(ver. 3) should be noted.  Sin is personified as dwelling in the flesh, which expression here means, not merely the body, but unregenerate human nature.  He has made his fortress there, and rules over it all.  The strong man keeps his house and his goods are in peace.  He laughs to scorn the attempts of laws and moralities of all sorts to cast him out.  His dominion is death to the human nature over which he tyrannises.  Condemnation is inevitable to the men over whom he rules.  They or he must perish.  If he escape they die.  If he could be slain they might live.  Christ comes, condemns the tyrant, and casts him out.  So, he being condemned, we are acquitted; and he being slain there is no death for us.  Let us try to elucidate a little further this great metaphor by just pondering the two points prominent in it—­Sin tyrannising over human nature and resisting all attempts to overcome it, and Christ’s condemnation and casting out of the tyrant.

I. Sin tyrannising over human nature, and resisting all attempts to overcome it.

Paul is generalising his own experience when he speaks of the condemnation of an intrusive alien force that holds unregenerate human nature in bondage.  He is writing a page of his own autobiography, and he is sure that all the rest of us have like pages in ours.  Heart answereth unto heart as in a mirror.  If each man is a unity, the poison must run through all his veins and affect his whole nature.  Will, understanding, heart, must all be affected and each in its own way by the intruder; and if men are a collective whole, each man’s experience is repeated in his brother’s.

The Apostle is equally transcribing his own experience when in the text he sadly admits the futility of all efforts to shake the dominion of sin.  He has found in his own case that even the loftiest revelation in the Mosaic law utterly fails in the attempt to condemn sin.  This is true not only in regard to the Mosaic law but in regard to the law of conscience, and to moral teachings of any kind.  It is obvious that all such laws do condemn sin in the sense that they solemnly declare God’s judgment about it, and His sentence on it; but in the sense of real condemnation, or casting out, and depriving sin of its power, they all are impotent.  The law may deter from overt acts or lead to isolated acts of obedience; it may stir up antagonism to sin’s tyranny, but after that it has no more that it can do.  It cannot give the purity which it proclaims to be necessary, nor create the obedience which it enjoins.  Its thunders roll terrors, and no fruitful rain follows them to soften the barren soil.  There always remains an unbridged gulf between the man and the law.