“For the good that I would I do not: but the evil which I would not, that I do. … For I delight in the law of God… . But I see another law in my members, warring against the law of my mind, and bringing me into captivity…” (Romans 7:19-22).
And then a heart-rending cry from the depths of despair:
“O wretched man that I am! who shall deliver me from the body of this death?” (Rom 7:24).
Paul is referring to a contemporary form of execution described in Virgil’s Aeneid, the poet tells of a “curs’d” king who, in a fatal hour:
Aſſum’d the crown with arbitrary pow’r
What words can paint thoſe execrable times…
The living and the dead, at his command,
Were coupled, face to face, and hand to hand;
Till choak’d with ſtench, in loath’d embraces ty’d,
The ling’ring wretches pin’d away and dy’d.
Such is the “loath’d embrace” of the “flesh” that “literally” consumes us — unless we walk not after the flesh, but after the “Spirit of Life”:
There is therefore now no condemnation to them which are in Christ Jesus, who walk not after the flesh, but after the Spirit. …
