The Basis of the Solution–Only Containers

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In eternity, God begat His Son, there by transmuting His own fire self into a light self and becoming the self of other-love. We understand from Genesis that our first parents were created in God’s image, to be containers of His Spirit and expressers of His nature by means of their humanity. To symbolize this planned union, the Tree of Life with its precious fruit was set in the midst of the Garden.

Satan, on the other hand, turned his self of fiery desires into the self-for-self nature of consuming love. And this nature of his is what he infused into us at the Fall, as though it were ours. So man, who was designed to be united with the Spirit of self-for-others, was tricked into yielding to the Satanic spirit of self-for-self (Eph. 2:1-3; John 8:44).

In the present, we have learned and by faith put into practice our Lord Jesus Christ’s Calvary identification with us, as us. As a result, a tremendous change of indwelling spirit has taken place in us; and that deceiver no longer indwells and controls us.

When Paul tells us that we are no longer under that former outer Law of Moses, doesn’t that mean that we shall be given over to a spirit of
license? “God forbid,” pronounces Paul. In our new life our human selves are motivated by, controlled by and spontaneously express the nature of God, by His Spirit united to our spirits. Laying the foundation of this assurance, in Romans 6:16-7:6, Paul there presents one strong evidence
after another that there is no intermediate, “independent me” to b taken over, unless we foolishly believe it.

“First,” he says, “we were always slaves, and a slave just obeys his owner.” We had handed ourselves over to owner Sin-Satan, to express his
sin-nature. Now, however, we have become God’s willing slaves through the obedience of faith which takes Him at His word, and we express His nature of holiness.

“Put it this way,” Paul explains. “We were free in our sinning, with no response to God’s law. Now we are free in our right living, with no
response to Satan’s laws. And there is no “you,” with an in-between or independent life of your own (Rom. 6:16-20).

Next Paul introduces a second illustration: a fruit-bearing tree. He describes how we are now producing right, good fruit in our lives,
whereas we were ashamed of the former fruit (Rom. 7:4-5; 6:21-22). He wants us to understand that we are only branches which have changed
trees. We never produced fruit without a tree!

To sum up, we learn through the slave and branch analogies that we never exercised any kind of in between life as self-operators. We are
slaves of either one owner or another, or branches of either one vine or the other. Therefore, the idea that we humans were self-operating selves
and had a “nature” or quality of life of our own has been a vast human illusion—there never was such a thing. We have been created to produce the way of life of our Deity Creator and Operator. Only first we had to experience and discard through Calvary that false deity operator, who
produced that opposite, negative way of life.

In Romans 7:1-6, Paul uses one further powerful and convincing illustration—the law of marriage, which he speaks of here as the “law of
the husband” (Rom. 7:2). The wife is legally bound to her husband so long as he lives, and he is her “lord” (1 Pet. 3:6); she receives his seed, conceives by it and produces their family.

We humans were “married” at the Fall to our Sin Satan husband and became his sin family, he working in us the “motions of sins” which
produced “fruit unto death” (Rom. 7:5). We had to do this according to the law and demands of marriage, as any change of husbands would have been an “adultery.” It looked hopeless; our husband was not going to die.

But there was One, representing the whole human family, who died as us. So the marriage was dissolved because we died “wherein we were held” (Rom. 7:6). The dissolution of the first marriage and release from that husband meant that in Christ’s resurrection we were immediately
married to another, our risen Savior, and are now under His law.

The law of marriage in Romans 7:1-6 is therefore a continuation by Paul of his two illustrations from Romans 6. For just as we have always been
slaves to an owner and branches producing the fruit of a tree, we have always produced the fruit of a husband. We have never been widows conceiving without a husband.