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Biblion Bible Commentary

Read the introduction to Romans · About this commentary

The Mind of the Flesh and of the Spirit

Romans 8:5-8

5 For those who live according to the flesh set their minds on the things of the flesh, but those who live according to the Spirit, the things of the Spirit. · WEB

Two mindsets are audited — one is death and hostility by nature, not by degree — and the impossibility verdict clears the ground for the Spirit.

For those who live according to the flesh set their minds on the things of the flesh, but those who live according to the Spirit, the things of the Spirit.

The walking of verse 4 is traced to its source: the mind-set — the settled orientation of attention and desire, what a life instinctively thinks toward. Conduct follows attention; the two walks are two mindsets before they are two behaviors, and the paragraph audits them as regimes.

For the mind of the flesh is death, but the mind of the Spirit is life and peace Romans 8:6.

The verdict is present tense — is, not leads to. The flesh's mindset does not merely end in death; it is death already in progress, the walking form of the wages Romans 6:23. And the Spirit's mindset is life and peace — the peace of the justified Romans 5:1 become a climate of thought.

Verse 7 explains the death verdict, and the explanation removes the middle ground the moralist lives on: because the mind of the flesh is hostile toward God, for it is not subject to God's law, neither indeed can it be.

Hostile — not indifferent, not underperforming: at war. The flesh's deepest posture toward God is enmity Romans 5:10, however politely dressed, because the flesh's project is self-rule and God's existence is the standing refutation of that project. And the last clause is the hard one: neither indeed can it be. Not does not — cannot. The incapacity is constitutional. The flesh cannot be reformed into submission any more than the wretched man's willing could produce performance Romans 7:18; what is needed is not improvement but the different principle verse 2 named.

Those who are in the flesh can't please God Romans 8:8 — the audit's last line, and the letter's justification for everything it has refused to build on human capacity since chapter 1. Read alone, the verse is despair. Read where it stands, it is the dark backdrop for the sentence that follows immediately and changes everything: but you are not in the flesh but in the Spirit Romans 8:9 — the address of every believer, stated as fact. The impossibility belongs to the old location, and the readers have moved.

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