(Ezekiel 36:24-28; Romans 8:1-17)
Therefore, there is now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus. Therefore. You may have heard, as I have many times, that when you see a “therefore” in the Bible you need to look and see what it’s there for. So you look up the page just a little, and you see . . . what? “Wretched man that I am! Who will deliver me from this body of death! . . . I myself serve the law of God with my mind, but with my flesh I serve the law of sin.” So, therefore there is no condemnation? That can’t be right.
Of course, you might be objecting that I skipped something, and so I did: Paul’s exclamation, “Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord!” But you know, that’s just sort of floating loose at the end of chapter 7—by itself, it doesn’t tell us how all this is supposed to fit together. It seems clear that his exclamation comes as an answer of sorts to his question in verse 24—Jesus Christ will deliver us from this body of death, and has delivered us—but then he’s right back into the negative: “I serve the law of God with my mind, but with my flesh I serve the law of sin.” (And no, contra the NIV, this is not “sinful nature”; Paul is talking about what we do with our bodies—how we actually act, vs. how we think we ought to act.) So what do we make of this?
Well, in the first place, look back further, to 7:6: “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.” Then look at the language Paul uses in chapter 8—and again, drop “sinful nature” out of the NIV and read “flesh.” “Flesh” here doesn’t refer to some nature within us; it means the life and the power of the old age, of our blighted, sin-twisted world, of which we as physical beings are very much a part. Before we’re saved, that’s the only frame of reference we have, and so everything in us is under the power of sin and controlled by the desires of the flesh. Even if we want to do what is good and right, we are only able to understand that in this world’s terms. The law can’t bring salvation because it’s powerless to change that: it can’t change the hearts of people who were born in sin, nor can it change their eyes and mindset to see themselves and this world differently. It can’t get people outside the flesh.
Now, when Paul talks about this in chapter 7, he sets the flesh in opposition to the mind or the inner being; but in chapter 8, he reaches back to 7:6 to introduce someone else into the argument. The mind cannot overcome the flesh, because the mind is set on the flesh, but in Christ it’s no longer just the mind vs. the flesh. Rather, if we are in Christ, we have been given his Holy Spirit, and now it is the Spirit of God versus the flesh; and that’s all different.
The Son of God became human—he became flesh just like us, but not under the power of sin—he lived the life of perfect obedience to God that the law required, and then he stood in our place to take the full condemnation for sin that the law required. In so doing, he stripped sin of its power to control us and condemn us, he gathered us to himself and put his Spirit within us, so that we might see with the eyes of the Holy Spirit, think with minds set on and shaped by the Holy Spirit, and so live in the guidance and power of the Holy Spirit.
Therefore there is no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus, because in Christ Jesus by the work of his Holy Spirit we have been set free from the flesh. We were under the power of sin and the condemnation of the law, we were bound to this world with chains of our own forging, and there was nothing we could do about it; but he delivered us. He led us out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery, through the water, into the land between. We have not yet arrived at the Promised Land; we have not fully entered into the kingdom of God; but we already belong to it. We are already under his rule, and we are already experiencing his life and his power, even as we struggle with the powers of this world.
Which is to say, we stand in the same place the Israelites stood after Moses led them through the Red Sea: the wilderness. The land between, that separated the land of slavery from the land of promise; the place of testing and challenge, where we have to live by faith and we have to follow God because he’s the only one who knows how he got us here, and he’s the only one who knows how to get us where we’re going. People tend to want to use the law like a spiritual GPS, like it can give us turn-by-turn directions to the Kingdom of Heaven, but it can’t. Even for the Israelites, who received the law from the hand of God on Mt. Sinai, it didn’t give them directions to the Promised Land. They still had to walk by faith, and follow; which is why so many of them were never allowed to enter it, because they wouldn’t do that.
So how do we live in the wilderness? By the leading and the power of the Spirit of God. We learn to live as God wants us to live not by following a set of commands, but by setting our mind on the Spirit, and on the things of the Spirit. In our reading, in the things we watch, in the activities on which we spend our time, do we choose things that fix our thoughts and our desires on Jesus—because the Spirit of God always points us to Jesus—or do we choose things that focus our attention on the world and the desires of the flesh? Do we set aside time for intentional prayer—time to set our minds on the things of the Spirit and turn our hearts to the Lord? Do we make time to read the Bible, not hastily, as a duty, but thoughtfully, listening to the voice of God? These are questions we need to consider, because these are the habits that set our minds on the Spirit, or not.
If we set our minds on the things of the Spirit, the more we do that, the more we see the love and goodness and glory of God, and especially in the sacrifice and resurrection of Christ; and as the historian George Marsden put it, summarizing the great American preacher and theologian Jonathan Edwards, those who see this
will see the beauty of a universe in which unsentimental love triumphs over real evil. They will not be able to view Christ’s love dispassionately but rather will respond to it with their deepest affections. Truly seeing such good they will have no choice but to love it. Glimpsing such love, they will be drawn away from their preoccupations with the gratifications of their most immediate sensations. They will be drawn from their self-centered universes. Seeing the beauty of the redemptive love of Christ is the true center of reality, they will love God and all that he has created.
And in that, we will be motivated to change. God calls us to put to death the sins we practice with our bodies, but not out of a sense of duty, or determination, or fear of punishment—no, out of joy. “By the Spirit,” he says—the Spirit of God who rejoices in the Father and in Jesus Christ the Son, who fills us with the life and love and hope and joy and peace of God, who teaches us to see the desires of the world and the flesh in the light of his goodness and glory. By the Spirit learn to put our sinful habits to death, not grudgingly or regretfully, but joyfully and with anticipation, seeing them not as good things God is making us give up, but as things that are holding us back—that we want to get rid of to make room for something better: the life of God.