There Is No Condemnation -- Paul the Apostle

Was he thinking these words might be a song someday? The words that Paul wrote were certainly a joyful exclamation, as he proclaimed “There is No Condemnation” in the mid-1^st Century, but he was no songwriter. The words don’t even rhyme! He was well-known for his travels throughout ancient southeastern European continent and the difficulties he’d endured as he delivered the message. But, could he have suspected that the people to whom he was writing would finally meet him as a result of an even more challenging episode? This guy was really convicted with the words he wrote, and fearless of his future, seemingly. And yet, the words came from a heart that was struggling mightily, a human yo-yo.

The great apostle who was named was Saul when born in Tarsus (current-day southeastern Turkey) was uniquely prepared as God’s tool by the time he thought about visiting Rome, some 50-55 years after his birth. He was a Hebrew believer, but from outside of the Holy Land, giving him a link to both Jews and non-Jews. He’d been a believer in the Christ for about 22 years, though much of what he wrote, even at this time, tells us he was still fighting uphill against his disappointments as a follower of the Lord. How can a guy who’d travelled on three missionary journeys still feel inadequate? Paul’s recorded thoughts that immediately precede the words of this song are some of the most challenging and tormented that we read of him. That group of words describes a man tossed to and fro on waves of a moral struggle. Some of us contemporaries call it the ‘do-do’ chapter of the Roman letter, or maybe you’ve heard it described as Paul’s ‘Romans 7 gap’ – an account of a fellow who wants to do what he seems unable to do, somehow. Certainly this man might have had reason to say these words some 20 years earlier, when his virulent opposition to Christianity just a few years before would have still been fresh in his memory. His Jewish upbringing, legalism at maximum pitch, still rang in his ears, perhaps. ‘…for the law…’ and ‘..from the law..’. You can sense he knew from where he’d come. To have been on the other side of his conversion by a mere 22 years, could he have felt this salvation in some sense was by just a whisker’s edge? Maybe, if he’d been trying to earn it. He could count two decades on the right side, three and a half decades on the wrong side. How many had he arrested or killed, versus how many had he led to safety? If he used this calculus, he had no hope. For Paul, though, he knew Christ blotted out his balance sheet and the accompanying tick marks in the plus and minus columns.

He was writing to teach the Romans, who he’d not yet met, what he knew about this faith’s fundamentals. Other groups to whom he wrote were people who’d he’d already visited. Not the Romans, who he needed to greet in written form initially. So, he wanted them to understand who he was, and what he believed. Could some of them be legalists, like Paul once was? Paul wanted to visit them soon, so he could imagine what he wanted to say in person to encourage them, probably. ‘I’m an up-and-down guy, but I know I’m saved, despite the fight in which I find myself’. He’d be arrested and suffer through a thorny journey before making it to Rome in the next few years. So, Paul was used to being nicked, and that wouldn’t change. But he felt free. That wouldn’t change, either.       

No story is known for this song, but the Biblical background used in the above is obtained in the New International Version Study Bible, general editor Kenneth Barker, 1985, copyright The Zondervan Corporation; and the books The Apostle – A Life of Paul, by John Pollock, Doubleday and Company Incorporated, 1985; and The Life of Paul, by F.B.Meyer, editor Lance Wubbels, Emerald Books, 1995.