And this is what Paul points to in saying that it ’was weak through the flesh.’  It is good in itself, but it has to work through the sinful nature.  The only powers to which it can appeal are those which are already in rebellion.  A discrowned king whose only forces to conquer his rebellious subjects are the rebels themselves, is not likely to regain his crown.  Because law brings no new element into our humanity, its appeal to our humanity has little more effect than that of the wind whistling through an archway.  It appeals to conscience and reason by a plain declaration of what is right; to will and understanding by an exhibition of authority; to fears and prudence by plainly setting forth consequences.  But what is to be done with men who know what is right but have no wish to do it, who believe that they ought but will not, who know the consequences but ‘choose rather the pleasures of sin for a season,’ and shuffle the future out of their minds altogether?  This is the essential weakness of all law.  The tyrant is not afraid so long as there is no one threatening his reign, but the unarmed herald of a discrowned king.  His citadel will not surrender to the blast of the trumpet blown from Sinai.

II.  Christ’s condemnation and casting out of the tyrant.

The Apostle points to a triple condemnation.

‘In the likeness of sinful flesh,’ Jesus condemns sin by His own perfect life.  That phrase, ‘the likeness of the flesh of sin,’ implies the real humanity of Jesus, and His perfect sinlessness; and suggests the first way in which He condemns sin in the flesh.  In His life He repeats the law in a higher fashion.  What the one spoke in words the other realised in ‘loveliness of perfect deeds’; and all men own that example is the mightiest preacher of righteousness, and that active goodness draws to itself reverence and sways men to imitate.  But that life lived in human nature gives a new hope of the possibilities of that nature even in us.  The dream of perfect beauty ‘in the flesh’ has been realised.  What the Man Christ Jesus was, He was that we may become.  In the very flesh in which the tyrant rules, Jesus shows the possibility and the loveliness of a holy life.

But this, much as it is, is not all.  There is another way in which Christ condemns sin in the flesh, and that is by His perfect sacrifice.  To this also Paul points in the phrase, ’the flesh of sin.’  The example of which we have been speaking is much, but it is weak for the very same reason for which law is weak—­that it operates only through our nature as it is; and that is not enough.  Sin’s hold on man is twofold—­one that it has perverted his relation to God, and another that it has corrupted his nature.  Hence there is in him a sense of separation from God and a sense of guilt.  Both of these not only lead to misery, but positively tend to strengthen the dominion of sin.  The leader of the mutineers keeps them true to him by reminding them that the mutiny laws decree