I’M going to keep my opening comment short with just one brief observation, so as to get right to our study.
Have you ever noticed incongruities, or maybe more accurately, oxymorons of the Christian life? Here’s one for example: Laboring to enter into Rest.
There remains therefore a rest for the people of God. For he who has entered His rest has himself also ceased from his works as God did from His. Let us therefore be diligent to enter that rest, lest anyone fall according to the same example of disobedience. Heb. 4:9-11
DILIGENCE takes effort, it is something you have to work at. We are naturally inclined to “works righteous,” to doing it ourselves. But the fact is, we have to work at not doing it ourselves – to trust in Him who has promised to complete what He has started (Phil. 1:6). We have to labor against our natural inclinations, reject self-effort and enter into a true faith-rest. As our author concluded in the previous comment: self is our greatest enemy, Christ is our only hope. “For to me to live is Christ” (Phil. 1:21). Again, diligence against our natural inclinations.
WITH that, let us see what else our author has to say in this important Romans Seven Reckoning, Chapter 46.
In the inexorable riches of Christ,
Joe
Neh. 8:10, Isa 30:15, Jas 1:2; Prov. 21:30
************
Chapter 46 – Romans 7 Reckoning – Part 3
With Paul, we came to recognize an internal law: when we would do good, evil was present with us. That is, we saw another law in our members, warring against the law of our mind, and bringing us into captivity to the law of sin which is in our members (Rom. 7:21, 23). All this has been specifically designed by the Spirit to bring us finally to the blessed condition of defeat where we cry from the heart, “O wretched man that I am! who shall deliver me from the body of this death?” (Rom. 7:24). Victory is found only through our realization of defeat: “I thank God through Jesus Christ our Lord” (Rom. 7:25).
First, we learn that our having died in Christ on the cross gives us the ground for freedom from the power of sin. But unless we learn the answer to the bondage of the principle of law, we will be right back in the defeat of Romans Seven, no matter how hard we reckon. Law reveals sin and produces bondage. The answer to the principle of sin prepares us for the answer to the principle of law. Reckoning is the key to both, and both have to do with the death of the cross and our life in Christ. “But now we have been discharged from the law, having died to that wherein we were held, so that we serve in newness of the spirit, and not in oldness of the letter” (Rom. 7:6, ASV). As Paul tells us in verse 1, as long as we lived and walked in the self-life we were under the principle and dominion of law.
But thanks be to God, we not only died to the principle of sin in Christ on the cross, but there we also died to (out from the dominion of) the principle of law! Further, we were not only thereby freed from the “oldness of the letter,” but were joined to Him in “newness of spirit.” “Wherefore, my brethren, ye also were made dead to the law through the body of Christ; that ye should be joined to another, even to him who was raised from the dead, that we might bring forth fruit unto God” (Rom. 7:4, ASV).
Here again we must be reminded that the power for deliverance from the law does not reside in the fact that we have died unto it, but in our relationship to the risen Liberator. “Christ the power of God” (1 Cor. 1:24). Unless we clearly reckon upon our having died to the principle of law, we are constantly under the pall of failing to meet our spiritual obligations. On the other hand, when we rest in our risen Lord we are more aware of His sufficiency than we are of the claims of law upon us, and we are able to walk in the “liberty wherewith Christ hath made us free” (Gal. 5:1). “Come unto me, all ye that labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest” (Matt. 11:28). …to be continued
