2 Corinthians 5:14 For the love of Christ constraineth us; because we thus judge, that if one died for all, then were all dead” Also Colossians 3:3 “For you are dead, and your life is hid with Christ in God.”
Ok, so legally when Christ died for all, EVERYONE legally became dead.
Romans 7:1 “Know you not, brothers, (for I speak to them that know the law,) how that the law has dominion over a man as long as he lives?”
Got it! If you are legally dead as a fleshy human being, then as a fleshy human you are legally not under the law. However as Colossians 3:3 shows YOU ARE STILL legally dead in the flesh, which only makes you a dead man walking. One day what is legally decided will be carried out physically. Just like in court. It does not give you life.
Romans 8: 3 For what the law could not do, in that it was weak through the flesh, God sending his own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh, and for sin, condemned sin in the flesh:
4 That the righteousness of the law might be fulfilled in us, who walk not after the flesh, but after the Spirit.
Oh, so God killed us in Christ legally paying for sin, because the price for sinning is death. Now being legally dead, there is nothing the flesh can do for us to provide salvation.
We need something from outside of ourselves. That is God’s Spirit which contains all the deep thoughts and power of God, giving us a new perspective and teaching us the truth.
Verses 12 – 14 (adds details)
12 Therefore, brethren, we are debtors, not to the flesh, to live after the flesh.
13 For if ye live after the flesh, ye shall die: but if ye through the Spirit do mortify the deeds of the body, ye shall live.
14 For as many as are led by the Spirit of God, they are the sons of God.
This explains why the Bible can say you are not under the law and then turn about and say we are establishing the law through faith. It confirms what Jesus said in Matthew 5:17 about how all the words of the whole Bible will always be valid and those that keep them or break them will incur consequences. All of this and more amazing attributes because God chose the route of killing us, in Christ, separating us from the law, so that he could bring us back to life in Christ by his spirit, so we have the power to obey the law.
This explains why Paul could say that the flesh cannot please God. It is legally dead. It explains many seemingly strange things Paul said, including the below:
Romans 7:24, “O wretched man that I am! Who shall deliver me from the body of this death?
25 I thank God through Jesus Christ our Lord. So then with the mind I myself serve the law of God; but with the flesh the law of sin.”
Paul was not speaking philosophically or some spiritual contrivance. He is talking about actual legal and physical acts and real life result of those acts. It is why scripture says that nothing profits in Christ except that person becoming a new creation with the final portion of the process being change from mortal to an immortal Super-being.
This is just one example of what many have twisted since the days that the Apostle Peter mentionesd it in his day. He said that when people twist what the Apostle Paul says, they do it to their own destruction; but look how easily the Bible explained itself. It makes perfect sense now. In fact the person that thinks the Bible contradicts itself and that they have the right to choose one of the so-called contradictions over the other are people who actually does not believe it is really the word of God; to their own destruction.
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