Greetings!
Are you seeing the bigger picture of your salvation?
Jesus paid the price for your sins so you could be reconciled to the Father. But He also paid the price for your righteousness. He overcame sin on your behalf, so He could transfuse you with overcoming life. What you could not do,
He did for you — on your behalf. He paid the price; you got it for free.
“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” (Romans 8:3 NASB).
What could the Law not do? The Law could not make us holy. The Law
could not give us power. The Law could only show us the standard, but
could not be the standard in us.
Why could the Law not do it? It’s weakness was that the Law could
only instruct flesh how to behave. The law came to the flesh from the
outside, demanding obedience but not providing the power to obey.
What did God do? Because of the inability of the law to accomplish
God’s agenda, God sent His own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh. He
sent His Son clothed in the vulnerabilities of human flesh, but filled
with the power of heaven. That was His perfect plan for freeing us from
the power of sin — something the law could not do. He sent His Son to
defeat — condemn — sin.
Where did He condemn sin? In other words, in what arena did He
condemn sin? He defeated sin in the flesh of Jesus.
God sent Jesus “in the likeness of sinful flesh.” Jesus’ soul had no taint
of sin in it at the beginning, and He never yielded to temptation, whereby His soul would have become tainted by sin. But Paul is making a very clear statement here that Jesus had the same kind of humanity that we have. He had a soul through which sin can enter. This is why He was able to fight our battle for us.
“He condemned sin in the flesh, so that the requirement of the Law
might be fulfilled in us” (Romans 8:3–4 NASB).
He took on flesh in order to “condemn sin in the flesh” — or beat Satan on his home turf. The word condemned may carry the sense of dethroning or deposing. The Law was able to pass judgment on sin, but only Jesus Himself could overthrow sin’s dominion.
Once He had dethroned sin in His flesh — passing through temptation
and overcoming it by leaning on the life of the Father in Him, that life could be transfused into us so that what the Law aimed at might be fulfilled in us.
During his earthly life, He did for us what the Law could not do. He did
it in the flesh, through a man soul. Then He came to live His victorious,
sin-immune life in us. Jesus came to earth as a real man. He lived out His time on earth wrapped in flesh — a man soul acting through an earth body. That was the arena in which He overcame sin. He condemned sin in His flesh.
Jesus’ Soul Was the Servant of the Spirit Jesus’ was filled and empowered by the Holy Spirit. His obedience was in keeping His man soul subjected to the indwelling Spirit. His man soul was operating through His earthly body, but the Spirit of God was acting through
Him. “It is the Father living in me doing His work.” I think each temptation
was an effort to get Jesus to act in the power of His flesh rather than in the power of the Spirit.
Even when He offered Himself on the Cross, He was acting in the power
of the Spirit. “How much more, then, will the blood of Christ, who through the eternal Spirit offered himself unblemished to God, cleanse our consciences from acts that lead to death, so that we may serve the living God!” (Hebrews 9:14).
I would assert that Satan could not have tempted Him to do evil
because, being holy, evil held no allure for Him. But Satan could tempt Him to do good in the flesh — not because Jesus wanted to sin, but because He wanted to do good. For Jesus, with His flesh limitations, to resist Satan’s subtle, skillful temptations, Jesus had to be in unbroken fellowship with the Father. He had to keep His steps synchronized with the Father’s heart.
Jesus, though He was God and had always been God, voluntarily laid
aside His independent power as God and limited Himself. He had the
body and the soul of a man. He overcame sin as a man depending upon the power of the Father living in Him. He lived in an altar’d state. The life He transfuses into us has accomplished for us everything that we could not do for ourselves. The life has already overcome sin and died to the power of the flesh. The life has brought the flesh back into its proper position, making it the servant of the Spirit.
He did it for you. He did it for me. He left His rightful place in heaven’s throne room to take on our enemy on our behalf. To fight our battle for us and transfuse us with His victory. From heaven, He could not have developed the antibodies against sin and death that would protect
us, because from heaven, He would never encounter temptation. Our
salvation was so precious to Him that when He looked at heaven’s glory
and compared it to the battle that awaited Him, He chose us.
He is God’s everything. It all depends on Him. Apart from Him, I can
do nothing. I have nothing to offer, except His life in me. Reflect
Your sin has been overthrown in the fleshed-out life of Jesus. Receive the
transfusion of His life and just believe that He is flowing in you and can flow through you. Only believe.
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Jennifer Kennedy Dean 2019
© | Legacy Writings
