No Condemnation, Creation Groaning, Love Unbroken

“Condemnation” is katakrima, the sentence passed and the penalty that follows it, a word Paul used in 5:16 and 5:18. The closing clause, “who walk not after the flesh”, is missing from the oldest manuscripts and seems to have been copied up from verse 4; the King James follows later copies.

Paul is still speaking in the first person, carried over from the anguished “I” of chapter 7. Several early manuscripts read “hath made thee free”, as though Paul turned to address the reader directly, a small variant that sharpens the personal edge of the line.

The Greek opens with a broken phrase, literally “the impossibility of the law”, and never quite finishes the grammar. “For sin” is peri hamartias, the phrase the Greek Old Testament uses for the sin offering in Leviticus, so many read it as naming Christ’s death as that offering.

“Righteousness” here is dikaioma, singular, the law’s righteous requirement taken as one whole. “Walk” is the Hebrew way of speaking about conduct, halakh, from which the Jewish word halakhah, the way of life under the law, is formed.

“Mind” is phroneo, to set one’s thinking on something, the verb Paul uses in Philippians 2:5, “Let this mind be in you”. “After the flesh” means according to it, taking it as the standard by which a life is measured.

“Carnally minded” is a noun phrase in Greek, “the mind of the flesh”, and the King James turned it into an adverb. “Peace” recalls 5:1, “we have peace with God”: the chapter keeps collecting the gains of the argument before it.

“Enmity” is echthra, the hostility Paul described in 5:10, “when we were enemies”. The last clause moves from will to ability: the mind of the flesh does not submit, and cannot.

“In the flesh” here names a realm or a rule, not bodily life as such. Paul himself writes of the life he now lives “in the flesh” by faith (Galatians 2:20), so the phrase cannot simply mean having a body.

“Dwell” is oikeo, from the word for house: to live somewhere as a resident, not visit. Paul uses the same verb in 1 Corinthians 3:16, where the church is the temple of God and the Spirit of God dwells in it.

“Dead” is nekron, a corpse word, stronger than the “mortal” of the next verse. The King James capitalises “Spirit”, reading God’s Spirit as life; many translations read the human spirit, “your spirit is alive”. The Greek allows either.

“Quicken” means to make alive; in 1611 “quick” still meant living, as in “the quick and the dead”. The first half calls the risen one Jesus, his personal name, and the second calls him Christ, his title.

Paul begins a sentence about debt and never finishes it. He says whom we do not owe, the flesh, but leaves the creditor unnamed, trusting the reader to supply the Spirit from the verses around it.

“Mortify” comes through Latin, mortificare, to put to death; Colossians 3:5 uses the same idea, “Mortify therefore your members”. The Greek is in the present tense, a continual putting to death, not a single act done once.

Being “led”, bondage, sonship and inheritance are all words from the Exodus, where God called Israel “my son” (Exodus 4:22) and led the people through the wilderness. Many readers see Paul telling the church’s life as a new Exodus.

Abba is Aramaic for father, the word Jesus himself prays in Gethsemane: “Abba, Father” (Mark 14:36). “Adoption” is huiothesia, a term of Roman law, under which an adopted son received the full standing of a natural heir.

The law required two witnesses to establish a matter (Deuteronomy 19:15), and here there are two: God’s Spirit and ours. The King James says “the Spirit itself” because the Greek word for spirit is neuter; later translations say “himself”.

Heirs usually inherit when a parent dies. God does not, so heirship here means sharing in what is his while he lives. Psalm 16:5 speaks this way: “The LORD is the portion of mine inheritance.”

“Reckon” is logizomai, the accountant’s verb, the same one used in chapter 4 of Abraham’s faith being counted for righteousness. Paul has done the sums. The glory is to be revealed “in us”, a preposition that can also mean to us or upon us.

“Earnest expectation” is apokaradokia, a vivid word for craning the neck, watching with head thrust forward. “Manifestation” is apokalypsis, unveiling. Creation is pictured on tiptoe, straining to see the curtain drawn back.

“Vanity” is mataiotes, the word the Greek Old Testament uses all through Ecclesiastes: vanity of vanities. The one who subjected creation is most likely God, with the ground cursed for Adam’s sake in Genesis 3:17 in view.

“Glorious liberty” is literally “the liberty of the glory”; the King James turned the noun into an adjective. Creation is to share the freedom that belongs to the glory of God’s children, not merely a pleasant liberty of its own.

“Travaileth in pain together” is the language of labour. Jewish writings spoke of the birth pangs before the age to come, and Jesus calls the wars and earthquakes “the beginnings of sorrows”, literally birth pains, in Mark 13:8.

“To wit” simply means “that is to say”. “Redemption” is apolytrosis, release on payment of a ransom, the word used of buying a slave’s freedom. What is to be ransomed here is the body itself.

The Greek tense is past: we were saved, in hope. Paul then makes a small argument almost by wordplay, the kind of thing a teacher says to a class: nobody hopes for what they are already holding.

“Patience” is hypomone, endurance, literally remaining under a load. It is the word of 5:3, “tribulation worketh patience”. Waiting in this sense is active and strenuous, not idle.

“Helpeth” is a rare compound verb meaning to take hold of a load together with someone. Its only other use in the New Testament is Martha’s complaint in Luke 10:40: bid her therefore that she help me.

“He that searcheth the hearts” is an Old Testament title for God (1 Chronicles 28:9, Jeremiah 17:10). “Saints” means holy ones, Paul’s ordinary word for all believers, as when he addresses the Romans as “called to be saints” (1:7).

Some of the oldest manuscripts make God the subject: “God worketh all things together for good”. The King James follows the reading where “all things” is the subject. Either way, the promise is qualified by the two phrases that close the verse.

“Firstborn” in the Old Testament is a rank as well as a birth order: “I will make him my firstborn, higher than the kings of the earth” (Psalm 89:27). “Conformed” is the word Paul uses in Philippians 3:21 of bodies fashioned like Christ’s glorious body.

The verse is built as a ladder, each rung picking up the word before it: predestinate, called, justified, glorified. Sanctified is missing from the chain, which suggests Paul is tracing what God does at each step, not a full order of the Christian life.

“What shall we then say?” is Paul’s signature question in Romans, used at 4:1, 6:1, 7:7 and 9:14. The “if” in “If God be for us” assumes the condition is true; it means since.

“Spared not his own Son” echoes Genesis 22:16, where the Greek Old Testament uses the same verb of Abraham, who “hast not withheld thy son, thine only son”. Paul sets the Father where Abraham stood on Moriah, with no ram caught in the thicket.

“Lay any thing to the charge” is a formal courtroom verb for bringing an accusation. The sequence closely follows Isaiah 50:8–9: “He is near that justifieth me; who will contend with me?”

Greek manuscripts had no punctuation, and this verse can also be read as a question: is Christ, who died and rose, the one to condemn? “At the right hand of God” is the language of Psalm 110:1, the verse the New Testament quotes more often than any other from the Old.

“The love of Christ” means his love for us, not ours for him. Paul had lived through most of this list, as he recounts in 2 Corinthians 11:23–27; the sword, according to early tradition, came at the end.

Psalm 44 is a lament in which Israel protests that it has not been unfaithful. Two verses after the line Paul quotes, the psalm cries, “Awake, why sleepest thou, O Lord?” (44:23). A reader who knew the psalm would hear that question hanging behind the one Paul does quote.

“More than conquerors” is one word in Greek, hypernikomen, super-conquer, possibly Paul’s own coinage. “Him that loved us” is in the past tense, pointing to a single act of love, the one named in verse 32.

“I am persuaded” is a perfect tense: I have become convinced and remain so. “Principalities” and “powers” are ranks of spiritual beings, as in Ephesians 6:12. The oldest manuscripts place “powers” after “things to come”, a small reordering.

“Height” and “depth” were also technical terms in ancient astrology for the highest and lowest points of a star’s path, where its influence on human fate was believed strongest. If Paul has that in mind, even the stars are included in the list of what cannot separate.