The Spirit is Life

“But if Christ is in you, although the body is dead because of sin, the Spirit is life because of righteousness.” -Romans 8:10

It should grab our attention that Paul says, “if Christ is in you.” Up till now, he has said “If the Spirit of God dwells in you.” And he will continue using Spirit in subsequent statements with not indication that he is changing the subject. It would be an overreach to say that Paul is equating the person of Christ with the person of the Spirit. In other words, he is not dissolving the distinct persons of the Trinity into one person with his statement. Yet, to say that the Spirit is in a believer is nothing less than saying Christ is in the believer.

Again, Paul makes a conditional statement by using if, but this is a continuation of his thought about the same subject in the former verse, verse 9 (this is one example of where chapters and verses can foster confusion in reading Scripture). 

We could understand Paul to be saying (I’m paraphrasing vss. 9-10), “But we all know you Roman Christians are not in the flesh but in the Spirit, that is if it is in fact the case that the Spirit of God dwells in you, because as you know, anyone who does not have the Spirit of Christ does not belong to him. But, as I was saying, if Christ is in you…”

In the second clause, it would be wrong to understand Paul ascribing to the body the source of sin. As he has continued to do in this entire discussion, he uses body metaphorically, to represent that part of our old nature, our Adamic nature, that is not yet mortified by the Spirit of God. 

Paul is encouraging the believers at Rome with the knowledge that although there remains on us that judgment unto death as far as our old Adamic nature remains in us, because of the righteousness God has imputed to us, the Spirit that is life is also in us and is conquering that old nature and blessing us with new life. 

Said another way, though there are vestiges of our old nature and the consequences of those vestiges still play a role in our lives, the seed of the new life we have in Christ has been planted in us by the Spirit of life and we are experiencing the first fruits of that new life.