8:12
Here the distinction between “flesh” and “sinful nature” is vital to understanding what Paul is saying. In saying that “we have an obligation, but it is not to the flesh, to live according to it” Paul is not saying we must not live according to our sinful desires. Now it is absolutely true that we should not live according to our sinful desires, but that is not what he is saying here. Paul’s argument is chapters 7 and 8 is about how we live to please God. Do we do it by living by law, ie trying to do good by our own efforts, or do we do it by the way of the Spirit? The Jews thought they had an obligation to obey the Law, to live according to it. For all of us there is a sense of what is right and wrong. That sense, or our conscience, is often good, but we then feel that we have an obligation to live out of the flesh, to seek to do good out of our own strength. We do have an obligation, but it is not to live by the flesh.
8:13
The reason we do not have an obligation to live according to the flesh is that it leads only to death. Yet it seems so right, it seems to make sense. We know what is the right, therefore we should do our best to live up to that standard. But doing so will not work because of the deep-rooted nature of sin within us, because of our corrupt nature, or total depravity, to use a Calvinist term. Instead we are to live by the Spirit, and by the Spirit we put to death the misdeeds of the body. Note that Paul certainly recognises that our bodies have wrong desires and we do wrong things, and that something needs to be done about it. It is the way we go about it that matters. Only by the Spirit can we put the misdeeds of the body to death, not out of our fleshly strength.
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