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

electrifying and intense emotionality, he has fought a terrible battle with this indwelling energy
antagonizing the law of God; meanwhile, with Napoleonic energy and Alexandrian perseverance,
mustering all his powers of mind, heart and spirit, and focalizing all his gigantic volitional
enthusiasm, he has striven with desperation to verify the law of God and do His will on earth as the
angels do it in heaven. Along this line failure, defeat, collapse and discomfiture have floored him
time and again, despite all his wallowing in Arabian sands and importunately crying to God. Three
awful years of terrible conflict with this old man of sin, roaring like a lion, floundering like the
leviathan and snapping like a crocodile, having fruitlessly passed away, victory evidently further off
than ever. We here have a historic metaphor deduced from the custom on the part of ancient
conquerors to inflict on their war captives the horrific retribution of binding them fast to a dead
corpse taken from the battlefield, tying back to back and limb to limb. It is said that the inhalation
of the poisonous miasma emitted from the putrefying corpse invariably killed the living soldier
before he got rid of him, unless fortunate to receive some extraneous aid, bringing him happy
deliverance. This fact again sweeps away the hypothesis which would apply this chapter to a sinner,
as in that case there could be no living body, as every sinner is simply a spiritual corpse. How
vividly, clearly and unmistakably do we here see the “double-minded man” (James 1:8; 4:8), the
corpse representing the old, dead, carnal mind, and the living soldier the mind of Christ, wrought in
the heart by the Holy Ghost in regeneration. Paul himself, with his glorious Damascus experience
of conversion, was this living soldier, with the old man of sin tied to him, represented by the
loathsome corpse. Every Christian, when converted, sets out to obey the Lord on earth like the angels
in heaven, thus keeping the law in the beauty of holiness; but destined to defeat, failure,
mortification, despondency, culminating in desperation, like Paul in the verse when he cried out, “O
wretched man that I am!” I went on this line precisely nineteen years, fighting down old Adam by
the power of the law, only suffering a thousand signal defeats, till in the midst of a glorious revival,
in which I was doing all the preaching, thirty years ago, I reached this memorable Pauline
culmination, when, crying out, “O wretched man that I am! “I gave up the fruitless war against
indwelling sin, turning the battle over to Him who is mighty to save and strong to deliver. Then,
glory to God, the victory came!
25. “Thanks be unto God through Jesus Christ our Lord.” Here we have Paul’s testimony to the
glorious victory which the Omnipotent Sanctifier gave him in a moment, when, after three years’
battle with indwelling sin, despairing and abandoning his own efforts, he turned the Stygian monster
over to the Lord Jesus Christ. Then the uproarious shout of victory came in a moment. The church
of the present day, with the exception of a little handful of sanctified people, are in the seventh of
Romans, roaming round through the howling wilderness of Arabia, where Israel spent forty years.
Oh, how we need a hundred thousand Joshuas to lead the universal church into the land of corn and
wine! How foolish it is for them to take the fog, darkness, storm and conflicts of this chapter, and
not the glorious sunburst which crowns it in the twenty-fifth verse, where Paul leaps and shouts
uproariously and trudges back to the great Syrian metropolis to tell the good news and preach the
gospel of full salvation like a messenger from heaven. You must remember that while this chapter
describes Paul’s battle with indwelling sin while in the justified state, he did not stay in it, but, as
you see, he passes out with a shout, leaping triumphantly into the eighth chapter, which opens with
a jubilant hallelujah of complete deliverance, roaring a continuous gaudeamus of entire sanctification
till it is drowned by the co-mingled hallelujahs of angels and redeemed saints congratulating
glorified humanity in the transcendent ultimatum of final and eternal heavenly triumph. “Then,