_JUSTIFICATION AND HOLINESS: ILLUSTRATIONS FROM HUMAN LIFE_
ROMANS vi. 14--vii. 6
At the point we have now reached, the Apostle's thought pauses for a
moment, to resume.[94] He has brought us to self-surrender. We have
seen the sacred obligations of our divine and wonderful liberty. We
have had the miserable question, "_Shall we cling to sin?_" answered
by an explanation of the rightness and the bliss of giving over our
accepted persons, in the fullest liberty of will, to God, in Christ.
Now he pauses, to illustrate and enforce. And two human relations
present themselves for the purpose; the one to shew the absoluteness
of the surrender, the other its living results. The first is Slavery,
the second is Wedlock.
[Sidenote: Ver. 14.] =For sin shall not have dominion over you;= sin
shall not put in its claim upon you, the claim which the Lord has met
in your Justification; =for you are not brought[95] under law, but
under grace.= The whole previous argument explains this sentence. He
refers to our acceptance. He goes back to the justification of the
guilty, "without the deeds of law," by the act of free grace; and
briefly restates it thus, that he may take up afresh the position that
this glorious liberation means not licence but divine order. Sin shall
be no more your tyrant-creditor, holding up the broken law in evidence
that it has right to lead you off to a pestilential prison, and to
death. Your dying Saviour has met your creditor in full for you, and
in Him you have entire discharge in that eternal court where the
terrible plea once stood against you. Your dealings as debtors are now
not with the enemy who cried for your death, but with the Friend who
has bought you out of his power.
[Sidenote: Ver. 15.] =What then? are we to sin, because we are not=
brought =under law, but under grace?= Shall our life be a life of
licence, because we are thus wonderfully free? The question assuredly
is one which, like that of ver. 1, and like those suggested in iii. 8,
31, had often been asked of St Paul, by the bitter opponent, or by the
false follower. And again it illustrates and defines, by the direction
of its error, the line of truth from which it flew off. It helps to do
what we remarked above,[96] to assure us that when St Paul taught
"Justification by faith, without deeds of law," he meant what he said,
without reserve; he taught that great side of truth wholly, and
without a compromise. He called the sinner, "just as he was, and
waiting not to rid his soul of one dark blot," to receive at once, and
without fee, the acceptance of God for Another's blessed sake. Bitter
must have been the moral pain of seeing, from the first, this holy
freedom distorted into an unhallowed leave to sin.[97] But he will not
meet it by an impatient compromise, or untimely confusion. It shall be
answered by a fresh collocation; the liberty shall be seen in its
relation to the Liberator; and behold, the perfect freedom is a
perfect service, willing but absolute, a slavery joyfully accepted,
with open eyes and open heart, and then lived out as the most real of
obligations by a being who has entirely seen that he is not his own.
=Away with the thought.= [Sidenote: Ver. 16.] =Do you not know that
the party to whom you present,= surrender, =yourselves bondservants,=
slaves, =so as to obey= him,--=bondservants you are,= not the less for
the freewill of the surrender, =of the party whom you obey;= no longer
merely contractors with him, who may bargain, or retire, but his
bondservants out and out; =whether of sin, to death, or of obedience,
to righteousness?= (As if their _assent_ (ὑπακοὴ) to Christ, their
_Amen_ to His terms of peace, acceptance, righteousness, were
personified; they were now the bondsmen of this their own act and
deed, which had put them, as it were, into Christ's hands for all
things.) [Sidenote: Ver. 17.] =Now (δὲ) thanks be to our (τῷ) God,
that you were bondmen of sin,= in legal claim, and under moral sway;
yes, every one of you was this, whatever forms the bondage took upon
its surface; =but you obeyed from the heart the mould of teaching to
which you were handed over.[98]= They had been sin's slaves. Verbally,
not really, he "_thanks God_" for that fact of the past. Really, not
verbally, he "_thanks God_" for the pastness of the fact, and for the
bright contrast to it in the regenerated present. They had now been
"_handed over_," by their Lord's transaction about them, to another
ownership, and they had accepted the transfer, "_from the heart_." It
was done by Another for them, but they had said their humble, thankful
_fiat_ as He did it. And what was the new ownership thus accepted? We
shall find soon (ver. 22), as we might expect, that it is the mastery
of God. But the bold, vivid introductory imagery has already called it
(ver. 16) the slavery of "_Obedience_." Just below (vers. 19, 20) it
is the slavery of "_Righteousness_," that is, if we read the word
aright in its whole context, of "the Righteousness of God," His
acceptance of the sinner as His own in Christ. And here, in a phrase
most unlikely of all, whose personification strikes life into the most
abstract aspects of the message of the grace of God, the believer is
one who has been transferred to the possession of "_a mould of
Teaching_." The apostolic Doctrine, the mighty Message, the living
Creed of life, the Teaching of the acceptance of the guilty for the
sake of Him who was their Sacrifice, and is now their Peace and
Life--this truth has, as it were, grasped them as its vassals, to form
them, to mould them, for its issues. It is indeed their "_tenet_." It
_holds them_; a thought far different from what is too often meant
when we say of a doctrine that "we _hold it_." Justification by their
Lord's merit, union with their Lord's life; this was a doctrine,
reasoned, ordered, verified. But it was a doctrine warm and tenacious
with the love of the Father and of the Son. And it had laid hold of
them with a mastery which swayed thought, affection, and will; ruling
their whole view of self and of God. [Sidenote: Ver. 18.] =Now
(δὲ), liberated from your (τῆς) sin, you were enslaved to the
Righteousness= of God.[99] Here is the point of the argument. It is a
point of steel, for all is fact; but the steel is steeped in love, and
carries life and joy into the heart it penetrates. They are not for
one moment their own. Their acceptance has magnificently emancipated
them from their tyrant-enemy. But it has absolutely bound them to
their Friend and King. Their glad consent to be accepted has carried
with it a consent to belong. And if that consent was at the moment
rather implied than explicit, virtual rather than articulately
conscious, they have now only to understand their blessed slavery
better to give the more joyful thanksgivings to Him who has thus
claimed them altogether as His own.
The Apostle's aim in this whole passage is to awaken them, with the
strong, tender touch of his holy reasoning, to articulate their
position to themselves. They have trusted Christ, and are in Him.
Then, they have entrusted themselves altogether to Him. Then, they
have, in effect, surrendered. They have consented to be His property.
They are the bondservants, they are the slaves,[100] of His Truth,
that is, of Him robed and revealed in His Truth, and shining through
it on them in the glory at once of His grace and of His claim. Nothing
less than such an obligation is the fact for them. Let them feel, let
them weigh, and then let them embrace, the chain which after all will
only prove their pledge of rest and freedom.
What St Paul thus did for our elder brethren at Rome, let him do for
us of this later time. For us, who read this page, all the facts are
true in Christ to-day. To-day let us define and affirm their issues to
ourselves, and recollect our holy bondage, and realize it, and live it
out with joy.
Now he follows up the thought. Conscious of the superficial
repulsiveness of the metaphor--quite as repulsive in itself to the
Pharisee as to the Englishman--he as it were apologizes for it; not
the less carefully, in his noble considerateness, because so many of
his first readers were actually slaves. He does not _lightly_ go for
his picture of our Master's hold of us to the market of Corinth, or of
Rome, where men and women were sold and bought to belong as absolutely
to their buyers as cattle, or as furniture. Yet he _does_ go there, to
shake slow perceptions into consciousness, and bring the will face to
face with the claim of God. So he proceeds: [Sidenote: Ver. 19.] =I
speak humanly,= I use the terms of this utterly _not-divine_ bond of
man to man, to illustrate man's glorious bond to God, =because of the
weakness of your flesh,= because your yet imperfect state enfeebles
your spiritual perception, and demands a harsh paradox to direct and
fix it. =For=--here is what he means by "_humanly_"--=just as you
surrendered your limbs,[101]= your functions and faculties in human
life, =slaves to your (τῇ) impurity and to your (τῇ) lawlessness,
unto that (τὴν) lawlessness,= so that the bad principle did indeed
come out in bad practice, =so now,= with as little reserve of liberty,
=surrender your limbs slaves to righteousness,= to God's Righteousness,
to your justifying God, =unto sanctification=--so that the surrender
shall come out in your Master's sovereign separation of His purchased
property from sin.
He has appealed to the moral reason of the regenerate soul. Now he
speaks straight to the will. You are, with infinite rightfulness, the
bondmen of your God. You see your deed of purchase; it is the other
side of your warrant of emancipation. Take it, and write your own
unworthy names with joy upon it, consenting and assenting to your
Owner's perfect rights. And then live out your life, keeping the
autograph of your own surrender before your eyes. Live, suffer,
conquer, labour, serve, as men who have themselves walked to their
Master's door, and presented the ear to the awl which pins it to the
doorway, each in his turn saying, "I will not go out free."[102]
To such an act of the soul the Apostle calls these saints, whether
they had done the like before or no. They were to sum up the perpetual
fact, then and there, into a definite and critical act (παραστήσατε,
aorist) of thankful will. And he calls us to do the same to-day. By
the grace of God, it shall be done. With eyes open, and fixed upon the
face of the Master who claims us, and with hands placed helpless and
willing within His hands, we will, we do, present ourselves
bondservants to Him; for discipline, for servitude, for all His will.
[Sidenote: Ver. 20.] =For when you were slaves of your (τῆς) sin,
you were freemen as to righteousness,= God's Righteousness (τῇ
δικαιοσύνῃ). It had nothing to do with you, whether to give you peace
or to receive your tribute of love and loyalty in reply. Practically,
Christ was not your Atonement, and so not your Master; you stood, in a
dismal independence, outside His claims. To you, your lips were your
own; your time was your own; your will was your own. You belonged to
self; that is to say, you were the slaves of your sin. Will you go
back? Will the word "freedom" (he plays with it, as it were, to prove
them) make you wish yourselves back where you were before you had
endorsed by faith your purchase by the blood of Christ? Nay, for what
was that "freedom," seen in its results, its results upon yourselves?
[Sidenote: Ver. 21.] =What fruit, therefore,= (the "_therefore_" of
the logic of facts,) =used you to have then,= in those old days, =from
things over which you are ashamed now?= Ashamed indeed; =for the end,=
the issue, as the fruit is the tree's "end," =the end of those things
is--death;= perdition of all true life, here and hereafter too.
[Sidenote: Ver. 22.] =But now,= in the blessed actual state of your
case, as by faith you have entered into Christ, into His work and into
His life, =now liberated from sin and enslaved to God, you have your
fruit,= you possess indeed, at last, the true issues of being for
which you were made, all contributing =to sanctification,= to that
separation to God's will in practice which is the development of your
separation to that will in critical fact, when you met your Redeemer
in self-renouncing faith. Yes, this fruit you have indeed; =and as its
end,= as that for which it is produced, to which it always and for
ever tends, you have =life eternal.= [Sidenote: Ver. 23.] =For the pay
of sin,= sin's military stipend (ὀψώνια), punctually given to the
being which has joined its war against the will of God, =is death; but
the free gift of God is life eternal, in Jesus Christ our Lord.=
* * * * *
"Is life worth living?" Yes, infinitely well worth, for the living man
who has surrendered to "the Lord that bought him." Outside that
ennobling captivity, that invigorating while most genuine bondservice,
the life of man is at best complicated and tired with a bewildered
quest, and gives results at best abortive, matched with the ideal
purposes of such a being. We "present ourselves to God," for His ends,
as implements, vassals, willing bondmen; and lo, our own end is
attained. Our life has settled, after its long friction, into gear.
Our root, after hopeless explorations in the dust, has struck at last
the stratum where the immortal water makes all things live, and grow,
and put forth fruit for heaven. The heart, once dissipated between
itself and the world, is now "united" to the will, to the love, of
God; and understands itself, and the world, as never before; and is
able to deny self and to serve others in a new and surprising freedom.
The man, made willing to be nothing but the tool and bondman of God,
"_has his fruit_" at last; bears the true product of his now
re-created being, pleasant to the Master's eye, and fostered by His
air and sun. And this "_fruit_" issues, as acts issue in habit, in the
glad experience of a life really sanctified, really separated in ever
deeper inward reality, to a holy will. And the "_end_" of the whole
glad possession, is "_life eternal_."
Those great words here signify, surely, the coming bliss of the sons
of the resurrection, when at last in their whole perfected being they
will "live" all through, with a joy and energy as inexhaustible as its
Fountain, and unencumbered at last and for ever by the conditions of
our mortality. To that vast future, vast in its scope yet all
concentrated round the fact that "we shall be like HIM, for we shall
see HIM as HE is," the Apostle here looks onward. He will say more of
it, and more largely, later, in the eighth chapter. But as with other
themes so with this he preludes with a few glorious chords the great
strain soon to come. He takes the Lord's slave by the hand, amidst his
present tasks and burthens, (dear tasks and burthens, because the
Master's, but still full of the conditions of earth,) and he points
upward--not to a coming _manumission_ in glory; the man would be
dismayed to foresee that; he wants to "serve for ever";--but to a
scene of service in which the last remainders of hindrance to its
action will be gone, and a perfected being will for ever, perfectly,
be not its own, and so will perfectly live in God. And this, so he
says to his fellow-servant, to you and to me, is "_the gift of God_";
a grant as free, as generous, as ever King gave vassal here below. And
it is to be enjoyed as such, by a being which, living wholly for Him,
will freely and purely exult to live wholly on Him, in the heavenly
places.
Yet surely the bearing of the sentences is not wholly upon heaven.
Life eternal, so to be developed hereafter that Scripture speaks of it
often as if it began hereafter, really begins here, and develops here,
and is already "more abundant" (John x. 10) here. It is, as to its
secret and also its experience, to know and to enjoy God, to be
possessed by Him, and used for all His will. In this respect it is
"_the end_," the issue and the goal, now and perpetually, of the
surrender of the soul. The Master meets that attitude with more and
yet more of Himself, known, enjoyed, possessed, possessing. And so He
gives, evermore gives, out of His sovereign bounty, life eternal to
the bondservant who has embraced the fact that he is nothing, and has
nothing, outside his Master. Not at the outset of the regenerate life
only, and not only when it issues into the heavenly ocean, but all
along the course, the life eternal is still "the free gift of God."
Let us now, to-day, to-morrow, and always, open the lips of
surrendering and obedient faith, and drink it in, abundantly, and yet
more abundantly. And let us use it for the Giver.
We are already, here on earth, at its very springs; so the Apostle
reminds us. For it is "_in Jesus Christ our Lord_"; and we, believing,
are in Him, "saved in His life." It is in Him; nay, it is He. "I am
the Life"; "He that hath the Son, hath the life." Abiding in Christ,
we live "because He liveth." It is not to be "attained"; it is given,
it is our own. In Christ, it is given, in its divine fulness, as to
covenant provision, here, now, from the first, to every Christian. In
Christ, it is supplied, as to its fulness and fitness for each arising
need, as the Christian asks, receives, and uses for his Lord.
So from, or rather in, our holy bondservice the Apostle has brought us
to our inexhaustible life, and its resources for willing holiness. But
he has more to say in explaining the beloved theme. He turns from
slave to wife, from surrender to bridal, from the purchase to the vow,
from the results of a holy bondage to the offspring of a heavenly
union. Hear him as he proceeds:
[Sidenote: Ch. vii. Ver. 1.] =Or do you not know, brethren, (for I am
talking (λαλῶ) to those acquainted with law,= whether Mosaic or
Gentile,) =that the law has claim on the man,= the party (ἄνθρωπος)
in any given case, =for his whole lifetime?= [Sidenote: Ver. 2.] =For
the woman with a husband (ἀνὴρ) is to her living husband bound by
law,= stands all along bound (δέδεται) to him. _His life_, under
normal conditions, is his adequate claim. Prove him living, and you
prove her his. =But if the husband should have died, she stands ipso
facto cancelled[103] (κατήργηται) from the husband's law,=
the marriage law as he could bring it to bear against her.
[Sidenote: Ver. 3.] =So, therefore, while the husband lives, she will
earn adulteress for her name, if she weds another (ἑτέρῳ, "a
second") husband. But if the husband should have died, she is free
from the law= in question, =so as to be no adulteress, if wedded to
another,= a second, =husband.= [Sidenote: Ver. 4.] =Accordingly, my
brethren, you too,= as a mystic bride, collectively and individually,[104]
=were done to death as to the Law,= so slain that its capital claim
upon you is met _and done_, =by means of the Body of the Christ (τοῦ
Χριστοῦ),= by "the doing to death" of His sacred Body for you, on His
atoning Cross, to satisfy for you the aggrieved Law; =in order to your
wedding Another,= a second Party (ἑτέρῳ), =Him who rose from the dead;
that we might bear fruit for God;= "_we_," Paul and his converts, in
one happy _fellowship_, which he delights thus to remember and
indicate by the way.
The parable is stated and explained with a clearness which leaves us
at first the more surprised that in the application the illustration
should be reversed. In the illustration, the husband dies, the woman
lives, and weds again. In the application, the Law does not die, but
we, its unfaithful bride, are "_done to death to it_," and then,
strange sequel, are wedded to the Risen Christ. We are taken by Him to
be "one spirit" with Him (1 Cor. vi. 17). We are made one in all His
interests and wealth, and fruitful of a progeny of holy deeds in this
vital union. Shall we call all this a simile confused? Not if we
recognize the deliberate and explicit carefulness of the whole
passage. St Paul, we may be sure, was quite as quick as we are to see
the inverted imagery. But he is dealing with a subject which would be
distorted by a mechanical correspondence in the treatment. The Law
cannot die, for it is the preceptive will of God. Its claim is, in its
own awful _forum domesticum_, like the injured Roman husband, to
sentence its own unfaithful wife to death. And so it does; so it has
done. But behold, its Maker and Master steps upon the scene. He
surrounds the guilty one with Himself, takes her whole burthen on
Himself, and meets and exhausts her doom. He dies. He lives again,
after death, because of death; and the Law acclaims His resurrection
as infinitely just. He rises, clasping in His arms her for whom He
died, and who thus died in Him, and now rises in Him. Out of His
sovereign love, while the Law attests the sure contract, and rejoices
as "the Bridegroom's Friend," He claims her--herself, yet in Him
another--for His blessed Bride.
All is love, as if we walked through the lily-gardens of the holy
Song, and heard the call of the turtle in the vernal woods, and saw
the King and His Beloved rest and rejoice in one another. All is law,
as if we were admitted to watch some process of Roman matrimonial
contract, stern and grave, in which every right is scrupulously
considered, and every claim elaborately secured, without a smile,
without an embrace, before the magisterial chair. The Church, the
soul, is married to her Lord, who has died for her, and in whom now
she lives. The transaction is infinitely happy. And it is absolutely
right. All the old terrifying claims are amply and for ever met. And
now the mighty, tender claims which take their place instantly and of
course begin to bind the Bride. The Law has "given her away"--not to
herself, but to the Risen Lord.
For this, let us remember, is the point and bearing of the passage. It
puts before us, with its imagery at once so grave and so benignant,
not only the mystic Bridal, but the Bridal as it is concerned with
holiness. The Apostle's object is altogether this. From one side and
from another he reminds us that _we belong_. He has shewn us our
redeemed selves in their blessed bondservice; "free from sin, enslaved
to God." He now shews us to ourselves in our divine wedlock; "_married
to Another_," "_bound to the law of_" the heavenly Husband; clasped to
His heart, but also to His rights, without which the very joy of
marriage would be only sin. From either parable the inference is
direct, powerful, and, when we have once seen the face of the MASTER
and of the HUSBAND, unutterably magnetic on the will. You are set
free, into a liberty as supreme and as happy as possible. You are
appropriated, into a possession, and into a union, more close and
absolute than language can set forth. You are wedded to One who "_has
and holds_ from this time forward." And the sacred bond is to be
prolific of results. A life of willing and loving obedience, in the
power of the risen Bridegroom's life, is to have as it were for its
progeny the fair circle of active graces, "love, joy, peace,
longsuffering, gentleness, goodness, fidelity, meekness, self-control."
Alas, in the time of the old abolished wedlock there was result, there
was progeny. But that was the fruit not of the union but of its
violation. [Sidenote: Ver. 5.] =For when we were in the flesh,= in our
unregenerate days, when our rebel self,[105] the antithesis of "the
Spirit," ruled and denoted us, (a state, he implies, in which we all
were once, whatever our outward differences were,) =the passions,= the
strong but reasonless impulses, =of our sins, which= passions =were by
means of the Law,= occasioned by the fact of its just but unloved
claim, fretting the self-life into action, =worked actively in our
limbs,= in our bodily life in its varied faculties and senses, =so as
to bear fruit for death.= We wandered, restive, from our bridegroom,
the Law, to Sin, our paramour. And behold, a manifold result of evil
deeds and habits, born as it were into bondage in the house of Death.
[Sidenote: Ver. 6.] =But now,= now as the wonderful case stands in the
grace of God, =we are= (it is the aorist, but our English fairly
represents it) =abrogated from the Law,= divorced from our first
injured Partner, nay, slain (in our crucified Head) in satisfaction of
its righteous claim, =as having died (ἀποθανόντες[106]) with regard
to that in which we were held captive,= even the Law and its violated
bond, =so that we do bondservice in= the =Spirit's newness, and not
in= the =Letter's oldness.=
Thus he comes back, through the imagery of wedlock, to that other
parable of slavery which has become so precious to his heart. "_So
that we do bondservice_," "_so that we live a slave-life_"; ὤστε
δουλεύειν ἡμᾶς. It is as if he must break in on the heavenly
Marriage itself with that brand and bond, not to disturb the joy of
the Bridegroom and the Bride, but to clasp to the Bride's heart the
vital fact that she is not her own; that fact so blissful, but so
powerful also and so practical that it is _worth anything_ to bring it
home.
It is to be no dragging and dishonouring bondage, in which the poor
toiler looks wistfully out for the sinking sun and the extended
shadows. It is to be "_not in the Letter's oldness_"; no longer on the
old principle of the dread and unrelieved "_Thou shalt_," cut with a
pen of legal iron upon the stones of Sinai; bearing no provision of
enabling power, but all possible provision of doom for the disloyal.
It is to be "_in the Spirit's newness_"; on the new, wonderful
principle, new in its full manifestation and application in Christ, of
the Holy Ghost's empowering presence.[107] In that light and strength
the new relations are discovered, accepted, and fulfilled. Joined by
the Spirit to the Lord Christ, so as to have full benefit of His
justifying merit; filled by the Spirit with the Lord Christ, so as to
derive freely and always the blessed virtues of His life; the willing
bondservant finds in his absolute obligations an inward liberty ever
"_new_," fresh as the dawn, pregnant as the spring. And the
worshipping Bride finds in the holy call to "keep her only unto HIM"
who has died for her life, nothing but a perpetual surprise of love
and gladness, "new every morning," as the Spirit shews her the heart
and the riches of her Lord.
Thus closes, in effect, the Apostle's reasoned exposition of the
self-surrender of the justified. Happy the man who can respond to it
all with the _Amen_ of a life which, reposing on the Righteousness of
God, answers ever to His Will with the loyal gladness found in "the
newness of the Spirit." It is "perfect freedom" to understand, in
experience, the bondage and the bridal of the saints.
[94] It will be observed that we place _the paragraph_ after ver. 13,
not, as many editions of the Epistle do, after ver. 14. It seems to us
clear that ver. 14 has a closer connexion with the following than with
the previous context. It looks back, not precisely to ver. 13, but to
the general recent argument, that it may then look definitely forward,
over new ground.
[95] Ὑπὸ νόμον, ὑπὸ χάριν: the accusative case gives the preposition
properly the meaning of _motion underwards_. But this must not be
pressed too far.
[96] p. 157.
[97] Luther's _Esto peccator, et pecca fortiter_, has been often
quoted as if that great saint meant to argue licence from
Justification by faith. "God forbid." The words occur in a counsel to
Melanchthon, whose anxious conscience doubted whether it were not a
sin to communicate in one Kind, even where the true Rite in both Kinds
could not be had. It was Luther's glowing paradox, to drive a
manifestly morbid and weakening scrupulousness from his friend's mind.
See Julius Hare's _Vindication of Luther_, pp. 178, etc.
[98] So undoubtedly the Greek must be rendered.
[99] See above, p. 173.
[100] We do not forget that many Christians feel a strong repugnance
to the use of this word, steeped as it is in associations of
degradation and wrong. For ourselves, we would yield to this feeling
so far as habitually to prefer the word of milder sound,
"_bondservant_." But surely in this passage the Apostle on purpose so
accentuates the thought of our bondservice that its fullest and
sternest designation is in place. And, if in any degree we gather the
thought of other hearts from our own, there are times and connexions
in which the fulness of _the joy_ of service demands that designation
in order to its adequate realization.
[101] Μέλη: what "_the body_" is in such passages as xii. 1 that
"_the limbs_" are in detail.
[102] Exod. xxi. 5, 6; Deut. xv. 16, 17.
[103] We render the bold phrase literally.
[104] See 1 Cor. vi. 17.
[105] No word, _for practical purposes_, answers better than "_self_"
(as popularly used in Christian parlance) to the idea represented by
St Paul's use of the word σὰρξ in moral connexions.
[106] So read, not ἀποθανόντος. The textual evidence supports
ἀποθανόντες, and the evidence of the context is all for it. He has
elaborately _avoided_, in applying his illustration, the thought that
_the Law can die_. _We die_, in Christ, in judicial satisfaction of
its most righteous claim. It lives with us, it guides us, with the
authority of God. But it is now our monitor, not our avenger of blood.
[107] Such passages as this and its companion, 2 Cor. iii. 4-8, have
no reference, however remote, to the "letter and spirit" of Holy
Scripture. They contrast Sinai and Pentecost.