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§18 The Advocacy of the Spirit (Rom. 8:1–17)

In sublime contrast to the questions which have beset the argument since chapter 6 (6:1, 15; 7:1, 7, 13ff.), chapter 8 begins with a thunderous proclamation, “Therefore, there is now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus.” Especially in 7:7–25, Paul’s blow-by-blow account of indwelling sin reminded one of a ringside announcer reporting a losing struggle. But the long and doleful report is now interrupted with ecstatic news. The contest has been decisively reversed. Sin and law may have been the overwhelming favorites, but victory belongs to “those who are in Christ Jesus.” The fires of hope had dwindled to a cold flame when reinforcements finally arrived.

Credit for the victory, as irrevocable as it was unexpected, belongs to the Spirit. Unforeseen and from the outside, like a ray of hope extending backward from the future to the present, the Holy Spirit has broken into the dreary domain of sin, law, and death with freedom from oppression, strength for the struggle, and hope for the future. Paul had alluded to the Spirit briefly in 7:6 when he mentioned “the new way of the Spirit.” But because of the need to clarify the problem of indwelling sin (7:7–25) he had to hold the subject in abeyance until now. But in chapter 8 the Spirit commands center stage. Before this chapter the Spirit is mentioned only five times, and afterwards only nine times. But in chapter 8 the Spirit occurs twenty-one times—a record for any chapter in the NT.

The Spirit’s activity can be roughly divided into two foci. The first half of the chapter (vv. 1–17) describes the advocacy of the Spirit in the lives of believers even now dogged by the “flesh.” The chapter concludes (vv. 18–39) with the completion of salvation and the transformation of believers into the image of God’s Son. The Spirit thus resolves the two major problems between humanity and God, the problems of condemnation and alienation.

The Hebrew and Greek words for spirit, rûāḥ and pneuma respectively, mean “breath” or “wind,” thus air in motion. God’s Spirit was the animating breath of life at creation (Gen. 2:7), the inspiration of prophecy (Ezek. 2:2), and the divine force that swept over the church at Pentecost (Acts 2:4). For Paul, Spirit “give[s] life to your mortal bodies” (v. 11) by breaking the reign of sin and flesh. The Spirit is not to be confused with an enlightened though inherent component of human personality (e.g., body, mind, and spirit). The Spirit is God’s creative presence, both in believers and in the church, which bears witness to Christ, provides liberation from sin and death (v. 2), and guarantees the completion of salvation in the world to come (2 Cor. 1:22; 5:5).

The Spirit belongs indissolubly to the person and work of Jesus Christ. It is not an impersonal force or energy field or an intensified “noosphere,” as certain evolutionary thinkers claim. The Spirit is God’s will and capacity to act as manifested in Jesus Christ. Paul can speak interchangeably of “the Spirit of God” and “the Spirit of Christ” (8:9), or he can say, “the Lord is the Spirit” (2 Cor. 3:17). Through the Spirit the resurrected Lord carries forth his redemption and lordship of the world. Any spirit not bearing witness to Jesus Christ and not drawing believers into obedient discipleship to him and fellowship with one another is not God’s Spirit. The Spirit empowers believers (v. 9; Gal. 3:3) and is their ethical guide (v. 14; Gal. 5:22–25). The Spirit not only unites believers to Christ and his body, the church (Eph. 4:4), but also through that body the Spirit shapes believers into the very image of Christ (Eph. 4:13).

8:1 / Chapter 8 begins with the triumphant crash of Beethoven’s “Emperor Concerto”—Therefore, there is now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus. The Greek behind Therefore (ara nyn) signals an emphatic break from the preceding train of thought. To be in Christ Jesus is to experience something not offered by the law of Moses. Paul’s tireless labors have shown that the law reveals sin (3:20), aggravates sin (7:8–9), and condemns both sin and sinner (7:11); and the burden of this awareness causes him to cry out, “What a wretched man I am!” (7:24). His only recourse is to cry for help outside himself, and help he finds in Jesus Christ.

Without diminishing the force of verse 1, we must not mistake its message. Paul does not say that those in Christ Jesus no longer sin or that they are exempt from the struggle against sin so dramatically portrayed in 7:7–25. Romans 8 is not an apology for Christian perfectionism. What he does say is that there is no condemnation for those who are in Christ. The antecedent idea is found in 5:16 where, in speaking of Adam’s sin, Paul said, “The judgment followed one sin and brought condemnation” (also 5:18). It is that condemnation which is revoked in Jesus Christ. Verse 1 is therefore a victorious summary of 5:12–6:11. The ongoing skirmishes with sin do not defeat believers, but the thought of being cursed or abandoned by God does. Believers need to know that they do not stand condemned by God. Christ has cancelled the bond of indebtedness against humanity (Col. 2:14). The accent throughout falls on Christ’s victory, not on human merits.

When Paul says, there is now no condemnation, he means that the sentence of death and judgment on the Last Day has been commuted. Verse 11 will repeat the idea of 7:24: believers remain in “mortal bodies” (see also 2 Cor. 4:7–11). But the consequences of sin are annulled through Christ’s death, and even now the Spirit begins in believers a work of regeneration that will be completed in the world to come. Grace is knowing that God is for us and with us even in our “body of death” (7:24).

8:2 / Paul now resumes the thought of 7:6 concerning the “new way of the Spirit.” Paul’s Jewish contemporaries were familiar with the belief that the day of the Messiah would be accompanied by an outpouring of the Spirit. Keying off the theme of law, Paul says, in effect, that a higher law of the Spirit supersedes the law of sin and death. We know of instances in nature where the effects of one law are cancelled by another. When an airplane wing provides the necessary “lift” to raise a plane upwards, one law (that nature abhors a vacuum) prevails over another (the law of gravity). In like manner, the law of the Spirit of life set me free from the law of sin and death. This is a development of 5:20–21, “Where sin increased, grace increased all the more.” The Spirit now stands where the law formerly stood. It is the Spirit of life through Jesus Christ which set me free. The past tense, set me free, refers to a decisive point, most probably Christ’s crucifixion, but possibly the believer’s conversion. At any rate, it is no vague, undefined spirit which stands there for me. Paul expressly links the Spirit with the redemptive and liberating work of Jesus Christ. What God did through the historical Jesus on Golgotha, he now applies and extends to believers through the Spirit in the community of faith. The emphasis again falls on God’s initiative. Christ’s work, and its ongoing effect as applied by the Spirit, brings peace and freedom. “Grace renders that most easy, which seems difficult to man under the law, or rather does it itself,” said Bengel (Gnomon, vol. 3, p. 98).

There is, to be sure, a bristling tension between being a “prisoner of the law of sin” (7:23) and being free from the law of sin. But the inherent intellectual contradiction does not cancel the fact that both represent the experience of believers (see also 2 Cor. 4:7–12). In their earthly frames Christians are never free from the hold of sin, yet there is a marked difference between their response to that grip and that of non-Christians. Augustine said prior to conversion, “My sin was all the more incurable because I did not think myself a sinner” (Confessions 5.10). Christians are alerted to the ways of sin and are no longer ignorant and unresisting accomplices to its work. They recognize the power and deception of its tyranny and fight against it in the name of Christ and in the power of the Spirit.

Christians may still live with the effects of sin, but they do not live under its authority. When Paris was liberated in 1944 the Allies declared France free, even though a large portion of the country still lay under Nazi control. With the loss of the capital, however, the Nazi power base was broken, and it was only a matter of time until the remaining forces were driven from the land. The Christian experience is similar. The cross of Christ has once and for all broken the claim and power of evil over the lives of believers. The capital belongs to Christ, so to speak, even if mopping-up operations are still in effect. The liberating edict of the Spirit is now effecting Christ’s victory throughout creation. The future is assured even if the present is still uncertain. “He must win the battle” proclaimed Luther in the hymn, “A Mighty Fortress is Our God.”

8:3–4 / Verse 3 is a classic formulation of redemption. The beginning of the verse lacks a verb in Greek and is somewhat defective, reading literally, “For the inability of the law because of the weakness of the flesh.” But there is no doubt of its meaning: the law was rendered ineffective because of the “flesh.” Paul does not say the law was unable to condemn sin; that it could do because it was “holy, righteous, and good” (7:12). The law is not bad, but its good counsels are undermined by a bentness and gravitational pull in human nature toward evil. The law offers a proper diagnosis of the disease, but no cure.

To accomplish what neither the law nor human will could carry out, God entered decisively and historically by sending his own Son. God had, of course, dispatched messengers and prophets to Israel in the past. “From the time your forefathers left Egypt until now, day after day, again and again I sent you my servants the prophets” (Jer. 7:25). More than forty times in the OT God sends something or someone to lead Israel back to God. But the sending of the Son is something entirely different. God no longer represents himself through a surrogate, like the law of Moses, nor does he send someone in his behalf. In the Son, God comes in person. His own Son emphasizes the filial intimacy between Jesus and the Father. In Jesus, God takes the problem of sin into his own hands. In Jesus, God takes personal responsibility for humanity’s salvation.

“God sent his Son” was a heavily freighted expression in the early church (John 3:16; Gal. 4:4; Phil. 2:6f.; 1 John 4:9). It was both a theological and liturgical capsule of the mystery of the incarnation: the preexistent Son of God had been sent for the salvation of the world. The yeast of this truth continues its redemptive fermentation in the world. Pop religion tells us we can do something for God; sociology, that we can do something for others; and psychology, that we can do something for ourselves. But the gospel says that God has done something for us, apart from which we are caught in a tailspin of futility (vv. 18ff.). This brief phrase rearranges the axis of the world. “God sent his Son” means that God—not humanity or the world—is the source and center of reality; it means that where there was no help within creation, God intervened from outside it; and it means that God’s help is not a pious intuition, but a historical manifestation in first-century Palestine. “God sent his Son” is salvation in four words: enacted from the fullness of divine love, evoked by the fallenness of the world, and effected by the incarnation of Jesus Christ.

Of special importance is the meaning of the likeness of sinful man. On the one hand, Paul doubtlessly wants to avoid saying that Christ became as “sinful man,” for in the first eleven verses he employs that term, or “flesh [of sin]” as the Greek reads, eleven times with reference to sin and death. Moreover, in 2 Corinthians 5:21 Paul states that Christ “had no sin.” On the other hand, Paul does not use likeness abstractly, as did the Docetists when they taught that Christ only appeared human (from Gk. dokein, “to seem or appear”). Docetism characteristically taught that Jesus could not have been tempted, nor could he have sinned, nor did he really suffer. It was, however, fallen humanity which needed redeeming, not an ideal or apparent humanity, and Christ had to become fully human if he were to condemn sin in sinful man (v. 3). If human flesh is the stage of sin, that same flesh must become the stage of redemption. Likeness, therefore, means that Christ did not take on any nature other than our nature, though apart from sin. In the likeness of sinful man agrees with Philippians 2:7–8, “being made in human likeness, and being found in appearance as a man, he [Jesus] humbled himself.” “God achieved his purpose for man,” says Dunn, “not by scrapping the first effort and starting again, but by working through man in his fallenness … and remaking him beyond death as a progenitor and enabler of life according to the Spirit” (Romans 1–8, p. 421). The critical difference between Christ’s humanity and ours is that whereas we yielded to sin’s dominion, he rendered perfect obedience (Phil. 2:8; Heb. 5:8). In the likeness of sinful man almost certainly recalls the Adam typology of chapter 5. This offers an explanation why Christ obeyed, whereas all other humanity disobeyed. The answer is that the Son entered humanity with a nature like Adam’s before the Fall. It was possible for him not to sin, though for all others it was not possible not to sin. As a human being he was tempted by sin, and he could have sinned, but he was not subject to sin as was humanity after Adam. Where the first Adam disobeyed, the last Adam obeyed. And whereas our yielding to sin brought our condemnation, Christ’s obedience to God brings sin’s condemnation!

The mission and goal of the incarnation were to be a sin offering. God did not send the Son primarily as a moral reformer. The essential aspect of the incarnation is not ethical but sacerdotal: He condemned sin in sinful man (v. 3). Before humanity can live it must be freed from death. It is a delusion to think that humanity needs only a better model for life. Its plight is more desperate. It needs a savior from bondage to sin, and the price of deliverance was the suffering and death of a sacrificial victim. In the old covenant God had established the practice of animal sacrifice in anticipation of the future and ultimate sin offering of the new covenant, the “Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world” (John 1:29). And thus the death which had until Christ’s advent been sin’s ally became in Christ’s death sin’s defeat.

Understanding the progression of thought in verses 2–4 is essential. Paul begins with the Spirit who brings liberation from “the law of sin and death.” The Spirit, however, is not a free agent. The Spirit attends to Jesus Christ and is the divine auxiliary who makes Christ’s redemption efficacious. Moreover, the Spirit salvages the law as a moral standard, in order that the righteous requirements of the law might be fully met in us, who do not live according to the sinful nature but according to the Spirit (v. 4). Paul does not say “righteousness of the law,” for he has argued that righteousness comes by faith. Rather he speaks of the righteous requirements of the law (see 2:26), meaning that which the law demands, even if the law cannot provide it. Those who live in the Spirit are for the first time enabled to acknowledge the true intent of the law, and they are empowered to begin fulfilling it. This is the first positive role of the law in Romans so far. The Spirit is the supernatural reinforcement of God’s grace who empowers Christians to fulfill the intent and requirements of the law. Paul does not say that one must keep the law in order to be saved but that one must be saved in order to keep the law! Augustine understood Paul correctly, “The law is given that grace might be sought; grace is given that the law might be fulfilled” (quoted by J. Stewart, A Man in Christ, p. 109). The reader familiar with the OT cannot resist the allusion here to Jeremiah 31:31ff. and Ezekiel 36:26ff. Both prophets agonized over the fatal flaw in Israel which thwarted Israel from fulfilling the law and pleasing God. Both foresaw the need for a new covenant and new spirit, not coercing Israel by external dictates but moving Israel from within to fulfill God’s righteous will. And the longing and anticipation of both are fulfilled in Christ.

Does not Paul’s confidence in fulfilling the law in verse 4 (that the righteous requirements of the law might be fully met in us) contradict his frustration in not fulfilling it in chapter 7? According to verse 4, the Spirit reveals the essence of the law and enables Christians to conform to its fundamental intent, even if not to its every detail. The Christian is like a man who has the right tune in his head but cannot remember all the words. Accordingly, when Paul says that love fulfills the law (13:8; also Gal. 5:14), that is not to assert that Christians are perfect, but that they live … according to the Spirit. The present tense of the Greek peripatein, “to walk” or live, connotes continued action, forward progress, a pattern of behavior under the Spirit’s leading. The idea is one of direction, not perfection; orientation toward a goal, if not yet attainment of it. Otto Michel correctly notes that the willingness and strength to resist sin is the unmistakable sign of the Spirit. “The claim to possess the Spirit of God is justified only where it is accompanied by the battle against the flesh” (Der Brief an die Römer, p. 180 [my translation]).

8:5–8 / It is usually possible to gain an idea of something unknown by describing what it is not. This is Paul’s tack in verses 5–8, where, in a Jekyll-and-Hyde contrast, he sets the Spirit in antithesis to the flesh (NIV, the sinful nature). Paul has employed global contrasts before with Adam and Christ, slavery and freedom, death and life. In these verses he begins with the negative consequences of the flesh, and later in verses 12ff. he highlights the positive consequences of the Spirit.

The antithesis of Spirit and flesh is to this day often mistaken as a dichotomy in morals (good and bad), or in religion (dos and don’ts), or in personality (mind and body, spirit and matter, etc.). But Spirit and flesh are not descriptive of a theological or ethical schizophrenia, or of higher and lower principles in the same person, one Christian, the other unchristian, or one saved, the other unsaved. Spirit and flesh are rather two exclusive realms, two authorities or governing powers. One is either in the Spirit or in the flesh, but not in both at the same time. The language indicates a sense of sovereignty and totality of the one or the other: to live according to the sinful nature / Spirit (v. 5), “controlled by the sinful nature / Spirit” (v. 9), “belonging to Christ” (v. 9), “if the Spirit … is living in you” (v. 11), in “obligation … not to the sinful nature / Spirit” (v. 12–13).

In verses 5–8 Paul speaks of the mind of the Spirit or flesh. Phronēma means “thought,” conveying the idea of the sum total of inner dispositions, literally a “mindset” that leads to a goal. “Flesh” then connotes not base instincts or the material side of life, but that which human nature in its rebellion against God has made of itself. Spirit, likewise, is not a noble or ideal self, but God’s transmitting of the effects of Christ’s salvation to believers and God’s infusing himself into them.

We noted that there are twenty-one references to the Spirit in chapter 8. Only slightly less important is sarx, “flesh,” which occurs thirteen times in the first thirteen verses of the chapter. Paul sets the two in opposition, like flint sharpened by flint, in verse 6: The mind of sinful man is death, but the mind controlled by the Spirit is life. Flesh and Spirit, and death and life are polar opposites. The disposition controlled by sin leads to death, and is death even in life. The disposition controlled by the Spirit participates even now in the life and peace that will be fully realized in the world to come.

In 5:10 Paul contended that unreconciled humanity is “God’s enemy.” It is not unusual to find people who do not believe in God, but it is unusual to find people who claim to hate God. Paul resumes this offensive idea in verse 7 by saying that the sinful mind is hostile to God. It is a commonplace in the modern West to regard human nature as basically good, or at least as neutral. Blatantly wicked persons or events are regarded as aberrations of an innate moral norm and are thus the less explainable because of it. One could more easily make alligators into house pets than convince Paul of this. He has argued that humanity honors the made above the Maker, condemns others and exonerates self, serves self and denies others, and loves self in place of God. Left to itself human nature is red in tooth and claw, locked in combat against God. Whether or not the expressions of human egotism are socially acceptable does not change their fundamental enmity from God and others. Those controlled by the sinful nature cannot please God (see Heb. 11:6).

8:9–11 / Paul now departs from the fulminations of the flesh and turns to the hopeful certainty of the Spirit. The mood shift, accompanied by a shift in person from the third to second person, thus reassures Paul’s readers of the Spirit’s personal advocacy in their lives. The chief idea is that the Spirit unites the objective achievement of Christ’s sacrifice of atonement to the lives of believers. The Spirit integrates and internalizes the work of Christ with the response of faith. Hence, the Scriptures speak of Christ dying for us, and of the Spirit dwelling in us. It is thus the Spirit who actualizes the doctrine of justification by faith in believers’ lives and guards it from becoming a sterile intellectual dogma. Paul highlights this with the ambiguous wording of verse 9, You, however, are controlled … by the Spirit, if the Spirit of God lives within you. The Greek word eiper can mean either “since” or “if.” If it means the latter (so NIV) it may function as a gentle prod to Paul’s readers to encourage them to consider whether or not they belong to the Spirit. For the solid church members in Rome it would have been an inducement to humble self-examination, and for inquirers about the faith, an invitation to its grateful acceptance.

Above all, the Spirit accentuates the experiential nature of faith. Paul says expressly that possession of the Spirit is the criterion for belonging to Christ: If anyone does not have the Spirit of Christ, he does not belong to Christ (v. 9). God does not hold his children over the fires of anxiety regarding their salvation; neither is it his pleasure to keep them guessing whether or not they belong to him. God has sent his Spirit into the heart of each believer and each community of faith to produce an inner conviction based upon demonstrable change in character and conduct, reassuring Christians of God’s sovereign and irrevocable love for them, thus freeing them for praise, witness, and service.

Verses 9, 10, and 11 all contain a condition prefaced by if (protasis), followed by “then” (apodosis). The purpose of these statements is hortatory, and their effect resembles an orchestra’s crescendo, or climactic finale. Paul does not deny the lingering effects of the fallen nature on believers. Believers are still human believers in the present age. God has not yet transposed believers into a heavenly state, but he has transformed their earthly state, and this means the battle with sin and death continues, though the victory is won. Paul testified to that struggle when he complained of “sin living in me” (7:17, 20). But he recognizes another and more compelling agent in believers, God’s Spirit, who lives in you (v. 11). In both passages Paul uses the Greek word, oikein, meaning “to dwell or inhabit.” The old regime is no longer the only regime, for the power of life, the Spirit who raised Jesus from the dead, even now resides within believers. The Spirit’s present succor in their lives is the prolepsis that his vivifying power will quicken them fully in the final resurrection. “Though outwardly we are wasting away, yet inwardly we are being renewed day by day” (2 Cor. 4:16).

The Spirit is therefore the decisive answer to the agonizing struggle of 7:7–25, help from deep heaven for the world’s deepest need. Through the Spirit the saving work of Jesus is present for us and at work in us. The Spirit is the divine answer to the human question, “Who will rescue me from this body of death?” (7:24). Justification by faith is the means by which believers appropriate Jesus’ death for salvation, and through the Spirit they receive Jesus’ life for sanctification. The Spirit is the divine guarantee that “God is for us” (8:31), both in present struggles and for future glory.

8:12–13 / The transition in verse 12 is more emphatic in Greek than the NIV (Therefore) indicates. Again in verse 13 Paul includes two conditional statements beginning with if, which are followed by apodoses. This, combined with a switch again to the second person, intensifies the note of admonition to the readers. Believers may be in the flesh, but they are not obligated to it. It would be an error to consider sin like a mugging from which Christians could get up, brush themselves off, and continue on their way, the wiser for it. A Christian is a “debtor,” as Paul says literally (NIV, obligation, v. 12). The Adam-Christ typology taught that all humanity stands under the rule of either Adam or Christ (5:12–21). This domination extends also to moral commitments (6:12–23, 8:2–4). Both the rule of Christ and its moral obligations are actualized as believers forsake their selfishness and sinful nature and relinquish themselves to the Spirit.

Freedom is not simply doing what we want; that is a capitulation to the flesh, sin, slavery, and death. Freedom is the decision to act according to God’s Spirit, for if by the Spirit you put to death the misdeeds of the body, you will live (v. 13). The Greek of the verb put to death is in the present tense, which indicates continuous action. The battle with sin is not a momentary event, no matter how sincere, but a lifetime commitment. The Spirit is not a promise to those who succeed in overcoming sin, but God’s abiding presence in the midst of the flesh or sinful nature. The ability to sustain warfare against sin signals the Spirit’s presence. The Spirit emancipates believers from slavery to sin and joins them in sonship with Christ (vv. 15, 29).

8:14–17 / Those who are led by the Spirit of God are sons of God (v. 14). With this subtle transition Paul ushers believers into abiding fellowship with God and their spiritual inheritance in Christ. The imagery is that of a family. Sin abducts, God adopts. Sin makes slaves, God makes children. Sin provokes fear, the Spirit evokes trust. Sin foments rebellion and hostility, the Spirit leads believers to appeal to God in the most intimate and urgent cry, “Abba, Father.” The paradox of grace is that those who deserve death are granted life.

The relationship of a slave to its master is ultimately one of fear. The law itself contributed to the status of servitude by making its promises on the basis of conditions, for conditions create anxiety and fear. When humans fail to meet conditions, as they inevitably do, they find themselves condemned. But grace cancels condemnation, as Paul heralded in verse 1; indeed grace short-circuits the whole downward spiral of law, sin, and death because grace is unconditional, that is, it is bestowed not on the basis of human merit, but on the basis of God’s love.

The alternative of grace is expressed in pneuma hyiothesia, rendered Spirit of sonship (NIV, v. 15). Hyiothesia literally means “adoption,” which clearly implies that believers are not naturally begotten children of God, but constituted children. Since adoption, as far as we know, was not practiced in Jewish society, Paul must have taken over the metaphor from Hellenism where it was practiced. The point, however, is not where the metaphor came from, but what it means. That answer is found only in the life and teaching of Jesus. In its conception of God as Father, and in its intimate address, Abba, meaning “Daddy,” or “Papa,” the early church bore witness to the central element in Jesus’ relationship with God (see v. 23, 9:4; Eph. 1:5, and esp. Gal. 4:4–6). In all rabbinic literature there is no passage where the Spirit of God aids believers in prayer. Neither is there any clear evidence in that same immense corpus that Jews customarily addressed God as “my Father,” much less with the intimacy of Abba. Jews, to be sure, knew how to pray, and they prayed fervently, but they avoided pronouncing God’s name when possible; and when not, they accompanied his name with a blessing, for fear of profaning it. But in a remarkable break with tradition, Jesus dared to address God simply and intimately as “Father” in all his prayers—indeed probably addressing God as Abba, since the Aramaic Abba appears to lie beneath the Greek patēr, “Father”—and he invited his followers to do the same!

According to verse 15 God is by nature Father, not distant and forbidding, but near and intimate. The Spirit witnesses to believers that they too share Christ’s Abba-relationship with the Father. The Spirit himself testifies with our spirit that we are God’s children (v. 16). And if believers are on a “first name” basis with God, if they participate in the trust and confidence which Christ shared with the Father, they also receive the same benefits as heirs of God and co-heirs with Christ (v. 17). Heirs of what? Of glory! Sin deprived humanity of God’s glory (1:23). Once glory was marred in humanity, it was marred in the whole creation (1:23). But God restored his glory by the cross of Christ to fallen creation (5:2; 8:30).

If in the mystery of God the suffering of his Son became the gateway to glory, then believers and the church must also participate in Christ’s suffering if they are to share in that glory. In the history of theodicy the problem of suffering has normally been posed as an obstacle to belief. But in verse 17 this problem is wholly absent. Suffering and glory are not presented as a theological dilemma, or in diametrical opposition, but in identification with Christ: they are his sufferings and his glory. Suffering is not a glitch in the divine purpose or a lapse on the part of believers. Suffering is an unavoidable and necessary part of God’s purpose for Christ and his church. The power of resurrection is known only through suffering (Phil. 3:10). “No cross, no crown” is not a trite cliché; it expresses God’s saving purpose, for both suffering and glory are the believer’s inheritance with Christ.