Paul began chapter 8 assuring those who believe in Christ that God has forgiven and accepted them.

So now there is no condemnation for those who belong to Christ Jesus. And because you belong to him, the power of the life-giving Spirit has freed you from the power of sin that leads to death. The law of Moses was unable to save us because of the weakness of our sinful nature. So God did what the law could not do. He sent his own Son in a body like the bodies we sinners have. And in that body God declared an end to sin’s control over us by giving his Son as a sacrifice for our sins. He did this so that the just requirement of the law would be fully satisfied for us, who no longer follow our sinful nature but instead follow the Spirit (8:1–4).

This triumphant statement is the exclamation point of Romans 7:25: “Thank God! The answer is in Jesus Christ our Lord.” Because Jesus paid for all our sins on the cross, those who have placed their trust in him are free from the possibility of condemnation. Paul’s phrasing helps us embrace the deep and comforting reality of God’s forgiveness.

We “belong to him.” Those who believe in Christ no longer stand before God alone and exposed. Instead, we “belong to him.” Anyone who puts faith in Christ is now so united with him that they are his possession. Jesus is at God’s right hand “far above any ruler or authority or power or leader or anything else—not only in this world but also in the world to come” (ephesians 1:20–21). And that means we are there too, spiritually speaking. God has taken us, who were spiritually dead, made us alive, and “raised us from the dead along with Christ and seated us with him in the heavenly realms because we are united with Christ Jesus” (2:6). We are inseparably united to Jesus. God cannot look at us without seeing Jesus.

The fact that God sees in Christ is one of the most inspiring truths of the Bible. To belong to him is to be accepted by God because of Christ alone, because of who he is and what he did (and didn’t do).

Sometimes this is spoken of in bookkeeping terms. If our sins were placed in a spreadsheet to keep their tally, when we trust in Jesus, that whole column—no matter how long it is, how many times a row has been added—gets cut and pasted into Jesus’s column. And his column, filled with all the goodness and righteousness that was and is his, is put into our column. Our balance now reflects his transactions instead of our own.

That balance transfer is only good when we put our faith in Jesus. Our salvation is not found in being good (not many of us would want to see the balance between our good and bad columns anyway). We are right with God only because we have received Jesus as Savior. When we did that, God placed us in Christ.

We are “freed from the power of sin.” What does it mean to be freed from “the power of the life-giving Spirit has freed you from the power of sin that leads to death” (ROMANS 8:2)? Here Paul reveals that the good law of God (and it is good), his rules for conduct, even the Ten Commandments are “unable to save us” (v.3). We try to please God by keeping his laws, that’s good and well. After all, God’s laws show us how to live well in a broken world as a broken person who must interact with other broken people. But Paul says that cannot save us. It is “the life-giving Spirit” (v.2)—not the law—that frees us from the power of sin and death.

Paul is saying that because of what Christ did for us, we have been freed from needing to keep the law to earn favor with God.The problem with trying to impress God by following his rules is that we keep breaking them no matter how hard we try not to. The law tells us what to do without giving us any helpful hints on how to do it. The law is a cold pronouncement that does not and cannot give anyone the power to keep it. The law can only point out when it has been broken. Even Paul wrestled with this problem. He said that the power of sin within him kept making him a lawbreaker (7:23). The law of God is good, but it can’t help us overcome our inclination toward sin. Trying to gain favor with God by keeping the law is an exercise in futility. It just keeps piling up our sins and increasing our guilt. Therefore, the law can do nothing except condemn us.

We have been freed from needing to keep the law to earn favor with God. The law of God is good, but it can’t help us overcome our inclination toward sin.

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We have been rescued. Despite the fact that we seem to keep falling on our faces when we try to do everything right, God never gives up on us. That passage about love in 1 Corinthians 13 describes God too, since God is love. The first characteristic of love is … patience. God is love, love is patient, God is patient.

Instead of scrubbing the human experiment when we choose to live for ourselves, God provided a way to make us right with him. “God did what the law could not do. He sent his own Son in a body like the bodies we sinners have” (8:3). What the law could not accomplish, God did by coming to live among us. He came to earth in the person of Jesus. He came in the likeness of sinful humans, not as a sinful man. He was like us in that he came in a body like ours, not as a superman. He got tired and hungry and suffered pain. Yet he was without sin.

“And in that body God declared an end to sin’s control over us by giving his Son as a sacrifice for our sins. He did this so that the just requirement of the law would be fully satisfied for us, who no longer follow our sinful nature but instead follow the Spirit” (8:3-4). As one of us, Jesus, God as a human, confronted the devil and sin and defeated them. Then he died, no sin in his ledger, to atone for our sins. He conquered death with his resurrection. Sin and its consequence of death is now a toothless and clawless monster.