From Death’s Authority to Life’s Power

I’ve slowly been making my way through Romans lately and I’m finding it fascinating. Right now, in Romans 8, where I’ve been reading the first passage for at least 4 days now, I keep going over the first several verses.

“And because you belong to Him the power of the life-giving Spirit has freed you from the power of sin that leads to death. The law of Moses was unable to save us because of the weakness of our sinful nature. So God sent Jesus and declared an end to sins control over us…” Romans 8:2-3 NLT(with some paraphrasing)

The two times “power” is used can also be translated “law”. So the law of the life-giving Sprit and the law of sin that leads to death.

This got me thinking about different kinds of laws. Vine’s Expository Dictionary defines these two types of laws as such:

• The law of the Sprit is the animating principal by which the Holy Spirit acts as the imparter of life.

• The law of sin is the principle by which sin exerts its influence and power despite the desire to do what is right.

In another verse it says God did not judge people for their sin before the law of Moses was established because there was no law to show the people they were sinning. (Romans 5:13)

Paul goes into great detail in Romans about how we become aware of sin because of the law. All of these concepts have been rolling around in my mind for a while now and I think they’re finally starting to click for me in a way they never have before.

1. Different kinds of laws.

2. Having laws makes us aware of sin.

3. Law = power/authority.

4. No law to hold people accountable = no judgement.

Thinking about our very human, always changing state/federal laws today you can see that laws do have power and authority. You break the laws of the road by speeding, you get a ticket, a fine. You commit murder, you go to prison and possibly receive the death sentence depending on where you live.

You break God’s laws, it brings death – both physical and spiritual.

But there are other laws. There is the law of nature, for example, which dictates seasons and growth cycles. If animals give birth out of season, their offspring may not survive. If plants bloom in the middle of winter, they won’t produce food. And yet to some degree, weather can show up out of season. A hard freeze in late spring can destroy a fruit crop for the year. As humans, we live around laws of nature. Where I live in Northern Utah, I know I can’t safely plant tomatoes outside until the last week of May. If I go against the laws of nature, I get no tomatoes. No matter what law you look at, if you go against that law, there are negative consequences.

When God’s laws are broken, it results in death. Period.

After Adam and Eve sinned, and before Jesus, we were subject to the law of sin only. We had no other choice, we were bound by sin nature from birth. Once the law of Moses was given, people had laws to guide how they lived. These laws were meant to show people what the consequences of sin nature were and to show how God intended his creation to live.

By sinning, Adam broke God’s law for life, and sin created a new law that was written into our DNA. As Paul says in Romans 8:3 The law of Moses was unable to save us because of the weakness of our sinful nature. We could not overcome sin nature by ourselves, no matter how much we wanted to.

You can see this all throughout the Old Testament. David was known as a man after God’s own heart, yet he slept with Bathsheba and had her husband killed. Sin nature.

Solomon was the wisest man on earth, yet in his later years he walked away from God and participated in idolatry that his foreign wives introduced to him. Sin nature.

Moses, who spoke face to face with God disobeyed God and dealt with fear.

Noah got drunk, Abraham lied, Jacob lied and manipulated people. Some of these people had the law of Moses, some didn’t. Yet they knew God, knew there was a difference between right and wrong, and because of sin nature, still found themselves doing wrong.

But after Jesus came and died for our sins, we now have a choice. Follow the law of the life-giving Spirit or continue to follow the law of sin and death. However, because we are still in human bodies, born into sin nature, it’s a choice we have to make constantly. Because sin nature is the principle by which sin exerts its influence and power despite the desire to do what is right. It’s the concept of renewing our minds.

The more time we spend choosing the law of the Spirit, I believe, it should become easier to overcome the influence of the law of sin.

In some ways, we can think of sin nature like an addiction. Once you have an addiction to something it’s incredibly hard to get free of it, especially if you have to do it by yourself. You can hear all the right words, you can know that whatever you’re addicted to isn’t healthy for you, but the pull of that addiction is so strong it feels like it’s out of your control to overcome it.

But if you have help, someone who pulls you out of your addiction, gets you cleaned up, and becomes your support system then it becomes more possible to overcome the addiction. But as you overcome, you have to be aware of your weaknesses that would pull you back to that addiction. The more you stay away from your addiction, the easier it is to stay away from it. But addiction recovery typically includes relapses where the addict goes back to their addiction and has to climb out, or be pulled out over and over. But hopefully, the amount of time between relapses lengthens as we work to overcome the addiction until we reach a place where we no longer relapse.

As Paul says in Romans 8:5-8 “Those who are dominated by the sinful nature think about sinful things, but those who are controlled by the Holy Spirit think about things that please the Spirit. So letting your sinful nature control your mind leads to death. But letting the Spirit control your mind leads to life and peace. That’s why those who are still under the control of their sinful nature can never please God.”

When we accept Jesus as our savior and the Holy Spirit comes to live in us, we get a choice about which law we’re going to choose to live under. Those who have not accepted Jesus as their Savior do not have that same choice. Their only choice is to live in their sin nature. They may have godly morals, but that is the equivalent of someone in the Old Testament trying to follow the law of Moses to the best of their abilities. It doesn't really count because they still only have the law of sin guiding them.

Day in and day out, we have to choose to follow the life-giving law of Christ. But that doesn’t mean we should berate ourselves when sin nature exerts its influence. Sin nature is not who we really are. It’s not who God created us to be and it’s not who He intended us to be. It’s simply an opposing law we have to contend with until we shed our earthly bodies. (Or earth suits for anyone who listened to Christian rock music in the late 90’s early 00’s)

As I’ve been thinking on these things I have been trying to rephrase certain things in my mind. For instance, when I eat too much sugar it is easy for me to tell myself that I failed, I messed up, I going to gain ten pounds and never lose it. I’m an idiot for giving into cravings. But now, I try to tell myself, as Paul did, that it’s just my sin nature acting up. Romans 7:17 “So I am not the one doing wrong; it is sin living in me that does it.”

It’s like the old cartoons where there is a little devil on your shoulder trying to convince you to do things you don’t want to do. If you haven’t renewed your mind, you won’t recognize that it’s the little devil on your shoulder. You'll think it’s you thinking those thoughts. But the closer you get to Jesus, the more time you spend in prayer and in His Word, renewing your mind to His law of life, the more you can recognize that the true you is designed to desire the things of God. And sin nature is no longer a part of who you truly are. The worst it can do is try to exert its influence over you because you still live in a human body. You can’t get rid of the little devil on your shoulder until you shed the human body, but you can begin to listen to it less, distinguish it’s voice from the real you, as well as from God’s voice and remember:

“Now there is no condemnation (blame, punishment, reprimand, criticism) for those who belong to Christ Jesus. And because you belong to Him, the power (law) of the life-giving Spirit has freed you from the power of sin that leads to death.” Romans 8:1-2