Romans 8 begins with the mind-blowing good news that “there is no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus.” But Paul follows that up with one heavy dose of good news after another. The Spirit has set us free from sin and death (Romans 8:2), because God did what no one else ever figured out how to do – destroying sin on the cross (8:3). And now, living in tune with God’s will is truly possible because sin is out of the way and God’s Spirit is guiding us (8:4).
As per usual in Romans, the language of the Exodus is on full display here. There is freedom for the people of God from that which enslaves, namely sin.
We don’t mean just one thing when we use the word sin. At its most literal, sin is missing the mark, aiming for the bullseye and not quite landing there. We’re only human, after all. But it’s more than something we calculate on a case by case, bullseye by bullseye basis. Sin is a current, a frequency. Sin not only misses the mark, but places us in a different current than that of God’s love and will. More than a series of isolated mistakes, sin gets us operating on a frequency that cannot get in tune with God’s. Where sin goes unchecked, we can’t even get on God’s wavelength. But that’s not all we mean by this word, either. Sin is described in Romans as its own proper character in the story. It has a will. It acts. It enslaves (6:6). It controls (6:12). “Sin seized an opportunity in the law, deceived me through it and killed me!” (7:12) We might as well be talking about the devil. In Romans, sin is the name we give to the evil that manipulates and seeks to destroy us.
And this is why there is no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus – because sin, and not us, was condemned on the cross in the body of Jesus (8:3). Just as Pharaoh is drawn into his own demise at the Red Sea, the cross is the location where Jesus took all sin, the totality of human violence and hatred, into himself so that it could die on the cross with him. Sin wants to condemn us (5:18), but God’s plan all along was not to condemn us, but to condemn sin itself, to draw it all into one place and annihilate it for good.
There’s an old Latin name for this: Christus Victor. It means what it sounds like – Christ is victorious over sin and death. And because of that, Paul goes on, we who are in Christ are free to “fulfill the just requirement of the law (8:4),” that is, free to live in the patterns of holiness that God had always intended for us. And we are free to walk in the Spirit, to now swim in the same current as God’s love and will.
We have received the news. Sin was condemned and defeated. Christ is victorious and we are free from that sin that once threatened to destroy us. Life, moving forward, looks completely different and new. What will we do with that good news? What will it look like to walk in the Spirit today? This week? This year?
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