Harry Ironside Collection: Ironside, Harry A. - Lectures on the Epistle to the Romans: 05-Lecture 5 - Rom_5:12-7:25

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Harry Ironside Collection: Ironside, Harry A. - Lectures on the Epistle to the Romans: 05-Lecture 5 - Rom_5:12-7:25



TOPIC: Ironside, Harry A. - Lectures on the Epistle to the Romans (Other Topics in this Collection)
SUBJECT: 05-Lecture 5 - Rom_5:12-7:25

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Lecture 5 - Rom 5:12-7:25

The Gospel in Relation to Indwelling Sin

Part I



Chapters 5:12-7:25



It will be necessary to take up this third part of the great doctrinal division in two lectures because of the wide scope of chapter 5:12 to the end of chapter 8. We shall look first therefore at that portion which ends with chapter 7. In the last half of chapter 5 we have the two heads-Adam and Christ. In chapter 6 we have two masters, SIN personified and GOD as revealed in Jesus. In chapter 7 there are two Husbands to be considered-the Law and Christ risen.



The awakened sinner is concerned about one thing: how to be delivered from the judgment his sins have righteously deserved. This aspect of salvation has all been gone into and settled in the portion we have recently gone over. It is never raised again. As we go on into this next part of the epistle the question of guilt does not come up. The moment a sinner believes the gospel his responsibility as a child of Adam under the judgment of God is over for ever. But that very moment his responsibility as a child of God begins. He has a new nature that craves what is divine. But he soon discovers that his carnal nature has not been removed nor improved by his conversion to God, and from this fact arises many trying experiences. It often comes as a great shock, when he realizes that he has still a nature capable of every kind of vileness. He is rightly horrified, and may be tempted to question the reality of his regeneration and his justification before God. How can a Holy God go on with one who has such a nature as this? If he tries to fight sin in the flesh he is probably defeated, and learns by bitter experience what Philip Melanchthon, Luther’s friend, put so tersely, “Old Adam is too strong for young Philip.”



Happy is the young convert if at this crisis he comes under sound scriptural instruction instead of falling into the hands of spiritual charlatans who will set him to seeking the elimination of the fleshly nature and the death of the carnal mind. If he follows their advice he will be led into a quagmire of uncertainty and dazzled by the delusive will-o’-the-wisp of possible perfection in the flesh, will perhaps flounder for years in the bog of fanaticism and self-torture before reaching the rest that remains for the people of God. I have tried to tell of my own early experiences along this line in a little volume entitled, Holiness, the False and the True, which I am thankful to know has been blessed to the deliverance of many thousands of souls. It was the truth we are now to consider that saved me at last from the wretchedness and disappointments of those early years.



In taking up these chapters I desire to antagonize no one but, simply, to constructively open up the line of truth here set forth for the soul’s blessing.



And first we have to consider the two great families and the two federal heads of chapter Rom_5:12-21.



The moment a man is justified by faith he is also born of God. His justification is, as we have seen, his official clearance before the throne of God. His regeneration involves his introduction into a new family. He becomes a part of the New Creation of which the risen Christ is the Head. Adam the first was federal head of the old race. Christ Risen, the Second Man and the Last Adam, is Head of the new race. The old creation fell in Adam, and all his descendants were involved in his ruin. The new creation stands eternally secure in Christ, and all who have received life from Him are sharers in the blessings procured by His cross and secured by His life at God’s right hand.



“Joyful now the new creation

Rests in undisturbed repose,

Blest in Jesus’ full salvation,

Sorrow now nor thraldom knows.”



It is the apprehension of this that settles the question of the believer’s security and thus gives a scriptural basis for the doctrine of deliverance from the power of sin.



It will be observed that the subject begun in verse Rom_5:12 is concluded in verses Rom_5:18-21. The intervening passage (verses Rom_5:13-17) is parenthetical, or explanatory. It may be best therefore for us to examine the parenthesis first. Sin was in the world dominating man from Adam’s fall even before the law was given by Moses; but sin did not as yet have the distinct character of transgression till a legal code was given to man: which he consciously violated. Therefore, apart from law, sin was not imputed. Nevertheless that it was there and to be reckoned with, is manifest, for “by sin came death” and death reigned as a despotic monarch over all men from Adam to Moses, save as God interfered in the case of Enoch, who was translated that he should not see death. Even where there was no wilful sin, as in the case of infants and irresponsible persons, death reigned, thus proving that they were part of a fallen race federally involved in Adam’s sin and actually possessing Adam’s fallen nature. He who was originally created in the image and likeness of God defaced that image by sin and lost the divine likeness, and we read that “Adam begat a son in his own likeness, after his image” (Gen_5:3). This is characteristic of all the race of which he is the head. “In Adam all die.”



Theologians may wrangle about the exact meaning of all this and rationalists may utterly refuse to accept it, but the fact remains, “It is appointed unto men once to die,” and apart from divine interference each one may well say with the poet:



“I have a rendezvous with death,

I shall not fail my rendezvous.”



You have doubtless heard of the epitaph, often mentioned in this connection, which is engraven on a tombstone marking the resting place of the bodies of four young children in St. Andrew’s churchyard in Scotland:



“Bold infidelity, turn pale and die.

Beneath this stone four sleeping infants lie:

Say, are they lost or saved?

If death’s by sin, they sinned, for they are here.

If heaven’s by works, in heaven they can’t appear,

Reason, ah, how depraved!

Turn to the Bible’s sacred page, the knot’s untied:

They died, for Adam sinned; they live, for Jesus died.”



There is no other solution to the problem of childhood suffering than that of the fall of the race in Adam.



But Adam was a figure, an antitype, of Him who was to come-yea, who has come and has Himself taken the responsibility of undoing the effects of the fall for all who, trusting in Him, become recipients of His resurrection life; and with this is linked a perfect righteousness which is eternal in duration and divine in origin. There is a difference as to the offence and the gift however. Adam’s one offence involved his race in the consequences of his fall. Christ, having satisfied divine justice, offers the gift of life by grace to all who will believe and so it abounds unto many. Notice that here in verse Rom_5:15 we have the third “much more.”



Nor is it merely that as by one that sinned so is the gift-for the one sin brought universal condemnation, putting the whole race under judgment. But the reception of the gift of life and righteousness in faith places the recipient in the position of justification from all things irrespective of the number of offences. Death reigned because of one offence. But we are told that “much more,” those who receive this abundance of grace and this free gift of righteousness now reign triumphant over death in life by Jesus Christ, the one who has overcome death and says, “Because I live ye shall live also.”



This is the substance of the parenthesis. Now let us go back-with all this in mind-to verse Rom_5:12, and link it with verses Rom_5:18-21. Sin entered into the world by one man and death by sin, so death passed upon all men for all have sinned, inasmuch as all were in the loins of Adam when he fell and all the race is involved in the defection of its head.



Now look at verse Rom_5:18. “Therefore as by one offence” there came universal condemnation, even so by one accomplished act of righteousness on the cross there comes an offer to all-that of justification of life. In other words, a life is offered as a free gift to all who are involved in the consequences of Adam’s sin, which is the eternal life manifested in the Son of God who once lay low in death under the sentence of condemnation, but arose in triumph having abolished death, and now as Head of a new race imparts His own resurrection life-a life with which no charge of sin can ever be linked-to all who believe in Him. They share henceforth in a life to which sin can never be in any sense attached. This is a new creation, of which Paul writes so fully in 2Corinthians Chapter 5 and in 1Corinthians Chapter 15: “If any man be in Christ it is new creation.” And it is in new creation that “all is of God”; “Old things have passed away and all things have become new.” So we get the full force of the word, “As in Adam all die, so in Christ shall all be made alive.” It is not universal salvation, nor is it merely that He will raise all the dead, but the two races, the two creations, the two Headships, are in contrast. Christ is the beginning, the origin, the federal Head of the creation of God (Rev_3:14). As the risen Man at God’s right hand, having passed through death He now is the fountain of life, pure, holy, unpolluted life, to all who believe. So we are now before God in justification of life.



By one man’s disobedience the many were constituted sinners. “Much more,” by one glorious act of obedience unto death on the part of Him who is now our new Head, the many are constituted righteous.



The coming in of the law added to the gravity of the offence. It gave sin the specific character of transgression. But where sin abounded (had reached its flood-tide, so to speak) grace did “much more abound,” that is, grace super-abounded, so that as sin reigned like a despotic monarch throughout the long centuries before the cross, unto the death of all his subjects, now grace is on the throne and reigns through accomplished righteousness unto eternal life by Jesus Christ our Lord!



What a gospel! What a plan! It is perfect; it is divine; like God Himself! How gloriously do these five “much mores” bring out the marvels of grace!



In the light of all this, is it any wonder that the apostle, recognizing the innate tendency of the human heart to turn the grace of God into lasciviousness, puts into the mouth of the reader the question, “Shall we continue in sin that grace may abound?” Chapter 6 answers this cavil (for it is really that) in a masterly way.



“Far be the thought!” he exclaims indignantly. “How shall we who have died to sin live any longer therein?” In what sense did we die to sin? If actually dead to it we would not be concerned about either the question or its answer. That which perplexes us is the fact that while we hate sin we find within ourselves a tendency to yield to it. But we are said to have died to it. How and where? The next verses give the answer.



The very fact that our link with Adam as federal head was broken by our association with Christ in His death tells us that we have the right to consider ourselves as having died, in that death of His, to the authority of sin as a master. Israel were redeemed from judgment by the blood of the Lamb. This answers to the first aspect of salvation. By the passage through the Red Sea they died to Pharaoh and his taskmasters. This illustrates the aspect we are now considering. Sin is no longer to hold sway over us, we served it in the past. But death has changed all that. Our condition of servitude is over. We are now linked with Christ risen and thus have been brought to God.



Of this the initiatory ordinance of Christianity speaks. “Know ye not that so many of us have been baptized into (or unto) Christ were baptized into (or unto) His death?” Israel were “baptized unto Moses in the cloud and in the sea.” They passed through death in figure, and Moses was their new leader. Pharaoh’s dominion was ended so far as they were concerned (1Corinthians Chapter 10). So we who are saved are now baptized unto, or into, the death of Christ. We have accepted His death as ours, knowing that He died in our place. We are baptized unto Him as the new Leader.



Is this the Spirit’s baptism? I think not. The Spirit does not baptize unto death, but into the one new Body. It is establishment into the mystical Christ. Our baptism with water is a baptism unto Christ’s death.



The apostle goes further, “Therefore we are buried with Him by baptism unto death; that like as Christ was raised up from the dead by the glory of the Father, even so we also should walk in newness of life” (vs. Rom_6:4). In my baptism I confess that I have died to the old life as a man in Adam under the dominion of sin. I am through with all that. Now let me prove the reality of this by living the life of a resurrected man-a man linked up with Christ on the other side of death-as I walk in newness of life. Thus all thought of living in sin is rejected, all antinomianism refuted. My new life is to answer to the confession made in my baptism.



1 am to realize practically my identification with Christ. I have been planted together with Him in the similitude of His death-that is, in baptism-I shall be (one with Him) also in the similitude of His resurrection. I do not live under sin’s domination. I live unto God as He does who is my new Head.



Logically he continues, “Knowing this that our old man is crucified with Him, that the body of sin might be destroyed (or, rendered powerless) that henceforth we should not serve sin, for he that is dead is freed (or, justified) from sin” (vers. Rom_6:6-7).



My old man is not merely my old nature. It is rather all that I was as a man in the flesh, the “man of old,” the unsaved man with all his habits and desires. That man was crucified with Christ. When Jesus died I (as a man after the flesh) died too. I was seen by God on that cross with His blessed Son.



How many people were crucified on Calvary? There were the thieves, there was Christ Himself-three! But are these all? Paul says in Gal_2:20, “I am crucified with Christ.” He was there too; so that makes four. And each believer can say, “Our old man is crucified with Him.” So untold millions were seen by God as hanging there upon that cross with Christ. And this was not merely that our sins were being dealt with, but that we ourselves as sinners, as children of Adam’s fallen race, might be removed from under the eye of God and our old standing come to an end forever.



But we who were crucified with Him now live with Him. So the apostle continues in Gal_2:20 - “Nevertheless I live, yet not I, but Christ liveth in me, and the life that I now live in the flesh (that is, in this body) I live by the faith of the Son of God who loved me and gave Himself for me.” And so here. The body of sin is thus annulled, as the body of Pharaoh, all the power of Egypt, was annulled so far as Israel was concerned. Sin is not my master now. In Christ I live unto God. I am no longer to be a slave unto sin. I am righteously free (justified) from sin’s authority.



Now he shows the practical effect of all this precious truth. We have died with Christ. We have faith that we shall also live with Him. Then -in heaven-sin will have no authority over us. Nor should we own its authority here by yielding ourselves to it. We know that the risen Christ will never die again. Death’s authority (and sin bringeth forth death) is forever abolished. “In that He died He died unto sin once for all,” unto sin as our old master (not His-upon Him never came the yoke, He was ever free from sin), and now in resurrection He lives only unto God. And we are one with Him, therefore we too are henceforth to live unto God alone. This involves practical deliverance from the power or authority of sin.



It certainly never was the mind of God that His blood-redeemed people should be left under the power of the carnal nature, unable to walk in the liberty of free men in Christ. But practical deliverance is not found by fighting with the old master, SIN in the flesh, but by the daily recognition of the truth we have just been considering.



And so we are told to count as true what God considers to be true that we died with Christ to all the claims of Pharaoh-Sin, and we are now free to walk in newness of life as one with Christ risen. “Likewise reckon ye also yourselves to be dead indeed unto sin, but alive unto God through Jesus Christ our Lord” (vs. Rom_6:11). This word “Reckon” is one of the key-words of the chapter. It means, literally, “count as true.” God says I died with Christ. I am to count it true. God says I live unto Him. I count it true. As faith reckons on all this I find the claims of sin are annulled. There is no other method of deliverance than that which begins with this reckoning. Reason may argue, “But you do not feel dead!” What have feelings to do with it? It is a judicial fact. Christ’s death is my death. Therefore I reckon myself to have died unto sin’s dominion.



The next verse follows in logical sequence. “Let not sin therefore reign in your mortal body that ye should obey it in the lusts thereof.” I feel an impulse rising within demanding that I yield to a certain sinful desire. But if on the alert I say at once, “No, I have died to that. It is no longer to dominate my will. I belong to Christ. I am to live unto Him.” As faith lays hold of this the power of lust is broken.



It involves watchfulness and constant recognition of my union with Christ. As in times past I was in the habit of yielding the physical members as instruments of unrighteousness, controlled by sin, now I am to definitely and unreservedly yield myself unto God as one alive from that death into which I went with Christ, and as a natural result all my physical members are His to be used as instruments to work out righteousness for the glory of God whose grace has saved me. The word translated “instruments” is really “weapons,” or “armor,” as in Chap. Rom_13:2; 2Co_6:7; 2Co_10:4. My talents, my physical members, all my powers are now to be used in the conflict as weapons for God. I am His soldier to be unreservedly at His disposal.



Because I am not saved by any legal principle but by free grace alone sin is no longer to hold sway over my life. Christ risen is the Captain of my salvation whose behests are to control me in all things.



Nature might reason in a contrary way and tell me that inasmuch as I am under grace not law it matters little how I behave, and I am therefore free to sin since my works have nothing to do with my salvation. But as a regenerated man I do not want liberty to sin. I want power for holiness. If I habitually yield myself unto sin to obey its behests voluntarily, I show that I am still sin’s servant, and the end of that service is death. But as a renewed man I desire to obey the One whose I now am and whom I serve. So he says, “God be thanked, that ye were the slaves of sin, but ye have obeyed from the heart that form of doctrine which was delivered unto you. Being then made free from sin (that is, by God’s judicial act on the cross) ye became the servants of righteousness” (vers. Rom_6:17-18).



He speaks in a figure, illustrating his theme by personifying SIN and RIGHTEOUSNESS that our weak human minds may understand, and he repeats his exhortation, or rather what had been stated doctrinally he now repeats as a command: “For as ye have yielded your members slaves to uncleanness and to iniquity unto iniquity (in the old life before our identification with Christ) even so now yield your members servants (bondmen) to righteousness unto holiness” (vs. Rom_6:19). When slaves of sin, righteousness was not our recognized master, and we can only hang our heads in shame as we think of the fruit of that evil relationship, the end of which would have been death, both physical and eternal.



Therefore now that we are judicially delivered from sin’s dominion and have become bondmen to God, our lives should be abounding in fruit unto holiness and the end everlasting life. We have everlasting life now as a present possession, but here it is the end that is in view when we are at home in that scene where Christ who is our life has gone.



He concludes this section with the solemn yet precious statement: “For the wages of sin is death, but the gift of God is eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord.” Sin is in one respect a faithful master. His pay day is sure. His wages are death. Note it is not divine judgment that is in view for the moment, but sin’s wages. Death is the wages of sin, but “after this the judgment.” Penalty has yet to be faced at the judgment-bar of God. Through error to see this many have taken up with the error that physical death involves cessation of being and is both wages and penalty. Scripture clearly tells of divine judgment after sin’s wages have been paid.



On the other hand eternal life is a free gift, the gift of God. None can earn it. It is given to all who trust in Christ as the Saviour of sinners. It is ours now, who believe the gospel. We shall enjoy it in all its fulness at the “end.”



The seventh chapter takes up another phase of things that would be particularly hard for the Jewish believer to comprehend. It raises and answers the question, “What is the rule of life for the yielded believer?” The Jew would naturally say, “The law given at Sinai.” The apostle’s answer is “Christ risen!” Alas, how many Gentile believers have missed the point here as well as those who came out of Judaism.



That it is his Jewish-Christian brethren who are primarily before him is clear from the opening verse. “Know ye not, brethren (for I speak to them that know the law), how that the law hath dominion over a man as long as he liveth.” Now it is unthinkable that he is using the term “the law” here in any different sense to that which he has had in mind as he has used it over and over again in the former chapters. The law, here, means the law of Moses, and it means nothing else. It means that which was the heart of the law of Moses, the ten words given on Sinai. And his argument here is that the law has dominion over men until death ends its authority or ends their relationship to it. But he has just been showing us in the clearest possible way that we have died with Christ; therefore we died not only unto sin, but we have died to the law as a rule of life. Is this then to leave us lawless? Not at all: for we are now, as he shows elsewhere (1Co_9:21), “under law to Christ”, or “en-lawed”, that is, “legitimately subject” to Christ our new Head. He is Husband as well as Head, even as Ephesians Chapter 5 so clearly shows.



This truth is illustrated in a very convincing way in verses Rom_7:2-3, and the application is made in verse Rom_7:4. A woman married to a husband is legally bound to him in that relationship until death severs the tie. If she marries another while her husband is living she becomes an adulteress. But when the first husband is dead she is free to marry another with no blame attaching to her for so doing.



Even so, death has ended the relationship of the believer to the law, not the death of the law but our death with Christ, which has brought the old order to an end. We are now free to be married to another, even to the risen Christ in order that we might bring forth fruit unto God.



The somewhat weird and amazing conception has been drawn from the apostle’s illustration that the first husband is not the law at all but “our old man.” This is utterly illogical and untenable, for, as we have seen, the old man is myself as a man in the flesh. I was not married to myself! Such a suggestion is the very height of absurdity. The Jewish believer was once linked with the legal covenant. It was proposed as a means of producing fruit for God. It only stirred up all that was evil in the heart. Death has dissolved the former relationship, and the one who once looked to the law for fruit now looks to Christ risen and, as the heart is occupied with Him, that is produced in the life in which God can delight.



He says, “When we were in the flesh (that is, in the natural state, as unsaved men) the motions of sins which were by the law, did work in our members to bring forth fruit unto death.” This clearly establishes the position taken above. The law was the husband, the active agent through whom we hoped to bring forth fruit unto God. But instead of that, we brought forth fruit unto death, all our travail and suffering in the hope of producing righteousness ended in disappointment, the child was still-born.



“But now we are delivered from the law, having died to that (relationship) wherein we were held (note the marginal reading) that we might serve in newness of spirit, and not in the oldness of the letter” (vs. Rom_7:6). In the illustration the first husband dies and the woman is free to be married to another. In the application he does not say the law has died, but the point he makes is that death (and for us it is Christ’s death) has ended the relationship in which we stood toward it. So there is after all no real disagreement; in either case the former condition is ended by death. The law, as we have seen, was addressed to man in the flesh, and this was our former state, but now all is changed. We are no longer in the flesh, but (as the next chapter will show us) in the Spirit, and so in a new state to which the law in no sense applies. Again the old question comes to the fore: If all this be true shall we sin then? Are we to be lawless because not under law? By no means. The law must simply be recognized as having a special ministry but not as the rule of the new life. It is a great detector of sin. Paul could say, “I had not known sin but by the law.” That is, he had not detected the evil nature within-so correct was his outward deportment-had not the law said, “Thou shalt not covet.” The sin-nature rebelled against this and wrought in him all manner of covetousness, or unsatisfied desire. Observe carefully how conclusively this proves that it was the ten commandments he has had in view throughout. To say it is the ceremonial law alone to which we have died is absurd in view of this statement. Where is the word found that forbids covetousness? In the ten commandments. Therefore “the law” means the divine ordinances engraved on tables of stone.



Apart from the law sin was dead, that is, inert and unrecognized. Sins there were even before the law was given, but sin-the nature-was not recognized till the law provoked it.



He says, “I was alive once without the law; but when the commandment came, which was ordained (or proposed) to life, I found it to be unto death. For sin, taking occasion by the commandment, deceived me and by it slew me” (vers. Rom_7:9-11). In other words it is as though he said, “I was blissfully unconscious of my true moral condition before God as a sinner until the force of the commandment forbidding covetousness came home to me. I had not realized that evil desire was in itself sinful, providing the desire was not carried out. But the law made this manifest. I struggled to keep down all unlawful desire; but sin-an evil principle within-was too strong for repression. It circumvented me, deceived me, and so by violation of the commandment brought me consciously under sentence of death.” This is exactly what the law was intended to do, as he shows in the epistle to the Galatians as well as here. “The law was added because of (or, with a view to) transgressions.” That is, the law served to give to sin the specific character of transgression, thus deepening the sense of guilt and unworthiness.



Therefore, he concludes, “the law is holy, and the commandment holy, and just, and good.” The fault is not in the law but in me.



Well, then, he asks, was this holy law made death to me? Not at all, but it detected that in him which could only result in death-namely, sin, which in order that it might be made manifest in all its hideousness was brought fully to light by the law, thus “working death” in him by that which he owns to be in itself good. And so sin, by means of the legal enactment, is made exceeding sinful.



Verses Rom_7:14-25 have been taken by many as the legitimate experience of a Christian throughout all his life. Others have thought that it could not be the conflict of a real Christian at all, but that Paul was describing the conflict between the higher and lower desires of the natural man, particularly of an unconverted Jew under law. But both views are clearly contrary to the argument of this part of the epistle.



As to the latter interpretation, it should be remembered that in this entire section of the epistle the question is the deliverance of a believer from the power of sin, and not of an unbeliever from his sins. Moreover no unsaved man can honestly say, “I delight in the law of God after the inward man.” It is only those who possess the new nature who can so speak. And as to this being the normal experience of one already saved I shall attempt to show as we go on with the study of the 7th and 8th chapters that there is an orderly progression from the bewilderment of chapter 7 to the intelligence and walk in the Spirit of chapter 8. All Christians doubtless know something of the state depicted in verses Rom_7:14-25 of this 7th chapter, but once out of it no one need ever go through it again. It is not merely the conflict between the two natures. If it were, one might indeed be back in the same unhappy experience again and again. It gives us the exercises of a quickened soul under law who has not yet learned the way of deliverance. This once learned, one is free from the law forever. I have said earlier in the address that primarily here we have a believing Jew struggling to obtain holiness by using the law as a rule of life and resolutely attempting to compel his old nature to be subject to it. In Christendom now the average Gentile believer goes through the same experience; for legality is commonly taught almost everywhere.



Therefore when one is converted it is but natural to reason that now one has been born of God it is only a matter of determination and persistent endeavor to subject oneself to the law, and one will achieve a life of holiness. And God Himself permits the test to be made in order that His people may learn experimentally that the flesh in the believer is no better than the flesh in an unbeliever. When he ceases from self-effort he finds deliverance through the Spirit by occupation with the risen Christ.



Paul writes in the first person singular, not necessarily as depicting a lengthy experience of his own (though he may have gone through it), but in order that each reader may enter into it sympathetically and understanding for himself.



The law is spiritual, that is, it is of God, it is holy and supernatural. But I am carnal, even though a believer; I am more or less dominated by the flesh. In 1Corinthians Chapters 2 and 3 we have distinguished for us the natural man, that is, the unsaved man; the carnal man, who is a child of God undelivered; and the spiritual man, the Christian who lives and walks in the Spirit.



Here the carnal man is sold under sin, that is he is subject to the power of the evil nature to which he has died in Christ, a blessed truth indeed, but one which has not yet been apprehended in faith. Consequently he continually finds himself going contrary to the deepest desires of his divinely-implanted new nature. He practises things he does not want to do. He fails to carry out his determinations for good. The sins he commits he hates. The good he loves he has not the strength to perform. But this proves to him that there is a something within him which is to be distinguished from his real self as a child of God. He has the fleshly nature still, though born of God. He knows the law is good. He wants to keep it, and slowly the consciousness dawns upon him that it is not really himself as united to Christ who fails. It is sin, dwelling in him, which is exercising control (vers. Rom_7:14-17).



So he learns the weakness and unprofitableness of the flesh. “I know,” he says, “that in me (that is, in my flesh) dwelleth no good thing.” He wants to do good but he lacks the power to perform aright. Still he gives up slowly the effort to force the flesh to behave itself and to be subject to the law.



But the good he would do, he does not, and the evil he would not do, he does. This but establishes him in the conclusion already come to, that, “It is no more I that do it, but sin that dwelleth in me.” A law, or principle of action, then, has been discovered. He goes with the good and does the evil. According to the inward man he delights in the law of God, but this does not produce the holiness he expected. He must learn to delight in Christ risen to reach the goal of his desires! This he reaches later, but meantime he is occupied with the discovery of the two natures with their different desires and activities. He detects “another law,” a principle, in his members (that is, the members of the body through which the carnal mind works) which wars against the law of his renewed mind taking him captive to the sin-principle which is inseparable from his physical members so long as he is in this life. This principle he calls “the law of sin and death.” Were it not for this principle or controlling power there would be no danger of perverting or misusing any human desire, or propensity. Almost convinced that the struggle must go on during the entire course of his earthly existence he cries in anguish, “Oh, wretched man that I am! Who shall deliver me from this body of death!” He is like a living man chained to a polluted, because corrupt, corpse, and unable to snap the chains. He cannot make the corpse clean and subject, no matter how he tries. It is the cry of hopelessness so far as self-effort is concerned. He is brought to the end of human resources. In a moment he gets a vision by faith of the risen Christ. He alone is the Deliverer from Sin’s power, as well as the Saviour from the penalty of guilt. “I thank God,” he cries, “through Jesus Christ our Lord!” He has found the way out. Not the law but Christ in glory is the rule of life for the Christian.



But the actual entering into this is reserved for the next section. Meantime he confesses “So then with the mind (that is, the renewed mind) I myself (the real man as God sees him) serve the law of God, but with the flesh the law of sin.” Such an experience cannot be the Christian ideal. The next chapter which we take up separately shows the way out of this perplexing and unsatisfactory state.



If I am addressing any believer who is even now in the agonizing throes of this terrific struggle, endeavoring to subject the flesh to the holy law of God, let me urge you to accept God’s own verdict on the flesh and acknowledge the impossibility of ever making it behave itself. Do not fight with it. It will overthrow you every time. Turn away from it; cease from it altogether; and look away from self and law to Christ risen.



Israel of old wanted to find a short cut through Edom, type of the flesh, but the children of Esau came out armed to contest their way. The command of God was to turn away and “compass the land of Edom.” And so with us; it is as we turn altogether from self-occupation we find deliverance and victory in Christ by the Holy Spirit.