Tag Archives: Separation

He lives; you died

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Jesus joins us to Himself, blanketing us with His righteousness as He lives His life in us. He lives; you died; you share His life.(Colossians 3:3-4) In Christ Jesus we have died to sin and are now free from its power. Why? Because through Christ God has eliminated sin as the reason for separation from Him.

Sharing in Jesus’ life is the cornerstone of our relationship with God. While we must not minimize the importance of sharing in His death, it doesn’t end there. To be sure, in Romans 6:5 Paul emphasizes the fact that, “if we have become, united with Him in the likeness His death, certainly we shall also be in the likeness of His resurrection.”

Remembering that in God there only exists life, the only possible outcome of being joined with Christ in His death is that we also share in His resurrection. Just as Christ was raised from the dead, so we too are raised up from our dead old self into glorious new life in God.

Set Free from Law

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In Romans 8:4 Paul talks about there being a “requirement of the Law,” meaning that the law obligates us to obey it in its entirety.(James 2:10) But God knows there is no possibility that we can ever obey His entire law. And since the punishment for failing to do so is spiritual death—separation from God—He had to provide a way to overcome this barrier. So, God’s solution was simply to take the law out of the way as it relates to our relationship with Him.

Paul further explains this truth in Romans 8:3-4: “For what the Law could not do, weak as it was through the flesh, God did: sending His own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh, and as an offering for sin, He condemned sin in the flesh, so that the requirement of the Law might be fulfilled in us, who do not walk according to the flesh but according to the Spirit.”

The effect of having been set free from law—since punishment for breaking it is no longer imputed—is that we are in fact now no longer subject to the realm of the flesh, even though our flesh may continue to brutally oppress us.

Paul puts it this way in Romans 8:9-10: “However, you are not in the flesh but in the Spirit, if indeed the Spirit of God dwells in you…If Christ is in you, though your body is dead because of sin, yet the spirit is alive because of righteousness.” Consequently the outcome for us—unbelievable as it may seem—is that “there is now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus. For the law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus has set you free from the law of sin and death.”(Romans 8:1-2)

Excerpted from: Free from the Power of Sin: The Keys to Growing in God in Spite of Yourself

No Separation from God

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Jesus took the punishment for our sin upon Himself, as a result freeing us from its inevitable consequence—separation from God. When we receive Jesus Christ as our Lord and Redeemer, a secure union is established with God. And since we have now been joined to Him by means of the indwelling presence of the Holy Spirit, we share in all the benefits that Jesus Himself experienced in His resurrection.(Romans 6:5)

The death and resurrection of Christ as it relates to our own death and life in Him is a constantly recurring theme throughout these chapters of Romans. Time and again he brings this issue to the forefront, because Paul knows that understanding this principle is absolutely vital to our spiritual progress.

At the very heart of this truth is the fact that freedom from the power of sin—our death to sin—is guaranteed by our death to law through Christ’s bodily death and resurrection.(Romans 6:14)

Thinking back to Paul’s example in the first few verses of Romans 7 of a married woman, one might say that Jesus was both the old husband (coming in the form of
sinful flesh, dying for sin to free from law), and the new husband (resurrected
to life in God, never to die again). Freedom is now the absolute reality of our
life in Christ because we are no longer bound by what Paul calls, “the law of sin and death.”(Romans 8:2)