Romans 9-11, Being in the Spirit Part I

Thus, Paul writes verses 9-11:

⁹ You, however, are not in the flesh but in the Spirit, if in fact the Spirit of God dwells in you. Anyone who does not have the Spirit of Christ does not belong to him. [Since it is the Spirit alone who brings one into relationship with Christ, there can be no relationship with him without the Spirit. This is where the “free will” argument disintegrates.] ¹⁰ But if Christ is in you, although the body is dead because of sin, the Spirit is life because of righteousness. [For Paul, the human spirit is not alive until it is quickened by the Holy Spirit. It is by the Spirit that the risen Christ dwells in you.] ¹¹ If the Spirit of him who raised Jesus from the dead dwells in you, he who raised Christ Jesus from the dead will also give life to your mortal bodies through his Spirit who dwells in you.

This is Wright’s translation of these verses:

^9a But you are not flesh-determined people but spirit-determined people, ^9b if the Messiah’s spirit dwells in you; ^9c but if someone doesn’t have the Messiah’s spirit, they are not one of his people. ¹⁰ But if the Messiah really is in you, then, though the body is dead because of sin, the spirit is life because of covenant justice. ¹¹ So then, if the spirit of the one who raised Jesus from the dead dwells in you, the one who raised the Messiah from the dead will give life to your mortal bodies also, through his spirit who dwells in you.

According to Tom Wright: These three verses convey a sense of mounting excitement, as the goal is glimpsed in Jesus the Messiah (v. 10) and then, by the spirit, is guaranteed to the Messiah’s people (v. 11). The result is clear: there is no condemnation because of the sure and certain promise of the resurrection.

The natural temptation of a modern western mind is to hear “flesh” in terms of “physicality”—solid material substance—and “spirit” in terms of non-material reality. But that is not how a first-century Jew would hear those words. “Flesh” refers to the corruptible, decaying world; to corruptible, decaying human life within it; and then, very specifically, to Jews “according to the flesh,” highlighting the problem we saw in chapter 7 that the Jewish people, for all their great privilege of God’s calling and the giving of Torah, are nevertheless still “in Adam.”

But are we not all, Christian and none-Christian alike, still “in the flesh?” Yes, but we don’t conduct our lives in a fleshly way. We may still as human beings be headed for decay and death, but we are not living “according to the flesh.” This meaning of “flesh” (sarx) is why, for Paul, the resurrection body is not “flesh” (sarx) but “spirit” (soma). By contrast, when Paul uses the phrase “flesh and blood,” he means “humanity in its present corruptible state.” That is why in 1 Corinthians 15:50, after talking about the resurrection body, he declares that “flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom.”

Tomorrow we will see what else Wright has to say about 8:9-11.