There Is Now Therefore No Condemnation . . .

All good theology is practical – even the theology that isn’t immediately intuitive.  That is because all good theology has real world consequences.  Sometimes it might take a bit of effort to understand how theology and your practical world intersect, but very often this connection is obvious.  One such place where it is fairly obvious is at the beginning of Romans 8, where Paul spells out the practical consequences of his theology on the Law of the Spirit of Life, and the Law of Sin and Death (Romans 8:1-8). He had just finished explaining in Romans 7 how sin living inside of a person becomes provoked by the law, which then leads a person to embrace sinful passions and to express them in their behaviors. This reality made the law useless. It had no power to change a person for good. It only had power to show a person their true nature. He carefully argued that it isn’t the law that is evil, but rather it is the sin that lives in us. The law is good because it spells out for us the values which God wishes for us to embody, while sin is evil because it opposes God and his values and works against our embodiment of those values as his image bearers. In humbleness, Paul even illustrated this by sharing his own struggles with sin. Famously, he shared how sin keeps him from doing the things he really wants to do, and persuades him to do the very thing that as a child of God he does not want to do.  He famously cried out, “Wretched man that I am! Who will rescue me from this body of death (Romans 7:24-25)?” He then immediately gave thanks to Jesus Christ, and expressed a recognition that there is a divide between his mind, which serves the Law of God, and his flesh which serves the Law of sin. At that point in the letter, he begins chapter 8 with the enormously powerful scripture, “There is now therefore no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus (Romans 8:1).” The word, “therefore,” is the clue to the practical application of Paul’s theology, which he develops further in chapter 8 and elsewhere.  

That theology is that we have died with Christ, and that his death has released us from the old way of the written code.  This means two things. First, it means we are set free from the law because Jesus fulfilled the law’s requirement. He was perfect and sinless, and bore for us the terrible personal sacrifice required by the law. The second thing it means is something more profound than the legal fulfillment at work in what Jesus did with his death. Paul points out that those of us who are in Christ Jesus will set our minds on the things of the Spirit, while those who are in the flesh set their minds on things of the flesh. What this means practically, is that our spiritually transformed minds will actually cause us to embody the law. That person will love God with everything, and will love his neighbor as he loves himself and thereby live out the values of God (Matthew 22:37-40). Not so for the person whose mind is set on the flesh.  That person will be hostile to God (Romans 8:7-8). That person will love himself with everything, and he will love his neighbor only in so far as it serves to please himself. He will embody the values of selfishness. 

The reason that there is no condemnation for the follower of Christ is that Jesus directly received the punishment for that follower. There is also no condemnation because that follower is now supernaturally and spiritually oriented to embody the values of the law rather than oriented to pursue the selfish pleasures of death. He produces fruit for God with his life instead of death, destruction, and the promotion of sin.  And that practical mindset has practical results.