A Burden Lifted

At first glance, Romans 7 and 8 would almost appear to contradict each other. In chapter 6, Paul lays out how it's necessary for me (and for you) to quit living to sin and in sin, because we have died in Christ to sin, and we have been raised up to new life in Him. Life must be lived righteously. It's in chapter 7 though, that Paul tells us that it is impossible to live a righteous life that fulfills the Law's requirements. It boils down to the fact that sin is more powerful than our flesh. We just aren't equipped with the power to live in complete, perfect compliance with the Law.

It's in the last verses of chapter 7 that things get itchy. "O wretched man that I am! who shall deliver me from the body of this death?" Our bodies cannot vanquish sin or produce righteousness. There is a story from tradition, that holds that the Romans had a particularly gruesome form of punishment for certain crimes. They would take the lawbreaker, and tightly chain him to a dead body. If the offender could even get up and walk with the weight of the burdensome corpse, no one was allowed to assist them upon pain of death under Roman law. The person usually ended up dying with their fleshly counterpart still attached. This punishment was called, "the body of death." If this is what Paul was alluding to, I don't know, but it would have been entirely appropriate. A decaying, weighty, awful companion that we are unable to get away from, dragging us down to death with it.

The answer to Paul's question arrives in the first verses of chapter 8. For anyone who walks after the Spirit in Christ Jesus, there is no condemnation. The Holy Spirit provides us with the power to live the way the Law requires us to. The same Holy Spirit who raised up the lifeless body of our Lord to life again is the one who likewise, raises our own bodies of death unto everlasting life.