The Big Question
At this point, the question must be asked: So with all this discussed… why do we still sin?
One thing Dr. Farley makes clear is this: “if we’re going to look for a reason why we still sin, we’d better not resurrect the old self in our theology. To do so goes against God’s Word. And consider this: if you don’t believe your old self is dead, buried, and gone, you’re going to try to kill off “half of you” somehow.”
This gives us a bigger picture to what it means when Christ says in Mark 3:25 that a house divided cannot stand. No, friends.
We’re meant for something simpler. We’re meant for something better. We’re meant for the truth. We are new.
But sure. At the end of the day, we still sin. And this is why we say stuff like “we’re new creations ‘positionally'”, or this truth of our being new creations is ‘becoming’ true and thus manifesting, little by little; We’d say all of this, if only to reason out why we still sin. But here’s the thing.
The Real Culprit
Dr. Farley pulls up a couple of controversial verses, from the equally controversial exhortation of Paul in Romans 7. For purposes of discussion let’s pull up the ESV:
For I know that nothing good dwells in me, that is, in my flesh. For I have the desire to do what is right, but not the ability to carry it out.Romans 7:18
Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord! So then, I myself serve the law of God with my mind, but with my flesh I serve the law of sin.Romans 7:25
He points out that the word ‘flesh’ in both accounts is the Greek word ‘sarx’. Now before I go into his explanation of the word I’ve thought it necessary for me to look it up myself, and here’s what I found from our good folks at biblehub.com, and what we pull up is interesting, almost immediately.
[4561 / sárks (“flesh”) is not always evil in Scripture. Indeed, it is used positively in relation to sexual intercourse in marriage (e.g. Ephesians 5:31, “Therefore a man shall leave his father and mother and hold fast to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh.”) – as well as for the sinless human body of Jesus (“And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, and we have seen his glory, glory as of the only Son from the Father, full of grace and truth.” – John 1:14; “By this you know the Spirit of God: every spirit that confesses that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh is from God, and every spirit that does not confess Jesus is not from God. This is the spirit of the antichrist, which you heard was coming and now is in the world already.” – 1 John 4:2-3). Indeed, flesh (what is physical) is necessary for the body to live out the faith the Lord works in (Gal 2:20).]
So from my understanding, one usage of the word ‘sarx’ or ‘sarks’ as ‘flesh’, is our earthly body – Husband and wife shall (perform intercourse and as such) become one flesh (earthly body) // Jesus Christ has come in the flesh – that is, He was born into this reality, with an earthly body… and as for us, our flesh, our earthly bodies live out the faith the Lord has authored into our being. Not always evil, as stated. However, it’s safe to say the cliche that it all goes downhill from here. The definitions and elaborations go further:
4561 sárks properly, flesh (“carnal”), merely of human origin or empowerment.
4561 (sarks) is generally negative, referring to making decisions (actions) according to self – i.e. done apart from faith (independent from God’s inworking). Thus what is “of the flesh (carnal)” is by definition displeasing to the Lord – even things that seem “respectable!” In short, flesh generally relates to unaided human effort, i.e. decisions (actions) that originate from self or are empowered by self. This is carnal (“of the flesh”) and proceeds out of the untouched (unchanged) part of us – i.e. what is not transformed by God.
Bear with me here, because I’m learning as we go. We’re getting into the general understanding of flesh. Apparently when we talk about what is ‘fleshly’, we are referring to what is ‘merely of human origin or empowerment’ – and when we talk of human origin, it’s (1) what’s ‘done apart from faith (independent from God’s inworking)’, (2) ‘unaided’ / ‘(originating) from self’ / ’empowered by self’, and (3) what ‘proceeds out of the untouched (unchanged) part of us – i.e. what is not transformed by God’.
Interesting. ‘Sarx’ or ‘Sarks’ is defined as our flesh or our earthly body, but its more prominent usage connotes that it’s what’s of human origin, apart from faith, and – this challenged me – ‘what is not transformed by God’; I’d like to think that this describes our old self. And now with that in mind, can we say that what Paul refers to as the ‘flesh’ in which nothing good dwells in Romans 7:18 is the old self, while the ‘flesh’ that serves the law of sin in Romans 7:25 is our earthly body? Or maybe we ought to look at both definitions as a whole and say that the ‘flesh’ in both verses is also both our earthly body and our old self?
Now I may be jumping the gun here, but the way I personally seem to respond to this, or the way I personally seem to see this is as follows: Here and now, as I type this, I exist through this physical, earthly body, and though it’s still ‘alive’, all that’s of human origin, all that’s apart from faith, and all that is not transformed by God – all that died when Christ died, all that was crucified when Christ was crucified. But let’s soldier on.
Just as today’s elected leaders automatically inherit the problems and issues of the previous administration, so our earthly body still has remnants of the old self: old mindset, our own former choices, and deep-seated patterns of thinking and long-applied strategies of living in this world stored in our own minds. You can tether these old ways of thinking and collectively call it ‘flesh’, in line with what we’ve already established – it is apart from faith, empowered by human effort, and not transformed by God .
This ‘Flesh’ is our old way of thinking, and our old way of acting – it’s our old self that lingers while we still have this earthly body. It’s the problems from the old administration, inherited by the new regime.
I’ll stop here because I think what I have to share next will need to be in a separate article, which I hope will be posted today as well.
Until the next post, God bless you!
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