Godbey's Commentary - Acts - Romans - Enter His Rest

In case of the wicked, this old man of sin is buried in hell-fire; while in the experience of the
saved he receives interment into the death of Christ, there to abide forever actually exterminated. Is
this crucifixion gradual or instantaneous? When the poor victim is nailed to the cross, he gradually
suffers and bleeds his life away, finally dying suddenly in a moment. One moment there is life in
him, and not yet dead. The next moment life has actually ebbed away, and he is dead as the bones
in Ezekiel’s vision. The instantaneity and completeness of the crucifixion is here settled beyond the
possibility of cavil, revealed by the Holy Ghost in the aorist tense peculiar to the Greek language
alone, and made by the Holy Ghost to reveal His own mighty work. Sanctification throughout the
New Testament is constantly revealed by this tense. While a gradual work precedes and another
follows sanctification, yet the work itself is instantaneous. While regeneration is birth, sanctification
is the death of the old man. Do you not know that death is always sudden? I was well acquainted for
forty years with a man who was a hopeless consumptive, been given up by all physicians to die at
the beginning of that period. Yet he lived on the forty years, through all the time the same hopeless
consumptive, and finally died as suddenly as the tick of the clock. The burial which follows the
death, putting away the corpse out of sight permanently to abide in its final resting place (for there
is no resurrection in this case, unless you let the devil raise him and ruin everything), indicates the
settlement of the sanctified in the permanent and growing experience of holiness. “That the body of
sin may be destroyed.” This statement of the Holy Spirit is an additional confirmation of the grand
and glorious work of God in sin’s utter extermination. How honest Bible readers can pass
superficially over this and still believe in the necessary survival of the old man in the heart till
corporeal death, I can not see. I defy the scholarship of the world to formulate a statement more
clearly conclusive of extermination than this, which we have from Paul’s infallible pen. The word
“destroyed” here is also in the aorist tense, indicating a complete work, and precluding the possibility
of survival. Oh, how hard it is to get people to believe the mighty works of God! We so naturally
look upon His work from a human standpoint, forgetting that it is as easy for Omnipotence to create
a world as to precipitate a snowflake from a passing cloud. How pertinent that we pray, “Lord,
increase our faith.”
7. “For the one having died has been made free from sin,” i.e., the person who has “died to sin,”
as above described, i.e., “had the old man crucified,” and the “body of sin destroyed.” “Has been
made free from sin,” fully and literally translated, giving the force of the Greek perfect, would read,
“Has been made free from sin, and more so now than ever.” Whereas the English definition of the
perfect tense is an action completed in past time, developing a state continuing down to the present;
the Greek has the same definition, but always lays the emphasis on the present, the English putting
it on the past, thus giving a wonderful force to the revealed truth on Christian experience; e.g.,
Hebrews 10:10, “By whose will we have been sanctified by the offering of the body of Christ once,
and have it yet better than ever.” This verse 7 we are now investigating has been appropriated by
Universalists to refute the future punishment of the wicked, deducing from it the conclusion that
physical death liberates all from sin. This construction is utterly untrue, since the apostle is not
speaking of the physical man at all, but the spiritual, throughout the entire argument. This verse
follows the sixth as a legitimate corollary from the death of the old man and the destruction of the
body of sin. Of course in that case the person having experienced the actual death of sin has been
made free from it. There is a rattlesnake on your premises, much to your annoyance and danger. That
venomous monster is not only killed, but taken away and buried deep in the earth, there to remain
forever. Of course you are now free from the presence, alarm, and peril of the monster, and will so