death without mercy.  Guilt felt may drive to desperation and hopeless continuance in wrong.  The cry, ‘I am so bad that it is useless to try to be better,’ is often heard.  Guilt stifled leads to hardening of heart, and sometimes to desire and riot.  Guilt slurred over by some easy process of absolution may lead to further sin.  Similarly separation from God is the root of all evil, and thoughts of Him as hard and an enemy, always lead to sin.  So if the power of sin in the past must be cancelled, the sense of guilt must be removed, and the wall of partition between man and God thrown down.  What can law answer to such a demand?  It is silent; it can only say, ’What is written is written.’  It has no word to speak that promises ’the blotting out of the handwriting that is against us’; and through its silence one can hear the mocking laugh of the tyrant that keeps his castle.

But Christ has come ‘for sin’; that is to say His Incarnation and Death had relation to, and had it for their object to remove, human sin.  He comes to blot out the evil, to bring God’s pardon.  The recognition of His sacrifice supplies the adequate motive to copy His example, and they who see in His death God’s sacrifice for man’s sin, cannot but yield themselves to Him, and find in obedience a delight.  Love kindled at His love makes likeness and transmutes the outward law into an inward ‘spirit of life in Christ Jesus.’

Still another way by which God ‘condemns sin in the flesh’ is pointed to by the remaining phrase of our text, ‘sending His own Son.’  In the beginning of this epistle Jesus is spoken of as ’being declared to be the Son of God with power according to the Spirit of holiness’; and we must connect that saying with our text, and so think of Christ’s bestowal of His perfect gift to humanity of the Spirit which sanctifies as being part of His condemnation of sin in the flesh.  Into the very region where the tyrant rules, the Son of God communicates a new nature which constitutes a real new power.  The Spirit operates on all our faculties, and redeems them from the bondage of corruption.  All the springs in the land are poisoned; but a new one, limpid and pure, is opened.  By the entrance of the Spirit of holiness into a human spirit, the usurper is driven from the central fortress:  and though he may linger in the outworks and keep up a guerilla warfare, that is all that he can do.  We never truly apprehend Christ’s gift to man until we recognise that He not merely ‘died for our sins,’ but lives to impart the principle of holiness in the gift of His Spirit.  The dominion of that imparted Spirit is gradual and progressive.  The Canaanite may still be in the land, but a growing power, working in and through us, is warring against all in us that still owns allegiance to that alien power, and there can be no end to the victorious struggle until the whole body, soul, and spirit, be wholly under the influence of the Spirit that dwelleth in us, and nothing shall hurt or destroy in what shall then be all God’s holy mountain.