Rescue from Condemnation: An Exposition of Romans 8:1-11
Everyone fears condemnation, and the world is filled with both condemners and the condemned. The word itself is a combination of “con” which means “with” and “damnation” which is such an ugly word that it is condemned in polite speech. Why is there so much condemning going on, when all it does is make everyone angry and miserable? More importantly, how do we get rid of it from ruling our lives? What does the Bible say? Paul gives us a masterful answer to this problem in Romans 8:1-11, if we will but listen.
Whether the world acknowledges this or not, the bible tells us that condemnation entered into the world in the Book of Genesis when Adam and Eve disobeyed God. They were told that they would certainly die if they ate from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. When they listened to Satan rather than God, the condemning curse entered into the world. Death came into the world as well as the fear of death. This condemning dread has passed from generation to generation to this day. We also see in the fall, the human tendency to blame one’s problems on someone else. Adam blamed Eve, and Eve the serpent. This is an attempt to avoid condemnation by condemning someone else. The idea is to have someone else die for one’s own sin. So this is why we have a world filled with condemners and the condemned.
The Holy Spirit inspired Paul to write the masterful Epistle to the Romans to address this problem. We mentioned earlier that the way that men deal with condemnation is to condemn someone else in their place. We see this clearly demonstrated in the great racial divide we have in America. We have rich, mostly white and liberal people who try to deal with the problems of personal guilt and inequity in their dealings with other people, such as African Americans, but not limited to them. They try to place the condemnation of racism on middle-class and poor white people. As long as they do this, they feel that they will escape condemnation. I am not saying by this that there isn’t the taint of racism in the white middle-class or poor whites. One thing is abundantly clear. Every single person is a sinner. No one is exempt from it. The mostly middle-class Americans condemn the poor on welfare and having to pay high taxes to support them. Workers, Black, White, Hispanic, Asian, etc., condemn illegal immigrants for undercutting their jobs and keeping wages low. They also condemn the rich for creating the conditions for their failure. I do not say that there isn’t some justification for these attitudes as it is quite true that not only are we all sinners, we are also sinned against.
In God’s masterful plan, He took this universal curse of condemning and being condemned by sending His Son Jesus Christ who tasted the pain of condemnation for all people. Paul tells us that we are too weak to overcome sin, which is at the root of condemnation. Sin puts us at enmity against God. But in what is Paul’s equivalent of John 3:16, he tells us: “While we were yet sinners, Christ dies for us.” We then remember that even with the curse in Genesis is the promise of restoration in Genesis 3:15. A male descendant of Eve would have His heel bruised by Satan. But this one would deal Satan a death wound to the head. In His death, Jesus condemned condemnation. This is at root of our recovery if we will but believe and receive Jesus as Lord and Savior.
Paul goes on in Romans 5 to compare the condemning curse of sin in Adam with the superabundant grace of God in Jesus Christ which restores and frees us. Not only this, our final state will even be greater than what Adam and Eve had. Adam and Eve were naked, in a garden and talked with God in the cool of the day. they knew day and night. But there is no night in the Kingdom. It was said that the sun never set on the British Empire. One might question the truth of that statement today. But the eternal Kingdom is previewed that the Gospel has spread around the globe to all people groups in the world. The sun might set on part of this Kingdom, but it is rising elsewhere. We also have the presence of the Holy Spirit in the church and in our own lives. We are not limited to talking with God to evening or at a particular time of day. We will not be in a garden, but a great city, whose builder and maker is God. We are clothed in splendorific garments as the Bride of Christ. Where sin abounded, grace has superabounded.
The end of chapter 5 leaves us breathless. It is such a glorious promise. Grace has freely given us so much. But we come down to earth starting in chapter 6. We have to deal with several issues. One of them is that if our sin led to this enjoyment of grace, would not more sin lead to even greater grace? This is a fundamental misunderstanding of grace as well as the righteousness of God. Grace was meant to free us “from” sin and not “to” sin. God justifies sinners in Jesus Christ, not sin. When we were baptized, we die to the old life and the old way of thinking. We have been freed from condemnation to live to Christ.
What is even more troubling is that we see in Romans 7. Some try to say that Paul’s plaintiff wailing of his sinful nature and its grip on him as being Paul before his conversion. But Paul does not give this much support in his other writings. He even called himself “blameless” in his scrupulous adherence to the Law. He does in Timothy call himself the “chief of sinners” and a murderer and a blasphemer. But if we look at this as belonging to his pre-Christian life, then Paul becomes some sort of superhero. What this does is to have us miserably reflect that we are no Paul. It also does not forward Paul’s argument of the relation of sin and grace, and the call to rise above the old way of thinking. This is a constant struggle.
Others interpret Romans 7 as Paul presenting a “straw man.” In other words, he is speaking of the common struggle of all humanity and is not writing about himself personally. Whereas there is some truth to this statement in that we share in this common struggle with sin. But sin is also personally. As much as society is condemned, we still examine ourselves and condemn ourselves. I do not think Paul could exclaim: “O wretched man that I am!” (note present tense) unless he was deeply and personally grieved by his own failure to live up to his principles. His answer is not to try harder but to immediately reaffirm his faith: “But thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord!”
It has taken a while to get to this morning’s text, but what I have said provides the necessary context to understand the 8th Chapter of Romans which begins triumphantly. The great descent unto Romans 6-7 returns to the mountaintop of joy. Having struggled with these chapters, we come back even stronger. “There is no condemnation to those who are in Christ Jesus!” This is the final answer to sin, death and condemnation. It isn’t what we did; it is what God did for us in Christ Jesus. God has this final word for us if we are in Christ Jesus. Whether “who walk not after the flesh, but after the Spirit” occurs here is debated by scholars. Your version may not have it. But as it is repeated in verse 4, it is certainly a part of Paul’s argument. There are two ways of thinking. There is much scholarly discussion of what “flesh” means. The Greeks saw a great dichotomy between flesh and spirit. In this context, it is the fact that a person’s spirit was seen to be part of a greater spirit (God), it was good and divine. It is the fact that this divinity was imprisoned in a human body was the cause of all evil. Paul was trained in Greek learning as well as Hebrew. But Paul certainly would condemn such a thought because the Bible clearly states that God, having made man from the dust of the earth proclaimed both man and creation good. However, a good presenter of the Gospel has to begin with a sense of what is commonly held. This is how a Greek who had not yet become a Christian would probably have thought. This was their worldview. A person’s spirit was freed from a sinful body at death and returned to be reunited with God. They would have thought this to be a spiritual way of thinking, but it was not. It was actually a fleshly way of thinking. The human dilemma was not that a part of the divine spirit was trapped in a human body. Rather, God created man as a creature distinct from Himself, even though in His image and breathed his spirit into them. Man felt isolated from God not because he was an isolated piece of divinity, it was that man sinned and rebelled against God. So what the Greeks thought was spiritual thinking is actually fleshly, and the true spiritual thinking is that God created man in an earthly body and declared it good. Coming to Christ creates a radical shift in worldview.
This new teaching of the transformative Christian worldview is to replace the old way of thinking. The work of the Holy Spirit is to transform our thinking. The fleshly thinking of the world leads to condemnation and condemning. It leads to isolation from God. It offers no hope, even in death. In the Greek concept of death, drawn originally from Hindu thinking, was that death reunited you with the divine energy of the universe. But what kind of redemption is this. Part of their concept of being trapped in a human body was that one’s own individuality was an expression of sinfulness. So when one is reunited with this divinity, they lose all memory of having existed. You will never know who you were because you never were. Why anyone could get any hope from tis kind of thinking I know not. This was their answer to an intellectual problem which they called “the one and the many. The Bible tells us the real problem of isolation. Our sins have separated us from communion with the Creator. Redemption is not because we lose personality and diversity. Rather it is that the Creator God, the Son, became human flesh and lived among us. It is in his condemnation and death on a cross that the means of restored fellowship occurs. We will not lose our identity in heaven. We shall know and be known. We shall be changed. Tears shall be wiped from the eyes. We will be the same and yet different. We will be one even though we are many. We do not get absorbed into the One; we are instead reunited with God, Father Son and Holy Ghost, three yet one, the true answer to the one and many.
When we are transformed by grace, we think differently. Because we are not absorbed into the divine, we retain memory. We remember where we came from. We were once at enmity with God. We considered God an enemy, the great condemner. Now we experience Him as our great redeemer. Christ died for us. Part of our struggle we have in life is precisely because we have memory of who we once were. God has not erased this. We are then prone to return and wander into the old way of thinking. Yet God knows that the old way of thinking will no longer rule over His people, because He is greater in us than the spirit of the world. What we have to do is to constantly appropriate the new way of thinking. Fleshly (Carnal) thinking leads to death and condemnation. But we no longer stand condemned. We must continue to cling to this regardless of what Satan and the world tells us. Having been freed from condemnation, we should no longer feel the need to condemn. Jesus has already been condemned for our sin. We need not blame others any more. We should of course live our lives according to the new way of thinking. We need to live uncondemnable lives in this world. We seek not to condemn others, even if their actions are condemnable. Like Jesus, we need to seek and save the lost. They need to see our thinking as strange and peculiar. They will ask us why we don’t condemn, and we will be ready to provide an answer.
The new way of thinking is no longer dominated by condemnation and death but peace and life. God gives a peace that the world simply cannot understand. They cannot understand why the Christian seeks not to please themselves but God. They see people who no longer fear death. They know that their own way of thinking is killing them and that they have no hope. They stand in fear of hellfire. They try to deny that there is a hell, but they know better. They know they are going there and deserve it. The gift of the Gospel is that this does not need to be. Faith transforms everything and opens our eyes to the new reality that God desires to be gracious to them rather than condemn them. They will wake up to the reality that they need not fear death because they already have tasted death in the cross of Christ. We have been baptized into His death. We are now partakers of His life. This is what we want others to discover. We want to add the “they” to the “we.” Unless Jesus comes in our earthly lifetimes, this body we live in will die. But we are not dead. We live with God. We will get a new body someday, but we start eternal life the moment we believe in Jesus. We reckon the body we live in as already dead even as we anticipate a new one.
So let us constantly remind ourselves of this new reality. Let no one, either man or devil, condemn you. At the same time, strive to give no cause for them to condemn you. Do not give Satan room to drag you down into the pit of death. You were not saved for this. You were saved for life and peace through Jesus Christ our Lord.
