To Sum Up

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The main point has been the startling discovery that we have had really only one problem since the fall of man, and that has been our vast
delusion about ourselves— the lie of Satan concerning his own independence, which he has imparted to us concerning ourselves. As a
consequence, even when we are sinners saved by grace and in the new birth of the Spirit, and even when we have been taken further in Romans 6 to know that through Christ’s death and resurrection the control of us by Satan in his sin nature has been replaced by the control of Christ, we still deludedly regard ourselves as independent persons responsible for living our new way of life and therefore as equally responsible for
discarding the old.

The shock then comes when Paul says that old way of life will have no further control over us because we are “not under the Law but under
grace.” But our immediate reaction is, “Why, that is putting the cart before the horse! Don’t we need the Law to stop us from responding to
the pulls of that old life? Take away the Law and we shall be caught out again.” “Not so,” says Paul. “The opposite is true. Your great basic
deception is that you are self-managing selves. Therefore, what the Law will do while you are still under that delusion is to expose your
helplessness and the fact that you never were created to manage yourselves. And your old sin-manager will take advantage of the Law to
show you that you can’t obey it, but instead keep obeying him. However, because you are too blind to see this until you have been shocked into it, I will illustrate it for you.

Then Paul drives the point home by three illustrations that certainly settle the matter, although still our eyes must be sufficiently opened by the necessary radical shock to us. First, we all are slaves, compelled to do what our owner demands of us, and there is no middle condition in which we are just independent free humans. Second, we are branches, bearing the fruit of the tree of which we are a part, and there is no such thing as
us being independent and not a branch of either tree. Third, we ar married wives under the marriage bond of our husbands and bearing His
children. If our marriage is dissolved by the death of our first husband, then we are immediately married to the other husband. We never were just single and unmarried. These illustrations, of course, show that we were formerly slaves, branches and wives of Satan in his sin nature, but
now we are the same to Christ in His holy nature, and there never has been a just ourselves in imaginary activities of our own.

This point must be driven home never to arise again—that in actual fact we never were self-operating and never did or could manage our own
affairs. For it is in this point that Satan has so grossly deluded us, as he himself is deluded. So that shock has to come, as Paul tells of it in his own experience, and the means in his own experience was the impact of that outer law on him. So down came the Law on new-born Paul in its tenth “Thou shaft not covet” commandment: and because he was very much alive to that illusion of independence, back came his quick response, “Of course I won’t and don’t covet. I am a new man in Christ.” And he found all kinds of what he called “concupiscence” very much alive in him which he could not resist. He surely fell flat on his face and called himself a “slain man.”

But Paul made a unique discovery, which he refers to as his special revelation in his Galatian letter, when he spent three years alone in the
Arabian desert. It was that there is this sin virus deposited in us since the Fall (which he refers to in Romans 5:12-21), and that as our Lord Jesus Christ represented us on the cross, His body was as ours in God’s sight: as though, like us, the sin-expresser (“made sin —2 Cor. 5:21). And when he died, out went that sin spirit, and so out of us, and in the tomb in His
resurrection in came His own Spirit, and so into us. Now with the impact of the Law and Paul’s inability to obey it through the apparent power of indwelling sin, he saw the great lie of the independent self and that, believing this lie, he was only able to respond to the drives and lusts of the false deity. It was the impact of the Law with its demands that awakened him to this delusion. But now he also saw the great deceit of sin on him, because in Christ the sin indweller had been replaced by the Holy Spirit indweller, which fact had been revealed to him in Arabia. So
now suddenly he saw his freedom. All he had to do was to recognize and affirm as fact in himself that “the law of the Spirit of Life in Christ Jesus has set me free from the law of sin and death,” and now the Spirit already in him since his new birth inwardly confirmed that to him.

So the key had been turned in the lock by the exposure of the lie of independent self through the Law. This was the great value of the Law for
him and us. The claims of the Law exposed the lie of his supposed ability to respond to it as though independent. The other lie now exposed to his new-born self was that sin power still had its right and presence in him. No. “Dead to sin” in Christ and now alive in Christ to live by the Spirit.

As simple as that when the Law had done its Romans 7 work by forcing Paul to see there never was a Paul-self who could obey that law. And thus his Arabian revelation of the body death and resurrection of Jesus representing us took Paul right out of Romans 7 into Romans 8 liberty. Then he shares what follows as the fruit of that liberty outlined in chapter 8 in the Spirit-operated life, in the glory of the family relationship with the Father and the Son, the sharing of the eternal inheritance, and the present prolonged period in which we still have the full impact of the consequences of the Fall on our humanity and world conditions, and live the life of overcoming faith, as Jesus Himself did

The sufferings of this present life give us our great constant opportunities for the conquests of faith in every kind of adverse conditions. In the walk and warfare of faith we are experiencing new ways of proving the goodness of God in all kinds of deliverances, though sometimes the
highest is that martyrdom and extremity of suffering in the faith of the resurrection, as it says in Hebrews 11:35-38: “of whom the world was not
worthy.

And in all these the watching, hungry world is seeing the inner victories outwardly demonstrated in peace, joy, hope, faith and love for our
enemies, by which Christ is manifested in our bodies “whether by life or by death,” and countless others have been inspired to follow the same
way.