Biblion Bible Commentary
Read the introduction to Romans · About this commentary
The Spirit of Adoption
Romans 8:12-17
12 So then, brothers, we are debtors, not to the flesh, to live after the flesh. · WEB
The debt runs to the Spirit and not the flesh, mortification is Spirit-powered work, and the family cry is the evidence of sonship.
So then, brothers, we are debtors, not to the flesh, to live after the flesh.
The sentence breaks off before naming the creditor, and the ellipsis speaks: debtors — but to whom is left ringing, answered by everything around it. The flesh has earned nothing from the believer; whatever is owed, is owed elsewhere. And verse 13 states the two directions with life and death attached: if you live after the flesh, you must die; but if by the Spirit you put to death the deeds of the body, you will live.
The verb is put to death — mortify, an execution carried out daily on the body's schemes — and the instrument clause is the theology: by the Spirit. Chapter 7's man tried the same execution alone and reported his failure at length Romans 7:19; the act commanded here is the same act with different power. Believers are neither told to relax (the killing is real work, theirs to do) nor to strive unaided (the doing is by the Spirit). The letter refuses both errors in one clause.
Then the family language begins, and it governs everything to the chapter's end: for as many as are led by the Spirit of God, these are children of God Romans 8:14.
Verse 15 contrasts two spirits by the postures they produce: you didn't receive the spirit of bondage again to fear, but you received the Spirit of adoption, by whom we cry, "Abba! Father!"
Adoption — the legal act that makes an outsider a son with full standing, chosen deliberately by the adopter. And the evidence of it is a cry: Abba — the Aramaic word from the Lord's own praying, the intimate address of the child, preserved untranslated in a letter to Rome because the church had kept the sound itself. The Spirit does not merely inform believers of their status; he produces in them the child's instinctive address — the Spirit himself testifies with our spirit that we are children of God Romans 8:16, two witnesses agreeing, which is the law's own standard of confirmation.
And verse 17 draws the inheritance line with a clause of realism: if children, then heirs — heirs of God and joint heirs with Christ, if indeed we suffer with him, that we may also be glorified with him. Joint heirs — the estate shared with the firstborn Romans 8:29. And the road to it runs where his ran: through suffering to glory, which is exactly the sequence the next paragraph weighs Romans 8:18.
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