Friday, October 30, 2009

Romans 8:26-30

26 In the same way, the Spirit helps us in our weakness. We do not know what we ought to pray for, but the Spirit himself intercedes for us through wordless groans. 27 And he who searches our hearts knows the mind of the Spirit, because the Spirit intercedes for God's people in accordance with the will of God.

28 And we know that in all things God works for the good of those who love him, who [k] have been called according to his purpose. 29 For those God foreknew he also predestined to be conformed to the image of his Son, that he might be the firstborn among many brothers and sisters. 30 And those he predestined, he also called; those he called, he also justified; those he justified, he also glorified.


Dig Deeper
I’m not normally a paranoid person but if I ever have gotten a little paranoid from time to time it would have been when my boys were younger and were not feeling well and their mother would work overnight at the hospital. I was always slightly worried that if something happened to them in the middle of the night, I wouldn’t know what to do without her there save for calling 911 and hoping the emergency medical team got there quickly. So, every now and then if I was up late into the night working and they were asleep in there rooms, I would go check on them just to make sure that everything was okay. When I did check on them, though, I didn’t want to disturb them or wake them up by going all the way into the room and touching them, or turning the light on. So, I would just open their doors up enough so a crack of light would fall into the room. Then I would quietly peak in and listen. All I was looking and listening for was the gentle sound of them breathing and the subtle movement of their sheets lifting up and down as they slept. This would assure me that they were okay and that I could go to sleep or continue working without any fear of having to answer to their mother for something that happened to them. Once I could hear them breathing, though, I knew that all was well.

We don’t often think of God in terms like that, gently looking and listening to us for signs of life but this is something of the fatherly picture of God that Paul sketches for us here. God knows that we are weak and often incapable of doing his will fully in the present age even with the firstfruits of the Spirit, so he gently watches and listens. He looks for little signs of life and the subtle sounds of the Spirit groaning within us. As his adopted sons, our loving Father simply listens and searches for the signs of life in us that demonstrate that all is well.

So far Paul has told us that the entire creation groans, a word that means sighs inwardly but inaudibly in the way that Paul has used it, waiting for the restoration of God’s will fully within his world. He has also told us that the church groans with the same sort of inaudible expectation of being fully redeemed and restored to the image of God, the state in which humans were intended all along. Now Paul says that it isn’t just the creation, or the apex of God’s creation that groans like this but that he groans also through his own Spirit.

At the present, not-yet-fully-redeemed humanity is in a state of weakness awaiting our final restoration and unveiling as the heirs of God’s creation. The church and creation stand in agreement waiting for the time when all things are renewed (Matt. 19:28; Acts 3:21) and heaven and earth are finally brought back together for eternity as Paul describes in Ephesians 1:8-10: “With all wisdom and understanding, he made known to us the mystery of his will according to his good pleasure, which he purposed in Christ, to be put into effect when the times reach their fulfillment—to bring unity to all things in heaven and on earth under Christ.” In the biblical economy, heaven is the place where God’s will is done (Matt. 6:10). This means that as Paul looks ahead to when the times reach their fulfillment he sees a time when God’s will is done perfectly though God’s human agents restored in his image. In the present time, though, we simply don’t know how that will works out in specific situations. Finding and doing God’s will is our goal but we are weak and often unaware of it. So, although we pray and are called to do so we often find it difficult to put into words what to pray for.

But God knows this. He is the heart searcher who looks and listens intently for the intercession of the Spirit on our behalves. What Paul certainly does not mean in saying that the “Spirit himself intercedes for us through wordless groans” is that the Spirit prays through us by speaking in tongues so we don’t understand what is being said, as some are apt to claim. Paul is speaking of the will of God as it is expressed in inaudible longing. Just as the Spirit knows the mind of God (1 Cor. 2:11), so God knows the mind of the Spirit. It is the firstfruits of the Spirit that urges us to long for God’s age to come and his completed work in us, that knows the mind and the will of God, and that constantly pushes us towards his will even when we don’t understand all of it. God understands the Spirit and his working in our life even when we do not. God understands that the Spirit longs for the completion of redemption and works us towards that end even when we don’t see it or perceive it. Just as it is the role of the spirit to bring us to full fruition as the children of God (8:14) so that we can rightly call God our Abba in prayer (8:15-16), so the Spirit enables us through his intercession to pray and align ourselves with the will of God in anticipation of the time when we will be completely transformed to the will of God and be set in authority once again over his creation.

The truth is we groan, we don’t know exactly how to pray and see God’s will in everything but that’s okay because, says Paul, “we know that in all things God works for the good of those who love him, who have been called according to his purpose.” God knows the mind of the Spirit but we know that God works everything according to his will so we who have the Spirit at work in us can rest assured that God’s will is leading us to good of being transformed into his image. We should not abuse Paul’s words and claim that he is saying that only good things will happen to those in Christ. That would be a rather odd conclusion after declaring in 8:17 that part and parcel of the way of Christ is to share in his sufferings. Like he said in 5:3, Paul believes that all things, whether good times or times of trial, are being used by God to create Christ in us. He is constantly working us towards our final goal. The great comfort in understanding this is that whatever trial I may be going through (we can rightly distinguish these from self-imposed problems due to our own sin or lack of obedience), I can rest assured that God knows that this trial is better for me in the long run of who I am becoming than to not have gone through it. When I am obedient to God and live as though I know that he works in all things for my eventual good, every hard time, struggle, and trial in my life makes me more like Christ.

We know that God works for our good because he has a final destination in mind. It is vitally important in this passage and really all the way through the rest of the book that we must continue to keep in mind that Paul has been thinking in terms of people groups primarily and not individuals. Keeping that thought close at hand will help guide us properly through what Paul is saying rather than hunting down some rabbit trial of Enlightenment-style individualism. God has had a plan, a purpose in mind for a Christ-shaped family since before the foundations of the earth were laid.

In Revelation 22:16, we are told that Christ is both the root and the offspring of David. How can he be both the root and the offspring? The point that John is making, building off of Isaiah 11, is that Jesus is the cause of all history. It was always God’s intention to reveal himself in the person and work of Jesus Christ, the offspring of David. Thus, he is the offspring but he is also the very reason for David and everything else in history. Just as Paul delineates in Ephesians 1:1-14, here he makes it clear that part of that purpose in revealing himself through Christ was that God would have a people transformed to the image of his son. His son would be the firstborn, a term that referred to uniqueness as the heir of the inheritance, but would not be alone. He would have brothers and sister adopted into the covenant family by entering into him. Paul declares this clearly in Ephesians 1:4: “For he chose us in him before the creation of the world to be holy and blameless in his sight.” Rather than being a statement concerning the individual predestination of certain people, this passage is entirely focused on God. It was his plan to have a people “conformed to the image of his Son.” It was predestined before the world began that God would reveal himself through Christ and have such a family but Paul is not here trying to argue that God has chosen some to be saved and others to go to hell for eternity because they have not been pre-selected to receive grace and faith as others have. He is thinking in terms of people and what God has done rather than individuals.

But who is part of these predestined people? To explain that Paul uses three terms that we need to individually define before we can unpack his complete thought. The first is “called.” Theologian NT Wright says that “called” is “God’s action in setting people apart for a particular purpose, a purpose in which their cooperation, their loving response to love, their obedient response to the personal call, is itself all-important.” Thus, when Paul uses the term “called” it is virtually synonymous with “saved.” The second term is “justified.” As we have seen in previous passages, justified is God’s declaration that those who are called really are part of God’s covenant family. Finally, the term “glorified” refers to the full expression of a thing. Thus, when Paul says we are glorified he speaks of the time when we have been fully restored to God’s image and set in ruling authority over his restored creation as co-heirs in God’s Christ-shaped family. The members of the predestined family then, are those that have responded in believing obedience to the gospel, who have been declared to be part of God’s covenant family in the present awaiting the final vindication and judgment at which time we will rule with Christ in God’s age to come for eternity. It is of vital importance that we keep this all in mind as our destination while ordering the lives of churches and our individual lives in the present time. Does the way we spend our time, resources, and energy reflect that we truly believe that God is working in us for this final result?


Devotional Thought
Do you truly believe that God is working even through trying times to conform you to the image of his Son and that this is for your good? Do you embrace those times of stretching and transformation or do you fight against them and try to escape? How would your life and attitude change if you truly embraced them and trusted in God?

Thursday, October 29, 2009

Romans 8:18-25

Present Suffering and Future Glory
18 I consider that our present sufferings are not worth comparing with the glory that will be revealed in us. 19 The creation waits in eager expectation for the children of God to be revealed. 20 For the creation was subjected to frustration, not by its own choice, but by the will of the one who subjected it, in hope 21 that [j] the creation itself will be liberated from its bondage to decay and brought into the freedom and glory of the children of God.

22 We know that the whole creation has been groaning as in the pains of childbirth right up to the present time. 23 Not only so, but we ourselves, who have the firstfruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly as we wait eagerly for our adoption, the redemption of our bodies. 24 For in this hope we were saved. But hope that is seen is no hope at all. Who hopes for what they already have? 25 But if we hope for what we do not yet have, we wait for it patiently.



Dig Deeper
A long time ago a young man became frustrated with his life. He felt that he needed to have something that he could have control over. He needed an outlet where he could turn to and spend some quiet hours, caring and nurturing something that was in his control. He went outside into his backyard, which was quite large, and picked the perfect spot to plan a fairly large garden. Before he began, though, he spent months learning about how to properly plant and care for a garden. He loved his garden and spent countless hours planning it, caring for it, weeding it, and harvesting it at just the right time. This went on for several years and his garden grew and became his pride and joy. It was well known throughout the neighborhood as the most impressive garden around. Then his life changed fairly quickly. He was given the opportunity to live in another country for three years as part of his job but he had only two weeks to put everything in order and leave. He decided to go and quickly rented out his house to someone else for the three years. This new person, though a decent enough soul, did not have the same kind of passion about the garden. The new tenant did not have the time, the love, or the expertise to take care of this sprawling garden. Three years later, when the young man returned, he found a tangled mess of weeds and the remnants of his beautiful garden. Not only had it overgrown, they had begun to use the area as a bit of a refuse dump. He could not believe what had happened to his garden. But the only solution was to roll up his sleeves and begin the long, laborious process of putting things back to the way they were supposed to be. In reality, he believed, he was the only one that could restore his garden.

The present passage comes into much clearer focus if we journey with Paul back to the garden of Eden before we try to grasp his basic point here. Adam and Eve were placed in the Garden of Eden and given the responsibility as human beings, God’s image-bearers, to tend to God’s good creation. They would only be able to do this, however, if they remained in harmony with God’s will and in relationship with him. Once they sinned, though, humanity lost something of the image and likeness of God (Gen. 5:3) and carried on the image of their fathers. Human beings, marred in sin and cut off from relationship with God and his will, were not capable of caring for God’s creation in the way that God’s sons in his image could. In the same way, Israel was given the responsibility to care not just for their spiritual state and be a light to the nations, but they were also to care for the land, they were to care for all parts of God’s creation but failed. Paul’s mindset that we need to connect to in order to sharpen the image he has given us is that mankind in slavery to sin is incapable of being proper stewards over God’s creation. As a result of man’s separation from God, God’s garden called earth has fallen into disrepair and ruin. But that’s not the end of the story. Like the young man in the opening story, God is set to return to put his creation back to its original state. It is this time, that all Christians can look forward to and anticipate.

In the previous passage, Paul declared his belief that if Christians wish to share in the glory that is Christ’s as his co-heirs, then we have to be prepared to share in his manner of life, which involves the suffering of laying down one’s life for the benefit of others. As John, the beloved apostle, put is so succinctly, “Whoever claims to live in him must live as Jesus did” (1 Jn. 2”6). It would be normal human nature, I suppose, to question that line of thinking, though, so Paul quickly answers it. Why would one choose a way of life that involves such suffering and sacrifice? It is simply due to the principle that Jesus declared so boldly during his lifetime; if someone wants to save their life they must lose but if they keep it they will lose it for eternity. The way of remaining in the realm of death can be easier and more convenient but it ends in certain death. Paul is not just saying, we should be clear, that if we suffer now God will make up it for it with a really sweet reward in the age to come. His point is that in order to participate in the age to come and have the glory revealed in us as the image bearers of God, we have to walk, suffer, and sacrifice as Jesus did. The present sufferings in Christ are the very path that will lead us to glory of the coming age.

Just as humans suffer as a result of sin in the present age, the entire creation mirrors the incompleteness and frustration that humans experience. Paul shows, beginning in verse 19, that he is not just talking about the rescue and restoration of human beings. He has in view the entire creation. Humanity’s environment fell into disrepair and frustration as a result of mankind’s falling into sin. Humans were created, as we have seen, to take care of God’s good creation as stewards in his image. But when humans fell and were separated from God, no longer working for or representing him, the creation fell into bondage as well. It is subjected to frustration as well and is waiting eagerly for its proper caretakers, the sons of God (the TNIV incorrectly consistently changes “sons” to “children” and so loses the idea of sons being the ones who received the inheritance rights) to be revealed. Those who have been completely restored in the image of God through the glorifying work of the Spirit are the only ones capable of properly tending God’s creation. It is important to note that this subjugation of the creation is according to the will of God himself. It is no accident. Even the bondage of creation is part of God’s overall plan for his covenant family to fully and finally be revealed. The return of God’s people to their true, original purpose through the redemption brought about by Christ was accomplished in effect through the resurrection and will be accomplished fully when all who are in Christ are raised and set in authority over the world (1 Cor. 6:2).

In looking ahead to the liberation of God’s entire creation, Paul keeps two things firmly in view. One is the promise of the age to come, the new heavens and new earth (Isa. 65:17; 66:22; Rev. 21:1-5) and the other is that the new exodus can not only be seen as an Edenic restoration of humanity but that it anticipates and looks forward to the Edenic resotration of the entire cosmos. This is the time that Peter speaks of in 2 Peter when he uses very symbolic Jewish language and speaks of the time of the new heavens and earth when God’s consuming-fire-presence will fill the entire earth with his judgment, destroying the things that are opposed to his good will (2 Pet. 3:7,10). Peter confirms, in verse 15 of that passage, that he is not describing some fiery apocalyptic end to the universe but the same time of restoration and the age to come that Paul speaks of here.

It is not just the creation that groans and sighs waiting for the freedom that it will finally experience when the sons of God, restored in his image are revealed. Christians, those who have the firstfruits of the Spirit, are also pictured by Paul as groaning and sighing inwardly, eargerly awaiting our full and final adoption. Paul has already spoken in this chapter of Christians being adopted in some sense, but there is a fuller sense that will wait until the resurrection. The adoption that we receive is partial and positional until we are fully made like the Son of God himself. That will not happen until our bodies have been transformed to be like his resurrection body. In the meantime, we possess the Spirit as a pledge of what is to come and to begin that work in us even now, anticipating the final work. Because we have the Spirit within us and can take part in him in a partial sense now it actually causes the groaning and yearning for the fulfillment of the completed work. The Spirit is our bridge between the already-but-not-yet chasm in which all Christians find ourselves. We have already been saved but not yet fully. We are the sons of God but not yet fully. We have been adopted but not yet fully. The firstfruits of the Spirit begins the work of being restored to the image of God but also makes us sadly aware that our bodies have not yet been redeemed and so we have yet to sever all ties to the realm of sin and death. Christians have certainly been redeemed out of slavery just as Israel was out of Egypt, but we are still awaiting our full redemption. Until that time we are but a shadow of our future selves left to point ever so incompletely as a people to what we will be in the age to come.

Just as Abraham had resurrection faith and lived in a manner that demonstrated he was fully convinced that God would do what he promised even though he had seen no evidence of it at all, so we have seen no visible evidence of this future hope. We were saved in hope but we have yet to see it manifest itself except in the very invisible inner world of the Spirit working within us. We were saved already, Paul says, that much is true. But there is a future element of salvation that we have not yet experienced and so the proper response is to wait patiently. Yet, the precisely wrong response of God’s people would be to sit and do nothing in the world while patiently awaiting God to come back and do all of the work of restoration. He calls us to be the advance troops of that reality. We are to demonstrate what that future looks like, even if it is but a pale shadow, and call people to this sort of reconciliation between God and his entire creation. The whole world is in labor waiting for God’s creation to be re-born and it is the call of God’s people to being the work now to live as much as is possible by the values of that future age in the present. This is how we hope and wait patiently.


Devotional Thought
Do the people around you in your neighborhood, at your school, or at your job know that you live in eager but patient expectation for God’s restored creation? Do you truly live by the values of God’s age to come rather than those of the present age? If not, what would it look like for you to begin doing this fully in every area of your life?

Wednesday, October 28, 2009

Romans 8:12-17

12 Therefore, brothers and sisters, we have an obligation—but it is not to the sinful nature, to live according to it. 13 For if you live according to the sinful nature, you will die; but if by the Spirit you put to death the misdeeds of the body, you will live.

14 For those who are led by the Spirit of God are the children of God. 15 The Spirit you received does not make you slaves, so that you live in fear again; rather, the Spirit you received brought about your adoption to sonship. [h] And by him we cry, "Abba, [i] Father." 16 The Spirit himself testifies with our spirit that we are God's children. 17 Now if we are children, then we are heirs—heirs of God and co-heirs with Christ, if indeed we share in his sufferings in order that we may also share in his glory.


Dig Deeper
On July 17, 1918, forces of the Bolshevik secret police stormed into the residence of Tsar Nicholas II of Russia and brutally murdered the last sovereign of Imperial Russia and his entire family. It was the final blow of the Bolshevik revolution and forever changed the nature and direction of Russia, soon to be know as the Soviet Union. Among the family members of the Tsar that were slain that day was were four of Nicholas’ five daughters. It is likely that the other daughter, Anastasia, was also killed. I say likely, because since that day there have been persistent rumors that Anastasia had possibly escaped death and spirited away. Many years later a woman named Anna Anderson came forward claiming to be Anastasia. She had, she claimed, suffered from amnesia for years after surviving being shot in 1918, but escaped and only now was remembering who she was. Some people were skeptical but many relatives of the Tsar came forward after meeting the woman and said that they believed her. Imagine being in this young woman’s position. She was part of the royal family but apparently didn’t know it for years and then when did come forward, some doubted her. Anna died in 1984 still claiming that she was Anastasia but in 1994 DNA evidence proved that she was not part of the royal family. In 2008 new remains of a young woman were found in a shallow grave. DNA proved the remains were of Nicholas’s Daughter Anastasia. She had died in 1918 after all.

Things didn’t work out for Anna. She was not an estranged part of the royal family of Russia but imagine if she had been. Can you imagine many things more heartbreaking than being part of a royal family and not knowing it or not taking advantage of it? I can’t and yet it happens all the time. Those who have died to themselves and entered into the life of Christ have left the fallen family of Adam enslaved by the flesh and sin and entered into a new family. We have become part of the covenant family built on faith that God had promised all along but how many of us really know that or know what it means. Oh, we flippantly call God the Father and talk of being his children. We even call each other brother and sister but I wonder how many of us truly understand the position of sonship that has been granted to those in Christ. I wonder if we truly understand the incredible, glorious privilege it is to be adopted in the royal family of the king. We are a part of the greatest family that has ever existed and many of us have nothing more than a vague notion of what that even means. But for Paul, there was nothing more incredible, nothing more important.

In chapter 5, Paul began to speak in terms of creation and a new creation as he described the roles of Adam and Christ in the world. Then in chapter 6 he began an incredible narrative of the new exodus, the escape of God’s people from the slavery of sin, as he used language and allusions from the original Exodus. In chapter 7, he moved us to scenes of Israel receiving the law at Mt. Sinai as he explored the role of the law in Israel. Now, Paul begins us on the journey into the promised land. He speaks of being led by the Spirit of God. This is a clear allusion to the Exodus generation that were led through the wilderness by God himself as he sent a pillar of clouds during the day and fire at night to guide his firstborn son (Ex. 4:22) through the wilderness and into the promised land. The going in the wilderness was tough and fraught with temptations but the children of Israel were urged to hold on to obedience to God and come into their promised inheritance.

Inheritance is a key term. It was given typically to the oldest son, but at times, as we see in the Old Testament, the inheritance could be passed to another son (a point that will become important for Paul in the next chapter). If we think back through all that has been discussed to this point, the incredible depth of Paul’s point begins to come into focus. Going back to the point where man’s rebellion began in the garden of Eden, God promised that the solution to sin and death would be through the family or seed of a woman (Gen. 3:15). As we have seen, God gave that promise to Abraham, as he declared that Abraham would not only be the father of many nations but that through this family, the whole world would be blessed. This was no ordinary family this was God’s family; God’s family through whom the entire world would be restored to the state of paradise that God intends for his good creation. Only those in that family would have their sin dealt with. Only those in that family would be declared vindicated or justified on the final judgment. But those of us who were born into Adam and sinned were forever separated from that family. Paul has already made that point clear. We could look at that family from afar but could never be part of it. And that applied to Israel as well because, as we peak ahead to Paul’s point in the next chapter, just as the inheritance went to Isaac but not Ishmael, and Jacob not Esau, so that inheritance was given to Christ alone. He was Israel, the family of promise.

This is Paul’s point here and we need to take some time to let it fully sink in. Those who have been led by God’s own Spirit out of sin, just as he led the Exodus generation out of Egypt, have been brought into Christ where what is true of the king is true of his people. We have been declared the children of God because we have died to ourselves in Adam and taken up the life in Christ. No longer are we slaves to sin. No longer do we need to fear the final judgment. We have been adopted into sonship. Paul specifically uses that language because it is inheritance language. Men and women alike can celebrate that we have been given the sonship of inheritance. It is ours. And in Christ, we can do something unthinkable. We can rightly do what Jesus did throughout his life. We can call out to our Father; we can use the endearing term “Abba” because we are his sons. The fact that we have the Spirit leading us into the promised land and away from the slavery of sin demonstrates that we are heirs. We share in the inheritance that is Christ’s. We share in Christ’s own relationship with the Father and can truly identify with the youngest son in the parable of the prodigal son from Luke 15. Because we have thrown our lot in with the Messiah, the Father has rushed out to us and thrust a ring on our finger, thrown a robe around us, put sandals on our feet, and embraced us as his son.

The son has invited us into his life so that we may share in his glory. The glorification of which Paul speaks here is the rule of the Messiah over the restored world. We have been called to not only be part of God’s family and share in the Messiah’s inheritance but we will also reign with him (cf. Rom. 5:17). But, Paul gives an important reminder here, returning to his thoughts of 5:1-5. We do have the life of Christ but that calls us to live that life. We should not think that God has called us into his family to live lives of comfort and ease as the “king’s kids.” This is part of the twisted theology of the prosperity gospel folks but it stands in stark opposition to what Paul says so clearly here. In 1 Corinthians 1:24, Paul describes what he means by this call to suffering: “Now I rejoice in what I am suffering for you, and I fill up in my flesh what is still lacking in regard to Christ's afflictions, for the sake of his body, which is the church.” Paul understood that if we are called to the life of Christ that it is a life of laying down our selves for the benefit of others. The way that we pass on the life of Christ to others is to not just tell them about what Jesus did for them but to follow his example by laying our lives down for others. That will rarely call us to literal death (although it might) but it does call us to share in his life, share in his suffering for others. It is only then that we “may also share in his glory.”

Because we are part of God’s family (oh it is so incredible to even think of such a thing), this is why we call one another brothers (and sisters, an insertion by the TNIV which makes the important point that women are included in this just as much as men, but somewhat obscures the point that Paul is using the inheritance language of being sons). We are part of God’s family, don’t ever forget that. It obligates us, says Paulin verse 12, to live like members of that family. We represent our Father and that is serious business. It calls us to not be like the Exodus generation who repeatedly looked back to Egypt and opined about returning to the relative ease and comfort that they enjoyed there. It was so much easier than the struggle in the wilderness as they made their way to the promised land. We are called to look ahead to the glorious inheritance and not to how “easy” it was to not fight, to simply give into temptation, and do our own will. It is our obligation, but more than that our privilege and honor, to be led by the Spirit as he leads us into our promised land to life. It is high time that we stop lightly throwing around family terms in the kingdom of God and truly spend serious time contemplating what it really means to be part of God’s family. I believe we would find that the struggle with the flesh would not be nearly as difficult. We need to wake up to what we have been given by being called the sons of God and live up to the obligations of our new family.


Devotional Thought
You are part of God’s family. We tend to think of salvation in individual terms but in reality we have been brought into a family, oh the incredible thought of it all. How does this change our understanding of what it means to be a Christian? What does this do for our concepts of commitment to the body of Christ and to other Christians? Do you truly live as though you have brothers and sisters in Christ or are they just people you go to church with?

Tuesday, October 27, 2009

Romans 8:5-11

5 Those who live according to the sinful nature have their minds set on what that nature desires; but those who live in accordance with the Spirit have their minds set on what the Spirit desires. 6 The mind controlled by the sinful nature [d] is death, but the mind controlled by the Spirit is life and peace. 7 The sinful mind [e] is hostile to God; it does not submit to God's law, nor can it do so. 8 Those controlled by the sinful nature cannot please God.

9 You, however, are not controlled by the sinful nature but are in the Spirit, if indeed the Spirit of God lives in you. And if anyone does not have the Spirit of Christ, they do not belong to Christ. 10 But if Christ is in you, then even though your body is subject to death because of sin, the Spirit gives life [f] because of righteousness. 11 And if the Spirit of him who raised Jesus from the dead is living in you, he who raised Christ from the dead will also give life to your mortal bodies because of [g] his Spirit who lives in you.



Dig Deeper
I have lived virtually my entire life in the cold climate of Wisconsin. Growing up, you just get used to cold winters with a lot of snow and the accompanying countless hours of snow shoveling that come along with the snow. We never had a snow blower growing up so I had to do a lot of shoveling as a kid. A special thanks to my parents who immediately bought a snow blower only after I moved out of the house. For years, then, after my wife and I were married she would try to convince me to buy a snow blower but I felt like it was a waste of money and I didn’t mind shoveling. A few years ago, however, after moving to a new house with a much bigger driveway and realizing that I wasn’t getting any younger, I broke down and bought one in the middle of a late November blizzard. After purchasing the thing and using it the first night, I discovered something very important the next day. It was a special kind of snow blower that required a certain kind of fuel to run on. With this type of snow blower, you have to combine oil and gas quite carefully and pour it all into the same tank. If you don’t do that and just put in regular gas, the engine will no longer start and you’ll be out in the driveway shoveling like a fool while your brand new snow blower sits in the garage with a seized engine, no longer able to run. It simply requires a certain kind of fuel or it will not run.

As Paul continues to discuss the Mosaic law and the fact that it could not give the lasting life of the age to come that it promised but that God has now made that life available through the resurrection of Christ and the gospel announcement that the Messiah has defeated death, he will continue his contrast of the flesh and the Spirit. This contrast is really part of the contrast that he has been talking of since chapter 5, the contrast between the Adamic humanity and the Messiah humanity. It is the clash of the realm of sin and the realm of grace. The realm that you live in, Paul will demonstrate here, is determined by whether you live in the flesh or in the Spirit. Back in 7:14 Paul asserted that humanity is made of flesh but that the law is spiritual. If we really want to fulfill the law it simply won’t happen if we live in the flesh. It is like pouring the wrong fuel into an engine and just hoping that it works. It never will. The law will never bring the life that it promised if someone attempts to fulfill the law by the flesh. The promised life will only come to someone who no longer lives by the flesh but by someone who is animated by the Spirit. You must have the right fuel in order for the engine to run correctly. This is, in essence, what Paul is about to show us when it comes to living in the Messiah.

The contrast that Paul makes here between the Spirit and flesh is as simple as life and death. There is an unbreakable connection between the Spirit and life, and the flesh and death. We should again make clear that when Paul speaks of the flesh and the Spirit he is not speaking of the difference between the material world and the non-material world. When he refers to flesh (what the TNIV translates as sinful nature) he speaks of the part of human life that has been given over to corruptible and mortal rebellion against God. It is the aspect of humans, and indeed of the world in a sense, that stands in open opposition to God’s purposes for his world. That which is spiritual can still be absolutely part of the physical world, but they are the things that stand connected with God, working together with him for his purposes and according to his will. Thus, that which is connected with the flesh is part of the realm of sin and leads to certain death, while that which is connected with the Spirit is part of the realm of grace and leads to certain life.

Once a Christian is freed from the enslavement to sin, something that the law could never do, we are given a choice. Before entering into the Messiah humans have no choice. They are slaves to sin, with minds that are controlled by the flesh. But Christians have a different master and have minds that are to be set on God. The picture that Paul is really painting here points forward to 12:2 where he will declare that the act of Christian transformation has to do with changing our minds from the fleshly patterns of the world towards thinking according to the Spirit.

In practical terms this means that our starting point matters very much. What many Christians find is that cannot ever seem to grab hold of a consistent Christian, Spirit-led life as they would wish. The problem is not that they have not been freed from sin, the problem is their starting point. We have been freed from sin but that doesn’t mean that we will still not be pulled to live according to the old rules to which we are so accustomed. We have been trained to go after certain things in life, to have a certain starting point for our thinking which will control our actions. Perhaps an example here will help. If my starting mentality is to be happy in life that will control my actions. The problem is that being happy is something that very much comes from the flesh side of the equation. It is self-focused and often selfish. It means that I will go through life controlled by my desire to be happy and I will interpret everything in life as good or bad based on whether or not it brings happiness. The Spirit, however, desires Christ-likeness, not happiness. If I desire the things of the Spirit I will realize that oftentimes the best thing for me to become more like Christ is not the thing that will make me happy but the thing that will stretch me and make me feel uncomfortable. The flesh will lead me to things I want; the Spirit will lead me to things I need. The flesh will call me to avoid people that bother me; the Spirit will call me to love those people and grow in my patience, my humility, and my willingness to sacrifice.

Those who are committed to a flesh-driven mind simply cannot please God nor can they fulfill the law because they are running on the wrong fuel. Incidentally, Paul says that the sinful mind is hostile to God and cannot submit to his law but he only hints at what he will spell out later in 10:5-9 that faith in Christ’s life is how the law is fulfilled and in 13:8-10 that living out the love of Christ how Christians fulfill the demands of the law. Those who are controlled by the flesh will find themselves feeling much more like Israel, the “I” of chapter 7, than those that are fueled by God’s own Spirit.

You, however, Paul says very directly and personally, are not controlled by the flesh but are in the Spirit, which is virtually synonymous with being in Christ. That doesn’t mean that one cannot choose to live according to the flesh but we are free from automatic enslavement to it through the power of the Spirit. Christians have, and this is a monumentally important point, the same Spirit in us that raised Christ from the dead. We have access to incredible power. Yes, there is responsibility laid at the feet of the Christian to do the constant mental work of transforming our minds from subjectivity to our old master to living according to the desires and will of the Spirit, but this is not a losing battle. The Spirit brings life and just as surely as he brought life to the body of the Messiah, he will bring life to us. Paul is still operating here under the belief that what is true of the king is true of his people. That means just as surely as the power of the Spirit that was sent by God resurrected Jesus from the grave so he will give us life in the present age in the Spirit but he will also raise our mortal, physical bodies just as he resurrected Christ’s. The life that the Spirit gives us now and the justification that we have which is demonstrated by living by faith in the life of Christ gives us a guarantee of the final vindication that God has reserved for his people. The life we have now guarantees our resurrected life in the age to come.

Paul has basically laid out a clear connection between walking according to the Spirit and being in Christ. This not to say that every time we falter in following the Spirit we should question whether or not we are in the Messiah. It should serve as a wake-up call, though. It is a call to re-examine what we have been running on and what our starting point mentality is. If you see absolutely no evidence in your life of the growth in the Spirit and a willingness to realize the victory over sin and the flesh that is already yours, then it is time to go back to the beginning. Have you truly died to yourself? Have you really grabbed hold in your life to the power of the same Spirit who raised the Messiah from the dead? We must wake up as Christians and realize the incredible power that is available to us. We need to stop living in subjection to our old master who now longer has any rightful claim over us and live the lives free from sin that Spirit has made available to us.


Devotional Thought
What do you have your mind set on? Is it truly set on the things that the Spirit desires or is it on the things of the flesh? Do you find yourself being able to relate more to Israel under the control of the law and sin in chapter 7 than you do a Spirit-driven victor over sin? What does Paul challenge you here to do in order to realize the life that is yours in Christ?

Monday, October 26, 2009

Romans 8:1-4

Life Through the Spirit
1 Therefore, there is now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus, 2 because through Christ Jesus the law of the Spirit who gives life has set you [a] free from the law of sin and death. 3 For what the law was powerless to do because it was weakened by the sinful nature, [b] God did by sending his own Son in the likeness of sinful humanity to be a sin offering. [c] And so he condemned sin in human flesh, 4 in order that the righteous requirement of the law might be fully met in us, who do not live according to the sinful nature but according to the Spirit.


Dig Deeper
When I was a young man one of the great symbols of human oppression and evil came falling down with an emphatic thud. Following World War II and the defeat of Nazi Germany, the nation of Germany was occupied by it’s victors so that it could be rebuilt. Occupied Germany had been divided between former allies, the foremost of whom was the Soviet Union and The United States of America. The section of Germany occupied by the Soviet Union became a communist state while that occupied the US and her allies was rebuilt as a democratic state. The split wasn’t just isolated to the country, the city of Berlin itself was split into two and became parts of East and West Germany respectively. There was such a problem for the Communist East Germany of people escaping into West Berlin and West Germany that, in 1961, they built a wall through the streets of Berlin to keep people from leaving. It wasn’t until 1989 that the wall and communism in East Germany finally fell, brining freedom to those who had been forced to live under the Communist regime. When I saw the news coverage of the wall falling, I was a high school senior and I was, to be honest, mostly unimpressed. I saw the people knocking down the wall and celebrating wildly but it just didn’t mean that much to me. When our yearbook came out at the end of the year I couldn’t figure out why a big part of the “year in review” section had to do with the fall of the Berlin wall. It seemed to be such a big deal to everyone around me but for me it was just another barely interesting news story.

The reason that the fall of the Berlin wall didn’t seem that important to me was because I didn’t really grasp the significance of what it symbolized and what had gone on before. I was, at that time, grossly unaware of the true horrors and oppression that had gone on under the East German regime. I did not know about how the people of that country had been kept in poverty and denied their freedom at the expense of political ideology and power for a select few. Had I understood the worldwide significance of all of that and the massive symbolic importance that the fall of that wall carried then I would surely have understood the jubilant celebrations and would have probably joined in.

In this passage, Paul jumps to an incredible declaration of the victory of God in his son and you can almost feel his jubilation and excitement as he writes. “There is now no condemnation.” The depth of those words are truly the cause of joy and praise to a God who has accomplished exactly what he promised he would do. But those words only carry their full significance if someone truly understands the power of sin and their plight as one enslaved to it and under the impending wrath of God. It is only when we truly understand all that Paul has said about the powerlessness of anything else to free us from sin and death that we can rightly celebrate with him in his incredible declaration of freedom.

The fact that Paul begins verse 1 with “therefore,” indicating that his declaration of victory is directly related to what he says previously may seem a little strange considering that he left off with Israel, and all humanity as well, being a slave to sin despite a desire to be free. But this is exactly Paul’s point. I serve the law of God with my mind but the law of sin with my flesh, therefore there is now no condemnation because Jesus Christ has set me free from a previously inescapable situation. What could not be true before is “now” true. Those who are in Christ (think back to chapter 6) are no longer subject to condemnation, the penalty that sin exacts at the final judgment. In a tightly packed sentence, Paul has declared not only the new state of Christians, being in Christ and free from condemnation, but the very reason for that state, namely that they have died to their own wills and their fleshly identity and entered into Christ.

Condemnation is final state of lostness and estrangement from God’s family. When we truly understand how terrible that is, only then can we understand the true celebration of declaring that those in Christ have been permanently removed from that state. What the law could not do, which is to give life, because it could only tighten the grip of sin and death, the Spirit could do. Why is there no condemnation? Because the Spirit who gives life has set everyone free from the law of sin and death. The evil twin of the law that had been taken over by sin and used to increase the effect of sin has been dealt a death blow by the Spirit working through Christ to fulfill the promises of the law to bring life. In a strange way, only through Christ and participating in his self-giving love can the law be fulfilled. The Spirit, through the life of Christ, has enacted the new exodus, the escape from slavery. This is the Spirit who gives life both in the present and in the restored age to come. The depth of the nature of this dual aspect of life is something that will take Paul the rest of the chapter to work through more thoroughly.

The freedom that comes in Christ, the celebration of being free from condemnation for eternity is especially worthy of celebration and exultation because Christ has done what the law of Moses could only point to but never accomplish. Moses had led the people of Israel out of the slavery of Egypt and into the freedom of the promised land but that only pointed to the true freedom of life from the true enemy and enslavement of sin and death. The law, which was spiritual, demanded of man in the flesh something that only man animated by the Spirit could accomplish. This means, as Paul has clearly pointed out already, that the law could not affect the condemnation of anyone or free them from sin and death because the law was weakened by the flesh. We should restate that for Paul, the flesh (rendered “sinful nature” by the TNIV), referred to the fallen, this-worldly orientation of human beings. Thus, the law could point to freedom but could not overcome the weakness of the flesh which is, of course, sin. The law continued to stand with sin and death on the wrong side of the Adam/ Christ canyon.

God stepped in, however, and did himself what the law could not through the sending of his Son. He came, says Paul walking a very fine line, in the likeness of sinful humanity. Paul wants to show that Jesus came and fully participated in the normal human condition, showing that he could rightly act as a substitute or representative for mankind. He uses the word “likeness” here (homoioma) to denote the form or real participation and expression so as to show a distinction between Christ and sinful humanity. He does this because he cannot go too far in arguing that Christ fully entered into the human condition and became flesh. He does not want to give the impression that Christ participated to the degree that he was imprisoned in the sinful aspect of the flesh like other humans. The addition of “likeness,” then balances the scales lest “sinful flesh” went to far in the other direction. Jesus came in the form or expression of sinful flesh but not in every way. Although flesh usually speaks of the corruptible state of humankind, it is still important to distinguish that sin was an invader into the flesh. This means that sin is not necessary to genuine humanity. Jesus was in the likeness of sinful man, surely he was the real deal when it came to being human, but only the likeness because he had no sin himself (cf. Jn. 7:18; 8:46; 2 Cor. 5:21; Heb. 4:15; 7:26; 1 Pet. 2:22).

Jesus was presented as a sin offering to condemn “sin in human flesh.” What does Paul mean by this? He is still thinking in terms of the Messiah as the representative for his people. What is true of the king is true of his people. His death could serve as a representative death for all of his people. Going back to 5:20-21 where Paul stated that the law came so that sin could be collected in one place, Israel, but not just in Israel. Even more specifically, it would be piled up and dealt with in Israel’s representative, the Messiah. As Tom Wright has stated, “the weight of the world’s sin was focused on Israel; the weight of Israel’s sin was focused on the Messiah.” God holed sin up in the flesh of the Christ and condemned it right then and there. As Isaiah declared, “But he was pierced for our transgressions, he was crushed for our iniquities; the punishment that brought us peace was on him, and by his wounds we are healed” (Isa. 53:5). In defeating sin where it had the most power, God defeated sin’s ability to dictate the life and fate of those in Christ. The condemnation that our sins deserved has been poured onto Christ, the sin-bearer, so that there is no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus. We must be careful to avoid the heretical view that Jesus actually changed natures upon the cross and became sinful. Paul does not say that God condemned Jesus but that he condemned sin in the flesh of Jesus. He brought it onto one man to deal it with once-and for-all.

God did this for the clearly stated purpose that the “righteous requirement of the law might be fully met in us.” The law was powerless to do what it wanted to do, to bring life to those trapped in sin and death but the requirements of the law have now been fully met by Christ. The requirement of the law was to do God’s will which is the consistent lifestyle of love (cf. Rom. 13:8-10; Gal. 5:14) and now God has broken the power of sin and made that a possibility for those who enter into the life of Christ and live according to the Spirit. Those who live according to the sinful nature, the flesh, could never break the power of sin and fulfill the law but those who are animated by the Spirit can. The victory has been won. There is no condemnation for those in the because because the condemnation of sin has already taken place in him. But how will that victory play out and what does it mean in a world where the power of sin has been broken but sin has not been utterly destroyed? We will have to wait for Paul to unpack all of that throughout the rest of chapter 8, but take some time to really let the full meaning of his victorious declaration sink in here before moving on. There is enough here to celebrate for a long time if you fully understand the depth of what happened on the Cross and in the resurrection.

Devotional Thought
Do you live as one for whom there is now no condemnation? Or do you tend to be racked with guilt and fear of your judgment before God. For those in Christ, there in no condemnation. Take some time reflecting on this truth and what it means in your everyday life.

Friday, October 23, 2009

Romans 7:21-25

21 So I find this law at work: Although I want to do good, evil is right there with me. 22 For in my inner being I delight in God's law; 23 but I see another law at work in me, waging war against the law of my mind and making me a prisoner of the law of sin at work within me. 24 What a wretched man I am! Who will rescue me from this body of death? 25 Thanks be to God, who delivers me through Jesus Christ our Lord!

So then, I myself in my mind am a slave to God's law, but in my sinful nature [d] a slave to the law of sin.


Dig Deeper
I recently watched a football game between the Green Bay Packers and the Minnesota Vikings. For those who don’t know anything or don’t care anything about American football, these two teams are arch rivals and their games are always quite spirited. The people in these neighboring states also take this game very seriously but this game was even more intense than normal. Brett Favre was starting the game at quarterback for the Minnesota Vikings. This detail takes on more meaning when you realize that Brett Favre played for the Green Bay Packers for 16 seasons. He won three MVP awards with the Packers, led them to numerous playoff runs, and took the team to a Super Bowl Championship, becoming one of the most beloved players in the history of the franchise and one of the greatest players in the history of the NFL. After 16 seasons, however, he retired, then changed his mind, but was told that the Packers were going to move on with a new quarterback. Now we come to the game between the rivals with Brett Favre having signed with the Vikings and about to play his team of nearly two decades. Favre had a marvelous game, ripping apart the Packer defense, and leading the Vikings to a win. He was flawless, sharp, and something to behold. In short, the good Brett Favre showed up. Yet, those of us who have been Packer fans for many years know that there is another truth lurking behind the frequent greatness of Brett Favre. When you least expect it, the bad Brett Favre might show up for a big game. This Brett Favre throws the ball all over the field, makes poor decisions, and can kill the team by taking silly chances and getting intercepted.

For those who hate football, though, the point is this: We are pretty comfortable with the idea of there being dual sides or elements to an individual or an entity. This is a line of thinking that I believe we need to have in mind as we read Paul in this passage. To truly understand Paul as he sums up his thoughts on the role of the law in the life of sinful and fleshly Israel, we have to realize that he is going to describe not only two Israels, the good one and the bad one, but it also seems that he is even going to describe two laws, so to speak.

As with any biblical text, it is so important to follow the context of a passage. If we don’t we wind up reading passages Jeremiah 29:11 and coming up with the idea that God has a wonderful plan for us and only wants to bring pleasant things into our lives, rather than following the clear context which is a promise to Israel that despite the fact that God is responsible for their painful exile, it is all part of his plan to bring the Messiah into the world. Obviously context is important and in this chapter we cannot forget that Paul has been discussing the role of the law of Moses and what happened when it was introduced to Israel who was part of the sinful Adamic humanity. They did the same thing Adam did when confronted with God’s command, they sinned because they are in Adam and are born in his likeness (Gen. 5:3). Thus, it would be strange as many commentators contend and as the TNIV translation seems to imply, that, in verse 21, Paul has found a general law or principle that he is going to describe. This ignores not only the larger context but also the fact that, in the Greek, the word “law” has a definite article attached to it, meaning that it literally says “the law.” I would agree with a growing number of biblical scholars who contend that the proper translation of verse 21 is something along the lines of, “I have discovered this about the law. . . “. Paul is going to stop for a moment and summarize what he has been saying about the law of Moses and the role it played in the life of Israel and God’s purposes for Israel.

So what does he find about the law? Even though Israel had every intention of following God’s law they, like God warned Cain, found that sin and evil were lying in wait to grab hold and take them where they did not want to go. Israel delighted in God’s law, and well they should have, but that’s not the end of the story. Paul saw quite clearly that there was another aspect of the law, another law so to speak, at work. Paul is almost giving us a metaphorical image of an alter-ego. “The law was brought in so that the trespass might increase” (Rom. 5:20); it aroused sinful passions (7:5); sin sprang to life using the law as its springboard (7:8-11); sin used the law to bring about death (7:13). Yes, the law is good and was given to Israel for God’s purposes but, from one perspective, there was an evil twin of the law that was at work. Paul has made it clear that the law is not in-and-of-itself evil but here he it pictures another law, the one that has been taken over by sin and used to seize Israel and lead her into death. We must take care to not put words into Paul’s mouth and call the law itself evil but Paul is certainly painting a picture here to sum up the effect of the law that has been used by sin. There was simply a paradox of the law at work in Israel. It was good but was used by sin to enact the purposes of sin. Paul summed up this same line of thought in 1 Cor. 15:56-57, “The sting of death is sin, and the power of sin is the law. But thanks be to God! He gives us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ.”

The paradox is that the law is still good in its base, but it had been taken over by sin and actually could be called the law of sin. It was constantly at work in Israel, waging war so that Israel’s thinking would become as base and distorted as the pagan nations which she was sent to help (Rom. 1:21, 28). The inner person, a term that was used in the secular Greek word to refer to the immortal part of mankind that tended toward God, desired to do God’s will and obey his law. But the law under the power of sin, the one that seemed to work for the realm of sin, death, and the realm of Adam kept that from happening. Since chapter 5 Paul has been painting a mural of two realms, that of Adam and that of the Messiah. Just as there are two realms, he has shown that there is two aspects of the law, one as viewed by the realm of sin and one as viewed by the realm of grace. There is also, a double aspect to Israel, a double “I”. Theologian Douglas Moo sums this all up writing, “It is this duality that Paul. . . now brings to a climax in these verses by contrasting the law as it comes from God (v.22), and with which the ‘mind’ agrees (‘the law of my mind’), with that same law as it is twisted by sin (‘the law of sin’). The distinction. . . is not between two different laws but between the different operations and effects of the same law. It is, on the one hand, the law that, because of the flesh, arouses sin and brings death (cf. 8:2)—’ the law of sin’; but it is also God’s law, with which the mind agrees— ‘the law of my mind’—the law that is ‘unto life’ (v. 10) and, through the Spirit, can produce that life (8:2).” In short, the double identity of Israel under the law is matched by the double identity of the law taken over by sin.

All of this has left Israel, and Paul using the “I” as her representative, with the realization that Israel is in the same state as all other sons of Adam. Literally Paul has Israel crying out here “what a wretched human being I am.” They are, as he has stated many times before, in the same boat as the rest of the human race. Paul reaches his final conclusion in the latter half of verse 25, but just as he does in 1 Corinthians 15:57, he can’t help breaking in with praise in anticipation to the solution of the problem that he is about to summarize. “Thanks be to God,” he says, who has delivered all human beings, not just Jews, from their plight though the life of Jesus, the Messiah and the Lord.

Paul is now fully ready, after his interruption of praise at the beginning of verse 25, to sum up all that he has been saying. He returns to the dual “Israel” and the two realms that he has been discussing all along. There is an inner Israel that desires to stand firm in the realm of God as a slave to his good law, but the flesh that lurks within causes them to be prey to the law of sin and enslaved to the realm of sin and death. This is a realm from which there is now an escape. The horrifying problem for Israel is that the more they cling to the law, the more enslaved they become to sin. The law can never rescue Israel or anyone else. It could not bring the kind of new life that is needed. Only God’s own Spirit unleashed by the resurrection of Christ could bring the life that human beings needed. It is to that that Paul will now turn in one of the most powerful and majestic chapters in the entire Bible.

Before we end this passage, however, we should take a minute to consider if there is anything directly applicable to Christians today. There are at least two important areas that we should not overlook that do make this topic important for us. First, although we were not in the same situation, Paul’s description of Israel enslaved to the law and to sin certainly reminds us of us our past in sin and should drive us, as it did to Paul, to praise God all the more vigorously for freeing us from that enslavement. Second, this serves as a great reminder that holding strictly to a law or set of rules will not bring us the freedom that Christians so often think it will. This is a stern warning for Christian sects that desire to return to a required obedience to the Old Testament law but also for Christian groups that fall into the thinking that rules, commands, and strict guidelines will improve our ability to walk firmly in the life of Christ. There is certainly a place for discipline and even rules of thumb to guide us but we must take great care to not begin to rely on those things, thinking that they will lead us in to freedom. Only the Holy Spirit, as Paul is about to show us, can do that.


Devotional Thought
Take some time today to tell someone else your story of what you were before Christ. Don’t glorify it. Be honest about your enslavement to sin and death. Then share with them the incredible news of the gospel and what Christ accomplished on your behalf when he died and resurrected from the grave.

Thursday, October 22, 2009

Romans 7:13-20

13 Did that which is good, then, become death to me? By no means! Nevertheless, in order that sin might be recognized as sin, it used what is good to bring about my death, so that through the commandment sin might become utterly sinful.

14 We know that the law is spiritual; but I am unspiritual, sold as a slave to sin. 15 I do not understand what I do. For what I want to do I do not do, but what I hate I do. 16 And if I do what I do not want to do, I agree that the law is good. 17 As it is, it is no longer I myself who do it, but it is sin living in me. 18 I know that good itself does not dwell in me, that is, in my sinful nature. [c] For I have the desire to do what is good, but I cannot carry it out. 19 For I do not do the good I want to do, but the evil I do not want to do—this I keep on doing. 20 Now if I do what I do not want to do, it is no longer I who do it, but it is sin living in me that does it.


Dig Deeper
Nearly seventeen hundred years ago, a church leader named Athanasius penned one of my favorite pieces of theology that I have ever read. Athanasius was dealing with many critics, including Jews, who were critical of the whole idea of the incarnation and resurrection of Jesus, who the early Christians claimed to be the promised Messiah of God. His work, known as “On the Incarnation,” defends several Christian concepts including the ideas of his divinity, his incarnation as a human, his death on the cross, and his resurrection. In that brilliant essay, Athanasius argues that Jesus had to die publicly and cruelly and that he simply could not have died a private death to fully realize God’s plan. In dying such a public and horrible death and then resurrecting from the dead, the early church author compares Jesus to championship wrestlers from his day. He says that in order to be the grand champion one has to be willing to take on the very best opponent that is available and defeat him. This is what Jesus did, says Athanasius, in humbling himself to a violent and public death. He took on the very best attack that Satan and the world had to offer. He took on a cruel death and walked out the other side, thus defeating the very best opponent that could ever be mustered against him. In drawing out the most potent attack possible and defeating it, Jesus left Satan without any other options and had defeated him once-and-for-all.

This isn’t quite Paul’s argument as he continues his exploration of the role of the law within God’s covenant purposes in enacting a new exodus and creating a new humanity but it’s pretty close to what Paul is thinking. The law, the very thing that God gave to his people and told them to follow, seems to be the precise conduit through which sin and death had utterly enslaved God’s people. It seems as if God intentionally gave Israel something that would draw sin to a head and, as Romans 5:20 asserted, cause sin to increase in Israel. This brings up an obvious question, though. Why would God do this? Paul’s point, similar to Athanasius, is that God was drawing out the full potential of the enemy in order to defeat it decisively once-and-for-all.

As we begin this section, we have to admit that it can be one of the most difficult to read and follow in the entire New Testament. Many people have clung onto this passage as one of their favorite passages in the whole Bible because, according to a certain interpretation of this section, it encourages them to think that Paul is describing his own struggle and failure in overcoming sin. Many people see a similar struggle in their own life and so they find great comfort in supposing that none other than the Apostle Paul would find similar difficulties in overcoming sin. Paul will deal with the struggle with sin for the new humanity in the next chapter, but quite frankly, he doesn’t appear to be doing that right here. That, at least is not his primary concern. Paul has already demonstrated in the previous section that when the law arrived in Israel it caused them to do exactly what Adam had done by sinning against God and showing that Israel was sinful just as the rest of the world was. In this section Paul now moves to examining what happens when Israel, having been given the gift of the law, tries to actually live under it and according to it.

If the law is good, as Paul claimed in verse 12, why then has it become death to Israel? Why is it that the more Israel embraces the law, the more it seems to be thrust toward death rather than life? Paul says that the problem is not with the law but with sin. Israel wasn’t mistaken in clinging to the law, that’s exactly what they should have done. Yet, it must be understood that God allowed sin to used what was good to bring about the spiritual death of Israel. He let sin take the opportunity of the giving of the law so that sin could be brought to its full power. When the law came to Israel, showing that Israel was completely sinful, sin, Paul says, became “utterly sinful.” It was, in other words, seen in its fullest state. Paul doesn’t explain here why God would use Israel in such a way but he will begin to deal with that question in chapter 9.

But, Paul is clear, Israel was right to embrace the law. Paul seems as eager here to exonerate Israel as he was to previously exonerate the law because there would be an obvious question. If the law was good but sin brought death through the law in Israel then was there some inherent problem with Israel. Did God perhaps just pick the wrong people. No, says Paul, God knew what he was doing all along. The problem was that the law is spiritual but I, Israel in Adam, was made out of flesh (the TNIV’s rendering of verse 14, “but I am unspiritual” rather than “but I am in the flesh” is entirely misleading and seems to imply that there is a defect in Israel in that they were just unspiritual). Israel was in Adam so when the law came it had no power to free them from that state, only to highlight their current residence there (This is basically an expansion of the same point that Paul introduced in 2:17-24 while chapter 8 is an expansion of the thought he introduced in 2:28-29, which is why Paul will return, in chapter 9, to the same question he asked at the beginning of chapter 3).

So what happens on a practical level when God’s good and holy law runs smack into a sinful Israel? Paul describes it using not only the common technique of the first person singular to stand for a general group but he also grabs onto a discussion that was apparently fairly common in his time among Greek philosophers. Why can humans see the good that they should do and be well aware of what they shouldn’t, but still wind up sliding towards the bad anyway? This, then, puts Israel exactly where Paul said they were in chapter 2. They share the same plight and struggle with the same things that the Gentile world does, only more so because they have the law to also point out their shortcomings. Although Paul has already mentioned the advantages to having the law it still does not leave Israel any further along when it comes to their need for the gospel and the new humanity in Christ which is unleashed when one responds to the gospel in faith. Even with the law, Israel winds up standing on the same ground that the pagan world did. Regardless of how much they tried to cling to the law, it would not free them from sin because it was not designed to do that.

This is an important tightrope that Paul is walking because he wants Jews to understand their need for the gospel rather than the law to justify them as the true people of God but he also does not want to give the impression that the law was not godly or that Israel was inherently any worse than anyone else. Paul will explore this topic of Israel’s role further in 9-11 but to this point he has cleverly accomplished his dangerous walk. The law was good but was used by sin because Israel was in the same sinful, Adamic state as everyone else. Yet, the “I’ is cleared in a sense as well. Israel was right to embrace the law. There was nothing wrong with them doing that as it was part of God’s plan. What Israel didn’t see, though, was that in embracing the law they weren’t fulfilling the part of God’s plan that they thought. God was drawing the full measure of sin to one place. That was the purpose of the law that Paul is addressing now. To accomplish the vocation of being the light of the world and being a blessing to all people, though, God would no longer use ethnic Israel. For that he needed a representative from the family of Israel who was not in the same Adamic state as everyone else. Thus, Paul has brilliantly shown that Israel was part of God’s plan but, at the same time, that they needed the Messiah.

The problem for Israel in this passage is that they have sin indwelling or living within them as do all humans. This is not something that humans can overcome, law or no law, and so the “I” is reduced to doing precisely what it does not want to do. Paul is setting the stage for the next chapter by showing that Adamic humanity has a seemingly incurable problem of indwelling sin. The only solution to that is to die to the Adamic self and enter into the life of Christ where one can come into contact with the indwelling power of the Holy Spirit. He is demonstrating, then, that God has drawn out the sin in the human heart so that he can show it for what it is and show all humans their need for something to deal with that sin.

This drawing out of sin is what Paul meant in verse 13. Sin was used in order to bring about the death of Israel so that it might be seen and recognized in its most virulent state. First, we must ask who used sin? The obvious answer is that God did. Sin used the law but God was using sin all along to achieve his own purposes. God does not sin, nor does he cause sin, but he can certainly use it to further his purposes. It’s not that God gave Israel the law with an understanding that sin would reach its full measure when he did so. He gave Israel the law so that sin would reach its full measure. That was part of his purpose all along. Paul will give the complete answer as to why God did this in 8:3 where he will use a similar line of reasoning that Athanasius would three hundred years later. God gave Israel the law so that he could draw it to one location, deal with it, condemn it, punish it, and defeat once-an-for-all. God didn’t give Israel the law so that they might become a sin-free haven. Rather, the law was given to draw sin out to it’s fullness and then defeat it.


Devotional Thought
Compare what Paul says about Israel (the “I”) in this passage to your time before you became a Christian. Do you see any similarities? Spend some time contemplating on the incredible need that you had at that time for a savior as you prepare yourself for Paul’s stunning description of the victory of the cross and the resurrection in chapter 8.

Wednesday, October 21, 2009

Romans 7:7-13

The Law and Sin
7 What shall we say, then? Is the law sinful? Certainly not! Nevertheless, I would not have known what sin was had it not been for the law. For I would not have known what coveting really was if the law had not said, "You shall not covet." [b] 8 But sin, seizing the opportunity afforded by the commandment, produced in me every kind of coveting. For apart from the law, sin was dead. 9 Once I was alive apart from the law; but when the commandment came, sin sprang to life and I died. 10 I found that the very commandment that was intended to bring life actually brought death. 11 For sin, seizing the opportunity afforded by the commandment, deceived me, and through the commandment put me to death. 12 So then, the law is holy, and the commandment is holy, righteous and good.


Dig Deeper
When I was teaching high school in the inner city, before going into the ministry, we had a staff meeting one day when we decided to open up lunchtime. This meant that students could go out and go to restaurants or go home for lunch and did not have to stay in the school building or even on school grounds. The new rule was designed to give freedom to students who wanted the opportunity to go out and enjoy food other than the horrible food that was provided by the school district or even to have a few minutes to relax at home before coming back to school. It was a good thing but what we found out was that many of the students began to misuse the freedom that they were given during this open lunch period. As teachers, we had mostly thought of the good things that they could do with this thirty or so minutes but because of where the minds of the students were at, they began to do some things quite out of the realm of what we had ever envisioned. Many of the students used to opportunity to go to their own or a friends house but so as to get high rather than grab a bite to eat. That became a standard problem but one year things got much worse. In short, some students had created a fight club of sorts at a park a few blocks away where students would go and fight during the lunch period. Because of the condition of their hearts and minds, they took something that was good, in and of itself, the open lunch, and made it seem bad. In fact, you could argue that the open lunch aroused what was in them already, inducing them to these sorts of behaviors that they never would have otherwise taken during lunchtime. Thus, the good policy of open lunchtime worked together with their evil hearts to increase their evil and create situations that were expressly against the kind of behavior called for in our school.

Paul has alluded, throughout his letter, to the role that the law played in Israel and particularly its connection and role with sin and death. He made such a connection between the two in 5:20 and 7:5 that he now has to answer the question, is the law sinful. Is the law synonymous with sin and does it, in itself, have evil purposes. This is position that has been taken at various times throughout history. It’s a position that we now called Marcionism, based on Marcion, a 2nd century heretic that taught that the law and the Old Testament were completely un-useful for Christians and that the God of the Old Testament was a different and somewhat malevolent God compared to the God of the New Testament. Paul will have none of that line of thinking. He will not play into a Gentile audience or give any fuel to a movement that, once they have thrown off the realization that they are bound to the Jewish law as Christians, might go overboard and completely reject the role of the law in the history of the covenant people. Paul will carefully explain that the problem wasn’t with the law but with Israel itself and the way that it used and abused the law.

Before we proceed any further, we have to ask, because it will become quite important throughout the remainder of the chapter, who is Paul talking about here? In other words, who is the “I” of this chapter. That will come up again later because Paul will use a double “I” in a similar way that he used a double “you” in the previous section. Without the space to go into all of the arguments concerning this point, it will have to suffice it say that it is unlikely that Paul’s “I” is referring to himself. He has been systematically arguing the role of Israel as he re-tells the narrative of the Exodus and how it relates to the new exodus, the new humanity, and where that leaves ethnic Israel. It would not seem to flow with Paul’s line of argument to suddenly break in with his own personal story. Rather Paul is using a fairly common technique of his day which was to use the first person singular when they wanted to apply things to a more general group, similar to the way we use the word “we” to do the same thing. Paul’s “I” then refers to Israel. He has likely carefully chosen that term rather than they or simply referring to Israel so as not to appear that he, as a Jew, is trying to exclude himself or make himself appear to be better than his fellow countrymen.

In the last chapter Paul began the narrative of the new exodus through the language and imagery of the escape from the slavery of Egypt and the journey through the Red Sea. Now he moves his narrative into Mt. Sinai where Israel first received the law. But, while his current narrative echoes the incidents in Mt. Sinai, the incidents in Mt. Sinai echo even older incidents in the Garden of Eden. It was in Sinai when Israel was given the law just as it was in Eden where Adam and Eve were given God’s command. In both cases, the choice was between obedience and life or disobedience and death.

The law is not, Paul has firmly declared, sinful in any way. The law was not the source of sin nor is it identical with sin. It was the hole in the wall through which the torrent of sin came rushing. Paul is not claiming that one cannot sin or rebel against God without the law, he has already made quite clear that that is not the case. His point is that there is a difference between sin and the willful trespassing of a known command. When he says that sin was dead apart from the law we must keep 5:13-14 in mind. It’s not that sin doesn’t exist where there is no law but it doesn’t have the power and life that it has where the law provides the opportunity for intentional disobedience. Paul likely has one eye here on Adam’s original breaking of God’s command but also alludes to Israel who were in the throes of covetous and idolatrous behavior at the very moment that Moses descended from Mt. Sinai to give them the law.

At one time, before the law came to Adam or to the corporate people of God, they were alive but when the law came it exposed the sin and rebellion that were lying in wait in the form of their free will. The promise of the law was always life to those who obeyed it but death to those who disobeyed: “See, I set before you today life and prosperity, death and destruction. For I command you today to love the LORD your God, to walk in obedience to him, and to keep his commands, decrees and laws; then you will live and increase, and the LORD your God will bless you in the land you are entering to possess. But if your heart turns away and you are not obedient, and if you are drawn away to bow down to other gods and worship them, I declare to you this day that you will certainly be destroyed. You will not live long in the land you are crossing the Jordan to enter and possess. This day I call the heavens and the earth as witnesses against you that I have set before you life and death, blessings and curses. Now choose life, so that you and your children may live ” (Deut. 30:15-18).

But it goes back farther than Israel. When they failed to obey God’s will, they were mimicking Adam. God gave Adam the tree of life but once the command came, sin sprang to life in Adam and the result was death. In both cases, the good intent of the law, if obeyed, was to bring life but it brought death because of sin. Sin took the opportunity given by the law and used it, as theologian Tom Wright terms it, “Its base of operations.” Certainly physical death was involved but for Adam the “death” in the present age was exile from the Garden of Eden and for Israel, as it continued to echo Adam’s failures, they were exiled from the promised land.
Paul confirms that the law is holy, righteous, and good. He exonerates the law from guilt while at the same time showing that it could not bring life but death. Gentiles who might be tempted to now completely reject the Judaism that they likely had some kind of connection to before becoming Christians, should not go that route, though. To completely label the law as evil would be to rip up the roots of the tree that they were sitting on. God’s covenant with Israel and the role that his commands, his law, played in the life of Adam and Israel was no mistake. But if the law could not defeat sin and could not bring life then what could? Paul will turn to that soon but he still has a bit more to say about the role of the law.


Devotional Thought
Do you truly see the potent danger inherent in sin if we do not take advantage of the life of Christ and completely die and stay crucified to sin? Take some time to consider the fact that sin is diametrically opposed to God’s purposes in the world and in our lives. What happens when we return to sin which we have died to?

Tuesday, October 20, 2009

Romans 7:1-6

Released From the Law, Bound to Christ
1 Do you not know, brothers and sisters—for I am speaking to those who know the law—that the law has authority over someone only as long as that person lives? 2 For example, by law a married woman is bound to her husband as long as he is alive, but if her husband dies, she is released from the law that binds her to him. 3 So then, if she marries another man while her husband is still alive, she is called an adulteress. But if her husband dies, she is released from that law and is not an adulteress if she marries another man.

4 So, my brothers and sisters, you also died to the law through the body of Christ, that you might belong to another, to him who was raised from the dead, in order that we might bear fruit for God. 5 For when we were controlled by our sinful nature, [a] the sinful passions aroused by the law were at work in us, so that we bore fruit for death. 6 But now, by dying to what once bound us, we have been released from the law so that we serve in the new way of the Spirit, and not in the old way of the written code.



Dig Deeper
I don’t know if you can relate to this but I receive so many e-mails each day that I tend to skim through them very quickly and decide which ones I need to read quickly and then delete, which ones are spam and can be junked or moved to my spam box immediately, and which ones I need to read carefully and reply to or even keep in my box for a while. I recently received a very odd e-mail from a friend of mine. I quickly opened it and read and realized that it made absolutely no sense at first reading. As I looked at it further it made even less sense. It was addressed to his teenage son and seemed to have nothing to do with me. My first urge was to assume that he had cc’d me by accident and just delete the e-mail. I decided not to, though, for some reason. I still really didn’t understand, however, why he sent it to me. I found out later that my wife had been sent the same e-mail and had the same confusion. She asked me if I knew why he had sent it to her. This prompted me to go back and read it carefully again. It finally hit me that I had missed a small little clue in the beginning of the e-mail. The son was home sick from school and so the e-mail was sent to him as a suggestion of things that he could do during the day. About half way through the list of things that he could do during the day was the suggestion that he could e-mail us and several other people to catch up with us. Then I realized that my friend had copied the e-mail to us and the other people so that, I am assuming here, if he didn’t e-mail us we could e-mail him. It’s amazing, though, how confusing something can be if you miss a small little detail.

In this passage there are two small little details that, if we miss them, can easily leave us confused with what Paul is trying to say. The first small detail is hard to find because it is actually not there. If you’re confused, good, that means I have your attention. The first detail is a small little word at the beginning of the passage that the TNIV has removed somewhat inexplicably. The second detail is hard to find because it is easy to make a quick assumption about the point of this passage that makes the passage very confusing, to the point that it can seem to be somewhat out of place and leaves us with the urge to simply move past it and get on to passages that are easier to follow. If we go back carefully, however, we discover that the problem is not with Paul but with the assumption that is easy to make.

The first detail that we need to ferret out in this passage is the little word “or.” It should be the first word of verse 1, but it has been removed for ease of reading in many translations. The problem with that is it removes the ability to notice that this word connects it to an earlier thought that Paul mentioned and is now picking up on. In 6:14, Paul stated, “you are not under the law, but under grace.” Now he picks up on that thought. “You are not under the law, but under grace. . . Or don’t you know. . . that the law has authority over someone only as long as that person lives.” When we add that word back in we see that Paul is not moving on to some new thought that seems only vaguely related to what he has been discussing but that he is referring back to his earlier statement and explaining it further. He is actually continuing his line of reasoning rather methodically.

Paul continues to want to demonstrate the role of the law and its relationship to God’s covenant purposes. He appears, in verse 1, to be speaking to those who know the law, which seems a but confusing because it appears that a majority of the church was Gentile. The answer to that riddle is that most of the Gentile Christians in Rome were likely “God-fearers” (a term applied to Gentiles who respected and followed the Jewish law to varying degrees) or worshipped in the synagogue. At the very least, new Gentile converts would have had a fair amount of exposure to the law and the Old Testament in their early Christian training. Thus, Paul appeals to an assumed familiarity that his audience will have with the law. To make his point that death severs a relationship to the law, he appeals to a rabbinical saying, “if a person is dead, he is free from the Torah, and the fulfilling of the commandments.”

At first glance, Paul’s example of this in verses 2 and 3 seem to be saying that people are married to the law. It seems that his point is that we are the wife, the law is the first husband, and Christ is the second husband. That gets confusing though as Paul connects the analogy in verse 4 because you, seemingly the wife, die rather than the first husband. This is confusing but here is where the second small detail becomes important. Paul never actually says that the law is playing the role of the first husband, we just assume that. He actually says, in verse 2, that the law is what binds a wife to her husband. The law is not the husband.

What is Paul saying, then? If the law is not the first husband, then who is? We need to look back to chapter 6 to answer that clue. In this analogy the husband dies, so we have to ask who has Paul talked of dying repeatedly throughout this larger section? The answer is that seven times Paul says that our old Adamic selves have died to sin (6:2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 8, 11). Paul’s point in verse 4, which fleshes out the meaning of his illustration in verses 2-3 is that the “you” who died is the old you in Adam. You entered into the body of Christ (1 Cor. 12:12) and died to that which bound you to the old master. It is the law, Paul makes clear that worked in concert with the old sinful self in that it bound people to that state. This happened so that “you” (Paul has now switched, using a double “you,” from the old “you” to the new “you”) might belong to Christ. The resurrection of Christ has bound those in him to a marriage to him (see 2 Cor. 11:2; Eph. 5:25-32 where Paul uses the analogy of believers being the bride of Christ) and has allowed them to bear fruit or children through that faith just as Abraham and Sarah bore children when they trusted God.

Paul begins in verse 5 to lay out an introduction to his thoughts in 7:7-25. This fruit that is brought forth in the marriage to Christ is in contrast to the old self when we were controlled, says Paul, by our flesh (Paul’s word for the human state under the domain of sin and death) and bore fruit for death. This hearkens back to 1:18-32 where those opposed to God misuse their bodies and result in condemnation and death.

In dying to the law, though, we died to that which bound us to our old marriage and to our old selves, or the first husband in Paul’s analogy. Just as verse 5 points ahead to and introduces 7:7-25, so verse 6 points ahead to 8:1-11. As Paul declared in chapter 6, the old slavery that once bound us has been thrown off and exchanged for a new slavery. Paul distinguishes the “new way of the Spirit” over and against “the old way of the written code” in language that echoes that of 2 Corinthians 3:6: “He has made us competent as ministers of a new covenant—not of the letter but of the Spirit; for the letter kills, but the Spirit gives life. “

In 5:20, Paul intimately connected the law and sin saying that “The law was brought in so that the trespass might increase.” Clearly in Paul’s mind the law and sin worked together closely and he makes that connection even more clear in his use of substitute language in chapters 6 and 7 where he carefully exchanges language used of sin and death in chapter 6 with language pointing to the law in chapter 7. He says that we have been united to the likeness of his death (6:5) and that we are united to another by the law (7:2). We are no longer slaves of sin, says Paul in 6:6, but in 7:6 he says that we are slave to the Spirit and no longer slaves to the law. In 6:9 he declares that death is no longer lord, while in 7:1 that the law no longer has authority, or literally lordship, over us. In 6:10 he speaks of dying to sin while in 7:4 he says that we died to the law. Paul says that we were freed in from sin in 6:18, 20, 22 and made free from the law in 7:3. Author Daniel Kirk writes that “the glaring difference in ch. 7 from what has preceded it is that Paul now systematically replaces sin and death with the law. . . [which] explains why in 7:7 Paul must head off the seemingly inevitable conclusion: ‘Is the law sin?’ He has intentionally written sin and law into the story as playing cooperating roles in Israel’s history.”

This chapter stands firmly in the midst of Paul’s purposes to explain to the church in Rome, who had varying degrees of a Jewish backgrounds and connections, the incredible transition that has been made through the resurrection of Christ from a covenant family that they thought was defined by the law to the fulfillment of God’s promises, a covenant family defined by the Messiah and the Spirit. Part of this transition is the death to the Adamic type of Humanity which had the law at work within it to the new humanity in the Messiah. Leaving behind this old humanity and living in concert with the new life in Christ means leaving every aspect of life in the flesh, in Adam, in the grave and being brought into this new life by the Spirit. Part of that which must be left behind, then, is the law which aroused the sinful passions of those in Adam. If that is true, though, then what does Paul believe about the law. Is it for all intents and purposes identical to sin? This is a logical question to which Paul will turn his attention in the next section.


Devotional Thought
Do you continue to do the hard work of living in solidarity with your new life or do you constantly choose to return to the ways of your old life and your old master? In what ways do you see the Spirit bringing about your new life?

Monday, October 19, 2009

Romans 6:20-23

20 When you were slaves to sin, you were free from the control of righteousness. 21 What benefit did you reap at that time from the things you are now ashamed of? Those things result in death! 22 But now that you have been set free from sin and have become slaves of God, the benefit you reap leads to holiness, and the result is eternal life. 23 For the wages of sin is death, but the gift of God is eternal life in [b] Christ Jesus our Lord.


Dig Deeper
When I began college, I didn’t exactly take it seriously. I was far more concerned with playing basketball, having fun, and pursuing things other than academic success than I was with actually behaving like a serious college student. From the very beginning, my parents warned me that my behavior and choices were going to have severe consequences for my future. Generally speaking, people who behave like I did in college tend to have fairly bleak futures. Yet, the consequences of that behavior weren’t just reserved for the future. It wasn’t as though I was sailing along doing stupid things and behaving immaturely, but only piling up negative consequences for myself many years down the road. I had a clear choice, in a sense, of two types of behavior and I chose the irresponsible and self-focused path rather than the responsible and right one. But one did not have to look at my choices and actions for very long to see that they had failure and destruction written all over them in the present. My choices had the stench of stupidity permeating them through and through and each action that I took, whether it be to skip classes to play more basketball, to stay out all night rather than study, or any other poor choice, they served as an advance sign for the type of life that I was living and where I would end up in the end if I didn’t make some sort of radical change.

Paul has delved quite deeply into working out the reality of the new humanity in the Messiah and how that plays against the Adamic humanity. Particularly Paul has dealt with the reality of being in the Messiah, showing that the new humanity really has died to the realm of sin and are not in some sort of limbo where they have one foot in Adam’s realm and the other in Christ’s. They really have died to sin but that doesn’t mean that sin is not still powerful and dangerous, able to entice one back into slavery. What Paul now wants to make clear is something that he has hinted all along. The choices to be made between these two realms have very real implications for eternity but the realm in which we live in the present age have very real consequences in the present as well.

In verse 19 Paul asked his readers to consider the amount of time and energy that they spent in serving themselves under the reign of sin and to spend that same amount of time and energy under their new master. Now he continues to urge them to think about the benefits of their actions when they were slaves to sin versus their actions as slaves to God’s covenant purposes. Paul begins the discussion that will continue into the next chapter concerning the fruit that comes from the two ways of life that he has been discussing since the previous chapter. What was the result, the fruit, of the slavery to which they were previously beholden? He sets up a strange thought in order to make a parallel point in verse 22. The slavery of sin does come with a freedom of sorts. It is a freedom from the control of God’s covenant purposes, his righteousness. Thus the old slavery left its captives free from reconciliation with God and resigned to bearing the chains of shame and death. When we are stuck in the slavery of sin we do things that we are not ashamed of but should be as the fruit and “benefit” of those things are shown in that they lead to death.

On the other side of the ledger of sin, death, and freedom from righteousness, is the state of entering into Christ and becoming slaves of God. While the slavery of sin promises freedom but really brings death. This is a slavery that promises death but really brings freedom. When one dies to self and enters into the life of Christ by crossing in faith through the waters of baptism (just as Israel left the slavery of Egypt by crossing thought the Red Sea) they are freed from the tyrant that truly enslaves all of humanity and leads to death and eternal separation from the purposes of God. If anyone, we can almost imagine Paul declaring, really wants to be eternally separated from God’s covenant and his purposes of reconciling the world to himself, then they should stay right exactly in the realm of sin because that is the freedom that they will have. But if they want to be truly set apart for God’s purposes (the ultimate meaning of the word “holiness”) then the new slavery is the way to go. The old slavery leads to nowhere but death while the new slavery leads to eternal life.

Just as in 5:15-17 when Paul was pointing out that things between these two realms don’t really balance out, neither do they here. The wages of sin is death. A wage is something that is given in direct portion to what has been done. When you do a certain amount of work, you earn that wage. Thus, the sinner who bears the fruit of the realm of sin earns their wage which is death and eternally missing out on reconciliation with God. But God gives beyond anything we could hope, imagine, or earn. The gift of eternal life in Christ Jesus is not a wage, it is a gift precisely because we could never earn such a thing. Thus Paul has made a stark contrast that is easy to miss. The fruit of the realm of sin is a wage that we earn. The fruit of the realm of grace is a gift that we could never earn.

To fully grasp the power of what Paul is saying in this passage, however, we must see that he is not simply making a distinction of what happens when we die. True enough the realm of sin leads to death and the realm of grace leads to eternal life but we cannot simply reduce the choice to a giant reward given at the finish line. In chapter 1, Paul began to discuss the idea that the realm in which we live displays in the present the aroma of the final judgment of where we live. In other words, our present life already is bearing the fruit of our ultimate destination. The result of the things that are done in the realm of sin is death but those things have the smell of death all over them. The behavior shows the sign of its final destination. It’s not as if we commit a bunch of unrelated sin that brings wonderful results into our lives and then at the end, the final verdict is death and separation from God. Each action that we take in the realm of sin is an act of death and separation that point precisely in the road down which we are heading.

In the same way, eternal life cannot be reduced to something that we solely experience when we die. That is the whole point of the resurrection of Christ and what Paul has said throughout this chapter. The resurrection took the life of the age to come (eternal life) and brought it forward into the present. It changed the world at precisely the point where the world was eternally separated from life, enslaved to death. It is there that the resurrection broke through that barrier and offered life. The life of the age to come, the resurrection life, can be entered into now. As Paul says in Philippians 3:10-11, “I want to know Christ—yes, to know the power of his resurrection and participation in his sufferings, becoming like him in his death, and so, somehow, attaining to the resurrection from the dead.” Christ had resurrected into the life of the age to come and has brought that age forward into the present age. When people hear the gospel and respond to it with faith in the life of Christ, the signs of the life of the age to come, come bursting forth into the present world. That is what Christian community is all about. It is the place where a group of people have been brought together as the people of God and begin to live in unity by the values of the age to come rather than the values of the present age. The way that Christians live point ahead to the life of the age to come as each of our actions bear the fruit of life rather than death. This is why Christian life and behavior matter in the present. The Christian life isn’t a bunch of restrictive rules but they are the signs of where we’re heading. We either bear the fruit of life in our lives or the rotten fruit of death.

When Christians look at the two choices of Adam and Christ we should have no doubt that we are in Christ, a life that must be put into effect by no longer allowing sin to reign in our bodies. This is a victory that has already been accomplished for us and now we just need to implement it. Paul has now clearly laid out the distinction between the two realm s and is now about to turn his full attention to what happens when you add the law to the mix of these two realms 7:7-25). He will then, in chapter 8 show that God’s response to this is pure grace as he does what the law could not (8:1-11) and that the result is the fulfillment of the covenant promises that culminate in the renewal of all things (8:12-30).


Devotional Thought
Do you view the Christian life as restrictive and binding at times or as the advance signs of living by the values of the age to come? How does it change your thinking to embrace the idea that God calls us to obedience because he loves us and wants to lead us to eternal life both in time and for eternity?