Romans 8:3-4, What God has Done for Us

³ For God has done what the law, weakened by the flesh, could not do. By sending his own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh and for sin, he condemned sin in the flesh,

Those who are Jews by birth come to realize that belonging to the one whom the resurrection has identified as Israel’s Messiah means both the fulfillment of their aspirations as loyal Jews and the radical redrawing of their identity as the people of God. When someone comes to be “in the Messiah,” by baptism and faith, the only identity that now matters is the new, messianic one. As 2 Corinthians 5:17 states, “if anyone is in the Messiah, there is a new creation: old things have gone, and everything has become new.”

“Flesh” for Paul denotes the present corruptible, decaying world and humans; the new creation, and the new body, will be incorruptible. That is the somewhat technical sense in which “flesh and blood cannot inherit God’s kingdom.” The present “flesh” will decay and die, but God will raise his people from the dead into a new body like that of the risen Jesus.

The law could not give life. Therefore, God condemned sin, so that the law’s life-giving verdict might be fulfilled in us (v. 4).

⁴ in order that the righteous requirement of the law might be fulfilled in us, who walk not according to the flesh but according to the Spirit.

The start of verse 4 (“in order that”) shows that the latter work of the Spirit is the purpose of the former death of Jesus.

Only after Jesus death on the cross and resurrection from the dead, can the Spirit be breathed on the disciples as seen in John 20:22. 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. Sin had to be condemned—not just receiving the judicial verdict of condemnation, but having that sentence duly carried out. So, now there is no condemnation for those in Christ Jesus, because on the cross God condemned sin. The death of the Messiah, as the means of sin’s condemnation, results in there being no condemnation for those in the Messiah. He dies under the weight of sin; his people do not. Therefore Jesus’s death is “substitutionary” and an “atonement.”

Note that Paul does not say that God “condemned Jesus.” God condemned Sin—in the flesh of the Messiah. This is how the story of ancient Israel, the scriptural narrative from Adam through Abraham and Moses and David and the exile is finally resolved. In this continuity, the picture of present and future redemption in the rest of chapter 8 stretches back to creation itself.

The Torah brings Adamic Sin to larger-than-life size, precisely and paradoxically in Israel, so that it could be dealt with there. The purpose of Torah, according to Paul, was to lure Sin into one place, namely Israel, and there to let it do its worst, to become its full, horrid self—so that in the person of Israel’s representative, the Messiah, it might then be dealt with once and for all.

The exile of God’s people, their subjugation at the hands of the pagan world (Rome), reached its final extreme in the execution of Israel’s king outside his capital city. The Messiah represents Israel in himself; in his crucifixion, he draws Israel’s whole vocation on to himself. Sin has done its worst raising itself to its full height; and God, having planned this strategy, is able finally to condemn it right there. God’s second self, his only Son, has taken the heaped-up hatred, bitterness, sin, and death of the world on to himself. This is not an abstract “doctrine of atonement,” a legal fiction somewhere up in the air. This is the historical story of God’s people, Abraham’s family, called to be God’s partners in dealing with the problem of Adam. That purpose is finally complete when Torah’s curse falls on Israel’s anointed representative.

Here, then, we are at the heart of all Christian theology. God made humans to be his stewards, reflecting his wise image in the world, so that he might himself come into his world as the ultimate steward of creation. Humans were made as appropriate vehicles for God’s self-expression in his world. Israel was called as the vessel for the self-expression of God’s rescuing love. Davidic Messiahship was called into being to bring Israel’s task and destiny into focus on one figure, royal, rejected, resurrected, reigning. All this is here in Romans 8:1-4, dense and compact as only Paul could make it!