About a month ago I got intensely curious about sin. There’s a lot of it going around, lol. Holy Spirit took me to Romans 7:7-25
With great help from the Holy Spirit and Greek scholar Bill
Mounce, it has been brought to my attention that sin is an active agent in the
body. Mounce talks about a time his nephew preached an excellent sermon on
James 4:1 which says (according to the translation you have), “What accounts
for the quarrels and disputes among you? Is it not this—your desires that are
at war in your members?” The translation I prefer to go with says, “What causes
fights and quarrels among you? Don’t they come from your desires that battle
within you?” (NIV)
To me, this is a major revelation which deserves some
technical attention with translation, so here’s Mounce:
“I know that the word “members” doesn't refer to members of
the church, but the Greek is plural. ἐν
τοῖς μέλεσιν ὑμῶν.
These constructions are always interesting because they can refer to things
among the group, and one of the uses of μέλος can refer to people who make up a
group. “We who are many are one body in Christ, and individually members (μέλη)
who belong to one another” (Rom 12:54; cf. 1 Cor 12:27; 2 Cor 12:5, 26; Eph
4:25). This is the second definition in BDAG.
And yet, many of the uses of μέλος in the New Testament
refer to individual parts of our body. “So also is the tongue a small member,
yet it boasts of great things” (James 3:5). “For just as the physical body is
one yet has many members (μέλη), and all the members (μέλη) of the body, though
many, are one body, so also is the body of Christ” (1 Cor 12:12). BDAG’s first
definition is, “a part of the human body, member, part, limb literally,
of parts of the human body.”
I had always assumed James was saying that the source of
quarrels and disputes among a group of Christians was that people’s desires
were at war with other people, but my nephew saw μέλεσιν as the individual
members of each individual body. Most translations agree with him. “What causes
fights and quarrels among you? Don’t they come from your desires that battle
within you?” (NIV) “What is the source of wars and fights among you? Don’t they
come from your passions that wage war within you?” (CSB)
This creates a helpful picture of the battles we all face
with sin. Sin is an active agent in our body, affecting every part of who we
are. It creates such dissension within us that our internal battles produce
Paul’s quandary: what he wants to do, he doesn't, and he doesn't want to do, he
does. Sin’s battle plan is to affect every individual part of who I am, turning
one part against another.
I think I shared this in an earlier blog, but one of the
most helpful discussions I had along these lines was with Tom Schreiner. I had
been thinking of sin as a passive agent, sitting around looking for
opportunities to lead us down the wrong path. But Tom helped me see that sin is
very active, very deliberate, a foreign agent that is alive inside each one of
us and is aggressively working to accomplish it's purposes. As Paul writes, “It
is no longer I myself who do it (i.e., sin), but it is sin living in me” (Rom
7:17). This reminds me of those Science Fiction movies where the alien goes
into the human body, is nurtured by the body, and ultimately controls the body.”
Wow!
This should all lead us to go easy on ourselves and others
and pray daily (minute by minute even) for God’s protection and healing. Sin is
so much bigger than what I understand or attribute, but thanks be to God so
also is His grace in the blood of Jesus Christ, and the ministry of Holy Spirit.
I’m starting to agree with and relate to how Paul concluded Romans 7, “What a
wretched man I am! Who will rescue me from this body of death? Thanks be to God
through Jesus Christ our Lord!” (Rom. 7:24–25).
Source: https://www.billmounce.com/blogs/mondaywithmounce/sin-active-and-foreign-agent-your-body-james-4-1
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