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

hold on to the reckoning, shout victory and be true. God, pursuant to your faith, will certainly attend
to the death problem. He will kill it. So, to your infinite delight, you will find it is “indeed dead.”
12. “Let not sin reign in your mortal body that you should obey the lusts of the same.” This verse
is tersely recapitulatory, dropping, for a moment, back to the unconverted state in which sin reigns
in the “mortal body.” In justification sin is conquered and bound preparatory to execution in
sanctification (5:6).
13. “Neither permit ye your members arms of unrighteousness unto sin”; as in that case you will
necessarily backslide and go headlong to hell. Justification is a transition experience, destined either
to go on into holiness, consummated by the execution of the “old man,” or by yielding your members
as “arms of unrighteousness,” go back into sin and down to hell. “But present yourselves unto God
as alive from the dead, and your members as arms of righteousness unto God.” This is an important
appeal for entire consecration, which is the human side of sanctification. How pertinent this fervent
exhortation after his vivid description of entire sanctification by the crucifixion of the “old man” and
the destruction of the “body of sin.” The Jew presented the offering to God by laying it on the altar
which sanctified the gift. He had nothing to do with the work of sanctification. That was effected by
mere contact with God’s altar. But he must bring the offering and put it on the altar; even so the
crucifying of old Adam is not your work, thank God. For you could never do it; but it is the work of
Him who hung the heavens upon naught, and flung the stars glittering over the skies; so hurry up and
make the consecration. Time is flying and eternity is coming. Consecrate at once and make the
reckoning. Then the louder you shout, the sooner the walls of Jericho will fall.
14. “For sin shall not have dominion over you; because you are not under law, but under
grace.”The law has no quarrel with any one but the law-breaker, i.e., this old man of sin. Hence,
when he is dead, you are as free from the law as if there was no law. When you get rid of everything
in your nature that wants to violate the law, you are then just as free from the law as if there were
none. In a great city like this (New York), full of policemen, jails, and penitentiaries, I am as free as
a bird of paradise. Though I do not know the laws of the city, I have no fear; because I have no
longer any disposition to violate any law, human or divine. The four stages, i.e., sin, law, grace, and
glory, appertain to every soul in the transition from earth to heaven. Egypt is sin-vexed, Pharaoh
emblematizing the devil! The wilderness is law-land, the law actually thundering forth from Sinai
in the wilderness, and given to people who were in covenant relation with God and amenable to His
law, yet possessed of inbred sin antagonizing the law, and destined to die verifying the penalty of
the violated law. Pursuant to the violated law, old Adam is buried deep in the bottom of the Jordan,
and Canaan, grace-land, is entered amid the triumphant shouts which knock down the walls of
Jericho. In Egypt we had guilt; in the wilderness, depravity; and in Canaan, infirmity; justification
taking us out of bondage, sanctification out of legalism, and finally glorification sweeping away all
infirmities and transporting us out of grace into glory.
15. “What then? May we sin because we are not under law, but under grace? It could not be so.”
This is one of Satan’s heretical phases of sanctification, persuading people that when they are free
from the law, they can violate it with impunity. Ever and anon he catches a lot of fanatics on that
hook. Well does Paul settle the question summarily by a positive negation. Such a conclusion is
preposterously false, from the simple fact that this glorious freedom actually identifies you with the