Tom Wright, Paul for Everyone
ROMANS 8:1–4
God’s Action in Messiah and Spirit
1 So, therefore, there is no condemnation for those in the Messiah, Jesus! 2 Why not? Because the law of the spirit—the one who gives life in the Messiah, Jesus—released you from the law of sin and death.
3 For God has done what the law (being weak because of human flesh) was incapable of doing. God sent his own son in the likeness of sinful flesh, and as a sin-offering; and, right there in the flesh, he condemned sin. 4 This was in order that the right and proper verdict of the law could be fulfilled in us, as we live not according to the flesh but according to the spirit.
When we lived in the English Midlands, I was once visited by two men researching a potential television programme. There had been a lot of talk about ‘Middle England’, they said. Since I lived more or less right in the middle of England, what did I think about it?
It was a faintly ridiculous idea, and though we had an interesting chat I never heard what came of it. There is, in fact, a roundabout a few miles south of where we lived, which pretentiously called itself ‘Midpoint’ or something like that, claiming to be the centre of the country. But of course with a country the odd shape of England there are many different places that could say the same.
When I was teaching undergraduates, I sometimes used to ask them to find a passage which seemed to be right at the centre of Paul’s thinking. Like the geographical question, it is impossible to answer, because of the many-sidedness of his writing; but the verses now before us have as strong a claim as any other passage I know. They have a big, thoroughly Pauline picture of God, father, son and spirit; they contain one of Paul’s clearest ever statements about what was accomplished on the cross; they draw together both his critique of the Jewish law and the seeds of his view of how that law is strangely fulfilled in and through the gospel; and they hold out the glorious, and typically Pauline,
hope that there is indeed ‘no condemnation’ for those in the Messiah. A feast of good Pauline themes, in fact.
Faced with all this richness—not to mention the fact that this passage has been a favourite of many preachers for many years, the source of many prayers and hymns, and was turned into a whole cantata by J. S. Bach—we could be forgiven for being a bit bewildered, and failing to notice the role it plays in the actual argument of the letter, which is of course the primary thing one should always look for before delving into the detail. Though the mood and the tone of voice have changed drastically from the end of chapter 7, the same argument is still in process, as we can see by the continual mention of the law through verses 1–4, and on, in our next passage, to verse 7. The larger argument, in fact, of which chapter 7 forms the first section, continues in chapter 8 as far as verse 11. There we discover how it is that the intention of the law (to give life) is finally and gloriously achieved when, by the spirit, God gives resurrection life to all those who belong to the Messiah, Jesus. In our present passage the foundation for that conclusion is firmly laid, as Paul unveils (rather as in 3:21) the ‘but now’ of the gospel, the good news which addresses the problems and puzzles that the whole human race, including Israel, would otherwise still face.
This passage, too, opens a whole set of further discussions which take the rest of chapter 8 to address, notably concerned with the work of the spirit. This, in turn, contributes to the great theme of assurance which Paul sums up in the final paragraph (8:31–39), anticipating it in verse 1 with his great shout of triumph which in turn looks back to 5:1–11, and indeed to 5:1–2 in particular. The present passage and the next one (8:1–4 and 8:5–11) stand together as, simultaneously, the conclusion of the argument of Romans 7 and the introduction to the argument of Romans 8. No wonder they are so dense and tight-packed—though not, fortunately, as difficult to unravel as some of Paul’s other close writing.
I have often remarked that one of Paul’s regular styles of developing an argument is like the opening up of a flower. Out of my window I can see rose bushes. It is winter; they are surrounded by snow; but here and there you can just make out tiny little shoots. At some stage in the late spring they will turn into rosebuds. Then the rosebuds will open and reveal a wonderful flower. And I will think back to the tiny shoots and reflect that the whole rosebud was contained within the shoot, if only I could have seen it.
The present paragraph is an excellent example of this writing style. Verse 1 announces the main point Paul is going to make from now to the end of the chapter: there is no condemnation for those in the Messiah. Verse 2 offers the beginnings of an explanation, but it is so compressed that it will take quite a lot of inspection under a microscope before we can see what exactly it means. No matter; wait for the bud to develop and grow. Verses 3 and 4 open it out so we can see it better. Then verses 5–8 will widen the flower further. Finally, in verses 9–11, the rose will be fully open, releasing its fragrance to all within reach. This should teach us something of how to read Paul: don’t stop at a single verse and wonder why it’s so dense. See it as part of a larger, growing statement and celebration.
No condemnation! This assurance can of course only carry its full force for someone who has pondered carefully the seriousness of sin and the reality of God’s judgment. Anyone who imagined that sin wasn’t that serious, or that God wouldn’t judge it anyway, would probably shrug their shoulders at Romans 8:1. But then anyone like that probably wouldn’t have read this far anyway. The more interesting question about the verse is: why does Paul say ‘therefore’ at the beginning? Where he left the argument at the end of chapter 7 hardly encourages such a shout of triumph. One might have expected him to say, ‘There is therefore a lot of gloom and doom to be faced.’
The answer is not far away, in the string of ‘because’ sentences that follow in the next verses. Indeed, in the Greek, verses 2, 3, 5 and 6 all contain the little word that means ‘because’ or ‘for’, indicating that each step in the argument is explaining what has gone before. There is no condemnation, because the spirit-law has set you free from the sin-law, because God has acted in his son and his spirit to condemn sin and provide life, because there are two types of human beings and you are the spirit-type, because these two types are heading, respectively, for death and life. There is no condemnation, because of all this.
We should not suppose that the word ‘law’ in these verses means anything other than ‘God’s law’. Just as in the closing verses of chapter 3 and chapter 7, ‘law’ is not a ‘general principle’ or ‘system’. Paul revels in the paradox of all this. The spirit has been at work to do what the law wanted to do—to give life, moral life in the present, resurrection life in the future. The law looks on at what God is doing, knowing it hadn’t been able to do it itself, but celebrating the fact that God has done it. It is fulfilled (verse 4).
But how can God do this? Will sin, the old enemy, not strike back again? Well, that remains possible, as Paul knew only too well. But sin has received its death-wound. Before the spirit can be unleashed to blow like a spring gale through the dead wood of the world, the power of evil needs to be broken. The way that needs to happen is for sin to be condemned—not just the passing of sentence, but its execution. Paul declares that this is precisely what has happened in the death of God’s son, the Messiah. This is one of the points where we hear echoes of almost every chapter in the book, not least of the opening statement of the gospel in 1:3–4.
How does this ‘atonement theology’ actually work? Paul is writing in great excitement, but also with great precision. First, God sent his own son, which as we saw in 5:8 meant that God has not sent someone else, but has come in person. For the entire passage to make sense, we have to presuppose that by ‘God’s son’ here Paul means, not just Jesus as Messiah (though he means that too; it is vital in his argument) but Jesus as God’s own second self. Next, the son came ‘in the likeness of sinful flesh’; in other words, to the very point where the problem of chapter 7 had been identified (see particularly 7:14 and 7:25). Sin, as we saw in 5:20 and 7:13, had become ‘exceedingly sinful’ through the law; God specifically intended that it should. Now Israel, in whom that increase of sinfulness had occurred, was summed up in one man, the representative king, the Messiah. The weight of the world’s sin was focused on Israel; the weight of Israel’s sin was focused on the Messiah. And the Messiah died a criminal’s death, with ‘King of the Jews’ written above his head. At that moment, God condemned sin. He condemned sin ‘in his flesh’. He had cornered it and condemned it. As the prophet had said, ‘the punishment that brought us peace fell upon him; and with his stripes we are healed’ (Isaiah 53:5).
Notice two things about the way Paul says this. He does not say that God condemned Jesus, but that he condemned sin in the flesh of Jesus. He can say other similar things, too (e.g. 2 Corinthians 5:21; Galatians 3:13) but this is his clearest statement. And he also draws in a different image, that of the sacrifice for sins in the Old Testament, the specific sacrifice known as the sin-offering. Why?
In the Old Testament, the sin-offering is the sacrifice used when someone has committed sin unwittingly (not knowing it was wrong) or unwillingly (knowing it was wrong but not intending to do it). Paul has analysed the plight of Israel under the law in such a way that it falls exactly into these categories. ‘The good I want to do, I don’t do; the evil I don’t want is what I do.’ The ‘miserable person’ of 7:24 is answered by God’s provision of the sin-offering in 8:3, just as, at a more general level, the condemned sinner of 1:18–3:20 is promised that there is ‘no condemnation’ for those who are ‘in the Messiah’, because the condemnation of sin has already taken place in him.
There is no space left to reflect further on verse 4. It belongs, in any case, closely with the verses that follow, to which we now turn. But stay for a moment with the opening verses of chapter 8. You might even want to learn them by heart. You will seldom come upon a fuller or more exact statement of what God achieved in Jesus the Messiah, his son. Like someone in the desert discovering a small spring emerging from a huge cavern of water, there is enough here to live on for quite some time.
Tom Wright, Paul for Everyone: Romans Part 1: Chapters 1-8 (London: Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, 2004), 134–139.
