Walking According to the Spirit
Romans 8:1
We are in Romans, chapter 8, verse
1. This is one of the five greatest chapters in all of the New
Testament. This is the chapter that really tells us, really lays out in a
logical way, the foundation for the spiritual life. Romans
8 has to be understood in connection with Galatians 5. These are, I
think, the two greatest chapters in the Scriptures about the spiritual life and
of course they connect with Ephesians 5 and John, chapter 15, the abiding
chapter.
This chapter lays it out in the most
remarkable, logical way as Paul has taken us from Romans 6:1 dealing with the
focus on what happens at the moment of our salvation in terms of our how we are
identified with Christ in terms of His death, burial, and resurrection. Interestingly,
this time around, some of you may have listened to a series I did 12 or 13
years ago when I was first up at Preston City Bible Church. I went through
Romans 6, 7, and 8. I think it was 11 or 12 lessons, just to give an
overview of the spiritual life in Romans. Now we're going through it in a
more in depth fashion.
One of the things we see here in
Romans 8 and one of the things you'll see tonight is that I've sort of refined
a few things along the way as I continue to study. This is typical for any
pastor. Sometimes congregations idolize their pastors too much. I’ve
seen this, especially with younger pastors; they don't have patience with the
learning process that pastors go through. The first ten years of most
pastors’ ministries should probably not be recorded for posterity because
they're learning. You come out of seminary, no matter how much background
you have, no matter how much training you have, you're still cognitively trying
to put all the pieces together. Even though you may have the basic
structure right, the basic theology orientation, things like that together,
you're still really wrestling with a mass of detail that just seems like you're
trying to nail Jell-O to the wall at times because there's so much there you're
trying to control.
You're still just trying to learn
the Scripture. We've lost the kind of training that characterized the
Jewish community for thousands of years where everyone was expected to learn
and memorize the Scripture by the time you were 13 years old, especially for
the men. They would have the Torah memorized; they would have most of
the rest of the Old Testament memorized, and this was expected. We've
lowered our expectations so much that by the time we get to the late 20th
and early 21st centuries 50 to 75% of the men who go to a seminary
to learn to be a pastor have just really started studying the Bible at any
level within two years of their going to seminary.
Historically we've had a culture
that has, by the time men like Jonathan Edwards during the Colonial period (I'm
talking about the 1720s through the 1740s.) finished what we would call high
school today before he went to Yale, probably had a greater knowledge of Latin,
Greek, and Hebrew when he started university than most Th.M
(Masters of Theology) students have when they graduate from
seminary. Think about that. If you don't have that kind of
background, it takes a while to start putting things together.
There are so many different things
that come along today that we hear from this pastor, that pastor, that radio
personality, this television personality, who are not theologians. They
may have great personalities and they don't spend maybe a tenth of the time
they should, really studying through the Scripture. What I've discovered
sadly in our generation is that the more time a man spends in his study really
learning the Word of God so he can teach and lead his sheep, the fewer sheep
he's going to have, simply because people today don't value the education, the
training of a pastor. I see this among pastors. We've lowered the
level of expectation so much that in many circles and many congregations you
have churches that almost pride themselves on the fact that their pastoral
staff has no formal education.
Some of you are familiar with a
church on the West coast in California that has made a name for itself because
it emphasizes the idea of a purpose driven church. That pastor actually
got his start in the late 70's with that and it didn't become known nationally
for many people until the 90s. There's another church in Chicago by the
name of Willowcreek that I first became aware of in
the early 80s and it was another one of those huge mega churches that was started,
and by the late 80s it had a pastoral staff of over 300. Can you
imagine? Most churches don't even have 300 people in the church, even if
they count all the people that ever showed up at the church. Here was a
church that had 300 people on staff.
There was a man named Pritchard who
was getting his PhD in sociology at Northwestern University and decided that a
study of this particular church would be a tremendous PhD project. He went
to the church staff and got permission to study, write, interview them.
He spent a year at the church. One of his observations on the church was
about those 300 pastors. There wasn't one who owned a systematic
theology. Not one. There wasn't one who had any formal training in
Bible. No seminary, no Bible college. They
prided themselves on it. At the time that church was the largest church in
the United States. Now it's been superseded by what’s his name, down here
at the Summit. So that tells you something about the value of education in
this country.
The larger the
church, the less formal education. There was even a quote in that dissertation from one of the
pastors who said, “Well, we're afraid that if somebody went to seminary that
would somehow stifle our creativity and our growth.” My point in all of this is
that I've gone through growth in Romans 6 – 8. This was something
that I really focused on when I was a student at Dallas Seminary and my very,
very first semester we took a course on the spiritual life. I had a
professor who had pastored a church in Houston
previously and was a good Greek scholar. What is interesting is that he's
probably moved much closer to a Chaferean position
today than he was then but at that point he was still trying to get over his
second PhD at the University of Basel in Switzerland, but he was a good thinker
and I always enjoyed him. I took as many courses as I could from him
because he challenged my thinking.
You know that's why you should take
some professors. It's not because you want to learn what they want to
teach you but that they're going to teach you how to think. You may not
agree with a thing they say or ever tell you but they're the ones that are
going to inspire you to learn how to think and to present your
views. They're the ones who cause thoughts to generate in your
head. I read a lot of books for that reason. I tell others, “Oh,
that was a great commentary. I really enjoyed it.” I don't really
remember what I read in the commentary, what the guy said, but it was great
because of the thoughts it inspired me to think. I may not have agreed
with anything he said. Some of you know what I'm talking about.
Anyway, Ed was one of my
professors. We went through Romans 6, 7, and 8. He did not take the
view like Lewis Sperry Chafer, which is the view I hold today and many of you
hold and I consistently teach. It helped me to understand what I believe. It
took me a lot of years to get to that point because of that and one of the
products of that whole experience I had was that conference we had two years
ago on the spiritual life at the Chafer Conference. That was one of the
greatest conferences. The product of that from those men who came was the
result of that. It's a growth process.
I say that because as we come to our
first verse here, Romans 8:1, Paul begins with a conclusion. This
conclusion comes out of what he has said in Romans chapter 7. Now let's go
back and look at Romans 7, just a little bit. Romans 7 started off with
Paul addressing the question of the Law: what is the relation of the believer
to the Law? As I pointed out several times in the past few weeks, the role
of the Law in the life of the believer in this age has been terribly
misunderstood. There are many people who think that the Ten Commandments
and the Mosaic Law are, outside of the sacrifices, just as mandatory today as
they ever were.
My first church was down in LaMarque, Texas. Some of you know where LaMarque is. If you go past LaMarque
you fall into Galveston Bay. I was at a church that had been founded in 1895 as
a Union Church. A Union Church was sort of an older term, an antiquated
term for Community Church. If you went into a new settlement, a new area,
a new community, and you didn't have enough Baptists, Methodists,
Presbyterians, Episcopalians or whatever Protestants to have your own
denomination then you unify in the church. Now they certainly had some
doctrinal differences. Some believed in pedo
baptism or infant baptism, some would believe in believer baptism, some in
sprinkling, some in immersion so part of the deal was that whoever the pastor
was he would make sure that if somebody held a view that was different from his
on baptism, he would get another pastor in who would do whatever kind of
baptism they wanted; that kind of thing. It wasn't ecumenical in the
modern sense because no one was asked to compromise doctrine, but they didn't
have enough people to have more than one church so they just had a
union.
So this church was called Paul's
Union Church and it wasn't called for the Apostle Paul. But during the
depression the church ran out of money half way through their building program
and a man down the street whose name is Paul gave them the money for them to
finish the church so they named it after him. I'm glad his name wasn't
Herman. Otherwise it would have been Herman's Union Church or Fred's Union
Church. One of the first things as a young pastor that I said about two or
three months into my pastorate was that the Ten Commandments is not for
us. I thought I was going to have a revolt that morning. It took me a
long time to settle people down. That was because they just hadn't been
taught well even though they were allegedly dispensational. As a
dispensational church they would understand that there were different
requirements in different ages and when Jesus came—as Paul says in Romans
10—that was the end of the Law. So the big question that the
apostles wrestled with as we've seen in Acts and the question that comes up in
Romans and a couple of other times is Romans is what's
the role of the Law?
So that's the question asked here
and he ends this in the Romans 7:6, “For now we have been delivered from the
Law, having died [that is being separated from the authority of the sin nature,
the tyranny of the sin nature] to what we were held by, so that we should serve
in the newness of the Spirit and not in the oldness of the letter.” As I
pointed out, the contrast here is between the dynamic of the new dispensation,
the new age that started on the day of Pentecost where God the Holy Spirit
indwells every single believer and fills every believer, which is a term
related to the growth producing, sanctifying producing ministry of God the Holy
Spirit in the life of a believer who is walking by the Spirit or walking in
fellowship.
All of that summarizes where Paul is
headed in Romans 8. So he introduces this terminology of the Spirit and
the letter, the letter related to the Law, that the Law could only do so
much. It laid out the path but it didn't give anybody the ability to walk
the path. The purpose of the Law wasn't to show people that if you obey
the Law you can get to Heaven but that you can't ever obey the Law; so on your
own you can't ever get to Heaven. It was to point out inability, not to
point out ability. Then Paul introduces this next question in verse
7. “What shall we say then? Is the law sin?” So at this point
he stops his momentum at verse 6 and he goes down an important and necessary
side trail. He comes back to the main line of thought in Romans 8:1.
In Romans 8:1, he says, “There is
therefore no condemnation to those who are in Christ Jesus...” And so in
Romans 7 he asks this question and he goes down this rabbit trail of "is
the Law sin?” and he says 'no, it reveals sin'. And then he goes into the whole
discussion that without relying on the Holy Spirit, just trying to fulfill the
Law, he does what he isn't supposed to do and he doesn't do what he would
really like to do, which is obey God and the conclusion in verse 24, “O
wretched man that I am! Who will deliver me from this body of death?”
Body of death means that in our physical existence we are still mortal and we
still have a sin nature and we're still going to sin.
Then he has a statement in
praise in verse 25, “I thank God, through Jesus Christ our Lord! So then
with my mind I myself serve the Law of God, but with the flesh the law of
sin.” That sets things up for Romans 8:1. We'll come back to those in
a minute. I was just trying to give us an overview here.
In Romans 8:1, he says, “There is
therefore now no condemnation in those who are in Christ Jesus...” If you
have a New International Version, New American Standard Bible, New English
translation, the English Standard version, anything other than King James or
New King James, your verse ends with a period after Christ Jesus.
But if you have a King James or a
New King James it has a significant clause after it defining those who are in
Christ Jesus as those “who do not walk according to the flesh but according to
the Spirit.” This is one of those most significant, probably the top ten
most significant, contextual problems we run into. Usually I don't ever
address them or I just make a couple of comments but this is one that is really
important, for if you take out a couple of translations, New King James versus
New American Standard, you're missing half a verse.
Should that verse be
there? Having grown up with the King James version,
when I went to seminary—about that time, mid-70's, the New American
Standard became very popular—I remember sitting down and looking at these
and thinking, “Wow”. I didn't know Greek and I wondered how come my
version has something that version doesn't, and what are all the issues? If
you look down to Romans 8:4 you see where Paul says, “that the righteous
requirement of the Law might be fulfilled in us who do not walk according to
the flesh but according to the Spirit.” You see the similarity?
What happened in the 19th
century with the discovery of a number of manuscripts that came out of North Africa? ((CHART))
Some of you have heard these stories before, stories related to the discovery
of Codex Vaticanus that had been locked away in the
Vatican for centuries, and then it was gradually discovered and brought out
into the open by a couple of different scholars who put pressure on the
Vatican. You had Count Von Tischendorf who went down
and discovered Codex Sinaiticus in St. Catherine's
Monastery in Egypt where he looked at wadded up papyrus there being used as
kindling for the fire in room. He noticed as it flared up it had Greek
lettering on it. Being an expert in Greek he read it and realized he was
looking at a New Testament manuscript that was very old.
Four of these manuscripts that were discovered
all dated back to about the 4th to 5th century A.D. Well
that's pretty close to the writing of the New Testament. So the thinking
that permeated scholars at that time is that since these are older than
anything else we have, they must be better. Now that's really a
fallacy. Because if I have a really good, perfect copy of a second century
manuscript but that copy is made in the 8th century or the 9th
century and its made because the second century document is fading and hard to
read and it needs to be faithfully copied so that it is preserved, and then
after it is copied that second century manuscript is destroyed, the 8th
century manuscript may not be as old as Codex Sinaiticus
but it's better.
The reason these manuscripts in
Egypt were preserved is because they were in Egypt where the climate is dry,
it's in the desert and so they're preserved. In other places where the
climate is humid and damp and there are other problems the manuscripts would
rot and be destroyed and they wouldn't be preserved so there were four of these
that were discovered. The thinking that began to dominate the study of the
Scripture was that if any two of these four agreed, that had to be the Word of
God. That was it. Now they would say that was oversimplifying but
it's basically the truth and it's certainly true in this particular text.
It didn't matter how many other
manuscripts read differently. If two of these four agreed, that's what the Critical
Text went with. The Critical Text is a reference to a text that in the
bottom margin of the text they put all the different variants down there so the
scholars could read it. This is the text that's behind the New American
Standard, NIV, and others. It's now gone to the Nestle-Aland text. It's
just gone to the 28th edition. It's very, very helpful in many
ways but that's the theory behind it.
But there are differences. The
theory behind the King James Version and the New King James Version is what's
called the textus receptus, which is Latin for “received
text”. Now the way that came into being was that in the period of the late
1400s, early 1500s, the period which just precedes what is known in Europe as
the Renaissance and the Reformation in Northern Europe, there was a flood of
ancient manuscripts, original language manuscripts for all manner of different
writings, classical Greek, classical Roman period as well as the New
Testament.
What has happened is that those
peace loving Moslems have been once again conquering territory and torturing
and murdering and raping and pillaging all the Christians so the monks gathered
up all their scrolls and got on their wagons and donkeys and whatever else and
headed to Europe to get away from the encroaching barbarian Islamic
hordes. All these manuscripts have suddenly been discovered and they're
coming into Europe. What happened was in Southern Europe what fueled the
Renaissance was they went back to original documents in terms of ancient
classical Greek and Roman documents. In the northern areas, in Germany,
Switzerland, and France, they didn't go back so far. They went back to the
original documents of the Bible and camped out. That gave birth to the
Reformation.
Now there was a Roman Catholic
scholar by the name of Erasmus of Rotterdam who was a scholar known as a
humanist. Later he became a theological opponent of Martin Luther, who is
the one who started the Protestant Reformation. Erasmus found eight ancient
Greek manuscripts of the New Testament and he put them together and published
the first critical text of the New Testament where it had notes in the margin
and had different readings between these different manuscripts. Now all
eight of those manuscripts reflected what was known later as the Byzantine
text. The Byzantine Empire, the northern empire, around Turkey, Greece and
this area, is where scholarship dominated at that time. So that later
became known as the Byzantine text.
None of these documents were any
older than the ninth century and they weren't based on the best of
manuscripts. There were some real problems. In fact, there were a
couple of places where verses were left out so Erasmus just made it up,
especially a very famous one in John. Truly. No matter what view you
take on textual criticism everybody just about agrees that he just made it up,
unless you're a King James only person. King James only people say that if
it was good enough for the Apostle Paul it's good enough for us. We
laugh. They really believe that. Their missionaries will go to
places like Poland and Africa and India and tell them they have to learn King
James English so that they can read the inspired text of the King James
Version. That's what they believe.
Well, over the next couple of
decades Erasmus found three or four more ancient manuscripts, added those to
the original eight, and that became known as the Received Text. It's part
of what we now call the Byzantine Family but the Byzantine Family has much
better and older manuscripts than what became the TR, and they
differ. It's also known as the Majority Text. Now if you want to dig
into this, last year at the Chafer Conference 9 Ron Minton was here. He's
a missionary in Ukraine like Jim Myers is. He's in the Karkov
area. He is truly an expert on the history of the Bible and the Bible text
and he gave basically a course on textual criticism. He gave a short
version for the conference with about three lectures. All of these are on
the Dean Bible website.
That's sort of the background on
this. It's where the Textus Receptus
came from as many, many more manuscripts in that area of modern Turkey and
Greece became discovered in the 19th and 20th
centuries. That family of manuscripts became known as either the Byzantine
group or the Majority Text. The Majority Text didn't agree with the TR all
the time. There are over 1800 differences between the Majority Text and
the TR. I tend to be a Majority Text advocate. I think that's
superior. You actually have large Greek manuscripts. There are very few
that have the entire New Testament but you have large Greek codexes
or miniscules that read almost exclusively like the
Majority Text. If you look at the Critical Text there are no Greek
manuscripts that have the readings. If I picked up my Critical Greek Text
there's not a single Greek manuscript that reads like that. And that's
part of the difference between these.
One of the places where this really
does make a difference is here in Romans 8:1 where that last phrase is left out
of the Critical Text, but it is not only in the TR but in the Majority
Text. I put a note down at the bottom that the Critical Text is based on
this reading in Codex Sinaiticus which is mid-1400's.
That's the Codex that Tischendof found at St.
Catherine's of Mt. Sinai and Vaticanus. That's
the manuscript that was found in the Vatican. The Majority Text reading
which includes the phrase, “who do not walk according to the flesh but
according to the Spirit” is found in Codex Alexandricus,
which is also found in that same area of Egypt. It's early 5th
century. Only sixty or seventy years separate this manuscript from the top
two. But the Codex Sinaiticus is found in four
different readings where there are four different scribes who have corrected
it. So the uncorrected version leaves it out. The scribe assigned the
number two has it in it.
Are you thoroughly confused at this
point? So of all the ancient manuscripts you only have two primary ones
who leave it out, Sinaiticus and Vaticanus.The
corrected version of Vaticanus, corrected at that
time by another scribe, includes the phrase plus its in the majority of
documents and a number of others. Now there are a few other codexes from a little later on in history
that leave it out primarily based on the fact that it's not included in Sinaiticus and Vaticanus. On
the strength of its omission in those two codexes
it's omitted from the Critical Text. That's the trump card that they go
to.
Remember what I said? That if
any two of those four early Egyptian manuscripts agree on something that's
golden for them, that's end of discussion. I've simplified it a lot but
that's basically it. This is crucially important because almost everything
in Romans 8, aside from this textual difference, agrees consistently with Galatians
chapter 5 in this conflict between the believer either walking according to the
flesh, living his life according to the flesh or sin nature, or living his life
according to the Holy Spirit, that it's one or the other. If you take this
phrase out of this verse, it's not that it changes the whole meaning of the
context of chapter 8 but it gets fuzzy for a lot of people. It's really
clear if it's added in verse one and it's not just because the scribes saw it
down in verse 4 and wrote it twice, which is what the Critical Text guys will
say in terms of explaining it.
If it ends at “there is therefore no
condemnation to those who are in Christ Jesus”, it looks as if Paul who has
been talking about justification in Romans and that if you leave out the second
half of verse one, that what Paul is talking about here in Romans 8:1 is that
there's no condemnation to those who are in Christ Jesus. In other words,
if you're a believer in Jesus Christ, you're in Christ and therefore, there's
no condemnation. What kind of condemnation would that be? Temporal or eternal? Eternal, that's what it looks
like. But that doesn't fly. Now why doesn't it fly?
When I taught the short series
several years ago I took the view that this was positional. I'm correcting
myself through additional study. The context of Romans 6, 7, and 8 is not
talking about how to get justified anymore. It's not talking about how to
be righteous anymore. It's talking about what happens when righteous
people, those who are justified, are living according to the flesh. That's
all of Romans 7. Paul says, “Wretched man that I am” because he's a
believer who's living according to the flesh and he just can't have any victory
over the sin nature.
But it's not just related to the
word that's used here for condemnation. That's this word in the Greek katakrima [katakrima]. Katakrima is a noun that's only used three times
in the New Testament. And guess where it's used all three times. Romans 5:
16 and 18 and Romans 8:1. Now Romans 5: 16 and 18 is where we saw Paul
start making his transition from talking about justification and how to be
justified to the implications of how does a justified person live in
relationship to the sin nature. He goes into the topic then of how the
saved person or the justified person now lives. That's the topic of Romans
6, 7, and 8.
In Romans 3, 4, and the beginning of
5, Paul has been talking about how to be justified. Starting
in 5 and especially in 6, 7, 8 with 5 starting the transition, Paul begins to
talk about how does a justified person live. So if condemnation here is
talking about eternal condemnation, then Paul has reversed himself and he's
gone back to talk about initial justification, rather than how a justified
person lives. Now that could fit, and there are definitely scholars who
take that view and a number of folks who take that view, but it's important to
understand the difference in this word katakrima
and why this particular word is used. In the Loux
and Nida's Semantic Dictionary these scholars point
out that the word katakrima means
to judge someone as definitely guilty and therefore subject to
punishment. See condemnation has the idea mostly of declaration of
guilt. But the word katakrima goes beyond
guilt to punishment, the results of guilt. And that's really important to
understand here because when we use the phrase that they're condemned we're
thinking that they're guilty and we're thinking eternal but if the word
primarily means just the idea of punishment it could relate to a) eternal
punishment b) temporal Divine discipline, or it can wrap the whole ball of wax
up in talking about the present consequences of living according to the sin nature,
which fits the context here. I think it's very important to understand
this.
Bauer, Ardnt, and Gingrich, which is the foremost Greek lexicon, says that this
word katakrima doesn't merely mean
condemnation but it focuses on the punishment that follows the pronouncement of
legal guilt. Condemnation in English and in John 3:18 focuses on
guilt. That word normally translated condemnation is just krima in the Greek. Katakrima
takes the preposition kata, which we'll
see a lot in this passage, means 'according to a standard'. Katakrima when it is
added as a prefix to another word brings in this idea of according to
something. Now, I don't want to be guilty of what's called a etymological fallacy here. I'm not saying that the
meaning of this word is just determined by the compound of its parts but it
helps us understand this. Katakrima would mean what? According to judgment.
What's punishment? Punishment means according to the judgment. So
that's really what the word katakrima means. It
goes beyond the meaning of the word krima,
which indicates the pronouncement of guilt. It goes beyond it to focus on
the punishment or the consequences that come to the one that is guilty.
A number of years ago we had Ron Merryman who was speaking and he made some really good
observations to these words and how they're used in Romans. And so here's a
chart based on what he put up on the screen at that particular time and I just
want to show you how a little bit of observation here really helps expose some
of the things that are going on in Paul's thinking.
Ron is a great scholar. Now
he's living in Tullahoma, Tennessee as a vital part of Clay Ward's church
there. I just want to make a comment here. I'm really proud of Ron for
what he did. Ron had been a president of Western Bible College. He'd
been pastor of a church in Denver and then as he got older he retired. And
I think how we retire as pastors and as folks in the church are really
important. Now when you get to the point where you can retire, you ought
to think of going into some kind of full time ministry. You're going to
have a retirement income already. Go be a missionary. Do
something. Don't just quit. Don't just give up and say, “I'm going to
stay home with grandchildren” and sit out on the rocker. No. Go be a
missionary somewhere.
That's what Ron did. Initially
he and his wife retired to the Phoenix area and he was writing and doing other things,
but then he said, “I really don't have any kind of ministry in a local church
here.” So he looked around. He didn't want to go into an urban
environment so they had looked at some of the younger pastors coming up and
said, “These guys need to be mentored by older, mature pastors.” So he
picked Clay Ward in Tullahoma, Tennessee and he and his wife sold their house
in Arizona and moved to Tullahoma so he could be an older mentor, a voice of
stability, in a young church with a young pastor, and that's just
fabulous.
It's passing on, it's mentoring;
it's all these great, great things. So that's what Ron's doing. He's doing
a great job. What I would wish, but you have too many pastors who are
happy to stay where they are geographically because that's where there grand
kids are. I don't have kids or grandkids so I'm not going to go down a
road of saying, “Okay, they're wrong.” But wouldn't it be great if we
could get all these guys who are retired who have independent incomes to move
to one location and they wouldn't be dependent on a seminary for income because
they already have their retirement and they could be the faculty of a
seminary? That's really a dream. That's idealism. Because a lot
of pastors when they get into their 70's already have health problems; they're
near family; they don't want to move across the country someplace but that would
be an ideal situation is to have 4 or 5 pastors as they retire from their
ministry or whatever they've been doing, then they could just devote the rest
of their lives to mentoring young men, training them up to be pastors.
Anyway this chart is Ron's
observation. The way it works across in this chart is it's looking
horizontally through sections in Romans, the introduction through 3:20,
focusing on sin. The second column is the focus on justification by faith
from 3:21 to 5:21. The third column is sanctification from 6:1 to
8:39. And you see that according to the numerical spread here that the top
row deals with the two words krino,
the verb and krima, the noun and katakrima and you have 10 uses of the
word krima and 3 uses of the word katakrima in the first three chapters focusing on
guilt and condemnation. That's really strong.
And then you get into 3:21 to 5:21
and you have no uses of katakrima
and I think you have a couple of uses of krima. So the
focus on 6:1 through 8:39 isn't on condemnation at all. You see that in
the second row, pistis [pistij] the word for faith is mentioned one time in 1:19
through 3:20. So that where Paul is making the point that all are
sinners. Faith isn't the issue. But faith is then mentioned some 24
times between the verb and the noun in 3:21 to 5:21. How are you
justified? By faith. That's where that word
shows up all the time so then when you get into sanctification faith isn't
mentioned quite so much. Life or zoe [zwh], zao [zaw]for the verb, zoe for the noun is only mentioned a total of 3 times in the first
section, none in the justification by faith section so how many times do we
say, “Do you want to have eternal life?” as a synonym for “Do you want to be
saved?”
Paul doesn't even use the word life
in his explanation of justification, not once. Interesting. Where
does he use it? The results of justification. I
just think that's a great chart for showing where the emphasis is, the
proportionality there in Romans. That when we get in Romans 6-8 we're
talking about life, not about condemnation anymore in terms of the
pronouncement of guilt but there's an important distinction there between krima and katakrima, which is the other noun for
condemnation. Now the other things that comes into this and I know
sometimes you think I'm probably getting lost in the weeds but these kinds of
details are really important. If katakrima
isn't talking about condemnation like krima
is and its talking about the results then that indicates that to be consistent
with the use in Romans 5:16 and 18 that katakrima
is emphasizing not eternal punishment but the consequences of sin.
And what Paul has been doing in
Romans 7 is that even though you're regenerate and you become a new creature in
Christ you're still living like you're spiritually dead but for the person in
verse 1 who's not walking according to the flesh but according to the Spirit,
in Christ and not walking according to the flesh but according to the Spirit,
that person has no condemnation, no punishment, no Divine discipline in
time. Get eternal out of your mind on that word.
When we read condemnation we think
eternal punishment but when I pointed out when we went through Romans 5: 16 and
18 katakrima just focuses on the
consequences of the action, not the pronouncement of guilt. It can be
eternal but it can also be temporal so the context of this word is focusing on
the consequences of sin in the believer's life. Paul, when he says “Oh
wretched man that I am” is because he's trying to live the Christian life on
his own without the Holy Spirit and he's continually dominated by the tyranny
of the sin nature and he's totally frustrated and incapable of living the
Christian life.
Then when he realizes the role of
the Spirit, all of a sudden it's like the lights have come on. The Holy
Spirit is mentioned one time in Romans 7:6 where it says “we're saved to walk
in the newness of the Spirit, not in the oldness of the letter”, and then in
Romans 7:7-25 is just a side trail. Romans 8:1 picks up from where Romans
7:6 ended. That's the mention of the Spirit. The word Spirit is used
21 times in Romans 8. Guess what the focal point is in Romans 8. It's
the role of the Holy Spirit in the life of the believer. A couple of times
the word spirit is used there where it's not talking about the Holy Spirit but
the rest of the time it is.
So he's not talking in Romans 8
about justification; he's talking about how can the justified believer live
without temporal condemnation because he's under the control of the sin nature? Or temporal punishment.
So a couple of
passages just to sum up. In John
3:18 says, “the one who believes in Him is not
condemned.” That's krino, not katakrima; but it's translated by the
same English word. Don't get confused. That's a good translation for
John 3:18 but condemned is not a good translation for katakrima, which is not a good translation for Romans 5 and Romans
8. “The one who believes in Him is not condemned but the one who believes
not is condemned already because he has not believed in the name of the only
begotten Son of God.” That's focusing on that pronouncement of
guilt.
Romans 5:16, though, goes on to say,
“And the gift is not like that which comes through the one who
sinned.” That's the imputation of sin from Adam in the context, “For the judgment
which came from one offense resulted in ...” Resulted
in what? Punishment. It's the consequences. You can even tell
from how its translated resulting in something. Katakrima indicates the results of the guilt, not
the guilt itself. So, “resulted in punishment but the free gift which
came from many offenses resulted in justification.”
Romans 5:18 then says, “Therefore as
through one man's offense judgment came to all men, resulting in condemnation,
even so through one Man's righteous act the free gift came to all men,
resulting in justification of life.” Now it may seem like it's splitting
hairs but this really is a significant and deep, detailed analysis of this
word. I wouldn't have caught this but George nailed this two years ago at
that Sanctification Conference in his paper in Romans 6. He even put a
whole appendix in his paper on katakrima. He
did a good job pointing out the significance of this and then as I went back
and studied that even more I realized even more things. George didn't come
up with this. Very few of us have original ideas. We're just putting
things together from what other people have come up with in their in depth
scholarship.
What this emphasizes then is that in
Romans 8:1, not only are we no longer under a judicial penalty from the Supreme
Court of Heaven in terms of not being justified, we'd been set free from the
judicial penalty related to future punishment and present spiritual
death. So we're spiritually alive. We're not under condemnation;
there's a freedom, which is what Paul talked about in Romans chapter 6:18 “And
having been set free from sin, you became slaves of righteousness.” But
what happens is that if we live like a slave to the sin nature we go back to
like we lived when we're spiritually dead. We're not, but we live like
we're spiritually dead and so we experience the punishment in terms of divine
discipline of living like we are spiritually dead.
The arena of application in Romans
8:1 is not to unbelievers—how to get justified—but the arena of application
is to those who are already in Christ. It's clear from that. “There
is therefore now no condemnation to those who are in Christ [and is further
defined] who do not walk according to the flesh but according to the
Spirit.” So once again this just sets us up to understand that the
spiritual life in the New Testament is not just a matter of morality, doing the
right thing, which is the legalistic idea, going back to the Judaizers and those who thought that if they just did
the Law they were okay. But there's a new dynamic and that's the Holy
Spirit. The issue now isn't, are you doing the right thing? It's are
you doing the right thing by the right power, i.e., the Holy Spirit? It
isn’t enough to do the right thing, to be moral, to be obedient, to witness, to
read your Bible, but are you doing it in the power of the flesh, the sin nature
according to the flesh, or are you doing it according to the Holy Spirit?
It's the Holy Spirit that's given to
us now so that we can walk in the newness of the Spirit and not the oldness of
the letter. God's gives us the ability to obey Him, which the Law did not
give. The Law only said, “This is a requirement.” Now we have the
enablement of the Holy Spirit. That's why it's so tragic today that people
don't really study the New Testament like this and they don't really get into
emphasizing the significance of this great spiritual life. It is totally
different in the Church Age. The pattern for understanding the spiritual
life in the Church Age is Jesus Christ's life, not the Old Testament
believer.
And yet for much of Church Age
Christianity the focus has been, “Let's go back and do it like the Jews
did.” They developed a priesthood and sacrificial terminology. How
many times have you heard people say, “Oh, I walked to the altar at the
church,” and they're referring to the pulpit at the front of a church.
Well, nothing ever got sacrificed down there. We didn't shed any blood
down there. When I first got out into the broader stream of Christianity I
heard, “Well, you need to walk to the altar and lay it all on the
altar.” What altar? I haven't seen an altar but that's the
terminology we use because in the Church Age they thought the pattern was the
Old Testament. It's not. The pattern is Jesus Christ. He's the
one we follow and He lived His life in the power of God the Holy Spirit.
So Paul sets this up and what I've
said today dealing with all these little details is simply to show why this is
so important. Take the whole verse, don't chop it
up like some translations do, because that sets the framework for understanding
this chapter. The issue now is are you walking according to the flesh or
according to the Spirit?