Romans Says It All

I see God as presenting a loving three-fold approach to fully redeem and liberate lost mankind to the purpose for which we were created. These three stages are nowhere more clearly explained and presented to us than in the great Roman letter. Let’s now examine them more closely, always bearing in mind their ultimate goal: that man was originally created and now re-created in Christ to find his place in God and He in us.

The first stage may be called the outward approach. Man starts out as an extrovert, or at least he seeks to live like one. To look too far within might be disturbing. He tries to live on the surface; work, pleasure, practical interests, social and religious activities, the world’s merry-go-round. So it is from the outside that God approaches him. He can understand a God in heaven; he can see a Savior in history; he can recognize the sins he himself has committed. On this level, then, the gospel is preached to him.
Look at the first five chapters of Romans, where more plainly than anywhere else in Scripture, the way of salvation is presented. First, “God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men” (1:18). Then the sins of men are exposed in loathsome detail, and attributed to a worship of the creature rather than the Creator (1:21-32). The coming day of the righteous judgment of God is proclaimed (2:5-11). No pronouncements could be in plainer language: a child can understand them. The verdict of guilty on all the world is unmistakably foretold for the simple reason that all have sinned (3:19-23).
The gospel of free grace is then presented in the same practical, objective and reasonable form. There is a way by which the guilty are pronounced righteous. God has a worthy substitute for all to see at an exact place and on a fixed date: Jesus Christ (3:24-25). And it is not by works of self-effort but by “believing on Him who justifies the ungodly (3:27-28). To that man or woman who so believes, “his faith is counted for righteousness” (4:3-5).
The primitive forest-dweller, the little child, or alternatively, the sophisticated intellectual, hedonist, religious, can all understand such facts, if they will.
It does not deal with any such matters as our dwelling in God and He in us; it does not draw attention to the ramifications of the self-life, or raise questions of soul and spirit. In these first five chapters of Romans, up to 5:11, no reference is made to an inner relationship to God, except the one statement that “the love of God is shed abroad in our hearts by the Holy Spirit.”
But what a change in Romans 6! What does Paul mean when he suddenly alters the emphasis from Christ’s dying to my having died? (6:2). This takes us at once from the objective, outward approach to the second stage: the internal but still independent approach – from the historical to the mystical and spiritual. Anyone can understand the historical fact of the Savior dying for us, but who can understand the statement that we are dead? Quite obviously, physically speaking, we are not dead! And still less buried, as 6:4 says! Now we are passing on to where man really lives – within himself.
We have seen how the natural man will escape the discomfort of looking within himself, if he can, and God meets him where he lives. But, when he has come to Christ, and the Son has been revealed in him as his Savior, it will not be long before he finds out that the real problems of life are within. At his birth, it was his past sins that concerned him; but now he discovers that it is not the sins, but the sinner that must be dealt with. “Shall we continue in sin?” asks the apostle. The rebirthed Christian now wants to follow Christ, but what is he to do with the influences that rise up to prevent him? There are the attractions of the world, the distractions of home and business, the deadness in prayer and Bible study, the powerlessness in witness. He has to face the fact that the joy of sins forgiven, the gift of eternal life, the knowledge of Jesus as Savior and Friend does not give him the inner release and victory he needs. Often he seems to be still overpowered by sin and self; he struggles, he resolves, he prays; but one powerful sin or another keeps winning him over.
Paul gives the answer as no other writer in the New Testament. He leads us now into this second stage, to which the first was a gateway, and from which the third is a normal and necessary continuation.
He now begins to open up an inner relationship with God. For the saved man, though he does know Christ, he normally regards Him as apart from himself, often even outside himself, and sometimes so separate that there appears a great distance between them. Sometimes this especially appears to be so in prayer, or in time of crisis and bewilderment. Even very often, from our pulpits, no nearer presentation of Christ is given to the believer than that He is a Friend close at hand. The veil of a false separation is left over the eyes. Here, of course, lies the great error. It leaves man to do the very thing he was never created nor redeemed to do, to carry on by self-effort helped, he hopes, by the assistance of God.
We see in Romans 6 how Paul pointed out that in our redeemed experience of salvation by faith and new birth in Christ, we do not continue in sin. The reason is that as our Lord died and rose again as representing us, we then died with Him to being  sin-indwelt and rose with Him to being Christ-indwelt, as symbolized by our burial and rising in our water baptism.
But this is based on a further startling fact of a different kind – that we are no longer “under law, but under grace,” and that we are “dead to law” as well as “dead to sin.” But wait a minute! If we are not under law, don’t we mistakenly conclude that we shall easily slip back into sin living? Paul then opens to us the basic radical delusion that we have lived in since our human birth – the lie of us being independent, self-managing selves who must therefore see to it that we respond to law by our self-efforts. Not so.
Paul then points out that in fact we have always been just slaves, either to the sin-owner or the righteousness owner; branches bearing the fruit of either the false vine or the True Vine; married and producers of the seed of either Satan-husband or Christ-husband. There never has been such a thing as us being independent, self-producing human selves, and responding ourselves to a law of evil or good.
Paul proceeds to Romans 7 to explain his own experience of discovery and release from his false deceived bondage in this radical misconception, and thus his freedom in Christ to a totally liberated life. In Romans 7:7-25 Paul turns from general statements to the strictly personal. How do I find that the Christian life works? How do you? To explain, Paul does a big thing. He deliberately backtracks from his actual present experience as “dead to the law” and aligns himself with every born-again believer, using the present tense of “I, I, I.” He shares with us his earlier years of spiritual adolescence, and finally his searching and wrestling right through to the final answer for himself, and thus for all of us.
Paul’s use of the present tense about himself in sharing what he had long left behind has been misunderstood through all these succeeding years by millions of sincere believers, who have themselves not entered into the final understanding. Thinking that the furthest a believer can know in life is humiliation, struggles and constant failures under sin’s apparent dominion, they have falsely deduced a “two nature” condition, as if we humans are permanently caught up in the opposing strife of sin and holiness natures. Then we would have to oscillate despairingly between them and take them for granted as our normal experience.
The truth is that our God-created human self is merely a neutral vessel, or container. In Romans 7:17-18, Paul described it as being in itself neither the good nor the bad. It is merely the fruit producer of whichever vine it is a branch of and it can never be a branch of both at once.
Paul describes in detail his past dramatic experience. It was the sudden impact of that tenth commandment, with its “Thou shalt not covet,” which so rudely awakened him. He had been blissfully ignorant (7:9) and that is how all the world lives until confronted by the law. Paul had been “delighting in the law” (7:22). But under the lie of independent self, when that “Thou shalt not covet” struck him, he blindly thought, “No, of course I won’t and don’t.”
Then the blast hit him. Paul found an influence over which he had no control, which he named sin. He was devastated, not that there were these sin drives, but because he thought he ought to be able to control them. “I want to do good but there is an evil presence influencing me” (7:22). “I want to do the good and not the evil” (repeated in verses 14, 15, 18, 19 and 21).
There He says, “I am a wretched man” (7:24), a new-born Christian but still a slave to sin. Where lies the trouble? Is there a remedy?
The trouble is in that deceived, independent “I” popping up 32 times in those 19 verses. It is the enormous delusion which the law came to expose.
So all self-effort is Satan-backed effort whether good or bad in appearance. Paul lived with a godly nature of Christ (as all Christians do) but was externally influence by Satan.
In his self-delusion Paul was so ashamed and humiliated that he said he was like a slain man (7:7-11).
While in our deceived, self-relying state, we have to be confronted with the law and the standards by which the universe was created to function. These laws were first embodied outwardly for our enlightenment in those Ten Commandments from which any deviation finally brings total destruction. We are forced to accept the realization that first we didn’t fulfill them (conviction of sin) and second, we can’t fulfill them which is the final discovery of this Romans 7 chapter. You have no independent human ability to keep or not keep the law.
Now we move with Paul into Romans 8. Here he comes right out with the third and final stage of God’s approach to man – the internal and dependent rather than independent approach.
What Paul said he had “reckoned” on in 6:11, he now says he “realizes” (8:2). The governing principle, “the law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus,” has set him free. Now at the summit there is no condemnation. We are freed from that false self guilt – we are Spirit people in outer bodies. Now we are under Christ’s law with no escape. That old law standard, which had seemed unattainable, is now our natural way of living – “the righteousness of the law fulfilled in us”(8:3-4). Paul lays unique emphasis on life being the Spirit in us. Nowhere else in the New Testament is this said in such plainness. There are 15 mentions of the Spirit in chapter 8 in place of those many “I’s” in the previous chapter.
Paul says, “Get this clear! We are now Spirit people. Christ is living our life. We are walking His way (8:3). We think His thoughts (8:5-6). He in us counteracts those former self-for-self thought patterns.”
Certainly there are flesh pulls – sin’s self-for-self influence getting at us through all the world’s atmosphere around us. But we don’t resist them by any false self-effort. We recognize and admit them, but then we affirm who we ARE and know we ARE – Christ in our forms; and our faith affirmation puts to death those influences (8:13).
The normal background to our daily lives is the Spirit’s witness that we actually are God’s children (8:16).
From the moment in 8:17 when he opens up the incredible destiny of us humans being co-inheritors of the universe with God’s Son, Paul changes the tone of what we are to experience in our daily lives. This talk of sufferings comes as a shock until we see at the end of the chapter that those are the devastating condition in which we, as sons, operate triumphantly as Christ people.
Paul says the animal and material creation around us is engulfed in suffering – living in tension. The deliverance will come through the sons of God, but the methods aren’t explained in detail (8:19-22).
The Paul goes a glorious step further. He opens up the hidden purpose behind our suffering and disturbed conditions.  He says these are necessary training years on earth. But we must not confuse God’s soul transforming operations, taking place in us through those constant trials and pressures, with the total basuc transformation of human spirit already taken place. Growth in conforming us to the image of Christ (8:29) is the daily spontaneous development of trusting in our Christ union.
And then that glorious chapter ending verses of total security – we will be forever enveloped in the love of God as His child and nothing “shall be able to separate us from the love of God which is in Christ Jesus our Lord” (8:39).

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