Life to our mortal bodies!

BUT! If the Spirit of Him who raised Jesus from the dead dwells in you, He who raised Christ from the dead will also give life to our mortal bodies through His Spirit who dwells in you

I love this verse. I picture Paul writing it in hushed awe, as around him he can hear echoes of angels singing, trying to take in and to express all at once the goodness, the kindness, the mercy, the cleverness, the complete power and absolute victory of God. That said, I'm not really sure what it means. The thing that immediately strikes me is that God gets everything and Satan gets nothing.

I love how this translation starts the verse with "but", which I shouldn't make too big a deal of since most others say "and". Anyhow, at the end of the last verse, our bodies were dead because of sin, but the Spirit was life because of righteousness. Though actually, in the last post I never went into what the life part meant. I'm inclined to think that it means what's said here... He is the Spirit of Life, we are under His law now, and so are free from sin and death. Why say it again, what he already said in the first verse and again, sort of, in the verse directly previous? I think because it is very important for us to know specifically that resurrection and regeneration extends even to our bodies.

I love what this says about God. In Him is Life, he is the Life; to be in contact with Him is to be made alive. The power that was able to conquer death and raise Jesus from the dead lives in us.. making us part of it...and so even our mortal bodies become so infused with Life as He lives in us that they are alive even though they are dead because of sin. I have more instinctual understanding of this than actual understanding. One thing that I don't know is, does this refer to the resurrection, after we die? Or is this something that is happening now? My instinct is that since the Spirit dwelling in us is a continuous thing, it means that every part that is in contact with him is being made alive, so that when we are completely filled with him our whole body will be resurrected.

I'm a little confused about whether mortal bodies is referring to our actual flesh..the Life is living in us and so even the processes of decay will reverse. If this is the case, then the "life to our mortal bodies" is certainly not a continuous thing, because Christians get sick and die like everyone else. I guess what I am thinking is that as the fleshly mind becomes renewed and brought to life by continuously dying to itself and being made alive by the Spirit, when at last our mortal bodies die and, seeing Christ and being made like him, we fully at last are filled with the Spirit of Life, we will find that there is nothing about us that death can get any hold on, that it has anything to do with. We'll have been completely made into inappropriate material for death.

One last thing that I love about this... WH Auden says, "He is the Life/ Love Him in World of the Flesh/ and at your marriage, all its occasions shall dance for joy." Even our flesh will be redeemed and restored, even our flesh, that we thought weighed us down, will become... one of the occasions of our marriage. Even our broken and ugly flesh, weighing us down and embarrassing us, will become uniquely precious, and so can be loved and taken joy in now, for the sake of Christ!!!!!