THERE is a point of immense value, and I may likewise say of striking contrast, between the last half of Romans 8 and the opening verses of Romans 8.
In the former scripture, the commandment, which is holy, just, and good, is so pure as to detect an unknown lust, when applied to my state morally, in the sight of God. Moreover, by its authority and power exercised upon me in enforcing the good and forbidding the evil, it unavoidably stirs into activity what is in fallen human nature, and therefore works in me “all manner of concupiscence.” Further, it convicts me of the detested sin, and charges the guilt of it upon my conscience before God, discovering to me that I am carnal, sold under sin. Nor can the law stop here; for that which was ordained to life necessarily becomes a power of death, and condemns me. Thus Rom. 7 makes an end of the sinner on account of sin, and leaves the culprit in the condemned cell, under the tormenting sense of his wretchedness, and with a hopeless inquiry, “Who shell deliver me?”
On the other hand, Rom. 8 reveals a totally different action on the part of God in grace; so that Christianity, instead of putting an end to the sinner, declares an end of sin by the cross. “What the law could not do, in that it was weak through the flesh,” is the measure of this difference; for it could not extricate from the sin it detected, nor slay it in the flesh which had conceived it, nor spare the man who committed it; but, on the contrary, killed him. He was blotted out. This was extermination.
In this way and by such mean God could only be known, as terrible in His holiness, and fearful in His judgments.
The grand reserve of God in grace therefore comes in at this crisis, and He does what the law could not do; for “God, sending His own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh, and for sin, condemns sin in the flesh;” but saves the man on whose behalf Christ has died. Sin itself is gone. Death has satisfied the righteous claims of the law, and paid the penalty. Death has been accepted by Christ, and by the blood of atonement God is glorified. The veil is rent, and a risen Lord is gone up to the right hand of the throne of God, in life, righteousness, and glory.
But further, the death of Christ, as our Substitute, by the judgment of God upon sin in the flesh, has separated, nay terminated, that existence for the believer in which he sinned. Therefore, passing out of it, by mean of this judicial death, through “the body of Christ,” in new redemption title, “he’s free to be married to another, even to Him that is raised from the dead, that he might bring forth fruit unto God.”
Another law than “the law of sin and death” now claims him; and in perfect fealty to this new one he can say, “The law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus hath made me free.” He is thus separated by death (maintained in him by the power of resurrection life) from that nature in which, as a child of Adam, before he knew Christ, he was alienated from God, the consciousness of which made him cry, “O wretched man that I am! Who shall deliver me?” Henceforth, as a new creation in Christ, he takes his stand in life, and, brought into the law of liberty, asserts, “The life that I now live in the flesh, I live by the faith of the Son of God, who loved me, and gave Himself for me.”
How wondrous are the ways of our God, and unsearchable, save as opened out to us in Christ Jesus the Son of His love, and made good in our own souls by the indwelling Spirit, in present fellowship and love, that even then “passeth all understanding.”
He reads the Scriptures well who brings the from it instead of to it.
We shall never be above our Jeep and increasing sense of the value of the blood of Christ.