“No Condemnation”

“There is therefore now no condemnation to those who are in Christ Jesus... For what the law could not do in that it was weak through the flesh, God did by sending His own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh.” (Romans 8:1, 3)

There are two kinds of coffee: percolated and instant. Percolated coffee takes longer to make because it has to go through the brewing process. The book of Romans is like percolated coffee. We cannot get instant coffee out of Romans chapter 8. We must go through the preceding seven chapters. Those are the percolator. But the result is that much richer. Only when we have been through those chapters do we get to the “therefore.” The preceding chapters deal with the total sinfulness of all humanity, as well as with the failure of religion to change man’s sinful nature. Using the examples of Abraham and David (see chapter 4), with a comparison between Adam and Christ (see chapter 5), Paul moves on in chapter 6 to reveal God’s remedy for the old man: execution. God doesn’t patch up the old man. He doesn’t reform him. He executes him! The good news is that this execution took place when Jesus died on the cross.

Romans 7 deals with our relationship to the Law. I always used to think, Why come to the law after all that? But I have learned that the ultimate hurdle we have to get over, the last stage of this percolator, is how we relate to the Law. Without the percolator, we cannot live in Romans 8, because the essential condition is “no condemnation.” The moment in which we come under condemnation is the moment when we are out of the Spirit-controlled life of Romans 8. The devil’s main objective is to bring us under condemnation. The objective of God’s Word, especially in Romans, is to deliver us from condemnation.