The Spirit's Greatest Role - Romans 8:14-17
Paul continues to disclose the ways in which God confirms that believers are eternally related to Him as His children, testifying that we are led, given access to God, and granted inner assurance by His own Spirit. These three means of assurance are closely related and intertwined, but each presents a distinctive truth about the Spirit’s work in the believer’s life.
The movement of thought in this paragraph is very similar to that of Gal. 4:1–7. In both texts, Paul affirms that believers are transformed from slaves to sons of God through the redeeming sacrifice of Christ, “sent” as one like us. In both, this new status is called “adoption” and is tied to the indwelling Spirit, the Spirit who makes us deeply aware that we now belong to God as his dearly loved children (cf. “Abba”). And in both, being God’s children leads to our being his heirs. We have to do here with what must have been an important way of conceptualizing what Paul understands a Christian to be.
If “life” is the ruling idea in vv. 1–13, being “sons” (v. 14; cf. “sonship/adoption” in v. 15) or “children” (vv. 16, 17) of God dominates vv. 14–17
The connection between this verse and the preceding is as follows. Those who by the Spirit put to death the deeds of the body are led by the Spirit of God. But those who are led by the Spirit of God are the sons of God. And, if they are the sons of God, that status is the guarantee of eternal life.
“Led by the Spirit” implies that they are governed by the Spirit and the emphasis is placed upon the activity of the Spirit and the passivity of the subjects. “Put to death the deeds of the body” (vs. 13) emphasizes the activity of the believer. These are complementary. The activity of the believer is the evidence of the Spirit’s activity and the activity of the Spirit is the cause of the believer’s activity.
In a word, being a “child” of God means to be an “heir” of God also, and thereby one who must look to the future for the full enjoyment of “sonship”
This paragraph, then, carries forward Paul’s theme of assurance in three ways: (1) it gives further reason for the triumphant proclamation that believers who have God’s Spirit will “live”; (2) it adds to the growing list another important description—“sons of God”—of believers as God’s people, the heirs of God’s promises; and (3) it provides yet further justification for Paul’s categorical assertion that “there is now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus”
“being led by the Spirit” is a “distinguishing sign” of being a son of God.
more likely he uses the word rhetorically, as a hypothetical antithesis to the “Spirit of adoption”: “the Spirit that you have received is not a ‘spirit of bondage’ but a Spirit of adoption.”
Paul could hardly have chosen a better term than “adoption” to characterize this peace and security. The word denoted the Greek, and particularly Roman, legal institution whereby one can “adopt” a child and confer on that child all the legal rights and privileges that would ordinarily accrue to a natural child
“the Spirit who confirms adoption” rather than “the Spirit who brings about adoption.”
The Spirit not only bestows “adoption” on us; he also makes us aware of this new relationship: “we have not only the status, but the heart of sons.”
He is called “the Spirit of adoption”, not because he is the agent of adoption but because it is he who creates in the children of God the filial love and confidence by which they are able to cry, “Abba, Father” and exercise the rights and privileges of God’s children.
The Aramaic abba was the term Jesus himself used in addressing his Father, and its preservation in the Greek Gospel of Mark (14:36) and in the Greek-speaking Pauline churches attests to the fact that it was remembered and treasured as distinctive and meaningful.
This verse is not connected syntactically to v. 15, but its function, clearly enough, is to explain how it is that “receiving the Spirit of adoption” enables us to cry out “Abba, Father!” The Holy Spirit is not only instrumental in making us God’s children; he also makes us aware that we are God’s children. While the first occurrence of pneuma denotes the Holy Spirit, the second, modified as it is by “our,” refers to the human “spirit.” This is, then, the only occurrence of pneuma in Rom. 8 that does not refer to the Holy Spirit.
The nineteenth-century British pastor Billy Bray seemed never to have lacked that inner testimony. He had been converted from a life of drunken debauchery while reading John Bunyan’s Visions of Heaven and Hell. He was so continuously overjoyed by God’s grace and goodness that he said, “I can’t help praising the Lord. As I go along the street, I lift up one foot, and it seems to say, ‘Glory.’ And I lift up the other, and it seems to say, ‘Amen.’ And so they keep on like that all the time I am walking.”
In immediately adding “fellow heirs with Christ,” Paul is not correcting the first description but filling it out by reminding us that Christians inherit the blessings of God’s kingdom only through, and in, Christ. We, “the sons of God,” are such by virtue of our belonging to the Son of God; and we are heirs of God only by virtue of our union with the one who is the heir of all God’s promises
Paul uses the term here to denote full possession of all that sonship means in the new age, but it is not so much ownership as relationship that he has in mind. He speaks of being heirs of God, a bold piece of imagery, found here only in the New Testament (though cf. Gal. 4:7). Since God does not die, there is no question of inheritance in the strict sense of the term. But the heir is in a position of privilege as a result of his place in the family. Paul has been speaking of “sons” and of “children”; we are in a privileged position because of our membership in the family of none less than God.
“Heirs of God” can involve nothing less than that the sons of God are heirs of the inheritance which God himself has laid up for them. But it is difficult to suppress the richer and deeper thought that God himself is the inheritance of his children
Because we are one with Christ, we are his fellow heirs, assured of being “glorified with him.” But, at the same time, this oneness means that we must follow Christ’s own road to glory, “suffering with him” (cf. also Phil. 1:29; 3:10; 2 Cor. 1:5). Both the present tense of the verb and the continuation of the thought in v. 18 show that this suffering is not identical to that “dying with Christ” which takes place at conversion. Rather, the suffering Paul speaks of here refers to the daily anxieties, tensions, and persecutions that are the lot of those who follow the one who was “reckoned with the transgressors” (Luke 22:37)
What Paul is doing is setting forth an unbreakable “law of the kingdom” according to which glory can come only by way of suffering. For the glory of the kingdom of God is attained only through participation in Christ, and belonging to Christ cannot but bring our participation in the sufferings of Christ.
He is one with us in our sufferings. But also “we died with Christ” (6:8). We are one with him in his death. But our sufferings are not meaningless. We suffer in order that we may also share in his glory. The path of suffering is the path to glory.