One of the most horrible, most cruel forms of punishment in
Paul’s day was a method employed by the Romans to put people to
death, was to take a corpse, someone who had already been executed
and to strap that corpse onto the body of a live person. One can
imagine what it must have been like as that corpse began to rot,
what an abhorrent presence that would have been. Paul paints that
very picture when he illustrates the ever-present problem that his
sinful nature presented to him. Paul could not escape his sinful
nature no matter how fervently he tried. We can rejoice and we can
give all the glory and the praise to God and to our savior Jesus
Christ for the fact that even though that sinful nature is strapped
onto our fleshly backs like a rotting corpse, God does not see us
in our flesh from his judicial perspective. Our fleshly bodies will
never be worthy of heaven in that they will never be able to
perform to the measure of the righteousness that is true of God. We
are alive because of our position, not at all because of our
practice. God no longer views us in our human flesh, he views us in
our position in the second Adam (Jesus Christ), he views us in our
glorified identity.