10 And if Christ is in you, the body is dead because of sin, but the Spirit is life because of righteousness.

There are two translations of this; one capitalizes Spirit (as in, he is alive, in you) and one doesn’t (ie, your spirit itself is alive). This is a difficult and beautiful verse. It first assumes that Christ is in you. We know from the previous verse that that is because his Spirit is in us. Is the body dead because of sin because Christ is in us, (ie, Christ in us makes our bodies dead because of sin) or in spite of that fact (ie, even though the body is dead because of sin, because Christ is in you the spirit is life). I think it could go both ways. I guess the first thing to think about is, what is meant by death?

I feel like there are a lot of verses which talk about how we actually die because we are joined with Christ… say, Galations 2:19-20 (For through the law I died to the law so that I might live for God. 20I have been crucified with Christ and I no longer live, but Christ lives in me. The life I live in the body, I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me) and Galations 5:24 (Those who belong to Christ Jesus have crucified the sinful nature with its passions and desires.) Is this the same kind of death that Romans talks about? And what does it mean?

Here are some things that I think it can’t mean. It doesn’t mean that we died to sin… that is, us and sin are no longer in the same world and breathe the same air. Death means no movement, no interaction, and is very final, but we get up and fight sin in ourselves every day. Also, it can’t mean literally that our bodies are dead because they aren’t, or at least not what we call dead. It doesn’t mean that if Christ is in us, sinful nature is completely dead in us. Maybe go back a bit and say what we mean by “the body”. If we’re taking these verses to be parallel, “I” and “the body” could both mean “the sinful nature with its passions and desires”. This sounds reasonable. But if we fight with our sinful nature every day, how can we say we have crucified it? And, my old question… is it something passive that just happens when we accept Jesus, or is it something active and ongoing?

My instinct is that it’s both. Let’s see if it makes sense in light of grafting. So a branch on its own does what is its nature to do… it slowly dies. Its cells keep performing their functions, but since it’s not connected to a plant, they can’t get water and nutrients. By the nature of what plants are (ie, the law) it is dying. If it’s an apricot branch, it’s a dying apricot branch. But, say it’s grafted onto a plum tree. In order to not be condemned to death by the law of nature, it needs to become part of the plum tree--it needs to die to its apricot self. This is a silly metaphor. But that death is actually accomplished by the sap, the life of the plum tree entering into it and interacting with it. It’s attachment to the living plum tree means that it is both going to have to die to what it was before, and that because of the living sap moving in it can now be alive in a way it never was. Jesus, the Spirit of Christ, enters into our current death and helps us to die every day to our old nature.