Oh boy, I'm finally here. Romans 8:11 is one of my best verses, as the kids would say.

(Mother, are we there yet?)

Ta-dah! Here is one of the really big answers to Paul's struggle with "the body of this death," with his dilemma. God has in mind to make alive even our mortal body. Redemption is not going to cease with our inward nature.

Since it is the dead, sinful flesh that interacts with the Law of Moses, producing condemnation and separation from God, the grace of God through Christ Jesus includes a making alive of the body by God's Spirit.

Let us look at some of the parts of the verse.

We are speaking of the Spirit of the Father for it is the Father who raised the body of Jesus from the grip of death.

And here is an extremely important part: the making alive of our mortal body is contingent on the Spirit of the Father dwelling in us.

The Father shall make alive our mortal body.

The Father shall make alive our mortal body by means of His Spirit.

The last aspect, that the Father shall make alive our body by means of His Spirit who dwells in us may be thought of in two ways. The first way is that while God's Spirit is in us in the present hour, it will be an external rather than an internal exercise of His Presence that will raise us from the dead the same spirit but coming from outside of us.

The second way is the interpretation we tend to favor because of its implications. The second interpretation is that our resurrection is already present in us. One Word from the Father and that which now is in our inward nature will expand outward to our flesh, making our flesh eternally alive and free from sin.

The "expansion" will take place at the coming of the Lord and for most people will take place after they have died. It reminds us of the light that shone after the jars of Gideon's soldiers were broken. The light was there already but concealed.

I will discuss in a minute how it could be that hundreds of years after he or she has died the Spirit of God dwelling in an individual could expand to make alive his body.

The "expansion" interpretation makes some verses clear. Paul speaks several times that if we live after the flesh we will die. According to the expansion notion this means we now have the resurrection in us. Our task is to walk in the Spirit so that this life is maintained and continually increases so we have an abundant inward life. When the Lord appears He will speak the Word and our inner life will make alive our outward form. Then our whole personality will be housed in the "body from Heaven" that has been created by our response to the program of death and resurrection, to which we often refer.

But if we choose to live according to the impulses of our soul and the passions and appetites of our body, the resurrection life we were given will drain away. Then when the Lord speaks the Word there will be no inner response. We are a balloon without the hot air with which to rise. We are a jet plane with no fuel. We have slain our own resurrection.

To be continued.