📜WEB · Romans 8:10
What does Romans 8:10 mean?
"If Christ is in you, the body is dead because of sin, but the spirit is alive because of righteousness."
— Romans 8:10 (World English Bible)
Surrounding context
because the mind of the flesh is hostile towards God; for it is not subject to God’s law, neither indeed can it be.
Those who are in the flesh can’t please God.
But you are not in the flesh but in the Spirit, if it is so that the Spirit of God dwells in you. But if any man doesn’t have the Spirit of Christ, he is not his.
If Christ is in you, the body is dead because of sin, but the spirit is alive because of righteousness.
But if the Spirit of him who raised up Jesus from the dead dwells in you, he who raised up Christ Jesus from the dead will also give life to your mortal bodies through his Spirit who dwells in you.
So then, brothers, we are debtors, not to the flesh, to live after the flesh.
For if you live after the flesh, you must die; but if by the Spirit you put to death the deeds of the body, you will live.
Explanation
Romans 8:10 comes in the middle of Paul's extended argument about life in the Spirit versus life in the flesh, a discussion that runs through the whole eighth chapter of Romans. In plain language, the verse is saying this: for those who belong to Christ, the physical body remains subject to death as a consequence of sin, but the inner person — the spirit — is alive because of the righteousness that comes through Christ. Paul is describing a kind of paradox in the Christian's present experience: mortality still touches the body, yet spiritual life and vitality already belong to the believer right now.
To understand the context, remember that Paul wrote Romans to the church in Rome, a congregation he had not personally founded, in order to lay out a full explanation of the gospel — how both Jews and Gentiles are justified by faith and then transformed by the Spirit. Chapters 6 through 8 deal specifically with the believer's new relationship to sin, the law, and the Spirit of God. Just before this verse, Paul has been contrasting those who live "according to the flesh" with those who live "according to the Spirit" (Romans 8:1-9), stressing that those who belong to Christ have the Spirit of God dwelling in them. Verse 10 continues that thought, addressing an obvious tension: if the Spirit brings life, why do believers still die physically? Paul's answer is that the body still bears the effects of sin — meaning it is still mortal, still subject to decay and death — while the spirit, the inner self indwelt by God, is already alive because of the righteousness given through
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