“Do not think that I have come to abolish the Law or the Prophets; I have not come to abolish them but to fulfill them. For truly, I say to you, until heaven and earth pass away, not an iota, not a dot, will pass from the Law until all is accomplished. (Matt 5:17-18)
When Jesus said that without Him we can do nothing, we hear Him, but we don’t believe Him. No wonder then that so much of what we hear or read more or less have a call to some sort of self-effort. In many instances this call is so subtle that if we haven’t exercised our faculty to make spiritual judgments we might easily fall prey to those calls, and as a result condemnation isn’t far from knocking on our door.
The route God takes us in order to disclose our utter helplessness is through Romans 7. In Romans 6 we experience our freed self. We have moved from the dominion of darkness to God’s kingdom, and now we are ready to live the Christian life. Motivated to please our loving Father we approach the task with energy and high hopes. However, we soon discover, just like Paul, that we do not understand our actions. We are unable to do what we want, and we do what we hate.
It is in this state of wretchedness that God reveals Christ in us and we move into Romans 8 where we begin to live the victorious union life where we finally have found ourselves in Christ. Here we discover that the One who has fulfilled the Law and the prophets lives and moves as us. The outer laws which we in our once former ignorance with great fervor attempted to obey we find are fulfilled in us by Christ. Therefore there is no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus!
The righteous requirements of the law are now fully met in us, and finally we can accept ourselves just as God has accepted us. Concepts such as good and evil are beginning to be dissolved and lose their grip in our consciousnesses, and what we have left is right being, that is, the tree of life. So, here I am with a profound understanding of that my original design is fully restored. This is the truth that liberates.
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