'the likeness of the flesh of sin.' The word 'likeness' is the same as
that used in the similar passage[2], where we are told that the eternal
Son in love for us 'emptied Himself' so far as to take the 'form,'
{279} or essential characteristics, of our servile human nature; nor
only its essential characteristics, but also the outward conditions or
'likeness' of common men as they are. The point is that Christ, who
Himself as man 'knew no sin[3],' appeared amongst us under all the
circumstances of sin, and with no outward or apparent difference
between us and Him--'in all points like as we are' with the single
exception of sin in the will or in the nature.
2. In verse 3 the Authorized Version, and the margin of the Revised,
translating the Greek literally, give us, 'God sending His own Son ...
_for sin_.' But the phrase 'for sin' is continually used in the Greek
of the Old Testament for the sin-offering, and in the New Testament
always has the sacrificial meaning attached to it[4]; and accordingly
its meaning here must be so defined.
3. The flesh of man, considered as a material thing, is not evil. It
was that which the Son took, and it was 'in the flesh' so assumed that
He pronounced sentence on sin--in that very flesh which was sin's
domain; as, in the Epistle {280} to the Ephesians[5]. He is said to
have 'abolished the enmity in his flesh.' The flesh as such then is
not evil; but when, as in our fallen state, the proper order of our
complex manhood has been reversed, and the flesh has become the
predominant partner, having the mastery of the spirit, then it becomes
a 'flesh of sin.' To live 'in the flesh,' or 'according to the flesh,'
is to let the flesh have its way and be the master instead of the
slave. Then the whole life becomes carnal--a carrying out 'the works
of the flesh'--and even the rational faculty becomes a 'carnal mind.'
What our redemption effects is to restore the right order and make the
flesh again the instrument of the spirit--of the human spirit, that is,
empowered by the divine Spirit, without which it cannot hold its
ground. Then the whole life, with all its bodily faculties, becomes
spiritual and carries into effect 'the works of the Spirit.'
In the passage we have been considering, the Revised Version
distinguishes, by the use of capital letters, between the divine
Spirit[6] and the human[7], or spirit in general; but the fact that the
divine Spirit is what liberates and restores the human spirit is so
much in St. Paul's {281} mind that it seems better to make the primary
reference to the divine Spirit throughout.
It is of the greatest practical moment to grasp that, to St. Paul, the
change in human life which comes about through our conversion and new
birth is a change in order. What was managed from below is now
controlled from above. That is the point on which we need to examine
ourselves. Where do we begin from? Are we in the position of men
struggling to manage their own lives, and commend themselves according
to some standard more or less right, which either their personal pride
or their social circle or the divine law has set up? If so, God is
over against us, our taskmaster, our adversary, our stern judge, and
our life is 'according to the flesh.' It is managed from below. It is
ruled on its own level, and it fails. But there is another life which
begins at once from the thought of God. God has made us, and therefore
He is responsible for us. He has made me because He loves me.
Therefore He is bound to make the best of me. If I will only put
myself into His hands He is pledged, simply because He created me,
therefore to redeem me, to save me, to glorify me. He takes that
responsibility upon Himself. He has shown His {282} love by the
sending and the sacrifice of His Son and by the gift of His Spirit.
And His Spirit I have received. At a definite moment He came upon me.
He entered into my life, as into those first Christians to whom St.
Paul wrote, at baptism and by the laying-on of hands. This is the fact
then. God is on my side. He makes Himself responsible for my being.
If I will only entrust myself to Him with the cordial return of
trustful love, then all that He has ever breathed into my heart of
human possibility He will realize and bring to perfection. The
requirement of the law shall be fulfilled in us who walk not after the
flesh but after the Spirit.--This is a point of view upon which it is
worth while reflecting deeply, and over and over again. Unless we are
continually practising ourselves in this conception of life, we find
ourselves falling back again into the attitude of one standing over
against God with God for his taskmaster. And that is the false and
always ruinous idea.
We must also take careful note of what St. Paul means by 'spiritual'
and 'carnal.' 'Carnal' does not mean made of flesh, and 'spiritual'
does not mean immaterial. That is carnal which is ruled by the flesh,
ruled from {283} below. That life is carnal in which our spirit, meant
for God, is dragged at the chariot-wheels of our lower life; and that
is spiritual which is ruled and mastered by the Spirit. We must not
suppose that we shall make our religion spiritual by disparaging
external acts or bodily exercises of worship. No; that is spiritual
which is ruled by the Spirit. The worship in 'spirit and in truth,'
for us men who belong to the religion of the Incarnation, must be a
worship in body. But it will be spiritual if it is full of spiritual
intention. Secular business again is spiritual if it is ruled by the
divine Spirit according to the law of righteousness. Politics are
spiritual, commercial and municipal life are spiritual, art and science
are spiritual, and everything that develops our faculties is spiritual,
if we will allow the divine Spirit to rule in all according to the law
of righteousness, truth, and beauty. For the whole of our being, with
all its sum of faculties, is made by God and meant for God. What a
mistake it is then, when people speak, as they so often do, as if sin
were really natural, as if lust and worldliness were natural, and as if
spirituality were something unnatural, belonging to another world. It
is exactly the opposite. The only _natural_ position for us is when
our {284} flesh is ruled by the spirit. It is an unnatural usurpation
when the spirit is dragged at the chariot-wheels of the flesh, when our
life is dominated by lusts or appetites. That is the very overthrow of
nature. And grace does but restore to us the true order of our being,
when the flesh and all the faculties of our body are again controlled
by the spirit, so that our whole being expresses a spiritual purpose
and obeys a spiritual law. The same external acts are spiritual or
carnal, natural or unnatural, according as they express or do not
express the mind of the Spirit. The same physical facts are the basis
of true married love, and of the wildest licentiousness. In the latter
case they are carnal because they express no spiritual purpose; in the
other case they are spiritual because, consecrated in the family life,
they become the organ and the vehicle of the divine Spirit. God will
be responsible for our whole life, our politics, our commerce, our
marriage, the workings of our intellect, the workings of our emotions,
all the parts of our nature. He will raise our nature up through
death; He will consecrate it to life immortal in the divine city; He
will sanctify it here and now: if only, and in all things, we will
believe that He who made our {285} life is capable of making the best
of it, and show ourselves ready to entrust it to His disposal.
4. We must notice what is implied in this passage about the Holy
Trinity. St. Paul speaks[8] of 'the Spirit of God' (the Father), 'the
Spirit of Christ,' 'Christ,' and then again, the 'Spirit of Him that
raised up Christ,' as if all these expressions were identical; as
elsewhere[9] he prays that the Father will strengthen men by His
Spirit, in order that Christ may dwell in their hearts, and they be
filled with the fullness of God. All which language means that where
the Spirit is, Christ is, and where Christ is, God the Father is. So
in St. John, our Lord speaks of the Holy Spirit as 'another' advocate
who is to come 'in his name' from the Father; and yet adds that in the
Spirit's coming He Himself will come; and with Him the Father--'we will
come[10].' The sacred 'persons' are spoken of as distinct--personally
distinct--and yet as so mutually involved in the action one of another
that the coming of one is the coming of all. So truly is God one in
three. We find something like this in human personalities under the
influence of love. Each single personality is not {286} self-contained
and exclusive. Love, to a real degree, fuses persons; and thus the
husband and wife and child (to take the highest example) may be said to
live and act in one another and through one another's influence. But
this is only to a limited extent. We are also mutually exclusive. Our
responsibility and actions remain individual and impermeable. What I
am doing, I am doing, and not another. But with God the mutual
interpenetration of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, is represented in the
inspired language as far more complete. The Godhead is a fellowship
and relationship of perfect love 'in three persons.' But God is not
three separate individuals. What each 'person' does the others do.
The action of one involves all. God is inseparably one in His being
and in His action. If the Father creates, He creates through the Son
and by the Spirit. If the Son redeems, the redemption proceeds from
the Father and is effected in the Spirit. If the Spirit sanctifies, it
is from and in the Father and the Son. Thus when the Spirit came forth
at Pentecost out of the uplifted manhood of the Son to impart to us all
His richness, He came not merely to supply His absence, but to
accomplish His presence. He makes Christ present within us, and also
the {287} Father: so that God, three in one, dwells in the hearts of
His people.
5. 'The requirement of the law is to be fulfilled in us.' Do we ask
how we are to keep the whole of that terrible law? It is by obeying
the commandment to love our neighbours as ourselves, in which the whole
law is 'briefly comprehended[11].'
6. If in the last verse of this passage we read 'through His Spirit,'
and not (as the margin) 'because of His Spirit,' then the Holy Spirit
is expressly spoken of as the agent of our resurrection and, by
implication, of the resurrection of Christ. And this is the natural
function for the 'Giver of Life': indeed 'Spirit' means nothing else
than 'breath'--the 'breath of life from God[12].'
[1] The passage in brackets expands the sense in which St. Paul
conceives the Father to have passed sentence of condemnation on sin, in
the person and through the sacrifice of Christ, in accordance with such
passages as vers. 21-24; iv. 25; Phil. ii. 8-10; Eph. i. 15 ff.
[2] Phil. ii. 7.
[3] 2 Cor. v. 21.
[4] See Heb. x. 6, cf. 18, 26; xiii. 11; 1 Pet. iii. 18; 1 John ii. 2;
iv. 10.
[5] ii. 15.
[6] Verses 2, 9, 11.
[7] Verses 4, 5, 6, 9, 10.
[8] Verses 9-11.
[9] Eph. iii. 14-19.
[10] John xiv. 16, 18, 23, 26.
[11] Rom. xiii. 9.
[12] Ezek. xxxvii. 9; Rev. xi. 11.
{288}
DIVISION III. Sec. 8. CHAPTER VIII. 12-17.
_The life of sonship._
We are now in the Spirit. The divine Spirit dwells within us, and
restores our nature to its proper balance by giving us control over our
lower nature. The moral meaning and obligations of such a condition
are plain, and St. Paul proceeds to enforce them. When our impulses
and appetites solicit us to let them have their own way, we must give
them to understand that they are making a claim which we cannot
recognize and which, if we did, would lead us the way of death. On the
contrary, it is these merely physical tendencies--the practices of the
body when left to itself--that we must put to death by the power of the
Spirit. And if we do this we are on the way of life. Why so
certainly? Because we are sons of God--nothing less. Those who thus
act under the Spirit's guidance are all of them sons of God. Further,
{289} if we ask ourselves what sort of spirit we received when we
became Christians, we know that it was not a spirit appropriate to
slaves and calculated to bring us again into a condition of terror
under a law. It was a spirit appropriate to those who have been
adopted for sons of God, and it is in the power of that spirit that we
cry out to God by the name of Abba, Father, in our familiar
supplication. We have thus in our own spirits the sense that we are
sons; and behind that and reinforcing it, the divine Spirit, by putting
the word Father into our lips, bears the same witness. Well then, if
we are thus children of God, we have the child's prospect of entering
into our inheritance. Christ, our elder brother, has already entered
into it, and we shall enter into it with Him, if we are content to take
the Christian maxim for true, and suffer with Him on this side of
death, that we may share His glory beyond.
So then, brethren, we are debtors, not to the flesh, to live after the
flesh: for if ye live after the flesh, ye must die; but if by the
spirit ye mortify the deeds of the body, ye shall live. For as many as
are led by the Spirit of God, these are sons of God. For ye received
not the spirit of bondage again unto fear; but ye received the spirit
of adoption, whereby we cry, Abba, Father. The {290} Spirit himself
beareth witness with our spirit, that we are children of God: and if
children, then heirs; heirs of God, and joint-heirs with Christ; if so
be that we suffer with him, that we may be also glorified with _him_.
There are several phrases in this passage which we shall do well to
notice.
1. _If by the spirit ye mortify the deeds of the body, ye shall live_.
Mortification is absolutely necessary, and at every stage of the
Christian life. It is the carrying into effect in detail of the
fundamental law of our new life--the law which the baptismal ritual was
intended to teach--life by means of death. For the body had gained the
upper hand: it had come to control the weakened spirit. Therefore the
reinvigorated spirit must react upon the body and its impulses. It
must make its government felt, and the physical tendencies must be
checked, pruned, cut back. This is the Christian circumcision. And as
Christ was first born, then circumcised the eighth day; so each new
birth in Christ must be followed by a like circumcision of the
luxuriance of animal appetites. We learn the lesson when we are
children: we expect to be restrained and curbed: and unless we are very
foolish we learn the lesson only more deeply in later life. There
{291} is no single faculty or function of our being which can escape
this law. No friendship can be cemented without mutual self-denial.
No marriage, however founded on affection, can be blessed without the
mutual pain of self-repression and concession. No art or science can
be mastered by mere intelligence without moral discipline. No gift can
be consecrated in its natural luxuriance. 'Every branch in Christ that
beareth fruit, He pruneth it that it may bring forth more fruit.'
2. _As many as are led by the Spirit of God, these are sons of God_.
The New Testament language would have us regard all the baptized as
regenerate and sons of God, but it will not let us mistake the meaning
of this teaching. In any effective sense it is they, and only they,
who are really _controlled by_ the divine Spirit who can call
themselves sons. As St. John says, freedom from sin is the only test
of divine birth[1]. And the best way to make our new birth effective
is to meditate on the gift which we, when we became Christians, did
actually receive. We who, like the first Christians, received baptism
with the laying-on of hands, did then and there receive (such is the
implication {292} of St. Paul's language)[2] a spirit proper not to
slaves but to sons of God, qualifying us to call on God as our father,
and to co-operate in the purposes of His kingdom. It remains for us to
claim these powers and privileges of our sonship, and to claim them to
the full. Yet how many anxious-minded Christians of our day would
appear to have received nothing more nor less than the spirit of
slaves! They realize their religion as a restraint, a responsibility,
a cause of fear. And such a servile religion is no doubt better than a
hypocritical sense of sonship unaccompanied by the fear of sin. The
wise man remarks that 'a servant that dealeth wisely shall have rule
over a son that causeth shame, and shall have part in the inheritance
among the brethren[3].' But the spirit of the slave is not what we are
called to. If we had more religion, if we would give it freer course,
if we would consent to think less of our circumstances and more of God
and His gifts, there would be less fear and more joy both in our work
and our prayer.
3. _Abba, Father_. Our Lord, speaking in {293} Aramaic, the
vernacular of Palestine, is recorded by St. Mark in His hour of agony
to have said _Abba_. And even in the Greek-speaking churches of St.
Paul's day, that sacred word was still used side by side with its Greek
equivalent, according to the witness of this and the parallel passage,
Gal. iv. 6. St. Paul appears to be referring to some occasion on which
the Church was in the habit of calling on God with the Aramaic and
Greek words side by side, and it is more than likely[4] that he is
making a definite reference to the Lord's Prayer, as recited by the
Roman and Galatian Christians in the form prescribed for us in St.
Luke's version[5], beginning 'Father.' The retention by Greek
Christians of an Aramaic word in a familiar religious formula, is like
the later retention by the Latins of the Greek prayer, _Kyrie eleison_,
or the retention by us of the names _Te Deum, Magnificat_, &c. St.
Paul's meaning would come home to us better if we were to
read--'whereby we cry _Our Father_.'
4. '_The Spirit himself beareth witness with our spirit, that we are
children of God_.' This is a very {294} important passage for showing
that St. Paul did not in any way confuse the divine Spirit and the
human, and that in his belief the divine indwelling did not in any way
annihilate the human personality. Even in the closest union God
remains God and man man. But the passage is at least as important as
opening up a special avenue of insight into St. Paul's conception of
Christian worship and spiritual life generally. He speaks first of a
witness of the individual spirits of Christians to the fact of their
divine sonship; and he distinguishes from it something greater, a
witness of the divine Spirit, supporting the human. What exactly does
he mean by this witness of the divine Spirit as distinct from the
consciousness which--under the leading of the divine Spirit--Christians
are led themselves to form? How are we to distinguish the Spirit's
witness from the witness of our own hearts inspired by Him? Is it
merely[6] that the 'consciousness (of the individual) is analyzed, and
its _data_ are referred partly to the man himself, partly to the Spirit
of God moving and prompting him?' I do not think that a closer
examination will lead us to be satisfied with this.
{295}
The witness of the divine Spirit is apparently fixed by the context to
consist in the supply to us of the phrase 'Abba, Father[7]'. It is the
Spirit 'in whom we cry' (or, as the passage in the Galatians says, 'who
Himself comes into our hearts crying) Abba, Father,' who thus, by
suggesting this cry to us, bears witness with our own spirits that we
are sons of God. Thus the supporting witness of the Spirit lies
especially in a certain mode of address to God or formula of prayer
which He supplies. But this 'cry' or prayer the Spirit supplies to the
hearts of the Church as a whole. The whole Church, and not the
individual soul only, is the Spirit's home. 'Know ye not that ye are
(corporately) a temple of God, and the Spirit of God dwelleth in
you'[8]? The witness of the Spirit is thus a witness borne in the
whole Church, which supports and sustains the witness of the individual
soul. This is a thought full of consolation. The life of the
individual Christian reposes upon, and is infolded by, the larger life
of the whole body. Behind his own spiritual consciousness, with all
its vicissitudes, lies the inspired consciousness of the whole body,
the witness of the Spirit; and this in part expresses itself in
inspired {296} formulas--the Lord's Prayer, the psalms, the creeds of
the divine name, the Church's worship; and these formulas, representing
our best self, are to sustain us in our fluctuations of feeling, and
carry us over our periods of dryness and insensibility. 'The Spirit
Himself beareth witness with our spirit.'
5. 'The inheritance' of the children of God, which in the Old
Testament begins by meaning the Holy Land, was spiritualized into
meaning the kingdom of the Messiah. 'They shall inherit the land for
ever[9]': 'the meek shall inherit the earth[10].' And this kingdom of
the Messiah is an eternal kingdom: 'they shall inherit eternal
life[11]'--that is to be our inheritance as the chosen people of the
Lord. And it is an inheritance not only incorruptible but
inexhaustible: all share in it to the full of their capacities, and the
abundance of those who share diminishes nothing from the richness that
remains.
And into that inheritance Christ is 'the way.' His life shows the law
by which it is to be won. It was a current Christian saying--'a
faithful saying'--'if we died with Him, we shall also live with Him; if
we endure, we shall also reign {297} with Him[12].' And whenever we
are inclined to complain at anything we may have to suffer, there is
one thought capable at once of quenching all murmuring, because of its
indisputable reasonableness--'It is enough for the disciple that he be
as his Master.'
[1] 1 John iii. 9.
[2] 'Ye received' (at a particular time), not 'ye have received'; cf.
above, p. 214, note 1.
[3] Prov. xvii. 2.
[4] See Chase, _Lord's Prayer in the Early Church_ ('Texts and
Studies,' Cambridge), p. 23. Cf. Hort on 1 Pet. i. 17.
[5] xi. 2.
[6] S. and H., _in loc._
[7] Cf. Vaughan and Gifford, _in loc._
[8] 1 Cor. iii. 16.
[9] Isa. lx. 21.
[10] Matt. v. 5.
[11] Matt. xix. 29.
[12] 2 Tim. ii. 11.
{298}
DIVISION III. Sec. 9. CHAPTER VIII. 18-30.
_The hope of the creation._
St. Paul has touched upon the familiar topic of Christian suffering,
and he ends his great argument with a splendid encouragement to
believers to suffer gladly, and that for a manifold reason. First
(18-25), that the suffering is altogether inconsiderable by comparison
with the glory to which it leads, and is in itself only a part of the
universal travail-pang through which created nature as a whole is to
produce a glorious new earth to be the habitation of righteousness.
Secondly (26-30), that we are not alone in our sufferings. We have the
support, within us and around us, of the Holy Spirit as our effective
intercessor, and the consciousness of an eternal and infallible purpose
of divine love which is taking effect stage by stage in the case of
each one of us whom God has made members of His elect body. The
following is a paraphrase.
{299}