Dear Friends of "Dial Daily Bread,"
If you have ever been in despair, be encouraged, the apostle Paul himself was there too. It was in Romans 7 when he cried out, "O wretched man that I am! Who will deliver me from this body of death?" (vs. 24).
Then imagine his delight when he gets into the joy of Romans 8: "For the law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus has made me free from the law of sin and death" (vs. 2).
"No condemnation" means release from what the fallen Adam left to us--our inner sense of a verdict of divine judgment, which has hung over us all our lives. Although these feelings of psychic wrong and maladjustment were deep and penetrating, "the law of the Spirit of life" has gone even deeper and is therefore more far reaching. A new principle delivers from the craven sense of fear. Guilt and moral disorder have enslaved us even from infancy.
No psychiatrist can accomplish such a catharsis of the human soul. It heals. Wrongs and anxieties that even our parents were helpless to relieve find inner cleansing. David speaks of the process: "When my father and my mother forsake me [that is, where they must leave off], then the Lord will take care of me" (Psalm 27:10).
Here's a breathtaking bit of good news: "He who takes God for the portion of his inheritance, has a power working in him for righteousness, as much stronger than the power of inherited tendencies to evil, as our heavenly Father is greater than our earthly parents" (Ellet. J. Waggoner).
God the Father solved our problems by "sending His own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh, [and] on account of sin, He condemned sin in the flesh, that the righteous requirement of the law might be fulfilled in us who do not walk according to the flesh but according to the Spirit" (Rom. 8:3, 4).
The word "likeness" means identical, the same as. Christ who was fully God now became fully man. He built a divine-human bridge that spanned the gulf of alienation that sin had made between us and God. Its foundations reach all the way to the deepest root within us of sinful alienation.
--Robert J. Wieland
From the "Dial Daily Bread" Archive: November 26, 2007.
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