At the risk of sounding very Darby-ish, there is a constant temptation for Christians to try to please God in the power and energy of the flesh. If that sounds too abstract, we might say it a bit differently: there is a constant temptation for Christians to think they have something to offer God.
Of course the opposite error is also a problem, and we'll get to that too.
Let's first start with a very odd statement in Romans 7:17–18, "I know that in me, that is, in my flesh, good does not dwell." That sort of qualification isn't common in the Pauline epistles: "that is, in my flesh." It's not entirely unique, but it's not how Paul usually writes. I've learned to pay attention when Scripture breaks its own cadence like that: when it says something other than I would expect it to say.
Here's the truly odd thing: I might have expected Romans 7:18 to say something like, "I know that in me good does not dwell." I might have expected it to say, "I know that in my flesh good does not dwell." Either of those makes sense. But what it actually says is, "I know that in me, that is in my flesh, good does not dwell." What's the difference there?
It almost sounds like Paul is correcting himself. It almost sounds like he's mis-speaking and has to add a qualifier. But that's clearly not the case: in a letter we'd expect him to strike out a mistake, or even start his letter again. We don't expect him to keep a mistake in his letter and just sort of add a qualifier. So no, that small "that is, in my flesh" isn't correcting a mistake.
The effect of having those two statements together is to on the one hand tell us that there is nothing good in our flesh, but also to point out that the flesh is in us and there's nothing we can do about it. It's not that there is nothing good in me, it's that there is nothing good in me in and of myself. That's the point! That's what this awkward little interruption in the flow of thought in Romans 7 is emphasizing.
Notice how this aligns with the prior verse (Romans 7:17). On the one hand, I can differentiate between the "I" that has been born of God (John 3:3, 1 John 5:1) – that has died with Christ (Romans 6:11) and has been raised with Him too (Colossians 3:1) – and "sin that dwells in me." They're not the same thing. That's a distinction we must not miss. On the other hand, we must recognize that we are in fallen bodies (Romans 8:10) and we cannot do a thing about it. Christ will fix that when He comes for us (Romans 8:23, Philippians 3:20–21). We are waiting for the redemption of our bodies. So there's "me" and there's "my flesh," and they're not the same thing, but we really can't have the one without the other.
And we have to say yet again, there is a ditch on both sides of the road. On the one hand it's easy for us to fall into self-condemnation – perhaps even self-flagellation of some form – where there's nothing but despair as we see our own fallenness. It's all about "woe is me, I am undone" without acknowledging the new creation at all. On the other hand, it's tempting to latch onto the "not I, but sin that dwells in me" and claim some sort of entire sanctification that ignores the very real thoughts and motives we see in our own hearts.
Both of those errors put me at the center and take my eyes off Christ.
How grateful we are that the God who has called us is the God who commanded light to shine from darkness (2 Corinthians 4:6)! The God who needs nothing to work with. The God who created everything from nothing. The God who doesn't need to find something good in me before He can use me... that God is the one who has begun a good work in me and will complete it (Philippians 1:6).
And that God – the God who commanded light to shine from darkness – has put us into this difficult position for a very specific reason: so that we would learn not to trust in ourselves (2 Corinthians 1:9, 2 Corinthians 4:7).
I offended someone once by saying we are not yet completely redeemed. I understand why someone might find that offensive, but it's nothing more than that Romans 8:23 and Philippians 3:20–21 and 1 Corinthians 15:50ff teach. God has redeemed us in the sense that Christ has died for us and there is no more price to be paid. But we experience that redemption in an inside-to-outside process. That process won't be finished until His Son comes to get us, when our bodies will be made like His (Philippians 3:21).
And this is the biggest point of all: God designed it that way. God's not surprised when He looks down and sees a regenerated man stuck in an unregenerated body. He's not trying to come up with a work-around for us until He can apply the fix! No, God has chosen this as the way He redeems lost men and women. He has chosen this as the path His children will take. So let's not rail too hard against it. We can acknowledge the path is hard without questioning God's choice of the path.
Yes, it's hard. But we're on the right path.
So what do we do until Christ comes to redeem our bodies? Well, the first thing is that we are to wait. One prominent feature that Philippians 3:20–21 and Romans 8:23 share is the emphasis on waiting. We're not going to fix this problem, we can't. We're not going to see Christ coming for us and say, "no, I've got this." We can't fix this, only Christ can.
Well, we don't stop waiting. When we stop waiting – when we lose sight of Christ coming for us – then we've taken a big step into apostasy. I remember Darby pointing out that the unjust steward doesn't say his master isn't coming back, he merely says his master is delaying to return. Actually, Darby is so strong on this point, I'll just share some excerpts:
The apostasy of the church consists in saying in heart, as settling itself here, "my Lord delayeth his coming." And so it did. The effect shewn in ruling as lords over the fellow-servants (hierarchical or clerical assumption in the absence of Christ), beating instead of feeding, and intercourse and communion with the world, eating and drinking with the drunken. ("Matthew 24 and 25", Collected Writings, Vol. 24, p. 227)
Verses 42-51. The faithfulness of the church is made to hinge on its watchfulness as regards this truth of the return of Christ. From the moment that it was said, "My lord delays his coming," "then the servant began to smite his fellow servants, and to eat and drink with the drunken." "Therefore be ye also ready," said Jesus, "for the Son of man [not death] comes."Matthew 25:1-13. The expectation of the return of Christ is the exact measure (the thermometer, so to speak) of the life of the church. As the servant became unfaithful the moment he had said, "My lord delays his coming," so it was with the ten virgins, for it is said, they all slept. It was not death, nor the Holy Spirit, that the ten virgins were told to expect; for neither death nor the Holy Spirit is the Bridegroom. All the virgins were found in the same state; the wise ones (the true saints) as well as the foolish ones, who wanted the oil of the Holy Spirit, slept and forgot the immediate return of Christ, as, on the other hand, what wakes them up is the midnight cry that He is coming. ("The Second Coming of Christ", Collected Writings, Vol. 2, p. 292)
So let's not stop waiting.
Second, we're called to glorify God in our bodies (1 Corinthians 6:20). So we're not just to sit around until Christ comes for us. No, we're to use our fallen, sin-riddled bodies to God's glory. Romans 12:1ff gives us a more complete view than 1 Corinthians 6, but the theme is the same: we are called to glorify God in these bodies. We are called to be diligent, not slothful (Romans 12:11).
So don't let's get lazy.
And notice how these two things – waiting for the Lord to come for us, and glorifying God in our bodies – act as guardrails for the ditches on both sides of the road. Are you becoming worldly, forgetting your citizenship is in the heavens, storing up treasure on earth instead of treasure in Heaven? Then you need to meditate on Philippians 3:20–21. Are you becoming weirdly Gnostic, trying to pretend God hasn't called you to live in this world? Are you ignoring your earthly responsibilities because you're too busy staring at the sky? Then you need to meditate on Romans 12:1ff. There's a ditch on both sides of the road.
We are called to live for Christ here in this fallen world, and we are called to wait for Christ. We're pretty good at picking which ditch we'd rather fall into, but we're called to avoid them both. It turns out that doesn't come as naturally to us.
It seems to me that so many problems come from losing sight of the essential truth: it's the God who commanded light to shine from the darkness that has shone in our hearts. It's when we think that God looked into my heart and said, "Now there's something I can work with!" That's when we get into so much trouble.
I'm reminded of the John 8:33, where the Jews say, "We are Abraham's seed, and have never been under bondage to any one; how sayest thou, Ye shall become free?" That's such a ridiculous statement. It's like they were able to turn a blind eye to the fact that they were under Roman occupation. They were paying taxes to Caesar (Matthew 22:21), they had to ask Pilate's permission to execute the death penalty (John 19:1–7). They were anything but free. Their own Scriptures called them servants (Nehemiah 9:36–37). They had managed to expunge from their memory the prayer of Nehemiah, which is a bit of a feat.
It's interesting that Scripture leads us right up to the verge of despair then takes a sudden turn. So on the one hand, there's nothing we can do to remedy our fallen bodies' sinfulness. We can't improve ourselves, if you will. And we're assured that the harder we try to fight against the principle of sin "in our members," the worse we find ourselves sinning (Romans 7:14ff). And we start to think, "so there's nothing I can do, then." But it's right at that verge-of-despair that we find an answer (Romans 7:25).
So there is another hand: there is a last-minute switch right at the edge of despair. Romans 7:25–8:4 and Galatians 5:16 both call this "walking according to the Spirit." John 15:1ff addresses the same problem in terms of being unable to produce anything for God on our own vs. "abiding in Christ." I don't want to say abiding in Christ and walking in the Spirit are synonyms, but they're at least very, very closely related. And they both go against the idea of us producing something on our own.
God hasn't called us, redeemed us, justified us, and saved us so that we could just sit around and do nothing. But our attempts to do anything on our own often result in something far worse than "nothing." The point of life in the new creation is that we are to live for God as branches in the Vine, or as those who are walking in the power of the Spirit of God, or as those who are alive from the dead (Romans 6:13). Trying to live now like we lived then isn't going to work: there's something entirely new going on.
The key is depending on Christ, and there's nothing we hate so much as depending on someone else. We're fine saying we depend on Christ, as long as that's just a platitude. But to really do it – to have no backup plan – that's where we balk and fall back on ourselves.
When we look at the life the epistles urge us to live and try to divorce it from how the epistles tell us to do that, then we end up in this terrible place where we have responsibility and obligation, but we're not able to meet it. This is fundamentally the paradigm that's outlined in Romans 7:5ff. "[W]hen we were in the flesh the passions of sins, which [were] by the law, wrought in our members to bring forth fruit to death." There's not one word in Romans 7 to suggest that the person caught in that experience lacks a right sense of obligation or a correct understanding of what he ought to be doing. The problem is that he find himself entirely unable to do what he knows he ought.
This is the result from trying to separate the what from the how. Not one command in Romans can be obeyed if we obey the first one. There are plenty of that commands in that epistle, and they all rest on the first: "reckon yourselves dead to sin and alive to God in Christ Jesus" (Romans 6:11). That's the first imperative in Romans, and we cannot skip it. But the truth is that we all try. We all try to jump in at Romans 12:1ff without obeying Romans 6:11ff, and it's a disaster every time.
We simply can't obey Romans 12:1ff if we're not going to obey Romans 6:11ff. We can't obey Colossians 3:5ff unless we first learn Colossians 3:1–4. It just doesn't work that way.
And this brings us back to where we started. If we're not going to take the time (and it might take a very long time) to really learn Colossians 3:1–4 and Romans 6:1–11 and all those other very Pauline passages, we will find ourselves trying to become perfect in the power and energy of the flesh. We will find ourselves trying to know God like the unregenerate try to know God. We will find ourselves attempting to please God exactly like the unregenerate try to please God. And we will be just as successful.
We need to learn Romans 7:4; it's only those who have been made dead to the law by the body of Christ can bring forth fruit to God. We need to learn Romans 6:13; it's only those are alive from the dead that can yield themselves to God. Every time we allow ourselves to step outside of that – to build up an identity other than the one Scripture lays out for us – we find ourselves caught in the impossible position of trying to please God in ways we already know don't work.
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