No Condemnation, and She Kept Reading It Anyway

The noticeboard in that foyer has three layers on it, and the bottom layer has been there long enough that it is going brown at the corners, and nobody is ever going to take it down.

After the service. Coffee in the polystyrene cups that everybody complains about and nobody replaces. Three of them standing in front of the board because somebody spotted a photograph.

It is from a long time ago. Front row. Half the people in it have moved away and two have died and one is standing right here holding a coffee.

She is in it. Front row, on the end.

And she is looking at that woman and thinking one thing, and she is thinking it hard: she was awake.

Because since then there has been a long stretch. Nothing scandalous, nothing anybody would call backsliding, and she has not missed many Sundays. She has just been going through it, all of it, from about eighteen inches behind her own face, for longer than she wants to put a number on.

And what has started in front of that board is not sadness. It is a sentencing. She is standing in a foyer with a coffee handing down a judgment on herself, and the strange part is that she could quote you the verse that forbids it.

Sister, come and stand at the end of the board with me. Because you can quote it, and I want you to actually hear the first word.

Therefore

Romans 8 opens with a word that people read straight past.

There is therefore now no condemnation to them which are in Christ Jesus, who walk not after the flesh, but after the Spirit.Romans 8:1

Therefore.

That word means a conclusion is being drawn from something that came before it. And what came before it is the whole of Romans 7, which is Paul describing the most honest and least flattering interior state in the New Testament: a man who cannot do what he wants to do, does what he does not want, and calls himself wretched out loud.

So the no condemnation is not the conclusion drawn from a good chapter. It is the conclusion drawn from the worst self report in the letter.

And then two more words: there is therefore now. Present tense. Not eventually. Not once you have made it up.

You are standing inside a sentence that begins with therefore, and what it draws its conclusion from is the most unflattering chapter in the letter. That is not a way of softening Romans; Romans 8:1 opens on a therefore and Romans 7 supplies the grounds, and it is the Holy Spirit who takes an apostle's argument and stands it up in a church foyer with three layers of paper on a noticeboard. The verse was written for exactly the condition you are describing.

Now the sentencing, and let me be direct because you know your Bible and you would see straight through anything gentler.

You can quote that verse. You have probably taught it. And you are standing in a foyer contradicting it about yourself while holding a cup of coffee.

That is not hypocrisy and I am not calling it that. It is the ordinary human situation of knowing a thing in the head and having a court running in the chest that has never been informed.

But here is what matters: the court has no standing. Not because you are innocent, and not because those years were fine, but because the verse says there is no condemnation, and no is a quantity.

You are not able to hand down a sentence the text has already ruled out, and no is a quantity rather than a feeling. Romans 8:33 says who shall lay any thing to the charge of God's elect, it is God that justifieth, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes that question rhetorical, which leaves the seat you have been sitting in empty and unauthorized.

The woman in the photograph

One more thing, and it is about her rather than about doctrine.

You looked at that photograph and said she was awake. Let me ask you something you cannot answer, which is the point: how do you know?

You know what she looked like on one Sunday from the front row. You do not know what she felt during the service. You do not know what she was carrying. You have compared your entire lived interior across a decade with a photograph of a face.

That is not evidence. It is a picture of the outside of somebody, and you of all people know exactly how little that reports.

You have been comparing an interior you know exhaustively with a photograph of somebody's outside, and one of those is not evidence. 1 Samuel 16:7 says the Lord seeth not as man seeth, for man looketh on the outward appearance, but the Lord looketh on the heart, and it is the Holy Spirit who applies that where it is hardest to apply, which is to how a woman looks at a picture of herself.

And here is the last piece, because you have a mouth and it does more than quote verses accurately.

Jesus said in Matthew 17:20 that faith the size of a mustard seed, spoken to a mountain, is enough to move it. The smallest seed there is. Not how present you were on the Sundays behind you. That a person opens their mouth and says what God has said. You have that standing because you are in Christ and Christ is in you, and speaking is the appointed way this works. We flip the switch. He sends the current.