The Body of Sin Done Away

…just as in Adam too, when he came under the curse, the whole of human nature fell sick with that curse.

So too we are said to have been raised with Christ and to be seated with him in the heavenly places (Ephesians 2:6).

For even though Emmanuel is above us as God, yet since he became like us as one of us, he has been raised and sits beside God the Father.

So our old self was crucified with him (Romans 6:6), for through the resurrection the power of that ancient curse has been broken.

The body of sin has also been done away with (Romans 6:6). This does not mean the flesh itself, but the inborn savagery of the impulses within it, which always drags the mind down toward what is more shameful and sinks it, as it were, into the mud and marshes of earthier pleasures.

That this too has been accomplished for human nature in Christ, who could doubt, when Paul says plainly, “For what was impossible for the law, in that it was weak through the flesh, God, sending his own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh and for sin, condemned sin in the flesh” (Romans 8:3)?

Do you see, then, how the body of sin has been done away with? For the sting of sin has been condemned in the flesh. It was put to death first in Christ, and the grace has passed from him and through him to us as well.

“Or do you not know, brothers—for I am speaking to those who know the law…” (Romans 7:1).

Everywhere he shows that to seek to be under the law is dangerous.

He urges us rather to long for, and with our whole mind to thirst after, the grace that comes through faith, that is, justification in Christ. He firmly declared that the baptized have been buried with Christ (Romans 6:4), so that, having been put to death to sin, they might live to God in righteousness (Romans 6:11).

That is why he said, “So do not let sin reign in your mortal body, to make you obey its desires. Do not present your members to sin as weapons of unrighteousness, but present yourselves to God as alive from the dead, and your members to God as weapons of righteousness. For sin will no longer have dominion over you, since you are not under law but under grace” (Romans 6:12–14).

See, then, how he commands them to leave the shadow of the law (Hebrews 10:1) and instead to take shelter under the grace that is in Christ.

Yet the Spirit-bearer was well aware that some would surely say, or at least reason to themselves, that in that case the fathers had strayed from the straight road and from life, that the law had done them no good, and that the glories of their way of life had somehow already come to nothing.

For if it is absurd to seek to be under the law, and this was the aim of life for the people of old, how could it not be true to say that they missed what was fitting?

So he who has Christ within him takes up the contest. He skilfully gives the impression that he wishes to speak on behalf of those who lived under the law, but in many ways he turns the argument toward the view that, when the time calls to faith, one must not be too eager to linger over the ancient customs.

This is why he says, “Or do you not know, brothers, for I am speaking to those who know the law, that the law has dominion over a person for as long as he lives?” (Romans 7:1).

This is a general rule, holding both for…