“…because the law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus has set you free from the law of sin and death.” (CSB – Read the chapter)

In Paul’s letter to the churches in the region of Galatia (modern-day southern Turkey), he speaks at length about the freedom we have in Christ. But what exactly are we freed from? We know from the marvelous declaration Paul makes at the beginning of the chapter that we are freed from condemnation. Here, Paul spells out in a bit more detail what that means. Let’s talk about following Jesus and real freedom.

Have you ever lived before under condemnation? It’s exhausting. And heavy. And stifling. Everywhere you go, everything you do, it’s there, hanging over your head. It hardly ever gives you a moment of peace. Just when you think you’ll be able to relax a bit, it forcefully reasserts itself just to remind you who’s in charge. Spoiler alert: it’s not you. You want to be able to do something that isn’t controlled by the condemnation, but as long as you have whatever it is hanging over your head, you can’t. There’s no freedom there.

As we talked about yesterday, though, in Christ, all of that is gone. There is freedom. Real freedom. It isn’t some partial freedom where you are really only given a somewhat longer leash. In Christ you are free. The condemnation and all that comes along with it are gone forever. Jesus got rid of them.

What Paul does here in v. 2 is to explain a bit further why we have this freedom. We have this freedom from condemnation in Christ “because the law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus has set you free from the law of sin and death.” Okay, but what does that mean. Let’s clarify this out of the gate. Paul is not talking about some given law here like the Law of Moses. He’s instead using the word law to refer to how the world works more generally. He’s using the word more along the lines of how we talk about something like the law of gravity. Nobody gave that law (okay, well, God technically did, but that’s not what I mean), and yet the world operates by it with reliable consistency. It’s the way things always happen and the world itself enforces natural consequences if we try to ignore it and operate in a different way. Thus the legal language. It’s metaphorical language, but helpfully so.

That’s good to know, but again, what is Paul actually talking about? Let’s start with the second part. What is “the law of sin and death.” There are a couple of parts to this. The first is that we are all enslaved to sin apart from Christ. This is what Paul has spent most of the previous seven chapters talking about. On our own we sin. Period. That’s what we do. It’s all we can do. We aren’t capable of producing anything else in or through our lives. We are sinful by nature.

This, though, leads us directly to the second part. All sin leads to death. Even a single sin, something we might consider so small as to be something God should obviously ignore, results in our eternal separation from Him. While all sin is not equal in its personal or relational impact (that is, I’d rather you stomp on my foot than shoot me in the face), all sin is equal in its ability to separate us from God. This is because all sin, even what we understand to be the smallest of sins, comes out of a rejection of God’s authority as God, a rejection of His rightful sovereignty over our lives as Creator, and an intentional theft of our lives from that authority and sovereignty in order to rule our lives ourselves.

All sin starts from the point of a severing of our relationship with Him and proceeds from there. Sometimes it runs to obviously, culturally identified places of evil very quickly. Sometimes its impact is hardly noticeable to the untrained eye. But since God is the only source of life, when we sever our connection to Him, death is the only thing available to us anymore. It’s not a question of whether we receive it, but of how quickly that death comes. It will eventually be permanent for all those who choose to remain separated from Him.

Okay, then if that is the law of sin and death, what is “the law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus”? It is simply a reference to the fact that there is life for all those who are in Christ Jesus. That life is conveyed to us and we experience it through the ministry of God’s Spirit in us. When we place our faith in Jesus as Savior and receive Him as our Lord, our relationship with God is restored in Him. His sacrifice returned to God what we took on our behalf. His willing sacrifice of His own perfect life made it possible for us to keep ours and still have the relationship with God we were created for in the beginning. With our relationship to the source of life thus restored, life is indeed what we can enjoy in Christ; permanent life.

And again, leaning back into that explanation of Paul’s legal language from a second ago, neither of these are laws that have been explicitly spoken or written down somewhere…except, I suppose, in the Scriptures themselves…but they are nonetheless how the world works. Anyone separated from God, and who remains separated from Him until their natural, physical death receives eternal death and separation from Him because there is nothing else for them to receive. Anyone reconciled to God and living in a relationship with Him through Jesus at the point of their natural, physical death receives eternal life because in God that’s all there is. This is how the world works.

Landing on that middle phrase, “has set you free,” then, the former law frees us from the latter law. In Christ we are released from the enslaving clutches of sin and death and given new life in Him. We are freed from our inability not to sin and given the new ability to walk in the righteousness of God. This is the good news of the Gospel. In Christ there is freedom and life available to anyone and everyone willing to follow Him. No one is exempt from this offer. There is no set of circumstances that renders a person unfit to receive it. No one is disqualifyingly undeserving of it. We are all equally undeserving of it. That’s what makes it grace. But the fact that this is how God has made the world to work allows us to speak of it using the legal language Paul does. And because of this law, there is now no condemnation for those in Christ Jesus.

Let’s add one caveat to this here at the end. The freedom from sin that Jesus brings us is given to us so that we can walk in the righteousness of God in Christ. As Paul wrote some years earlier to the Galatian believers, we cannot use our freedom as a means to go back into sin. To do that is an indication that we never actually received it in the first place. Yes, we will still lose that battle against sin Paul described in chapter 7, but the occasional slip into sin is not what Paul has in mind. But the conscious choice to walk a path of sin with no intentions of repenting and turning away from that sin in favor of righteousness once again is a problem. We are instead to use our freedom for the sake of pursuing and expanding God’s righteousness in Christ. We are to use our freedom in Christ as a means of drawing others to Him. That’s how we show the world that it really is ours. Let’s live as the free people we are.