Introduction
Every believer faces a daunting dilemma. The predicament arises from indwelling sin with its agenda and tactics that infests all human bodies from birth to physical death. Of course, Jesus was not born with the dilemma because His birth was without a biological father from whom everyone else inherits indwelling sin.
The biblical record features the personal testimony of a single believer who articulated the dilemma and was guided by God into His solution for the predicament. The following essay recounts that believer’s struggle with indwelling sin, disclosing both sin’s power and methods.
A Biblical Problem
All translations that disclose the origin of the dilemma are subject to a spurious error in the English text. To set this study on the correct course, Paul’s words in Rom. 5:12 should read:
Therefore, just as through one man sin entered into the world, and death through sin, also thus it began to spread to all men on the basis of which all sin.
The “one man” is Adam. “Sin” is indwelling sin. “Death” is physical death. The antecedent of the pronoun “it” is indwelling sin. The comparative conjunction and correlative adverb “just as . . . also thus” mean that the introduction, as well as the spreading, of indwelling sin have a common source that can be traced to the male—i.e., Adam. “All men” means the entire human race—male and female—receive indwelling sin through each one’s respective father. “All sin” means that at some point—probably during adolescence—every member of the human race is irresistibly beguiled by indwelling sin to commit an act which separates that person from God.
Life Following One’s First Act Of Sin
The visible result from one’s indwelling sin leading to one’s first sin is eventual physical death.
Furthermore, each human has a spirit and a soul integrated within a physical body—a body that also houses indwelling sin. The spiritual effects of separation from God due to the first act of sin are threefold and devastating.
The first effect is that God’s Spirit is separated from the person’s own spirit. The person’s spirit then becomes a channel through which Satan and/or his minions can access the human body. The second effect is that the person’s heart—the seat of one’s reason, emotions, and will—becomes immediately and completely unresponsive to God. In biblical parlance, the person has a ‘heart of stone.’
A third effect is that indwelling sin now effectively controls the person’s reasoning, feelings, and actions.
Under the afore-described conditions, the human is now a sinner enslaved to indwelling sin, without any capability of accessing or pleasing God. The sinner does what comes quite naturally—sins. Those sins are credited to the sinner’s account for God’s adjudication and appropriate retribution following physical death.
God’s Solution To The Human Condition Following The First Sin
First and foremost, God’s Spirit sovereignly dispenses new equipment to restore the sinner. The Spirit effects a permanent ‘heart transplant,’ removing the heart of stone and replacing it with a heart that is both receptive and responsive to God. Second, the Spirit provides a new human spirit that is permanently connected to God. This new equipment, installed in a body and co-resident with indwelling sin, is protected by the Spirit (who also permanently indwells the body) from any corruption of the new equipment from indwelling sin’s presence.
The biblical description for such a human with new equipment is that the person is ‘born again.’
At some point in time following the new equipment installation, the person is confronted with a message from God that his/her own sins are forgiven through the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. By the Spirit’s ministry, the new receptive and responsive heart swings into operation upon hearing the message, and believes God’s promise of forgiveness.
Now the person is no longer a sinner by nature, but a saint—i.e., one separated from his/her former sins and separate also from the control of sin dwelling within the saint’s physical body. The saint has eternal life, permanently and irreversibly, will not experience God’s judgment of sinners, and has passed out of spiritual death into spiritual life. But the saint is still susceptible to the influence and passions of indwelling sin. The saint sometimes sins.
The Dilemma Shows Itself
All the world’s religions, except biblical Christianity, teach that a human must do things to please one’s god or gods, thereby hopefully receiving the deity’s blessings. Failure to please the deity runs the risk of experiencing the deity’s displeasure.
Judaism’s tenets around 35 AD were no exception to this form of teaching. So when Saul of Tarsus became born again, his immediate religious reflex was to please God by doing something. That ‘something’ was to obey God’s commandment.
Saul’s experience—the law-keeping Pharisee who later became better known as the apostle Paul—recorded his personal testimony in his letter to Rome (7:7-25). Paul’s experience reveals the dilemma all believers face throughout life after spiritual birth.
Details Of The Dilemma
Paul decided that he must please God by obeying the tenth commandment: “You shall not covet.” Paul, the newly minted saint, discovered he could not obey God’s commandment. In fact, he discovered that deciding to obey the Law actually resulted in his committing lots of sins.
This unanticipated behavior led to the realization that in his newly equipped body, indwelling sin was effectively at work deceiving him into thinking that his new equipment—including the Spirit of God—would promote and enable his own obligatory obedience to the Law. Such was not the case.
To summarize Paul’s dismal experience of failure: using God’s Law given to Moses—the Law which accurately described God’s will for His children—indwelling sin deceived Paul into thinking he had to obey the Law and would surely have the power to do so.
Paul’s new heart was totally willing and committed to obeying God’s will, but in Paul’s body was another entity at work, i.e., indwelling sin, that powerfully and effectively made Paul powerless to execute his own will even though his will was perfectly aligned with God’s.
Here, then, is the believer’s dilemma. On the one hand, the believer desperately wants to, and doggedly tries to, obey God’s Law. On the other hand, those same wishes and attempts to obey God activate indwelling sin that renders the believer powerless to do so. Furthermore, making the attempt to obey God actually promotes additional acts of sin because the believer has become enslaved to indwelling sin through trying to obey the Law.
God’s Solution Of The Believer’s Dilemma
Simply put, God’s ingenious solution to the believer’s dilemma is to remove the believer from the Law, and let someone else—who can and does always obey God’s Law—do so within the believer.
The solution was nothing less than to have Jesus dwell in the believer’s body. Jesus, Himself, by the Spirit’s power overcoming indwelling sin’s power, would fulfill His Father’s will perfectly by operating the believer’s body in obedience to God’s Law.
To illustrate: God’s Law for His child may be summarized biblically by the straightforward statement, “love one another.” Dwelling in Paul by faith, Christ’s love for Paul’s brethren would successfully nullify any coveting. Thus, the Law is fulfilled.
What is the believer’s role in resolving his dilemma? Simply to believe God’s promise that Jesus’ obedient life will be manifested by the Spirit’s power in His child. God will accomplish this despite the counterclaims and pressures of indwelling sin, and other believers, to the contrary.
Conclusion
The believer’s dilemma is solved by God doing what God requires. God’s sovereign grace in this matter—as always—is made functional simply through the believer’s faith.
Sin’s message is: ‘the believer, himself, must obey God’s will.’ In counterintuitive contradistinction, the Spirit’s message is: Jesus’ obedient, Law-fulfilling life, will be manifest by My power–under the Father’s direction–through the believer simply by the believer’s faith.
At the conclusion of his marvelously thorough commentary on Galatians, F. F. Bruce explains, “The religious mind is too prone to subject itself to regulations; the liberating gospel of sovereign grace is too ‘dangerous’ to be allowed unrestrained course. As Paul became less a figure of controversy, as his memory was venerated and his writings canonized, his teaching was overlaid with a new legalism. When, from time to time, someone appeared who understood and proclaimed the genuine message . . . he was liable to be denounced as a subversive character—as, indeed, Paul was in his own day.” However, Paul’s message, as Bruce continues, “. . . with its trumpet-call to Christian freedom, has time and again released the true gospel from the bonds in which well-meaning but misguided people have confined it so that it can once more exert its emancipating power in the life of mankind,”. . . and those who believe the message can, “. . . stand fast in the freedom with which Christ has set them free” (Bruce, F.F. The Epistle To The Galatians. A Commentary of the Greek Text. The New International Greek Testament Commentary, Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1982, 277-278).
To which, one might add: ‘to God alone belongs the glory!’