Daily Manna · Day 309 · November 5
Free from Sin
“For the law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus hath made me free from the law of sin and death.”
An aircraft at the end of a runway does not defeat gravity. Gravity is still pulling on every ounce of it, exactly as hard as before, all the way up.
And you know the loop by now. The same failure, the same shame afterwards, the same promise that this time you will simply try harder, and the promise gone by Thursday, and underneath it the question of whether you are a person who ever actually changes.
Paul's answer is not a better technique, and this is the point people miss because the verse has the word law in it twice. He is not talking about rules. He is talking about two operative forces, the way you would say the law of gravity: one principle producing sin and death, which he has just spent a whole chapter describing from the inside, and a stronger one now at work. He is careful about why the first one wins so often. What the law could not do, in that it was weak through the flesh, he says next. The commandment was not the problem. The material it had to work with was. Willpower fails against the pull because willpower operates at the same level as the pull.
So the question to ask when you fall is not the one you have been asking. Not can I keep this up, which is a question about your own thrust. Ask the other one and keep asking it: who owns me now?
Daily Manna runs on a two-year cycle. The year two reading for day 309 is In a Strange Land (Psalm 137:4).