“There is therefore now no condemnation to them which are in Christ Jesus, who walk not after the flesh, but after the Spirit. For the law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus hath made me free from the law of sin and death. For what the law could not do, in that it was weak through the flesh, God sending his own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh, and for sin, condemned sin in the flesh: That the righteousness of the law might be fulfilled in us, who walk not after the flesh, but after the Spirit.” Romans 8:1-4
As a child growing up in a Baptist home in North Carolina I was taught that salvation meant salvation from hell. And though that may be broadened to salvation from “the world, the flesh, and the devil” that was largely because the world, the flesh, and the devil would certainly take me to hell. So in the final analysis salvation in Jesus Christ was a fire escape. There were collateral benefits so they said though they did not seem to me to be so beneficial at the time. The world was a dangerous place salted with charming amusements and beauty that may transform you into an isolator before you know it. The flesh, my own flesh knew the language of pain and pleasure, but it was only through the church that I learned, mistakenly, that it was my enemy. Between the world and the flesh there was hardly anything left for the devil to do. We were also taught that the way our salvation was obtained was specifically through the pain, suffering and death of Jesus on the cross with emphasis on his inscrutable pain and suffering. The idea was that the legal punishment for all sin fell upon the merciful 2nd Person of the Trinity in order to placate the dishonored 1st Person. In fact back then if we were asked why God became Man in the first place without hesitating we would have said in order to have a body to sacrifice. It is surprising that given the very pathetic views of the world and the flesh there remained a fierce loyalty to the Incarnation and the bodily resurrection of Jesus. But salvation is more than a fire escape and it is not all about me.
“For what the law could not do, in that it was weak through the flesh, God sending his own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh, and for sin, condemned sin in the flesh…”
What I want you to consider is the little phrase:
“God sending his own Son…”
And I want to remind you of ubiquity of phrases like “his own Son” that run through out the New Testament:
“For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son…” John 3:16
“In this was manifested the love of God toward us, because that God sent his only begotten Son into the world, that we might live through him.” I John 4:9
“If God be for us, who can be against us? He that spared not his own Son, but delivered him up for us all…” Romans 8:31-32
What is my point? My point is that the phrases “his own Son” and “his only Son” are repeated so many times in the New Testament they become virtually a title and certainly a phrase that would remind any Jew of an Old Testament narrative that loomed large over Israel’s live, the story of Abraham and the “binding of Isaac.”
“And it came to pass after these things, that God did tempt Abraham, and said unto him, Abraham: and he said, Behold, here I am. And he said, Take now thy son, thine only son Isaac, whom thou lovest, and get thee into the land of Moriah; and offer him there for a burnt offering upon one of the mountains which I will tell thee of.” Genesis 22: 1&2
Realize that this occurred years after God has spoken to Abraham and promised him his own son and as the Bible says, “And he believed in the LORD; and he counted it to him for righteousness.” That is on the basis of Abraham’s faith in the most high God, God consider Abraham to be his man and God meant to use Abraham and his family to bring the world to its senses and furthermore God gave Abraham and his heirs the land he was standing upon when he made the promise. And in order to show Abraham the finality of that promise, the Lord God instructed Abraham to take specific animals, split them in half, and make a path between the slain animals. Abraham understood immediately that God was preparing to cut a covenant with him and from that event he would know that he wasn’t just putting words into God’s mouth but rather God was putting his word into Abraham’s heart. And he did exactly what God had told him to do.
Remember that in the days of the Old Testament the two covenanters would walk together between the two halves showing that they were bound to each other. Jeremiah the Prophet says that such a bond is so profound that each covenanter is proclaiming symbolically that it would be better to be like these animals than break his promise. Thus a blood covenant was a bond of life-fellowship, of life-communion, but remember that a covenant was made not only with the two persons involved, but also between the unborn children who were within their bodies.
After Abraham had completed that exhausting task he fell into a deep and awful sleep. There are two ways of thinking about what happened next. Abraham seemed to be dreaming or half asleep when he saw something like a censor full of smoke and a flaming torch passing between the split animals. The reality is that God Almighty himself passed between the animals without Abraham. One meaning of this strange event is that God Almighty stooped to our understanding; humbled himself in order to speak to Abraham and the rest of us. The reason that shows the humility of God Almighty is because a covenant is at best a shadow of the perfect unity and oneness that is God the Blessed Trinity and for us it communicates his constancy and unceasing faithfulness. The other meaning this scene holds for us is that no one could cut a covenant with God Almighty anyway because there is only one God, therefore the whole matter was God’s doing, God’s work, dependent upon God’s promise, and God’s character as St. Paul is forever reminding the Church.
This is one narrative that Romans is built upon but it is not the only one. By Paul’s day the story of Abraham and the sacrifice of Isaac had become a major focus for the teachers in Israel with emphatic emphasis upon the identification of the Sons of Abraham with national and racial Israel. This was common currency in the religious education of Jews and for that reason the repeated use of phrases like “his own Son” would remind any Jew of that story. What is surprising, at least to me, is that the only spot on reference to the narrative in the New Testament is in Hebrews 11. It is peculiar that such a powerful and ever-present narrative only shows up in one of the last authored texts of the New Testament. The reason for that may well be that the life, death, and resurrection of our Lord so enlarged the meaning of that narrative that it no longer had the force it once had for even for Israel. Paul like everyone else back then is aware of parallels between God the Father sending his own Son in our flesh to die us and Abraham and Isaac. But Paul is not merely replacing Abraham with God the Father nor is he replacing Isaac with God the Son. In fact what Paul is doing is enlarging the narrative in light of the resurrection of Jesus from the dead and the identification of Jesus as the Messiah.
“There is therefore now no condemnation to them which are in Christ Jesus, who walk not after the flesh, but after the Spirit. For the law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus hath made me free from the law of sin and death. For what the law could not do, in that it was weak through the flesh, God sending his own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh, and for sin, condemned sin in the flesh: That the righteousness of the law might be fulfilled in us, who walk not after the flesh, but after the Spirit.” Romans 8:1-4
There is no condemnation to those who are in Jesus the Messiah and who by virtue of being in Jesus are led by the Spirit of God to do the will of God. Those who are in Jesus the Messiah are beneficiaries of the promise made to Abraham but promises that are enlarged, eucharized and flow at least potentially to all humanity and to all creation. God has accomplished all this through the Incarnation of his only Son Jesus the Messiah. And it is important to remember that when Paul refers to the “weakness of flesh” and Christ coming “likeness of sinful flesh” he does not mean that our bodies are weak and sinful because of our physical, human nature. Our physical human nature is God given; and God affirmed his commitment to our physicality through the bodily resurrection of his only Son and his promise to raise us bodily in the last day. What Paul is referring to when he speaks of “sinful flesh” is the present corruptible state of humanity as well as the corruptibility that humanity has brought upon creation whose destiny is tied to our destiny. Sin had come home to roost in this world and in our lives and it is sin that God condemned upon the Cross of Christ:
“For what the law could not do, in that it was weak through the flesh, God sending his own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh, and for sin, condemned sin in the flesh…”
Please note that God has brought judgment down upon sin not flesh, not his material creation.
Not one bit of this that Paul writes and for that matter nothing that the other Apostles know to be true of Jesus was a matter of deduction from the Old Testament, that is they did not arrive at the truth of their own experience with Jesus from their understanding of the Old Testament, but rather it seems to be in spite of their Old Testament presuppositions – it was forced upon them by the resurrection of our Lord. They did not need to prove the resurrection from the Old Testament because they experienced the resurrected Christ first hand. Rather they returned to the Old Testament in light of the resurrection of Christ and with Jesus as their living hermeneutic. We can see in Romans and other New Testament texts not word for word, or spot citations, not even concept to concept parallels that are meant to prove Jesus to be the person they already knew him to be. They did not need to prove from the Old Testament the identity of Jesus. But an overarching theme of Jesus’ narrative is that he was not eliminating Israel, but he was recapitulating and thus finalizing, settling, and completing Israel. He is Israel. Thus in their faithfulness to Jesus what Paul and the Apostles show is that the events in the life of Jesus the Messiah fit, complement the Old Testament; what they experienced – his life, death and resurrection are not alien to God’s revelation to Israel and fact fulfill and complete the Promise of the Old Testament. This was not a matter established by proof texts from the Old Testament, but rather they searched the Scriptures in order to show the plausibility, the reasonableness and the finality of Jesus for the life of Israel. It was the bodily resurrection that forced that conclusion upon Paul and the other Apostles. The resurrection of Christ forced them to read the Old Testament as a finished narrative that has no meaning apart from the resurrection of Jesus Christ.
Make no mistake about it this was new. Absolutely new. Not even the most faithful Jews were anticipating the Incarnation or a Messiah-God, much less a Messiah-God who would be nailed to the cross and then rise from the dead. Jesus’ life of teaching, healing, raising the dead, casting out devils, as well as his own behavior toward portions of the Law of Moses especially those laws that dealt with ritual purification before and after eating, touching a human corpse, and Sabbath observance – his elimination of large chunks of the Mosaic Law for his disciples. And his personal decision to permit his life to be taken by the Romans and then the absolute right out of the blue dénouement: his physical, bodily resurrection from the dead – only then, days, weeks, months after his Ascension that the Church retrospectively and collectively see that God has kept all his promises made to the fathers. In another place Paul sums this up perfectly: