Romans 8:9-11, Part III (pleasing God)

According to Tom Wright: There is a strand of post-Reformation spirituality that is so anxious to avoid any appearance of works-righteousness that it shies away from any suggestion that anything we can do might actually please God. But if God’s spirit is at work within us, then of course we ought to please God. For Paul, the moral choices implied in verses 5 and 8 (flesh-minded vs. spirit-minded) are themselves part of the promise of resurrection itself. They are about the new way of life that is God’s advance gift from the ultimate future. The spirit comes to us from God’s future, enabling us to live as already-renewed humans even in the midst of a world of sin and death. Bodily resurrection results from the spirit dwelling in us. The spirit comes to dwell within humans. We are then the new Tabernacle. And the spirit will lead God’s redeemed people to their inheritance, which is not heaven but the entire renewed creation.

Paul rereads the exodus-story in the light of all that had gone wrong with the people of Israel. Jesus had chosen Passover—the exodus moment—to do what had to be done. He had given his followers a new version of the exodus-meal, the Passover. The early Christians quite naturally saw themselves as the new-exodus people. And part of the Judean expectation of the second exodus was the longing that Israel’s God would come back in person as he’d always promised. The Judeans had rebuilt the Temple after the return of some of them from Babylon. They had restarted the sacrifices. But the indwelling divine glory had not returned. But Paul, like all the other early Christians, believed that with Jesus and the spirit the promise had in fact been finally fulfilled. With Pentecost, the spirit comes to constitute Jesus’ followers as the new-Temple people, those in whom the glorious divine presence genuinely dwells. Therefore, if God’s spirit dwells in you, then your basic identity is not “in the flesh” but “in the spirit.” When the spirit dwells within us we are in tune with the new-creational purposes of God. We human temples, individually and together, are meant to be signposts pointing forwards to the final new creation of which Paul will speak about in verse 18.

In verse 11, we have a remarkable small window on Paul’s view of what we often call “Life after death.” Once we abandon Platonism, with its view of an immortal soul—something never mentioned in the New Testament—we are left with the question, where are we, who are we, and what are we in between our bodily death and our bodily resurrection? How can we talk wisely and humbly about this intermediate state, this apparent reality which is hardly mentioned in scripture? Part of the answer seems to be that, as God’s spirit has come to dwell within us, enlivening our own spirits, so God’s own spirit will hold on to us hereafter until the time of resurrection. Insofar as God’s spirit has as it were become us, taking on our identity to live and work in and through us, so after death we remain in the multi-track life-giving memory of God’s own spirit, until the time of resurrection. At this point, we ought to marvel at the reality of which Paul is speaking: the reality of the living God coming to dwell not just among us but within us.