《The Biblical Illustrator – Romans (Ch. 6b~8a)》

I. What is meant by the body of death of which the believer complains.

1. Indwelling sin is called the body of this death, as it is the effect and remains of that spiritual death to which all men are subject in unregeneracy.

2. The remains of sin in the believer is called the body of this death, on account of the deadness and dulness of spirit in the service of God, which it so often produces.

3. Remaining depravity is called the body of death, because it tends to death.

II. The grief and pain which remaining depravity occasions to the believer.

1. Remaining depravity is thus painful and grievous to the Christian, from his acquaintance with its evil and malignant nature.

2. Remaining sin is thus painful to the Christian, from the constant struggle which it maintains with grace within the heart. Even in eminent saints the contest is often singularly obstinate and painful; for where there is strong grace there are also, sometimes, strong corruptions. Besides, where there is eminent spirituality of mind, there is an aspiration after a freedom from imperfections which scarcely belongs to the present state.

III. The earnest longings and confident and joyful assurance of deliverance from indwelling sin which the Christian entertains.

1. Mark his earnest longings--“Who shall deliver me?” The language implies how well the Christian knows he cannot deliver himself from the body of sin. This is the habitual desire of his soul--the habitual object of his pursuit. For this end he prays, he praises, he reads, he hears, he communicates. So earnest, in short, is his desire of deliverance, that he welcomes with this view two things most unwelcome to the feelings of nature affliction and death.

2. Mark his confident and joyful assurance of deliverance. Weak in himself, the Christian is yet strong in the Lord. All the victories he has hitherto achieved have been through the faith and by the might of the Redeemer. All the victories he shall yet acquire shall be obtained in the same way.

3. Mark the gratitude of the Christian for this anticipated and glorious deliverance. Sin is the cause of all the other evils in which he has been involved, and when sin is destroyed within and put forever away, nothing can be wanting to perfect his blessedness. Well then does it become him to cherish the feeling and utter the language of thankfulness. (James Kirkwood.)

The spectre of the old nature

1. Some years ago a number of peculiar photographs were circulated by spiritualists. Two portraits appeared on the same card, one clear and the other obscure. The fully developed portrait was the obvious likeness of the living person; and the indistinct portrait was supposed to be the likeness of some dead friend, produced by supernatural agency. The mystery, however, was found to admit of an easy scientific explanation. It not unfrequently happens that the portrait of a person is so deeply impressed on the glass of the negative, that although the plate is thoroughly cleansed with strong acid, the picture cannot be removed, although it is made invisible. When such a plate is used over again, the original image faintly reappears along with the new portrait. So is it in the experience of the Christian. He has been washed in the blood of Christ; and beholding the glory of Christ as in a glass, he is changed into the same image. And yet the ghost of his former sinfulness persists in reappearing with the image of the new man. So deeply are the traces of the former godless life impressed upon the soul, that even the sanctification of the Spirit, carried on through discipline, burning as corrosive acid, cannot altogether remove them.

2. The photographer also has a process by which the obliterated picture may at any time be revived. And so it was with the apostle. The sin that so easily beset him returned with fresh power in circumstances favourable to it.

I. The “body of death” is not something that has come to us from without, an infected garment that may be thrown aside whenever we please. It is our own corrupt self, not our individual sins or evil habits. And this body of death disintegrates the purity and unity of the soul and destroys the love of God and man which is its true life. It acts like an evil leaven, corrupting and decomposing every good feeling and heavenly principle, and gradually assimilating our being to itself. There is a peculiar disease which often destroys the silkworm before it has woven its cocoon. It is caused by a species of white mould which grows rapidly within the body of the worm at the expense of its nutritive fluids; all the interior organs being gradually converted into a mass of flocculent vegetable matter. Thus the silkworm, instead of going on in the natural order of development to produce the beautiful winged moth, higher in the scale of existence, retrogrades to the lower condition of the inert senseless vegetable. And like this is the effect of the body of death in the soul of man. The heart cleaves to the dust of the earth, and man, made in the image of God, instead of developing a higher and purer nature, is reduced to the low, mean condition of the slave of Satan.

II. None but those who have attained to some measure of the experience of St. Paul can know the full wretchedness caused by this body of death. The careless have no idea of the agony of a soul under a sense of sin; of the tyranny which it exercises and the misery which it works. And even in the experience of many Christians there is but little of this peculiar wretchedness. Conviction is in too many instances superficial, and a mere impulse or emotion is regarded as a sign of conversion; and hence many are deluded by a false hope, having little knowledge of the law of God or sensibility to the depravity of their own hearts. But such was not the experience of St. Paul. The body of corruption that he bore about with him darkened and embittered all his Christian experience. And so it is with every true Christian. It is not the spectre of the future, or the dread of the punishment of sin, that he fears, for there is no condemnation to those who are in Christ Jesus; but the spectre of the sinful past and the pressure of the present evil nature. The sin which he fancied was so superficial that a few years’ running in the Christian course would shake it off, he finds is in reality deep rooted in his very nature, requiring a life long battle. The fearful foes which he bears in his own bosom--sins of unrestrained appetite, sins that spring from past habits, frequently triumph over him; and all this fills him almost with despair--not of God, but of himself--and extorts from him the groan, “O wretched man that I am!” etc.

III. The evil to be cured is beyond human remedy. The various influences that act upon us from without--instruction, example, education, the discipline of life--cannot deliver us from this body of death.

IV. The work is Christ’s and not man’s. We are to fight the battle in His name and strength, and to leave the issue in His hands. He will deliver us in His own way and time. Conclusion: We can reverse the illustration with which I began. If behind our renewed self is the spectral form of our old self, let us remember that behind all is the image of God in which we were created. The soul, however lost, darkened, and defaced, still retains some lineaments of the Divine impression with which it was once stamped. The image haunts us always; it is the ideal from which we have fallen and towards which we are to be conformed. To rescue that image of God, the Son of God assumed our nature, lived our life, and died our death; and His Spirit becomes incarnate in our heart and life, and prolongs the work of Christ in us in His own sanctifying work. And as our nature becomes more and more like Christ’s, so by degrees the old nature photographed by sin upon the soul will cease to haunt us, and the image of Christ will become more and more vivid. And at length only one image will remain. We shall see Him as He is, and we shall become like Him. (H. Macmillan, LL. D.)

The body becoming a second personality

The writer represents himself as having two personalities--the inner man, and the outer man, i.e., the body. A word or two about the human body.

I. It is in the unregenerate man a personality. “I am carnal,” that is, I am become flesh. This is an abnormal, a guilty, and a perilous fact. The right place of the body is that of the organ, which the mind should use for its own high purpose. But this, through the pampering of its own senses, and through the creation of new desires and appetites, becomes such a power over man that Paul represents it as a personality, the thing becomes an ego.

II. As a personality it becomes a tyrant. It is represented in this chapter as a personality that enslaves, slays, destroys the soul, the inner man. It is a “body of death.” It drags the soul to death When man becomes conscious of this tyranny, as he does when the “commandment” flashes upon the conscience, the soul becomes intensely miserable, and a fierce battle sets in between the two personalities in man. The man cries out, “What shall I do to be saved?” “Who shall deliver me?”

III. As a tyrant it can only be crushed by Christ. In the fierce battle Christ came to the rescue, and struck the tyrant down. In this Epistle the writer shows that man struggled to deliver himself--

1. Under the teachings of nature, but failed (see chap. 1). He became more enslaved in materialism.

2. Under the influence of Judaism, but failed. By the deeds of the law no man was justified or made right. Under Judaism men filled up the measure of their iniquities. Who, or what, then, could deliver? No philosophers, poets, or teachers. Only one. “Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ.” (D. Thomas, D. D.)

The body of death

1. St. Paul was not thinking with any fear of death. Indeed, toil worn and heart wearied as he was, he often would have been glad, had it been the Lord’s will. There was something that to a mind like Paul’s was worse than death. It was the dominion of the carnal nature which strove to overrule the spiritual. The body of sin was to him “the body of death.” Who should deliver him from it?

2. Now, is the feeling from which such a cry as Paul’s proceeds a real and noble feeling, or is it the mere outcry of ignorance and superstition? There are not wanting those who would say the latter. “Why trouble ourselves,” says one of these apostles of the new religion of science, “about matters of which, however important they may be, we do know nothing, and can know nothing? We live in a world full of misery and ignorance; and the plain duty of each and all of us is to try and make the little corner he can influence somewhat less miserable and ignorant. To do this effectually, it is necessary to be possessed of only two beliefs; that we can learn much of the order of nature; and that our own will has a considerable influence on the course of events.” That is all that we need attend to. Any idea of God and a moral law belongs to cloudland. But is there not an instinct within us which rebels against this cool setting aside of everything that cannot be seen or handled? And is that instinct a low one? or is it the instinct of minds that come nearest to Divine?

3. Which is the higher type of man--which do you feel has got the firmer grip of the realities of life--the man calmly bending over the facts of outward nature, and striving to secure, as far as he can, conformity to them: or, the man, like Paul, believing that there was a moral law of which he had fallen short, a Divine order with which he was not in harmony--good and evil, light and darkness, God and the devil, being to him tremendous realities--his soul being the battlefield of a war between them, in the agony and shock of which conflict he is constrained to cry out for a higher than human help? I should say the man in the storm and stress of the spiritual battle; and I should say that to deny the reality of the sense of such a conflict was to deny facts which are as obvious to the spiritual intelligence as the fact that two and two make four is to the ordinary reason, and was to malign facts which are much higher and nobler than any mere fact of science, as the life of man is higher and nobler than the life of rocks or seas.

4. Minds wholly engrossed with intellectual or selfish pursuits may be unconscious of this conflict, and disbelieve its existence in other minds. So may minds that have reached that stage which the apostle describes as “dead in sin”; but to other minds, minds within which conscience still lives, within which exclusive devotion to one thought or interest has not obliterated every other, this conflict is a stern reality. Who that has lived a life with any spiritual element in it, and higher than the mere animal’s or worldling’s, has not known that consciousness, and known its terror and power of darkness when it was roused into active life? it is of this consciousness Paul speaks. Under the pressure of it he cries out, “Who shall deliver me from the body of this death?”

5. And what answer does he find to that cry? Does the order of nature, or the powers of his own will help him here? Does not the very sight of the unbroken calm and steadfast regularity of the law and order of external nature add new bitterness to the conviction that he has forgotten a higher law and disturbed a still more gracious order? Is not the very conviction of the weakness of his own will one of the most terrible elements in his distress? Speak to a man under this consciousness of the power of sin about finding help to resist, through studying the laws of that nature of which he is himself a part, and through exercising that will, whose feebleness appalls him, and you mock him, as if you spoke to a man in a raging fever of the necessity of studying his own temperament and constitution, and of the duty of keeping himself cool. What is wanted in either case is help from some source of energy outside himself, who should restore the wasted strength from his own fountains of life--who should say to the internal conflict, “Peace, be still.” And that is what Paul found in Christ. He found it nowhere else. It is not to be found in knowledge, in science, in philosophy, in nature, in culture, in self.

6. Now, how did Paul find this in Christ? How may all find it? He was speaking about something infinitely more terrible than the punishment of sin, viz., the dominion of sin. What he wanted was an actual deliverance from an actual foe--not a promise of exemption from some future evil. And it was this that Paul realised in Christ. To him to live was Christ. The presence and the power of Christ possessed him. It was in this he found the strength which gave him the victory over the body of death. He found that strength in the consciousness that he was not a lonely soldier, fighting against an overpowering enemy, and in the dark, but that One was with him who had come from heaven itself to reveal to him that God was on his side, that he was fighting God’s battle, that the struggle was needed for his perfecting as the child of God. It was in the strength of this that he was able to give thanks for his deliverance from the “body of death.”

7. The consciousness of this struggle, the engagement in it in the strength of Christ, the victory of the higher over the lower, are in all the necessary conditions of spiritual health and continued life. To deny the reality of that conflict, and of the Divine life for which it prepares us, does not prove that these are not real and true. I take a man who does not know the “Old Hundredth” from “God Save the Queen,” and play him a piece of the sweetest music, and he says there is no harmony in it. I show a man who is colour blind two beautifully contrasted tints, and he sees but one dull hue: but still the music and the beauty of the colours exist, though not for him, not for the incapable ear and the undiscerning eye. So with the spiritual life. It is for the spiritual. (R. H. Story, D. D.)

The body of death

In Virgil there is an account of an ancient king, who was so unnaturally cruel in his punishments, that he used to chain a dead man to a living one. It was impossible for the poor wretch to separate himself from his disgusting burden. The carcase was bound fast to his body, its hands to his hands, its face to his face, its lips to his lips; it lay down and rose up whenever he did; it moved about with him whithersoever he went, till the welcome moment when death came to his relief. And many suppose that it was in reference to this that Paul cried out: “O wretched man that I am!” etc. Whether this be so or not, sin is a body of death, which we all carry about with us. And while I do not wish to shock your taste, yet I do wish to give you some impression of the unclean, impure, offensive nature of sin. And think--if our souls are polluted with such a stain--oh! think what we must be in the eyes of that God in whose sight the very heavens are not clean, and who charges His angels with folly. (E. Woods.)

The body of death

Doddridge thus paraphrases the latter half of this verse: “Who shall rescue me, miserable captive as I am, from the body of this death, from this continued burden which I carry about with me, and which is cumbersome and odious as a dead carcase tied to a living body, to be dragged along with it wherever it goes?” He adds in a note: “It is well known that some ancient writers mention this as a cruelty practised by some tyrants upon miserable captives who felt into their hands; and a more forcible and expressive image of the sad case represented cannot surely enter into the mind of man.” “Of this atrocious practice one of the most remarkable instances is that mentioned by Virgil when describing the tyrannous conduct of Mezentius:--

The living and the dead at his command

Were coupled, face to face, and hand to hand;

Till, choked with stench, in loathed embraces tied,

The lingering wretches pined away and died.--(Dryden.)

Doddridge is not by any means singular in his opinion that the apostle derives an allusion from this horrid punishment; although perhaps the text is sufficiently intelligible without the illustration it thus receives. Philo, in an analogous passage, more obviously alludes to it, describing the body as a burden to the soul, carried about like a dead carcase, which may not till death be laid aside.” (Kitto.) During the reign of Richard I, the following curious law was enacted for the government of those going by sea to the Holy Land--“He who kills a man on shipboard shall be bound to the dead body and thrown into the sea; if a man be killed on shore the slayer shall be bound to the dead body and buried with it.”

I thank God through Jesus Christ our Lord.

Christ the Deliverer

I. Man’s need.

1. While man is, in special organs, inferior to one and another of the animals, he is collectively by far the superior of everyone. And yet, large as he is, man is not happy in any proportion to his nature, and to the hints and fore gleams which that nature gives. He has, in being clothed with flesh, all the points of contact with the physical world that the ox or the falcon has. He is born; he grows up with all the instincts and passions of animal life, and without them he could not maintain his foothold upon the earth. But man is also a creature of affections, which, in variety, compass and force, leave the lower creation in a vivid contrast. He is endowed with reason, moral sentiment and spiritual life; but he has learned but very imperfectly how to carry himself so that every part of his nature shall have fair play. The animal propensities are predominant. Here, then, begins the conflict between man’s physical life and his moral life--the strife of gentleness, purity, joy, peace, and faith, against selfishness, pride, and appetites of various kinds.

2. To all souls that have been raised to their true life the struggle has been always severe. To have the power over our whole organisation without a despotism of our animal and selfish nature is the problem of practical life. How can I maintain the fulness of every part, and yet have harmony and relative subordination, so that the appetites shall serve the body, and the affections not be dragged down by the appetites; so that the moral sentiments and the reason shall shine clear and beautiful?

II. What remedies have proposed!

1. To give way to that which is strongest, has been one special method of settling the conflict. Kill the higher feelings and then let the lower ones romp and riot like animals in a field--this gives a brilliant opening to life; but it gives a dismal close to it. For what is more hideous than a sullen old man burnt out with evil? When I see men suppressing all qualms, and going into the full enjoyment of sensuous life, I think of a party entering the Mammoth Cave with candles enough to bring them back, but setting them all on fire at once. The world is a cave. They that burn out all their powers and passions in the beginning of life at last wander in great darkness, and lie down to mourn and die.

2. Another remedy has been in superstition. Men have sought to cover this conflict, rather than to heal it.

3. Others have compromised by morality. But this, which is an average of man’s conduct with the customs and laws of the time in which he lives, comes nowhere near touching that radical conflict which there is between the flesh and the spirit.

4. Then comes philosophy, and deals with it in two ways. It propounds to men maxims and wise rules. It expounds the benefit of good, and the evils of bad conduct. And then it proposes certain rules of doing what we cannot help, and of suffering what we cannot throw off. And it is all very well. So is rosewater where a man is wounded unto death. It is not less fragrant because it is not remedial; but if regarded as a remedy, how poor it is!

5. Then comes scientific empiricism, and prescribes the observance of natural laws; but how many men in life know these laws? How many men are so placed that if they did know them, they would be able to use them? You might as well take a babe of days, and place a medicine chest before it, and say, “Rise, and select the right medicine, and you shall live.”

III. What, then, is the final remedy? What does Christianity offer in this case?

1. It undertakes to so bring God within the reach of every being in the world, that He shall exert a controlling power on the spiritual realms of man’s nature, and, by giving power to it, overbalance and overbear the despotism of the radical passions and appetites. There is a story of a missionary who was sent out to preach the gospel to the slaves; but he found that they went forth so early, and came back so late, and were so spent, that they could not hear. There was nobody to preach to them unless he should accompany them in their labour. So he went and sold himself to their master, who put him in the gang with them. For the privilege of going out with these slaves, and making them feel that he loved them, and would benefit them, he worked with them, and suffered with them; and while they worked, he taught; and as they came back he taught; and he won their ear; and the grace of God sprang up in many of these darkened hearts. That is the story over again of God manifest in the flesh.

2. Many things can be done under personal influence that you cannot in any other way. My father said to me, when I was a little boy, “Henry, take these letters to the post office.” I was a brave boy; yet I had imagination. I saw behind every thicket some shadowy form; and I heard trees say strange and weird things; and in the dark concave above I could hear flitting spirits. As I stepped out of the door, Charles Smith, a great thick-lipped black man, who was always doing kind things, said, “I will go with you.” Oh! sweeter music never came out of any instrument than that. The heaven was just as full, and the earth was just as full as before; but now I had somebody to go with me. It was not that I thought he was going to fight for me. But I had somebody to succour me. Let anything be done by direction and how different it is from its being done by personal inspiration. “Ah! are the Zebedees, then, so poor? John, take a quarter of beef and carry it down, with my compliments. No, stop; fill up that chest, put in those cordials, lay them on the cart, and bring it round, and I will drive down myself.” Down I go; and on entering the house I hold out both hands, and say, “Why, my old friend, I am glad I found you out. I understand the world has gone hard with you. I came down to say that you have one friend, at any rate. Now do not be discouraged; keep up a good heart.” And when I am gone, the man wipes his eyes, and says, “God knows that that man’s shaking my hands gave me more joy than all that he brought. It was himself that I wanted.” The old prophet, when he went into the house where the widow’s son lay dead, put his hands on the child’s hands, and stretched himself across the child’s body, and the spirit of life came back. Oh, if, when men are in trouble, there were some man to measure his whole stature against them, and give them the warmth of his sympathy, how many would be saved! That is the philosophy of salvation through Christ--a great soul come down to take care of little souls; a great heart beating its warm blood into our little pinched hearts, that do not know how to get blood enough for themselves. It is this that gives my upper nature strength, and hope, and elasticity, and victory.

Conclusion: We learn--