NOTES for Rom 8:12-17

By trusting God, we receive His Kingdom, that is, His sovereignty in our lives, which takes up residence within us as the guidance of the Holy Spirit. The apostle Paul's main point today is that the presence of God's Spirit does not enslave us but fills us with filial love for God, who becomes for us not merely Father but "Abba," the tender and affectionate way in which Hebrew children addressed their fathers.

The limited nature of freedom is an unavoidable experience for every person in this world. Voluntarily or under compulsion, we submit to very many things: the laws of physics, the laws of society, the law of God... These countless laws entangle a person, and the best years of life are spent learning to accept them. This is normal and even, yes, right. But in the soul of a person under law, a kind of conditioned reflex eventually forms, so that without law, an impersonal external regulator of life, we can no longer live. Living in fear of violating something, whether the law of universal gravitation, the administrative code, or the law of God, a person nevertheless tries to find laws for himself in order to submit to them. Sometimes we simply declare our own desires to be the law of the universe; sometimes we find something more exalted. But then we try to force everyone around us to submit to it, and totalitarianism is born from a passion for law.

Law attracts a person because law is impersonal. You can conform to it or violate it, if you can, without entering into personal relationship with it. Thus arises the sense of the world as an objective reality given to us by God in our sensations. And because all laws are impersonal, the person himself remains the only acting subject in his own life. This half-voluntary submission to impersonal law is what the apostle Paul calls the spirit of slavery.

But in reality, besides laws, there is the Lawgiver, and it turns out that we are not strangers to Him. Therefore you can build a personal relationship with the Lawgiver, and the keeping of laws, generally speaking, happens in some way by itself. This is the alternative that the apostle Paul called the spirit of adoption. And the choice between law and the Lawgiver is one of the key choices for a person.

The promise made by Jesus Christ at the Last Supper is fulfilled: the Comforter comes, the Spirit of truth, the Spirit of adoption (Rom 8:15), and the apostles testify to “the mighty works of God.”

This is the beginning of the Church, because here, through the action of the Holy Spirit, people find one common Father through true faith in the only-begotten Son and, becoming brothers and sisters, unite in glorifying God. We too can enter into this joy by praying in the words of Psalm 103.

The Lord commands us to be wise as serpents and innocent as doves. In ordinary life, wisdom and innocence are rarely found together. How, then, are we to live in this world full of violence and betrayal? We cannot invent a formula. There is therefore no point in wondering in advance how to behave in a critical situation. It is better to trust in the Spirit, who will give us an answer at the necessary moment. According to the Apostle, this Spirit lives in those who belong to Christ and live according to the spirit, those for whom He is Wonderful, Counselor, and Mighty God.

Developing the theme of deliverance from the "body of death," the apostle turns to the theme of the Kingdom, without which such liberation is impossible, and to the mission of the Savior, who brought the Kingdom into the world. He speaks of the Torah, which now, after Christ's coming into the world, can be transformed from an instrument for knowing sin, an instrument of death capable of killing, into the source of the life of the Kingdom by which the Risen One lives. That is why Paul distinguishes between the Torah of sin and death, on the one hand, and the Torah of the "breath of life," on the other (vv. 1-2).

The inner Torah, of which learned rabbis and theologians spoke in Paul's time, was generally expected to cleanse and sanctify the believer, but the ideal was still a person who had become, according to the commonly accepted definition of that era, a "living Torah." For Paul, however, the inner Torah, as we can see, is connected with that "body of death" from which one must be delivered, while the living Torah is the Savior Himself. Therefore anyone else can become it only by entrusting himself to the Risen One and receiving from Him that fullness of the life of the Kingdom without which no "living Torah" is possible. For Paul, the "living Torah" is the Torah of Christ and the Kingdom (vv. 14-17). And the earthly ministry of the Savior becomes for him the manifestation of the Kingdom as the living Torah (vv. 3-4). After all, in order to become a "living Torah" and reveal the fullness of righteousness of which the apostle speaks here, a person had to be completely freed from the power of sin; otherwise, instead of the fullness of the Torah's righteousness, he would show the world only the fullness of his own sinfulness.

Bodily existence permeated by sin weakened the action of the Torah on the human heart, and therefore the fullness of the Kingdom remained inaccessible even to those who, by human standards, showed the world examples of righteousness. Because of this sinfulness that weighed upon the human being, God had to make a special effort to show the world what fallen humanity was not capable of: the example of perfect, sinless humanity that contained within itself the fullness of God, and therefore the fullness of the Kingdom. And now everyone who has resolved to say a firm "no" to his own "body of death" has both the possibility of carrying out his intention and the place where he can find the life that he has nowhere to seek in our world, which has not yet been transfigured (vv. 5-10).

Thus the example shown to the world by the Savior becomes not merely an example, but a real power that changes the world and opens the Kingdom to everyone who seeks it and is ready to go to the end in that search.