Into the Heart of Romans: A Deep Dive into Paul's Greatest Letter

by Tom Wright

As will become clear in the rest of Romans 8, the spirit constitutes the new mode in which the living presence of God himself will dwell in and with his people, constituting them as the new ‘Temple’. But for God to dwell in the Temple, the Temple must be cleansed of everything that pollutes it, everything that smells of death. How is that to be done? With the Torah itself, it is impossible – not because there is anything wrong with Torah, but because Torah was given to the Adamic, ‘fleshly’ people of Israel. As Moses already warned (in Deuteronomy 32 and elsewhere), and as one prophet after another insisted, the people seemed incapable of keeping the holy, just and good law. The law was thus ‘weak because of human flesh’, unable to give the life it promised (7.10). And the problem with ‘flesh’, as Paul has analysed it in 7.7–25, is ‘Sin’, hamartia, which as we said is here more than just the sum total of human wrongdoing. It is the dark, quasi-demonic power that used even the holy law as a base of operations to whisper its seductions (7.8–11). What had to happen, therefore, is that hamartia itself needed to be ‘condemned’ – not just receiving the judicial verdict of condemnation, but having that sentence duly carried out. And that, declares Paul, is what God has done – in the death of his son. ‘Right there in the flesh, [God] condemned sin.’