There was little condemnation for Casey Anthony. Yesterday she was pronounced “not guilty” of murder by a jury of her peers. Though she still faces some jail time for lying to the police she will be free very soon. Yet despite being free of legal condemnation, Casey’s verdict has unleashed a firestorm of informal condemnation through Facebook, Twitter and all sorts of blogs.
The problem is that though the legal system has declared Anthony innocent many people don’t believe she really is. My own sense is that we will probably never know the truth. It remains an unanswerable question.
You could raise a similar question about Paul’s declaration of innocence in the first verse of our text, Romans 8:1-11, “There is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus.” Perhaps God has in fact declared us innocent and taken away the death penalty for our sin, but are we in actual fact guiltless? It seems like the answer is no. So what makes Paul’s theology of atonement any different from a faulty jury verdict? Shall we simply rejoice to go scot-free, regardless of our actual guilt? Sometimes our doctrine of grace sounds like that.
However, Paul follows his “no condemnation” declaration with a clear indication that, while we may rejoice and be confident in our “not guilty” status before God, there is nonetheless a dimension of transformation in Christian experience. Verses 3 and 4 say that God actually dealt with sin through His Son, “so that the just requirements of the law might be fulfilled in us.” In other words, God’s “no condemnation,” the divine “not guilty” pronounced upon us through Christ is not meant to be a perpetual legal fiction about Christian believers.
The transformation from people who are “not guilty” only by a declaration to genuinely holy, “not guilty” people takes place as we find ourselves as verse 1 said, “in Christ.” We are in a new place.
My neighbor and I were talking about fishing and I told him about a recent fishing trip in Colorado, starting out poorly in a river swollen and muddy with snow melt, then moving to much better fishing in a little private lake. My neighbor remarked that our rivers were also “blown-out” with the runoff this year. Then he paused to correct himself and say, “But it’s better than floods in the Midwest and 118 degrees in Phoenix. We’ve got it better here than anywhere in the country.” That’s exactly the spirit of what Paul is celebrating at the beginning of Romans 8.
Here Paul distinguishes our new place from our old place by the term “the Spirit” versus the term “the flesh.” Lots of ink has been spilled to clarify that by “flesh” Paul is not simply talking about our physical nature, our bodies. You can see in the promise of verse 11, that “he who raised Christ from the dead will give life to your mortal bodies. If bodies as such were evil, God would not promise to resurrect them.
It’s not being physical that gives rise to sin, it’s living in a fleshly mindset that focuses only on this present material world and fails to give consideration to God and work of His Spirit in us. “Flesh” for Paul is the whole way of thinking that is in opposition to God. When we place our faith in Jesus Christ, a process begins which moves us from that realm of thought and experience into a new realm which is according to His own Holy Spirit.
Verse 9 says, “But you are not in the flesh; you are in the Spirit, since the Spirit of God dwells in you.” That’s how it is that “no condemnation,” “not guilty” is ultimately pronounced over us. There’s evidence. That evidence is our new life by the Spirit, a life which is no longer hostile to God, but hostile to sin.
There’s much more to think on with this text. It’s the prelude to the central and greatest chapter of Romans. Any thoughts from anyone out there?