I was reading the excellent commentary on Romans VI, VII and VIII.1-4 by James Fraser, entitled "A Treatise on Sanctification" yesterday afternoon, and came across the following.
In addition to commenting on each verse, Fraser offers extended paraphrases to summarize his comments. The following is his paraphrase of verse 12, which reads:
Let not sin therefore reign in your mortal body, that you should obey it in the lusts thereof.
Fraser's paraphrase:
"Alive you are, I say, unto God through Jesus Christ; through him, and by virtue of his resurrection, entitled to eternal life, to a happy immortality; when there will be no molestation or danger from sin; no cause of fear. But on this side of that, in your present embodied mortal state, there is much danger of sin. It remains in you, its law is in your members, and its various lusts, as the particular commandments of that law. But as you are made free from its reign, as it reigned unto death, and at the same time made free from its dominion by which it enslaved you, and so are brought into a capacity to resist it, and maintain war against it; let me earnestly exhort you to maintain your liberty by doing so; and to be anxiously careful that sin be not allowed to resume its dominion in any sort or degree, in this your mortal embodied state; so as that you should yield a voluntary obedience to the lusts which infest that state. Oh, maintain your liberty against the dethroned tyrant, by constantly refusing obedience to these his commandments, however much they be urged upon you during this your mortality, when sin hath so great advantage from the wretched condition of your bodies, besides the deep root it hath otherwise in your souls.If I have been thus putting you in mind of your mortality, and your danger from sin during the continuance of it, until your actual death; yet be encouraged concerning this: There is nothing of the reign of sin, by virtue of the law and its curse, in your mortality, or in the tribulations connected with it, or in the dissolution you are to undergo. Now life and death, things present, and things to come (I Cor. iii. 22), all are yours, and under a powerful influence and direction, to work for you, and not against you. Yea, let the consideration of your mortal state, as a state that will soon be at an end, encourage you with respect to these lusts, the motions of which will so often perplex and distress you. Not one of them in you will survive that state for a moment. Therefore, as the time of your warfare and conflict is short, acquit you against them like men, like Christians, like Christ's freed men."
As I consider the struggles our country is undergoing in which on both west and east coasts people are clammoring after their "rights", "rights" based on the particular proclivities for the means of satisfying their physical desires, I found Fraser's comments both timely, worthwhile and meaningful. The church has by and large stopped teaching about self-denial, and is now largely coming out in support of people's "pursuit of happiness", that American ideal that has become thoroughly individualistic. The church has failed to read her Bible, and instead is listening to the collective desire of many of her members to pursue wordly lusts, and rather than exhorting them to curtail those desires, instead supports them in their pursuit of them. The church writ large has lost her convictions. This, friends, is sad. We are encouraging slavery to sin, and proclaiming 'peace, peace' where there is no peace.
I don't offer these comments to argue that same-sex marriage is the first offense. We have fallen prey to all manner of error, of which Christian support of same-sex marriage is only the latest and most ugly manifestation. In the same way as Janet Jackson's breast-baring was only the last example of the problems pervading broadcast television, so same-sex marriage is only the latest error among many that the church in this self-centered and self-obsessed society is failing to oppose in united voice.
Posted by toddpedlar at March 29, 2004 05:23 AM | TrackBack