielding to the constraint of His love.
We have no need either to boast or to lament; pride of achievement and shame for failure are both alike ruled out. We are no longer slaves who have to toil for a meagre reward, or be dismissed for unsatisfactory service; we are sons and daughters of God, secure in the freedom of our Father's house and the fellowship of His Son, our elder brother. They rule their house by love, not law - 'by the Spirit', not 'by the book.'
So ... there is no condemnation. "Grasp the fact that you have peace with God," as Paul put it. (5:1)
Now Paul moves on to the result of that. Because we are discharged from the Law through the death of Jesus there is no condemnation hanging over us. That is one thing.
But there is another thing which follows from it.
Because we are freed from the Law, we are freed from our bondage to sin ... for as we have seen, what gives sin its hold over us is the Law. It is from the Law that sin derives its strength; so once the Law is removed, sin loses its strength. Our discharge from the Law not only frees us from condemnation, it frees us too from sin's hold over us. That is what Paul moves on to now.
"For the law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus has set you free from the law of sin and death."
Now the law of sin and death is what Paul was talking about through ch. 7. Sin presses God's Law into its own service and uses it either to crush us in our failure to keep it, or to deceive us into producing a hideously false righteousness if we do keep it. Either way, it brings us into a state of helpless wretchedness. We cannot call it anything but 'sin and death' - that is all our life amounts to. As Paul showed, there is no other sort of experience open to us while the Law rules the roost. The 'law of sin and death' is the way things always go when we try to be righteous by keeping the Law.
It is through the Law that sin imprisons us. That way of trying to be righteous Paul describes as the 'flesh' way. 'Living in the flesh' or 'walking according to the flesh' or 'having the mind of the flesh' does not mean, in Paul's vocabulary, being dissolute. It means pursuing the good life independently of God ... trying to 'make it' on our own, seeking meaning and satisfaction in our life our own way and by our own endeavour, not drawing humbly upon the resources that only God can supply to faith.
The subtlest way of doing this is to take God's own Law as our blueprint, and manufacture our own righteousness to that model. When we live 'in the flesh,' the Law is the best plan we have on which to base our endeavours - but we have nothing to bring to those endeavours but our sin-ruled self. As Paul has shown us, it is a futile, wretched business - no way can it make us good: if we fail we are finished, and if we succeed we have been deceived.
Paul summed it all up in the last verse of ch. 7, "I may serve the Law of God with my mind, (and that is all very well), but with my flesh I serve the law of sin." So what is needed is a way of living above the flesh.
And that is what is provided. We do not have to live like prisoners to the Law of sin and death in our members - we may live by a different law. Paul calls it 'the law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus.'
What does he mean by that? He is going to tell us now; it will occupy him all the way down to v. 17. It is not the first time he has spoken of it, of course; he has referred to it before.
In 7:6, he called it "serving in the new life of the Spirit."
In 6:17 he called it "being obedient to the standard of teaching to which you were committed,"
In 6:4 he called it "walking in newness of life,"
and that in turn went back to 5:2-5 where he described it as having "access to this grace in which we stand" and being "filled with the love of God through the Holy Spirit who has been given to us."
So it is the whole world of rich experience we enter when we experience the forgiveness of our sins that he means by the phrase. That is how 'the mind of Christ' on sin and on God is kindled into life in us, as we saw when we looked at ch. 6. But now Paul gives his whole attention to it, and develops it fully.
He starts by alerting us to 'what God has done.' (v. 3)
"God has done what the Law, weakened by the flesh, could not do: sending His own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh, and for sin, He condemned sin in the flesh, in order that the just requirement of the Law might be fulfilled in us who walk, not according to the flesh, but according to the Spirit."
On the face of it, that is a surprising thing to hear him say. God did what the Law could not do? - condemned sin in the flesh? But surely, condemning sin is what the Law can do, and does. That is precisely what it is good at. What does Paul mean here? God's condemnation of sin by means of His Son is in some way an altogether different thing from His condemnation of sin by means of the Law. What is the difference?
Here we must follow Paul closely. The answer usually given is that God condemned sin by executing the sentence of death on it in His own Son.
But that makes no sense of what Paul says here. For one thing he says that God's condemnation of sin in the flesh had as its result our progress to righteousness - and you have to understand the process of condemnation in such a way that you see at once why it has that result. It is important - because that is precisely the effect the Law fails altogether to produce. "Weakened by the flesh," as Paul says here, "it fails to produce the very righteousness it aims at."
But for another thing, Paul does not say that God condemned His Son! - he says God condemned sin ... in the flesh.
In whose flesh then? In Christ's? Yes, clearly, in Christ's: "God, sending His Son in the likeness of sinful flesh, condemned sin in the flesh" ... His flesh, obviously. What does that mean? ... that the flesh Jesus inhabited was sinful flesh? ... that sin was in the flesh of Jesus the way it is in ours, so God could as handily condemn it in Him as in us, putting Him to death instead of us?
But you cannot say that; that is to say that sin was in Jesus. But it was not: He was without sin. Was the sin, when God condemned it, in the flesh of Jesus, or was it not? You have to answer, "It was not. Jesus was without sin, from first to last."
That is why Paul is so careful to say that God sent Him 'in the likeness of sinful flesh' ... and not simply 'in our sinful flesh.' Paul wants to say that the Lord's connection with sin was real and effectual without saying that He actually partook of sin.
How then are we to understand his statement that sin was condemned 'in His flesh'?
We have to understand it, as we have said, in a way that makes sense of what Paul says next, that when God condemned sin in the flesh of Jesus, it was "in order that the just requirement of the Law might be fulfilled in us who walk, not according to the flesh, but according to the Spirit." You have to see that as the obvious consequence of what God did in Jesus. Whatever it really was that He did, He did it so that we might live the kind of life that the Law describes, but fails to produce. God so condemned sin in the flesh of Jesus, then, that it has the obvious effect of making us righteous ... and, what is more, it has that effect because "we live according to the Spirit and not according to the flesh."
The answer has to lie in the way we understand the condemnation of sin to have happened. By the word 'condemned,' Paul cannot mean 'passed sentence on': he has already said that God was doing what the Law could not do when He did this condemning, and passing sentence on sin is what the Law can do ... and does, par excellence!
So we have to understand God's condemnation to mean something else.
Happily, the Scriptures themselves supply the answer we are looking for.
Jesus, for example, when He chided His generation for not repenting in response to His ministry, said, "The men of Nineveh will arise at the last judgment with this generation and condemn it; for they repented at the preaching of Jonah; and you are being confronted with something greater than Jonah." (Matt. 12:41) Jesus there used the word 'condemn' in a rather different sense - not in the sense that the Ninevites would 'pass sentence' on His own generation, but in the sense that they would shame it. The Jews of our Lord's day were given far more persuasion to repent, and far better reason, than the Ninevites were - but the Ninevites did, and the Jews did not. By that fact alone, the Jews of our Lord's day stood condemned. Their failure was shown up in a bad light by the Ninevites' response. It was exposed as being the shameful failure that it really was
The word is used again in this way in Heb. 11:7: "By faith Noah, being warned by God about events as yet unseen, paid heed and constructed an ark for the saving of his household; by this he condemned the world ..." By his response Noah condemned the rest for their lack of response. He showed them all up. They stood condemned by it.
Now this is the sense in which I am persuaded Paul uses the word 'condemn' in Romans 8:3: Jesus condemned sin by not yielding to it when He was in the flesh.
The flesh is sin's springboard into all our hearts. Jesus shared that flesh with us - He came 'in the likeness of our flesh' - which in us is sinful, and which for Him might have become sinful if He had yielded to it - but He did not. That is why Paul says that He came in the likeness of sinful flesh: the flesh in which He came was real, but in His case not sin-indwelt. Temptation arose out of it for Him as it does for us. But He did not yield, the way we do. And by resisting it to the last He condemned it for the evil, rotten, deceiving thing it is. He exposed it for what it was - an imposter, a wicked imposter, a 'paper tiger.'
Sin lays claim to us all and says, "I'll have you. You cannot resist me. I'm your master." And sin said it to Jesus. And Jesus said, "You shan't have me. I can resist you. I shall master you."
And He did.
And He thereby condemned it ... in the flesh ... in our flesh. He lived above sin, even while He shared with us to the full all the conditions we blame for not living above it. He 'condemned sin in the flesh' (and condemned all us sinners too).
"Now," says Paul, "if that spirit - that Spirit of Jesus dwells in you ... if you walk according to the Spirit of life you see in Him, then you'll live above it too."
He condemned sin in the flesh, in order that the kind of righteousness to which the law bears witness might be fulfilled in us who walk, not according to the flesh, but according to the Spirit ... that Spirit."
It is the Spirit of Jesus dwelling in us - the same Jesus Who in our flesh resisted sin, and conquered it - which lifts us above the hold over of us of the sin that dwells in our flesh.
Now we can see how the way God condemned sin in the flesh of Jesus has its result that we may be righteous too.
Paul speaks of two laws which contend for possession of us - the Law of sin and death, and the Law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus. The one can lift us above the pull of the other.
The Law of sin and death will always exert its influence on us - it will always be there, trying to pull us down. But the Law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus will always exert its influence on us too ... if we have truly received His Spirit, that is. (This is what Paul is saying in verses 9-11 now.)
Because the Spirit of Christ (or Christ, or the Spirit of God - they all mean the same) ... the same Christ Who lived above sin in our flesh ... He will always exert His influence on us too; He will always be there too, to lift us up.
The simplest illustration of this is to think of the way an aeroplane flies. When an aircraft is in flight, there are always two Laws operating on it - the Law of Gravity and the Law of Lift. The Law of Gravity is always trying to pull it down; the Law of Lift is always trying to keep it up. Neither ever ceases to exert its influence. But while the aircraft moves forward with enough momentum, the Law of Lift overcomes the Law of Gravity and keeps it flying.
In much the same way, the Law of sin and death and the Law of the Spirit of Life in Christ Jesus are always - both of them - exerting their influence on us: sin trying to pull us down, the Spirit trying to lift us up. But if we 'keep up our momentum with Christ,' we can live above the pull of sin. We can fly!
The secret is "to walk according to the Spirit, and not according to the flesh."
"The just requirement of the Law will be fulfilled in us who walk, not according to the flesh, but according to the Spirit." v. 4
The 'just requirement of the Law' means the sort of righteousness the Law pleads for but cannot produce. The word in the Greek is not the regular word for righteousness. The regular word is dikaiosune; the word Paul uses here is dikaiwma, and it means, not so much the inward personal quality of righteousness as the concrete expression of it in life. To "fulfil the dikaiwma of the Law" means simply to live above the downward pull of sin.
Now the way to do that, says Paul, is to walk according to the Spirit, and not according to the flesh. What he means by that he explains at once, in words so clear and simple they need no explanation.
Vs. 5: "Those who live according to the flesh set their minds on the things of the flesh; those who live according to the Spirit set their minds on the things of the Spirit."
The secret lies in the mind - in 'what you have a mind to.'
What is it we have a mind to? ... the things of the flesh, or the things of the Spirit? "It is a question of our preoccupations - the ambitions that compel us, and the interests that engross us; where we spend our time, our money and our energy; what we give ourselves up to" (John Stott, 'Men Made New' [IVP?] p. 87) ... what we set our hearts on.
Verse 6 describes the result of those two outlooks.
To 'have a mind to the flesh' is death ... not 'will be,' notice, but 'is' - is now; because it severs our connection with God and with Christ, Who are our only source of real inner 'life.'
But to 'have a mind to the Spirit' is life ... again, notice, 'is' life - is now; because it re-connects us with God and with Christ, the source of inward life. It is life 'and peace,' and peace means well-being, an integrated state of being in which we are consciously happy and confident and safe. **
The way to it then is to set our mind on the things of the Spirit, not on the things of the flesh.
The mind of the flesh is of course the mind Paul described at length in ch. 7. As he showed very clearly there, it is hostile to God, even when it fools itself that it is setting up His Law as its standard; it is simply incapable of submitting to any Lordship. It starts by breaking the first commandment, "You shall have no other gods before me." The mind of the flesh says, "I'll do it my way. I'm the captain of my ship, the master of my destiny." In other words, "I'm God around here." It is a mind that gives God no pleasure at all, as Paul says in v. 8. No way can we please God in that frame of mind. And notice that it brings both death and war, just as the mind of the Spirit brings life and peace ... for the mind of the flesh is hostile.
But the mind of the Spirit is the opposite of all that. It is the mind that is born in repentance and grows in faith. It looks to God, it leans on God, it relies on God, it delights in God. It comes to God with open empty hands, and is content to be dependent on His gifts. It is willing to be 'led.'
The one mind is death, the other is life.
The two possibilities are always open to us. In verses 10 and 11 Paul says: "If Christ is in you, although your bodies are dead because of sin, your spirits are alive because of righteousness. If the Spirit of Him Who raised Jesus from the dead dwells in you, He Who raised Christ Jesus from the dead will give life to your mortal bodies also through His Spirit Who dwells in you."
Here Paul, with both feet on the ground, reminds us that both sin and the Spirit are present in the believer's experience, striving always to gain the ascendancy. (He says it again in Gal. 5:17.)
Indwelling sin is the lot of every child of Adam; but the indwelling Spirit to resist and subdue indwelling sin is also the lot of every child of God. We can rely on the Spirit to lead the fight so we do really win it. That is what Paul means when he says that "God will give life to our mortal bodies through His indwelling Spirit."
It is a thousand pities that at this point - the point of climax to the whole discussion - that statement is dismissed as a mere promise of resurrection after death. The words 'your mortal bodies' are assumed to imply that it is the resurrection of the body Paul has in mind.
Not so. The phrase 'your mortal bodies' is one Paul has used before, so there cannot be any real doubt about what he means by it. In 6:12 he wrote: "Let not sin therefore reign in your mortal bodies" where he obviously means 'the man I am now, a flesh and blood man in a physical body.' So he means the same thing here in 8:11 - "In this present life, the life I am living in the body, the Spirit will animate me to think and feel and behave in ways that are pleasing to God. By that Spirit (v. 13) I am to mortify now - not in some future beyond the grave - the deeds of the body ... the push and shove and heave of this sin-ruled self that I have to contend with every day. The Spirit dwells within me to supply exactly the thrust I need to subdue it."
Paul means the same thing as he said in Eph. 3.16: "I pray that out of the glorious richness of His resources, God will enable you to know the strength of the Spirit's inner reinforcement - that Christ may actually dwell in your hearts by faith." (J. B. Phillips)
This is the punch-line to Paul's whole argument.
This is where he tells us how we may be 'more than conquerors' over indwelling sin. The Spirit of Jesus dwells in us, in our flesh - the same Jesus Who in the same flesh mastered sin and lives to communicate that mastery to us now.
** The words 'being' and 'well-being' can helpfully be substituted for the words 'life' and 'peace' in the Bible.
This material is copyright; it may not be published, quoted or reproduced without permission, nor may it be preached without acknowledgment!
BACK TO SITE HOME PAGE