In our integral study of Romans, we’ve now reached the end of a significant argument that stretched from halfway through Romans 5 to the end of chapter 8. So it’s good time for a targum, a loose explanatory paraphrase of the text, that will remind us of where we’ve been.
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[5.12] We can think of salvation through our good-faith relationship with Christ like this: Sin entered the cosmos through one person, Adam, and through sin came death, so death spread to everyone, since everyone has sinned. (I know I’ve said that there is no sin without the law, but what I meant is that yes sin was in the world before the law, but sin wasn’t tallied up when was no law against which to judge our behaviour.) So death had free rein from Adam to Moses. In this way, Adam is a prototype of the one who was to come, Jesus.
But grace doesn’t share sin’s limitations. For if one man’s sin (that is, Adam’s) paved the way for everyone’s death, God’s grace and generosity exemplified in one man, Jesus, abounds all the more for everyone! Again, grace doesn’t work like sin does. The verdict following one sin is ‘guilty!’ but because of grace, the verdict following many sins is ‘not guilty!’ For if death reigned because of one man’s sin, how much more will those who receive God’s abundant grace and the gift of a ‘not guilty’ verdict through one man, Jesus Christ, truly reign in God’s life!
[5.18] It bears repeating: Just as one sin brought condemnation for all people, so one just act brings all people into justice. For just as one person’s disobedience established all of us as sinners, so also does one person’s obedience establish all of us in justice. When law came on the scene, sins multiplied, but where sin increased, grace has now abounded all the more, so that just as sin reigned in death, now grace reigns through that justice which leads to the life of the age to come through our Lord Jesus Christ.
[6.1] But if all this is true, does that mean we should keep on sinning so grace might increase even more? Absolutely not! How can we who have died to sin continue to live in sin? Have you forgotten the promise of baptism? All of us who have been baptized into Christ Jesus have been baptized into his death. We were buried with him through baptism into that death so that, just as Christ was raised from the dead by the Father’s glory, so will we also walk in new life. Again, if we’ve been united to him in a death like his so too will we be united to him in a resurrection like his, knowing full well that our ‘old humanity’ that follows in Adam’s footsteps has been crucified with Jesus, destroying the power of sin over our bodies, that is, freeing us from enslavement to sin. For when he died, he was fully innocent so sin and death had no hold on him. And if we have truly died with Christ, we trust that we will also be raised with him. He has died to sin and so sin is not his master. So he’s dead to sin and alive to God. In the same way, think of yourselves as dead to sin and alive to God through your participation in Jesus’ life and death.
[6.12] So then, may sin not reign in your moral body, leading you down the path of least resistance, obeying its every whim and appetite. May you not present your hands and feet as tools of injustice; rather, present yourselves to God like those who’ve been brought back to life, and offer your hands and feet to God as tools of justice. For sin is not your master anymore, for you are not subject to the law but to grace.
What then? should we keep on sinning since we are subject to grace and not the law? Absolutely not! It’s like this: You are the servant of whomsoever you obey. So who do you serve? Sin, which leads to injustice death? Or faithfulness, which leads to justice and life? Thanks be to God: You who were slaves to sin are now obedient from your hearts to the message entrusted to you, so you’ve been freed from slavery to sin in order to be ‘slaves’ to justice instead. (I know this metaphor doesn’t really work, but hopefully you’re following me.) For just as you used to offer your hands and feet to impurity and lawlessness, which led to even more lawlessness, now you present them as slaves to justice, which leads to holiness.
[6.20] For when you were enslaved to sin, justice had no claim on you. But what kind of fruit did all those shameful things bear in your life? Their fruit is nothing but death. But now, freed from sin and ‘enslaved’ to God, the fruit you bear leads to holiness and to the life of God’s Kingdom. When you work for sin, you get paid in death, but God’s gift is God’s Kingdom life in Christ Jesus our Lord.
[7.1] Here’s an analogy for those of you know the Law of Moses: As you know, the Law only has authority as long as someone is alive. So, a woman is bound by law to her husband’s authority only while he is alive. When he dies, the law that tied her to him no longer applies. If she pursued another man while her husband was alive, that would be adultery. But with her husband dead, she is free according to the law to pursue someone else. In this same way, Christ’s death, in which we participate in baptism, severs the law’s authority over you so that you are free to belong to him and bear good fruit for God. For when we were participating in the old humanity, our sinful impulses, spurred on by the law, operated in our bodies with the result that the fruit we bore was oriented toward death. But without the law, discharged from what tied us to sin’s power, we are free to serve the new law, the law of the Spirit, and not the old order of the written law.
[7.7] Does this mean that the law is bad? Absolutely not! But that said, I wouldn’t have known what sin was if it weren’t for the law. For example, I wouldn’t have known what coveting was if the law didn’t say “You will not covet…” But sin used that commandment as its starting point and caused me to covet all kinds of things. It was as though, without the law, sin was dead and I was alive. But with the coming of the commandment, sin sprung back to life and I died, and the very commandment that was intended to produce life in me, produced death instead. Again, sin used the commandment as its starting point, deceived me, and killed me through it. Even so, the law itself is holy, and the commandment is holy, just, and good.
Should we say then that that which is good killed me? Again, the answer is emphatically no! Sin, not the law, is the force at work here, skewing what is good to sin’s bad purposes, so that what is good might appear to be bad, and sin might become all the more sinful through this abuse of the commandment. The law may be spiritual, but, left to my own devices I am subject to the weakness of the flesh, sold as a slave to sin’s power. In this old humanity, I don’t know what I’m doing: I don’t do what I want to do and do the things I hate. And by hating the things I do, I’m tacitly agreeing that the law is good. So I’m not really the one doing it, but rather the sin that lives inside me. My bodily impulses direct me away from what is good; for I have the will to do what is good, but not the ability to follow through. For I don’t do the good I want, but do the bad I don’t want. So, it’s not really me doing it, but sin t work in me. There is a principle at work here that evil always lives close to my best intentions. In my heart, I delight in God’s law, but a different law is at work in my body, warring against that law in my heart. (What a miserable condition I’m in! Who can rescue me from this weak and mortal body? Thanks be to God, through Jesus Christ our Lord.) So then, in this state, even when my heart and mind are enslaved to God’s law, my flesh is still enslaved to the law of sin.
[8.1] But getting back to my original point, there is now no condemnation for those who participate in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ: For the new law of the Spirit of life that he makes available has freed you from old law of sin and death. For in him God did what the Law of Moses, weakened as it was because of the body and its impulses and appetites, couldn’t do: By sending us his own Son to deal with sin, in a body like Adam’s but not following in his footsteps, he condemned sin in his holy flesh, so that we might be free to live out the principle behind the Law of Moses— the love of God and of neighbour — not following our every bodily whim but following the Spirit’s leading. For if you go along with your whim and appetites, that’s what you’ll focus on, but if you follow the Spirit’s leading, your thoughts and focus will too. To put it bluntly: a mind focused on the appetites will be your death, but a mind focused on the Spirit will be your life and peace. That mind focused on the appetites is opposed to God because it does not submit — and could never submit — to God’s law of love. And that’s why those whose lives are oriented towards fulfilling their appetites can’t make things right with God.
[8.9] But of course, since the Spirit of God lives in you, you participate in its life, and not in the appetites. The Holy Spirit is the one true mark of those who belong to Christ; without it, you can’t claim to be his. But if you are in fact his, your body may be mortal because of sin, but the Spirit makes you alive because of the justice it brings. And if that same Spirit that raised Jesus from the dead lives in you, it will fill your mortal body with new resurrection life too. So then, my beloved siblings in Christ we owe the appetites nothing, nor are we bound to them any more. So put them and their misdeeds to death by the power of the Spirit and experience life to the full.
[8.14] For all who are led by God’s Spirit are God’s beloved children and heirs. For the Spirit you received is not about the instability and fear that comes from enslavement, but is about the belonging and confidence that comes from being fully adopted into the family. It’s this Spirit that allows us to call out to God as Father. And this same Spirit testifies with our own spirit that we are indeed God’s children, and if we are God’s children we are also God’s heirs. And being God’s heirs, that means we are co-heirs with Christ and all that is his will be ours — if indeed we follow his way, that yes, leads to suffering and difficulty in the kingdoms of this world, but will more surely lead to glory in the Kingdom of God.
And that’s the thing I’ve come to realize: The sufferings we experience in this present season are nothing compared to the glory that will be revealed to us in due time. Even now, the whole of creation is craning its neck in anticipation of the full revelation of God’s beloved children and heirs. For it has been subjected to frustration and knocked off course, not of its own doing but because God tied its destiny to Adam’s and Adam broke faith with it. But we have every hope that all of creation will be freed from this enslavement to decay and degradation and into the freedom that belongs to the glory of God’s children. We know that all of creation has been groaning with the birthpangs of God’s Kingdom, and us along with it. For we’ve experienced the initial harvest of what the Spirit can do and so we too groan inwardly, waiting for that initial work and the promises of our adoption to be fulfilled in us, so that even our bodies, with all their distracting appetites and impulses, might be fully redeemed and freed. So our salvation too involves hope, and hope for what we already see and experience is not hope at all. But having genuine hope — hope for what we do not already see and experience — we await it with patient endurance. And just as we and the rest of creation support one another in our suffering, so does the Spirit help pick up the slack when we feel weak. It’s all so overwhelming that we struggle to even find the words to pray, but but the Spirit intercedes for us with groans that are beyond words. But God, who searches our hearts, hears and knows the prayers of the Spirit who intercedes for God’s holy children as is God’s will.
[8.28] And we know that, despite all appearances, everything is working together for the ultimate good of those who love God and are called in alignment with God’s saving purpose. From all eternity, God has had a destiny in mind for us, that we be transformed into the image of the Son of God (which is nothing other than being restored into the image of God in which we were created), so that the Son of God might become the firstborn Son of a vast family of brothers and sisters. And all those who share that destiny, God has also justified, and those he’s justified he’s also glorified — now in part, but we confidently hope, in the future in full.
So what can we say about all this? If God is on our side — if God has done all of this for our sake — who could possibly oppose us? For if God did not spare the Son but handed him over to betrayal and death for our sake, what could God possibly withhold from us now? Who could possibly bring an accusation against those whom God has chosen? The only one with any right to accuse us is the same God who has already declared us to be good and just! And who could pronounce a guilty verdict on them? The only judge is Christ, who died, was raised from the dead, and glorified to the Father’s side, and who is in fact our defense attorney! And who or what could possibly separate us from Christ’s love? Could suffering or distress or harassment or famine or nakedness or danger or political persecution? (The Scriptures remind us that such things always follow those who follow God: “For Your sake we are being killed all day long; we are accounted as sheep for the slaughter.”) No. Even in the midst of all these things, we are beyond victorious through Jesus who loved us. In fact, I am convinced that neither death nor life, nor any angelic or spiritual force, nor anything in the present or future, nor powers, nor height nor depth, nor anything else in creation will be able to separate us from the love of God expressed in our Lord Jesus Christ.
Matthew Root 