Shall we not enter on our expository study full of holy expectation, and with unspeakable desires awake, to receive all things which in that Covenant are ours? Shall we not remember, over every sentence, that in it Christ speaks by Paul, and speaks to us? For us also, as for our spiritual ancestors, all this is true. It shall be true in us also, as it was in them. We shall be humbled as well as gladdened; and thus our gladness will be sounder. We shall find that whatever be our "_walk according to the Spirit_," and our veritable dominion over sin, we shall still have "_the practices of the body_" with which to deal--of the body which still is "_dead because of sin_," "_mortal_," not yet "_redeemed_." We shall be practically reminded, even by the most joyous exhortations, that possession and personal condition are one thing in covenant, and another in realization; that we must watch, pray, examine self, and deny it, if we would "be" what we "are." Yet all this is but the salutary accessory to the blessed main burthen of every line. We are accepted in the Lord. In the Lord we have the Eternal Spirit for our inward Possessor. Let us arise, and "walk humbly," but also in gladness, "with our God." St Paul speaks again, perhaps after a silence, and Tertius writes down for the first time the now immortal and beloved words. [Sidenote: Ver. 1.] =So no adverse sentence is there now,= in view of this great fact of our redemption, =for those in Christ Jesus.[120]= "_In Christ Jesus_"--mysterious union, blessed fact, wrought by the Spirit who linked us sinners to the Lord.[121] [Sidenote: Ver. 2.] =For the law of the Spirit of the life which is in Christ Jesus[122] freed me,= the man of the conflict just described, =from the law of sin and of death.= The "law," the preceptive will, which legislates the covenant of blessing for all who are in Christ, has set him free. By a strange, pregnant paradox, so we take it, the Gospel--the message which carries with it acceptance, and also holiness, by faith--is here called a "law." For while it is free grace to us it is also immovable ordinance with God. The amnesty is His edict. It is by heavenly _statute_ that sinners, believing, possess the Holy Spirit in possessing Christ. And here, with a sublime abruptness and directness, that great gift of the Covenant, the Spirit, for which the Covenant gift of Justification was given, is put forward as the Covenant's characteristic and crown. It is for the moment as if this were all--that "_in Christ Jesus_" we, I, are under the _fiat_ which assures to us the fulness of the Spirit. And this "law," unlike the stern "letter" of Sinai, has actually "_freed me_." It has endowed me not only with place but with power, in which to live emancipated from a rival law, the law of sin and of death. And what is that rival "law"? We dare to say, it is the preceptive will of Sinai; "Do this, and thou shalt live." This is a