We fed last week on God’s dramatic revelation in Romans 6, so crucial to its guarantee of our liberation from all negative behaviours (v14). When we were `born again`, something really dramatic happened; our `old self` actually died, we `united with Christ`, the Spirit of God has come to live within us with all His joyous power for transformation…
But what’s the practical value of all this? Because, whatever victories may be our birthright, we know all too well that it’s not `instant triumph`; we’re scarcely stepping straight into our inheritance. Romans 7 comes after Romans 6, not before, and portrays an all too familiar picture of someone struggling with sin, and frequently losing: `What I want to do I do not do; but what I hate I do`, says Paul; `What I do is not the good I want to do; no, the evil I do not want to do—this I keep on doing!‘ (vv15,19; NIV as usual).
Scholars have argued whether this is describing the situation before conversion (the plight of the merely `religious’ person, trying to live aright by their own efforts), or after it. Of course the passage does speak forcefully to the powerlessness of mere religion. But many of us recognize it from bitter post-conversion experience. Its relevance there seems confirmed by the way Paul speaks at the chapter’s end: I know in Christ I will have final deliverance, he says, but meanwhile I am caught between God’s law in my mind and the forceful tendency to sin elsewhere in my personality (vv24-25). `What a wretched man I am! Who will rescue me from this body of death?’
`Body of death’. Remarks like that cause panic among certain kinds of theologians, in their anxiety to avoid any `hellenistic’ denial of the body and of the physical world. Maybe we’ve overreacted, however. As we read these chapters, it’s difficult to avoid a recurrent note where Paul locates sin, for the Christian, in the body as against the spirit. `The sinful passions… were at work in our bodies’ (7:5). Paul sees a fatal tendency `at work in the members of my body, waging war against the law of my mind and making me a prisoner of the law of sin at work within my members… Who will rescue me from this body of death?’ (7:23-24) `If by the Spirit you put to death the misdeeds of the body, you will live’ (8:13). `If Christ is in you, your body is dead because of sin, yet your spirit is alive’ (8:10). Now, Paul is certainly not preaching an ascetic, body-denying, world-denying spirituality. But his point is perhaps closer (for once) to Freud: our physical nature has in it all kinds of drives and reactions, unhealed scars and hidden compulsions, derived deterministically from our genes, our history and our environment, that lead us with dire inevitability into behaviour we hate.
So now Paul is announcing liberating news: in our spirit, our innermost personality, the divine transformation has established its bridgehead. It takes place at an invisible level; you can’t see the results of new birth in our physical condition, for example. But from then on, salvation begins to spread through our entire, physically-embodied personality – our thoughts, our values, our dreams, our ambitions, our affections, our emotional scars. Indeed it seems unwise to insist that our physical bodies will remain untouched. (The more `charismatic’ our theology, the more strongly and `holistically’ we will put that!) Ultimately, says Paul, the `rescue’ he longed for in 7:24 will come, and our aging mortal body, precious as it too is to God, will be given total new life (8:11,23); though that has to wait till death or the second coming.
(Is one tempting application of this to 7:6 in particular – `The mind governed by the flesh is death, but the mind controlled by the Spirit is life and peace’ – in the area of stress management? It’s obvious that extending joyous, practised faith in God’s loving sovereignty, and the resulting tendency not to `worry about tomorrow’ (Matt 6:25-34), lead towards `life and peace’. The `worries of this life’ (Matt 13:22) not only `choke the good seed’ but many aspects of our psychological and physical health as well.)
So in other words, then: the biblical idea of salvation has three dimensions, and the new testament uses the word in three ways. In its most vital (and usual) sense it’s past; when we give ourselves to God, our most fundamental being is permanently `saved’ (Acts 2:21, 16:31, Rom 10:9, Eph 2:8, etc). But the new testament also speaks of it sometimes as a continuous process (Phil 2:12, 1 Tim 4:16); salvation spreading through our personality. There’s a lot to be done; and in fact it won’t be completed in this world. So finally, we also look towards `salvation’ as future (Rom 13:11, Heb 9:28): finally the process will be complete, and all that we are will be swept up into salvation, with our bodies too receiving `redemption’ into glory (Rom 8:23, Eph 1:14; cf 1 Cor 15:43).
(So the foundation for our transformation is, as Rom 8:12ff puts it, that because of what’s happened in our most central self we no longer have a built-in tendency, compulsion, `obligation`, to live according to the sinful nature, but instead to be `led by the Spirit` (Rom 8:12,14); and we must build on that (v13), but know too that triumph, sheer glory indeed, is coming, predestined for us indeed, as he rejoices to tell us in 8:17-30! And Colossians 3 is another passage where he makes this salvational process clear. On the one hand, says Paul, `You died… You have taken off your old self with its practices, and have put on the new self, which is being renewed in knowledge in the image of its Creator’ (vv3, 9-10). That’s once-for-all reality, definite, settled; and the certainty of this replacement that HAS happened in our innermost self can give us deep confidence for the ongoing transformation that happens as we go on living with Christ – something no `human commands… regulations` can actually help us with (Col 2:23, very relevant to Romans 7). But then secondly, that newness does have to be deliberately spread outward through the personality; so in the selfsame paragraph [in Colossians] he instructs them, `Put to death, therefore, what belongs to your earthly nature – sexual impurity… lust… greed’ (v5). The citadel is secured, but the battle isn’t over yet.)
We can recognize this process from ordinary life. When we buy a house, it becomes, legally, ours; as we become, in our identification with his death at conversion, legally Christ’s. We can go and live in it, as He comes to live in us. But the place is appallingly badly decorated; the wallpaper is a lurid shade of purple throughout, the bathroom stinks, the fittings are all in shabby disrepair. It may take us years to sort it all out. But we will! And so it is here. Once for all we are legally made Christ’s. Nor does He leave His `house’ empty: once and for all, He and His salvation through His empowering Holy Spirit have taken up residence in us. (`Christ is in you!’ (Rom 8:10).) For that transformation to work right through us is going to take time, and a great deal of skilful reconstruction; but, it’s guaranteed!…
(So thankyou, Lord, for Your patience, and Your skill! Again I surrender myself to Your rule, for Your transformation; in the events of today, and for all the days to come!)
PS I’ve skipped over the first part of Romans 7, vv1-6. This expands on a different issue, picking up on 6:14: we are one with Christ in his death, and therefore we are free from sin because we are free from the law (6:14). (7:7ff is then a parenthesis building on this, very necessary for the Jewish reader: despite what he’s saying in vv1-6, the law is not sin, it is holy.) And it’s because we are `released from the law` (7:6, 8:1-4 likewise) that we can live – the topic of ch8 – `in the new way of the Spirit`; the Spirit, not the sinful nature. Paul illustrates this by presenting the law as a husband, marriage to whom prevents marriage to Christ (7:2-4). Marriage is a great illustration here because these are matters of the heart (5:5, 6:17), not legalistic following of rules. (Indeed the grand purpose of all this is relationship, marriage to Christ as part of the Bride (Eph 5) of Christ!)
I found an exposition of this by Leif Andersen (former general secretary of KFS, the Danish IFES) very helpful. He relates it practically to the big problem that, since we see so much evil in the world as a result of sin, and the underlying fact of God’s judgment (6:23), we may find it difficult to grasp and trust God’s love. But if so, then we need to turn to the image of God in Jesus, because it’s here that we see God most clearly. And for that `turning` this chapter is very helpful. We can set the character of Jesus over against the character of that other, first husband. Once upon a time we were married to the law; this was a terrible slavery, and we couldn’t quit, otherwise we would be an adulteress. (Leif notes that this is only a partial illustration; Paul is not talking about our escaping abusive marriages and remarrying.) But our death that Romans 6 describes sets us free from the law and from that terrible marriage, and now we can `belong [joyfully!] to another` (7:4)!
(Andersen then asks: Doesn’t the wrong spouse die here (`you`, v4)? But, he says, Paul knows exactly what he’s doing. In the end no illustration can reproduce the full wonder of the reality, that we actually get to die in (`through the body of`) Christ, and thereby become free from the law. Paul obviously can’t say that the wife dies and so becomes free to marry another man! But as in 6:14 and 8:3-4, freedom from the law is the route to deliverance; it is the removal of the law that removes the barrier to the Spirit.)
(It is worth my noting however that Roger Forster, in his book Prayer, takes a different view, presenting the first husband in 7:1-6 as another picture of sin, rather than of the law. (And then the references here to the law are to the marriage certificate that ties us to that first husband.) As he says, we can fall so easily into the trap of believing that bondage tying us to sin is our inescapable identity, and that there is very little point in our trying to live otherwise; but this is a disastrous lie of the devil, because we are new creatures in Christ! We need to break the power of that wrong image and see ourselves as legally separated from that old relationship, and born again with a new life and a new power to live for God. (V4 might go against this interpretation as it does use the phrase `died to the law`, but in v6 we can conceivably take `what once bound us` (but no longer does) as the `sinful nature`, which v5 says has `controlled` us, and from which we need to grasp that we are free, once and for all!))
