For what the law could not do, in that it was weak through the flesh, God sending his own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh, and for sin, condemned sin in the flesh.
—Romans 8:3
In Romans 8:7 Paul wrote, “The carnal mind [the mind of the flesh] is enmity against God: for it is not subject to the law of God, neither indeed can be.” Here Paul opened up the depth of sin that is in the flesh. In Romans 7:18, he had said that “In my flesh, dwelleth no good thing” (verse 18). Here he went deeper and told us that the flesh is “enmity against God” (Romans 8:7); it hates God and His law. It was on this account that God condemned sin in the flesh on the cross; all the curse that is on sin is on the flesh in which sin dwells. As the believer understands this, he will cease from any attempt at seeking to perfect in the flesh what is begun in the Spirit. (See Galatians 3:3.) The two are at deadly, irreconcilable enmity.
This lies at the very root of the true Christian life: “God…condemned sin in the flesh: That the righteousness of the law might be fulfilled in us, who walk not after the flesh, but after the Spirit” (Romans 8:3–4). All the requirements of God’s law will be fulfilled, not in those who strive to keep and fulfill that law (a thing that is utterly impossible), but in those who walk by the Spirit and, in His power, live out the life that Christ won for us on the cross and imparted to us in the resurrection.
May God’s children learn the double lesson here. In me, that is in my flesh, in the old nature that I have from Adam, there dwells literally no good thing that can satisfy the eye of a holy God. And that flesh can never by any process of discipline, struggling, or prayer be made better than it is. But the Son of God, in the likeness of sinful flesh and in the form of a man, condemned sin on the cross. “There is therefore now no condemnation to them which are in Christ Jesus, who walk not after the flesh, but after the Spirit” (verse 1).