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

by Tom Wright

Paul is making a sharp contrast between those ‘in the flesh’ and those ‘in the spirit’. He is talking about the basic orientation of someone’s life. In particular, he’s talking about the basic mindset, the focus of the mind and its habitual patterns. He clearly doesn’t imagine that Christians are now sinless, or that they never suffer from wandering thoughts or wayward actions. Had they been sinless, he wouldn’t have had to give such frequent moral exhortation. Paul is obviously very concerned, in this letter and elsewhere, about outward bodily behaviour. But here he is thinking particularly of the mind, the thoughts. Verse 5: those in the flesh – I’ve cashed it out in my translation as ‘people whose lives are determined by human flesh’ – think about, focus their minds on, matters to do with the flesh. They focus attention, in other words, on the things he lists in Galatians 5 as ‘works of the flesh’, things such as factionalism and party spirit, jealousy and envy, as well as drunkenness, sexual immorality and so on.