Romans 8:3“God has done what the law . . . could not do. By sending own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh and for sin, he condemned sin in the flesh.”
Continuing in this short study in the eighth chapter of Romans, they state that even as Paul continues to unfold the marvelous benefits of the gospel, he never forgets what he has already said, and he seeks to make sure that we do not forget it either. In order to appreciate the consequences of the gospel appropriately, we must remember what God has done for us in Christ Jesus alone. The minute we forget that and try to serve God and enjoy the benefits of the gospel without a proper grounding in the gospel, our Christian lives will experience a downward spiral.
Ezekiel 18:4 “Behold, all souls are mine; the soul of the father as well as the soul of the son is mine: the soul who sins shall die.”
In the last post about Romans 8:1, the Apostle Paul reminds us that there is no condemnation for those who are in Christ, and Romans 8:3 explains why we are not under condemnation. We are never to think that in forgiving us, the Lord simply waves away the just demands of His law and ignores the sentence that His law pronounces upon fallen people. That unrealistic way of thinking is called “easy believism”, not justice. God will never fail to condemn our sin—the only question is where this condemnation will take place. The reason we do not suffer God’s condemnation is not because He sets the condemnation aside; rather, it is because the condemnation does not take place in us, but in Jesus Christ. As the Apostle tells us, our Father “condemned sin in the flesh” of His Son. He did not set aside His law—He upheld it in Christ for our sake. In God’s Son, there is no condemnation for His people. There is condemnation for their sin, but it is condemned in Christ on the cross and removed.
2 Corinthians 5:21 “For our sake he made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.”
In God’s plan of Salvation, it was because our Savior Jesus Christ came in the likeness of sinful flesh that this could be accomplished. Here the Apostle Paul is using the term “flesh” as a synonym for human nature as it was originally created and not as an identifier of those aspects of people that are opposed to God. To be the true mediator between God and human beings, the Son of God had to take on a human nature and live as a human being. His human nature is entirely in common with ours except for one thing—it never suffered the effects of the fall by sin. Christ is a true man, but He is said to have the likeness of sinful flesh because His flesh—His humanity—has never been tainted by sin. The early church father John Chrysostom writes, “Christ did not have sinful flesh but flesh which, though it was like ours by nature, was sinless. From this it is plain that flesh is not sinful by nature; when God created mankind and “it was good. It was not by taking on a different kind of flesh nor by changing ours into something different that Christ caused it to gain the victory over sin and death.”
Blessed in Christ
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