To be dead IN sin, is to be identified with the first Adam, Adam in rebellion. To be dead TO sin, all believers have been given a new dead to sin status, a dead to sin identity with the second Adam, Jesus Christ, given to us at the very point of our belief of Paul’s good news.
Why continue to consider your relationship with God to be based on your former identity? Why not consider your relationship with God to be based solely on your new identity and that alone being joined to God’s son.
God gave you a brand new identity. God can no longer view you according to your former identity. God views you the only way he can view you since you believed the good news of your salvation. What security we have IN our union with the Savior.
You are the Body of Christ! Why not come to the understanding that God now relates to you the only way he can relate to you, and that is according to your new identity in his son. God cannot relate to you, he will not relate to you according to your former identity in Adam, Adam in rebellion.
This is the reason for Romans Chapter 6, understanding identity is key. So, what does it mean to die in your sins? It means to die with your identity in Adam, Adam in rebellion; to die with that identification intact. Reconciliation and Sanctification, two different judicial transactions.
God is no longer imputing the sins of the world unto the world, because he imputed those sins to his son. Now, a person needs to be placed into God’s son, so that they can have God’s son’s righteousness attributed freely to their account.
If Satan’s desire is to be just like the most high God, and in that attempt Satan used false prophets to deceive people in time past, and he is using ministers of righteousness to deceive people during this age of grace, and since we know that he will be using a false Christ to deceive people in the age to follow this age of grace, why should we have difficulty understanding Satan’s counterfeiting efforts when it comes to the work of God’s energizing power from on high in this dispensation?
What will cause God to bring a halt to this present dispensation, and return Israel as his channel of blessing to the earth? A continual downward slide concerning human behavior, things will have progressed to a heightened or elevated state just prior to God pulling the plug on this present day program.
We have not been given a pass where tribulation is concerned. It certainly can get much worse than it is today for believers. It is just an Age of Grace tribulation and the Time of Jacob’s tribulation are entirely two different things. Persecution and suffering troubling circumstances in a wide variety of ways will very likely increase as this Age of Grace winds onward towards its culmination.
Satan will be overtly manifesting himself as the power behind the miraculous during the tribulation period. Right now, he is covertly manifesting himself as the power source behind the miracles. Satan distracts from the truth through the miraculous. Satan’s miracles will never stand on Paul’s message, because they want to distract from this message. Satan is an angel of light, a messenger of goodness of righteousness, law righteousness. He is sitting on your shoulder and trying to convince you that you do not have to sin.
Why so much confusion over Romans 8:1? Most of it has to with ignoring the context of the prior two chapters where Paul has been dealing with the issue of the believer’s identity in Christ. But, since the word “walk” and the word “flesh” were added to this opening sentence, and the idea of condemnation is added to the mix.
Where do most people’s minds immediately take them? The conduct of the Christian, people think Paul has left his context here and he is moving into the area of practice. Not so! The remainder of this chapter has to do with identity, not practice.
The more that we believe in the reality of our identity and focus on that identity, the more God is free to affect our practice, and he will by producing his fruit in our lives. The flesh is incapable of producing fruit acceptable to God. Believers who try to produce that fruit themselves through whatever religious system, through whatever legal practice of do’s and don’ts will only find themselves fruitless in their efforts.
Believer’s who strive to perfect their practice in an attempt to achieve or maintain a particular status with God is what Paul tells us he tried to do back in Romans chapter 7, how did that work for our apostle? The more Paul tried to make his flesh perform, the less his flesh was willing to conform.
The flesh cannot be perfected, it cannot be changed, and it cannot be Christianized, so render it dead. The more we focus on perfecting the flesh, the more we will end up minding the things of the flesh, and Paul wants us to put the flesh behind us.
Thank God, that in his perspective we are not in the flesh, but we are safe and secure in Christ. Whose righteousness? Christ’s righteousness freely attributed to the account of the one who takes God at his Word concerning what Christ accomplished for our sins.
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