Romans 8:2, The Law of the Spirit

² For the law of the Spirit of life has set you free in Christ Jesus from the law of sin and death.

Why is that the case? How has that been accomplished? God has done what the law couldn’t do. He has done two things, the first being the basis for the second: 1) the death of his Son and 2) the work of the Spirit.

The problem with the law or Torah was the people to whom it was given were hard-hearted. See Ezekiel 36:26-27: ²⁶ And I will give you a new heart, and a new spirit I will put within you. And I will remove the heart of stone from your flesh and give you a heart of flesh. ²⁷ And I will put my Spirit within you, and cause you to walk in my statutes and be careful to obey my rules.

What God has done in the Messiah’s death, and in the gift of the Spirit, is to give the life which Torah had promised all along.

Life is the goal. This life is given by the Spirit. The Spirit is actively at work within the Messiah’s people. Giving life was Torah’s original objective. Thus Paul can telescope all this together by speaking of the law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus.

Remember, the Spirit is our Advocate!

According to Tom Wright:

God made humans in his own image so that they could reflect God’s wisdom and life-giving rule into his creation. For that, they need to be raised from the dead to take up their ruling responsibilities in the new creation. The problem of sin isn’t just that we become guilty and deserve God’s wrath. It is that we fail to be effective God-reflectors, with the consequence that God’s good creation fell into corruption and decay. An exodus is needed. Romans 8 shows us that a new exodus is underway as the means by which the new genesis is to be achieved. Paul believed that Jesus had accomplished the true, ultimate exodus of which the first exodus was a shadow of things to come. God had come to dwell in the midst of his people, in and as a true image-bearing human, in order both to renew the covenant and thereby to renew the whole creation. And God was now dwelling, by his Spirit, in the hearts and lives of his people, to implement exactly this project. Thus through this new exodus, the work of Messiah and Spirit, God renews the covenant, rescuing humans in order that creation itself may be rescued and restored. Redeemed humans—us—will be in charge of it. That—and not going to heaven—is the vocation of the Messiah’s people. We are, says Paul in 8:29, to be “conformed to the image of God’s Son, so that he might be the firstborn among a large family.”

(Please note that much of what I will be writing in Romans 8 is taken from Tom Wright's book The Heart of Romans)