Fr. Stephen De Young: Let’s start recording. Okay, so when we get started here in just a minute we’re going to be picking up in Romans 8. I know it’s been a couple of months since we had a Bible study, and I’m not even sure who here was there. In fact, some of you I know weren’t here two months ago! [Laughter]

So, by way of catch-up, and sort of re-introduction, and by the time— As I usually say, by the time this is on Ancient Faith Radio, people who need to catch up will be able to go back and listen to my original introduction to the book of Romans, but for folks here who can’t listen to it yet, because there’s some lag time… I think this week they posted the beginning of Acts 19? So that gives you an idea of how far ahead we are!

St. Paul writes his epistle, his letter, to the Church in Rome, following— Even though he has not been there himself yet, he’s still hoping to get there at this point. Because of some things that have happened under the Emperor Claudius, the Jews were expelled from the city of Rome for about a year. So the Gentile Christians sort of continued to have— keep the Church functioning while they were gone, and then now, a year later, they’ve come back into the city. One of St. Paul’s primary concerns with the Church in Rome is that, with this group that’s been gone now coming back in, that the church get re-integrated, that there not end up being sort of a Jewish Christian group over here and then a Gentile Christian group over here, but that they re-integrate and they remain one and they remain united.

So, to that end, he began his epistle to the Romans by talking about the state, the sinful state, of both Gentiles and Jewish people, apart from Christ, talking about how Christ came to save both, that both are saved in the same way in Christ, to position it to them that they’re in the same boat, from whatever background they come, and so they need to remain one Church.

The next major section that leads up to where we’re going to begin tonight, St. Paul has been talking about the relationship between sin and death and how, through Adam, death came into the world. And through death coming into the world and through the fear of death, sin came, and sin spread to all people, and death spread to all people. Because of what Adam chose to do, all human beings became mortal, and he’s going to talk about that a little more tonight. And, being mortal, all human beings fell into sin. And presenting Christ as the solution to this problem in overcoming death and overcoming sin in order— for our salvation.

In chapter seven, right before we’re going to pick up here, he’s been talking about first baptism as this transitional moment, where they went from their old self in the world that’s ruled by sin and death and came into Christ and so have a new life where they’ve been set free from sin and death, and then to talk about how— He talks about the flesh—and I’ll talk about that a little more when we get started here—but talks about the flesh, our sinful flesh, that part of us that is a part of this world, not in the sense of the physical world, but in the sense of the world of sin and death, that mortal flesh, and how that continues to try to drag us back into sin, and how it exploits and takes advantage of even the holy things God gives us. The example he uses is the Law, God’s law, the Torah, that, hearing that, rather than it producing obedience in him, in his sinful flesh, it gave him occasion to go out and sin. When he heard the commandments, rather than saying, “Okay, these are good and I will follow them,” he ended up going and breaking them, because his flesh sort of rebelled against them.

So that’s where we’re going to be picking up here at the beginning of chapter eight, verse one. In chapter eight here, he’s going to use both the term “flesh” and the term “body,” and they’re not the same thing. We tend to think of them that way. So when he talks about our body, he’s talking about our physical body and the physical world; when he talks about the flesh, he’s talking about the sinful part of ourselves. They’re two different words.

Q1: He’s referring to our carnal desires as opposed to the actual physical being.

Fr. Stephen: Right. And this is derived from his understanding, and the understanding both in ancient Judaism and in the early Church and the Church Fathers, how they understood what happens in Genesis 3, when Adam and Eve are expelled from the garden. He’s already been talking about Adam, but we’re told that God kills some animals, and then he makes them garments of flesh. A lot of people interpret this woodenly, literally, as if God killed some animals to skin them and made them little suits of clothes, which isn’t what is happening there. [Laughter] The way this was interpreted in ancient Judaism and by the Church Fathers is that God killed the animals to show them what death was, because he’d just told them that now they were going to die, and they had no way of knowing what that meant.

Q1: And it was right in front of them.

Fr. Stephen: Right. And the garments of skin they were given means they received— When they came into this world, they received a different type of body. That’s translated as “garments of flesh.” This is going to be related— It’s going to be a while before we get there, but when we get to 1 Corinthians 15, and St. Paul is talking about the resurrection, he’s going to talk about our resurrection body, that just as Christ’s body after he rose from the dead he still had a body— St. Thomas comes and touches the wounds and sees the wounds, so it’s not that he doesn’t have a body any more, but his body is different. His body in the resurrection is different than his previous human body.

Q1: He has the mortal wounds, but isn’t dead.

Fr. Stephen: So in 1 Corinthians 15, he’s going to talk about how our current mortal body is going to die and then be raised and be transformed. He sees the opposite as having happened in Genesis 3, that Adam and Eve had their original bodies that they were created with, without sin, and then when they come into this world, when they’re expelled from paradise into this world, they’re given bodies that fit with this world, that are subject to death and corruption and decay. So that’s how St. Paul understands it. He’s going to allude to that fairly specifically later in chapter eight, but that’s the difference. When he’s talking about the body, he can talk about the body Adam was created with, the bodies we have now, the resurrection body. So “body” is not positive or negative necessarily, but “flesh” is bad. [Laughter]

Q1: Almost considered the inverse of “spirit,” almost.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, that’s exactly how he’s going to use it here. Now, when he refers to “spirit,” he doesn’t mean our spirit like our soul; he means the Spirit, the Holy Spirit, who is dwelling within us and transforming us.

And this is important, because this is a way St. Paul is sometimes misunderstood. He’s not saying that the immaterial part of us, our soul, our spirit, is good, and the physical part of us, our body, is bad. That’s the way a lot of paganism looks at it, like Plato said, “The body is the prison of the soul.” So they thought it was a good thing when you died, because your soul, which is your best part, was sort of set free of your body and of this world. And so that’s why, like in Acts 17, when St. Paul is preaching the Gospel in Athens, and the philosophers are with him to discuss it, they’re all on board until he talks about the resurrection, and then they all start laughing at him, because they’re like: “Why would you possibly want to have a body again?” [Laughter] It makes no sense to them. But that’s not the understanding of Christianity; that’s not what St.— And St. Paul is getting this from the fact that when Christ rose, he still has a body. And that God created the world good. So the creation is good. It’s become subject to sin through our sinfulness, but the creation isn’t bad.

Q1: It’s almost like a holdover from a pagan Roman concept, putting itself into theology.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and this is why ancient Jewish and Christian burial customs are different from pagan burial customs. Romans cremated everybody, because your body was trash; it was junk that you’d left behind and gone to a better place, whereas Jewish [and] Christians believe, no, your body was still you and it’s going to be raised up on the last day, and so it’s treated with respect. This is why we treat the relics of the saints with respect and sent them out, because we don’t think the body is bad or evil, and we think it’s going to be raised and transformed when Christ returns. People will be reunited with it.

So when St. Paul is going to, here in chapter eight, contrast “flesh” and “the spirit,” he’s talking about two principles that are at work inside of us. If we’ve been baptized—he’s already talked about baptism—we were chrismated, received the Holy Spirit. So we have the Spirit of God; we have the Holy Spirit dwelling within us, who’s working with us to transform us, to free us from sin, to bring about repentance, to bring us closer to Christ, to transform us and our lives. And then we also have this sinful flesh still lingering around, that’s trying to draw us back and pull us in the other direction. He’s going to talk about the fact that we have to live our lives according to one of those principles or the other. We have to choose which we’re going to follow.

I think that’s a good introduction to go ahead now and get into St. Paul’s epistle to the Romans, chapter eight, verse one.

“There is therefore no condemnation to those who are in Christ Jesus, who do not walk according to the flesh, but according to the Spirit.” This is that language already. There are those who choose to— And “walk” here is a common— It’s all through the New Testament, but it’s all through Jewish literature, too: “walk” is referring to the way we live our life as a whole. So there are those who live according to the flesh, following its desires, and there are those who live according to the Holy Spirit, who dwells within them. If you follow the Holy Spirit who dwells within us, then there’s no condemnation for us before God.

“For the law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus has made me from the law of sin and death.” Now this is picking up on the law language he has already used. We have to remember, we get “law” in English from the fact that St. Jerome translated the Greek word nomos with the Latin word lex, and the Latin word lex means “law,” but the Greek word nomos and the Hebrew word torah that it translates have a broader meaning than that. Torah in Hebrew just means teaching, in a broad sense, so it’s just God’s teaching. But nomos in Greek includes a lot of things.

There were a lot of debates at this time in philosophical schools in the first century when St. Paul was writing about what is according to nomos—what is according to law, we might say—and what is according to nature. For example, they would say the speed limit is according to law. There’s nothing naturally wrong about driving 35 miles an hour down the street. But because they’ve posted a sign that says “Speed Limit 25,” now it’s wrong to go 35. If there was no sign, though, you could go 35 and you wouldn’t be doing anything wrong. There are other things that are just wrong by nature: murder is wrong. Theft: these things are just wrong by the nature of things.

Q1: People have an instinctual moral reaction.

Fr. Stephen: Right, just by the nature of things. But so that use of nomos shows you that it’s broader. It includes not just laws but customs, culture, a way of life, a way of living. When St. Paul uses that term, when he talks about the law of the Spirit of life and the law of sin and death, he’s not talking about two lists of commandments; he’s talking about a whole way of life: of sin, that leads to death, and of the Spirit, that leads to life. So it’s like there’s these two paths that you can go down, to continue his “walking” language. You can walk down this path, following the Spirit that will lead you to life; you could walk down this other path, of sin, that’s going to lead you to death.

And so, because he now has the Spirit dwelling within him— Because of Jesus Christ he has the Spirit dwelling within him, and that has set him free from that path of sin leading to death that he was on before. He was walking that path; Christ, by giving him his Spirit, has now set him free from that to walk the path that leads to life.

“For what the law could not do in that it was weak through the flesh, God did by sending his own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh, on account of sin: he condemned sin in the flesh.” I’ll pause there because there’s a ton there. [Laughter] As we’ve noticed in Romans, each verse he packs— St. Paul packs a ton of different things into it, and it’s a little thick. “What the law could not do in that it was weak through the flesh”: we talked about this when St. Paul at the beginning of Romans was talking about the law— And here when he says “the law” like this, he’s talking about the Torah; he’s talking about the Old Testament Jewish law.

He’s made the point about what it was for. What was its purpose? And its purpose was that it was put into place to sort of manage sin until Christ came to deal with it. So there’s this problem in the world that there’s sin, there’s wickedness, there’s death, there’s all this destruction. That’s got to be— Christ was going to come and deal with it, and deal with sin. Until that point, it had to be managed. So this system was put in place, in the first five books of the Bible, in the Torah, whereby there were sin-offerings and sacrifices and ways of expressing repentance, repenting and being cleansed of sin. But this had to happen over and over and over and over and over again, because it wasn’t really dealing with the problem. It wasn’t transforming people. It was just sort of managing the issue, keeping all the plates spinning.

The reason it couldn’t change people is because people, with their sinful flesh, weren’t capable of just sort of changing by themselves. It wasn’t a question of: “Well, if I just try hard enough, I can stop sinning.” It doesn’t work that way. God had to intervene. And so this cycle just kept repeating itself. We see that all through the Old Testament, not only through the Torah but in the history of Israel, where again and again they fall into sin, God sends someone, some oppressor, ultimately they end up going into exile, they repent, they’re forgiven, God restores them—but this cycle just keeps happening over and over, and they fall back into sin. It keeps going on over and over and over again, because people are weak. They’re weak in their flesh, and they’re prone to sin, and so God has to intervene to stop—to stop that cycle. Just giving the management system isn’t enough to stop this cycle from happening over and over.

And this is one of the themes in the passages in Joel, many other prophetic books in the Old Testament that prophesy about the new covenant, in Jeremiah 31, that prophesy about the fact that the Holy Spirit is going to come and is going to dwell within people. This is what God says. God says, “I gave you my law. I told you— I gave you the commandments, and I told you to keep them, and you couldn’t keep them.” He says, “So now I’m going to put my Spirit in you, and my Spirit will complete them. My Spirit will keep them.” St. Paul is drawing on that idea, too, to say this is now being fulfilled. What the law couldn’t do, what just giving the commandments couldn’t do, is now happening, through the power of the Holy Spirit. And the Holy Spirit came because of what Christ did.

So he says God did it, what the law couldn’t do, “by sending his own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh, on account of sin.” Why does it say “the likeness of sinful flesh”? Well, Christ had a body like ours, but he didn’t have sin. Christ himself was not sinful, but he still had a body like ours. And we’re told he was tempted: the devil comes and tempts him. He gets tired; he gets weak, he gets weary—because he has a body like ours. So that’s what it means by “the likeness of sinful flesh.” Now, notice, it’s the likeness of sinful flesh, not the likeness of a body. Christ really has a body, for St. Paul; it’s that he doesn’t have this flesh element that we have.

And he does this— What it actually— A better translation of that from the Greek would be: “He condemned sin in this flesh,” meaning in Christ’s flesh. God condemned sin in Christ’s flesh. And St. Paul is here alluding to the ritual that was done on the day of atonement, which is Yom Kippur in Hebrew. On the day of atonement, once a year, in addition to the sin-offerings that were offered all the time— When people sinned, they’d come—they could bring an animal, they’d confess their sin, the animal would be sacrificed, they’d eat it, and it was for forgiveness of sins. Once a year, there was another ritual that was done to cleanse the people and the camp of sin. This shows you once again the issue with the Torah, with the law. Even doing all these sin-offerings wasn’t enough. We still have— Because the way it’s set up is, to boil it down a little, is there was sort of this residue of sin, that all that sin left. Even as people sinned and they were forgiven, there was this sort of taint and this residue in the camp itself, and later in the city and in the nation itself, that had to be gotten rid of.

I’ve said this before in Romans, but we tend to look at sin from a legal perspective. We think about it like: God makes a rule and you break the rule, so now you’re guilty of this crime, and God forgiving you is letting you off the hook.

Q1: Like a category, like a thing checking that box.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, and no one involved with the writing of the Scriptures and no one in the early Church looked at sin that way. [Laughter] Sin— It’s called by scholars the biological view of sin. Sin was looked as a contaminant; it was looked at like a disease. It contaminated you; it wounded you. Sin led to death in the way that a malignant illness leads to death if it’s left untreated. So it had to be quarantined. It had to be kept separate. So you’ll find all these passages in the Old Testament where they go—yeah, where things are unclean— where they go and they burn things, and you’re like: “Why are they burning this?” Because of the sin that was committed there. They believed it left this contamination in the way that we would, if there was an outbreak of plague or something, we’d go and burn all the linens, burn all the— you know, that might be infected with it.

Q1: It’s a very dire view of sin.

Fr. Stephen: Right. So that’s the view of sin. So someone who is— And this is why sin and healing is so associated in the gospels. You see Jesus healing people and forgiving their sins at the same time. In the book of James when it talks about unction, anointing with oil, like we did during Holy Week, it says, “They will be healed of their illnesses and their sins will be forgiven.” These ideas are tied together, of sin as a spiritual illness. It’s a spiritual infection or a spiritual cancer that will ultimately be deadly. So even though individual people had their sins forgiven through these sin-offerings and guilt-offerings, there still had to be this day of atonement ritual to sort of decontaminate everything.

And it had two pieces. There were two goats that were taken, and they cast lots over the two goats. One of the two goats, the high priest would lay his hands on and pronounce the sins of the people. Those would be put onto, into the goat, and then that goat would be driven out of the camp into the wilderness, presumably to die. And then the other goat, that did not have the sins on it, that was still pure, they would take— They would sacrifice that goat, and they would take the blood, and they would sprinkle that blood on everything in the sanctuary to purify it from the effects of sin.

A lot of imagery—not just here, but in the gospels, especially in St. Matthew’s gospel—of that goat that is driven out is attached to Christ. We have, for example, in the epistle of Barnabas— We have various accounts from the first century and the preceding couple of centuries and later couple of centuries about the ritual, how it was actually done, of the day of atonement at this time in history. And when you read the details, like in the epistle of Barnabas, like that they would take reeds and beat the goat with it to drive it out of the city, and then you see in the story of Christ’s Passion where they take the reed and strike him with it. They would drive it out, spit on the goat as it was driven out; Christ’s sort of carrying his cross outside the city, and the epistle to the Hebrews makes the point that Christ dies outside the city. It’s using that imagery to show us the way Christ takes upon himself the sin of the people and takes them out.

Q1: Takes it away.

Fr. Stephen: Takes it away and dies, and takes it away forever. And so this is what St. Paul is alluding to here when he says that God condemned sin in Christ’s flesh, condemned it to death. Christ came in the likeness of sinful flesh so that he could take our sin upon himself and die with it and take it away.

So God the Father doesn’t condemn Christ; he condemns our sin in Christ’s flesh. So it’s not that the goat was evil; it’s the sins that were put on the goat, so it could take it away.

Q1: It’s completely confusing outside of that explanation.

Fr. Stephen: So that’s what he’s alluding to.

Verse four: “So that the righteous requirement of the law might be fulfilled in us who do not walk according to the flesh but according to the Spirit.” So with our sin taken away, with the sin taken away, that disease, that infection taken away, it’s not just taking away the guilt for things we did before, but taking away that infection, taking away that malignancy, that now frees us to walk not “according to the flesh but according to the Spirit.”

“For those who live according to the flesh set their minds on the things of the flesh, but those who live according to the Spirit, the things of the Spirit.” What are the things of the flesh? Well, the flesh has a whole lot of desires. And this is related to— Again, this is related to our mortality. We can start with food, drink, comfort, but we can add in sex, we can add in all these—

Q1: Status, wealth, power…

Fr. Stephen: Status, wealth, power, that our flesh desires, and desires primarily in reaction to our mortality. We see these things—wealth, status, power, having children who will carry on our family name after us—all in terms of trying to sort of fight against our death or, when confronted with death, we decide, well, “eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow we die”: so we just pursue pleasure in this life. And so our flesh sort of craves and wants these things.

So a person who— The word for “mind” there is phronema; it means consideration or reckoning or thinking. If you’re walking according to the flesh, you spend all your time thinking about: “How am I going to gratify these desires? How am I going to get more money? How am I going to increase my status? How am I going to—?” That’s what your concern is all the time. He says, but if you’re walking according to the flesh, then, your mind, your thinking, is going to be concerned with the things— if you’re walking according to the Spirit, with the things of the Spirit, of the Holy Spirit, the things of God. Those are going to be the things that you’re always thinking about and trying to pursue.

Now it has here in the Orthodox Study Bible, “carnally minded,” but what it says is “to have the mind of the flesh is death, but to have the mind of the Spirit is life and peace,” because that’s where it leads. You’re not— No one sets and and says, “You know, I’d really like death. I’d really like condemnation.” [Laughter] But what he’s saying is when your concern is for those things of this world, that’s where it leads; that’s what you get. And if you’re concerned with the Spirit, then that’s how you receive life and peace, not by pursuing these other things.

“Because the mind of the flesh—” Mm, they translated this… “The mind of the flesh is the enemy of God” is what it literally says. “For it is not subject to the law of God, nor indeed can be.” So if your mind, if your thoughts are constantly on “How do I get the next things? How do I get more stuff/ How do I satisfy all my desires as much as possible and have as much pleasure as possible?” that can’t be subject to the law of God. You’re going to run up against it all the time! All the time, the things that you want are going to be denied you by God’s law. And so that means you’re always going to be an enemy; you’re always going to end up being an enemy of God, because his law is constantly going to be telling you that you can’t have or you shouldn’t have all these things that you want and that you’re chasing after. It’s not just a choice with consequences only to you, but you’ve actually set yourself up as an enemy of God by doing that.

And because of that, he says in verse eight, “So then, those who are in the flesh cannot please God.” It’s impossible for anything you do to be pleasing to God if all you’re pursuing is satisfying your own desires.

“But you are not in the flesh but in the Spirit, if indeed the Spirit of God dwells in you. Now if anyone does not have the Spirit of Christ, he is not his.” The point he’s making is, if you’re following the flesh, you’re following the mind of the flesh, it’s impossible to please God. But we as Christians have received the Holy Spirit, and so we’re not to be chasing after the things of the flesh. We have the Spirit, and the Spirit makes it possible for us to please God. It doesn’t mean that everything we do is automatically pleasing to God. Remember, he’s been talking about freedom: we’re now free from chasing after the things of this world; we’re free from the flesh, free from sin, free to, if we desire to now, pursue the things of God and to please God.

He says, “Now if anyone does not have the Spirit of Christ, he is not his,” because this is the marker that we belong to Christ, is that we’ve been baptized into Christ and we’ve received the Holy Spirit.

“And if Christ is in you, the body is dead because of sin, but the Spirit is life because of righteousness.” Now notice he switched here from “body” to “flesh.” Let me read one more verse.

“But if the Spirit of him who raised Jesus from the dead dwells in you, he who raised Christ from the dead will also give life to your mortal bodies through his Spirit who dwells in you.” So he switches from “flesh” to “body.” He’s already covered that we’re not a slave to the flesh any more, but now what he’s saying is your body, your old self is dead, but the Holy Spirit is living within you, and that means that your self who is dead is going to be raised from the dead in the same way that Christ is raised from the dead, because it was the same Spirit who raised him.

It’s interesting to note, as an aside, all of the Trinitarian language all through here.

Q1: Oh, yeah! There’s definite—

Fr. Stephen: He’s already said several times that God raised Christ from the dead, meaning the Father, and now he says the Spirit raised Christ from the dead. So who does that mean the Spirit is? [Laughter] So all through here the interrelationship of all three Persons of the Trinity runs through it.

Q2: So what comes under the Spirit? I don’t know, it’s completely the opposite of the flesh of the same, but what goes on with it?

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, well, in Philippians St. Paul lays out the fruit of the Spirit and then the works of the flesh. He lists a bunch of them. And the works of the flesh we already listed. [Laughter] He says the fruits of the Spirit are love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control; all of these things. And he ends this list by saying, “Against these things there is no law,” because, remember, he’s talking about how the Spirit fulfills the law within us. So if the Spirit is producing these fruits within us—if we have love and joy and peace and all of these things going on in us—we’ll keep the commandments. We don’t have to worry about following a whole list of rules if we’re doing all of those things.

And this is part of what’s going on in the gospels, and the conflict all the time between Christ and the Pharisees, where Christ heals someone, does something to show love and gentleness and kindness to someone, and they’re like: “Well, why’d you do that on the sabbath? There’s a rule!” [Laughter] Because they don’t understand. They don’t have the Spirit of God. They don’t have those things.

Q1: They’re still believing that the law can save them.

Fr. Stephen: Right. They’re trying to use the law to do something it’s powerless to do.

Q1: And you have to keep the entire law, in other words.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah.

Q2: So whenever it says, “please God,” it’s referring to that fruit of the Spirit that you’re saying.

Fr. Stephen: Right. God produces them in us, and they please him because they’re his doing in our lives. [Laughter] So just as God looks at— When he’s creating the world in Genesis 1, he creates something and he looks at it and he sees that it is good? As the Holy Spirit brings forth these things in our life, God looks at them and he says that they’re good.

Q3: But, I mean, the Holy Spirit puts the thing, but you have to cultivate it.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and we’re going to— He’s going to get into that here with some of the language he uses. Yeah, he’s said all the way through— Remember, he’s said there’s a choice: you can walk according to the flesh, or you can walk according to the Spirit. And he says we’re now free to walk according to the Spirit, but the fact that we’re free to do that means we have to choose to do it.

Q3: The Holy Spirit can leave?

Fr. Stephen: Well, I mean, Psalm 50 says yes. And there are passages not here that talk about grieving the Holy Spirit, quenching the Holy Spirit.

Q3: So it’s present; it doesn’t leave.

Fr. Stephen: Well, yeah, it’s… It’s actually worse, because if we have the Holy Spirit dwelling in us— And St. Paul’s going to get into this. If we have the Holy Spirit dwelling within us, then that makes the sins and the wicked things we choose to do worse, because we’re sort of doing them in his presence.

Q2: Ah, so they cannot be doing those things.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah. It’s like doing them in church. God is— If God is dwelling within us— He says, for example, at one point—apparently they’re having problems with sexual immorality, and he says, “You’re a part of Christ’s body. Are you going to go join the members of Christ to a prostitute?” That’s the language he uses. So it’s actually worse for us. That’s why he talks about, in terms of receiving Communion in an unworthy way, he doesn’t say, “If you’re unworthy to receive Communion.” It’s an adverb, not an adjective. He says, “Receiving it in an unworthy way.” The way that we come to receive is the problem. If we don’t come with repentance and we don’t come— That’s worse than if we don’t receive Communion. So it’s the same kind of thing. Having the Holy Spirit with us raises the stakes.

And we talked about that back in Acts. Remember, the Holy Spirit comes onto the people, and there’s those two people, Ananias and Sapphira? And they come— They sold some property, and they come and they bring some part of the money to give it to the apostles, and keep some for themselves. And that’s not the problem. The problem is St. Peter, when he receives the money, says, “Is this all the money that you received?” And they say, “Yeah!” And they fall over dead. And St. Peter says, “It was your money to do whatever you wanted with.” He said, “But you came here and you lied. And you didn’t lie to a group of men, you lied to the Holy Spirit. You lied to God.”

So the Holy Spirit being present with us sort of raises those stakes, because— And St. Paul talked about this at the beginning of Romans as well, when he was comparing the Jews and the Gentiles, when he was saying, “The Gentiles, they didn’t receive the Torah; they didn’t receive God’s commandments, and this kind of thing, and they went and they sinned, sure.” But when he’s talking to the Jewish people in the Christian community, he says, “You guys had it. You guys had the commandments, and you still went and sinned. So that makes you more accountable, because they didn’t have any way of knowing. You should’ve known better!”

And so that’s one of St. Paul’s themes here, is God holds us accountable for what he’s given— Whatever he’s given us, he holds us accountable for what we do with it. So the more he’s given us, the more accountable we are. If God has put us into this life and we’re poor, we’re going to be accountable for what we did with our money than somebody who’s wealthy. Whom God has given all these blessings of wealth, he’s going to hold them accountable for what they did with that wealth. For people who have been given a lot of knowledge of God and the Christian faith, God’s going to hold them to a higher level than somebody who is illiterate and doesn’t know much but sort of does the best they can with what they know.

So, yeah, that’s part of this. Now that we’ve received the Spirit and we’re now free to follow the Spirit and to please God, if we choose to not do that, if we choose to go back to living the way we were, then things will be worse for us than if we had never received those things. Not a cheery note, but sort of the other side! [Laughter]