The wretched man gets his answer. After a chapter of watching himself do the thing he hates, Paul finally says it: there is now no condemnation for anyone in Christ Jesus. Then he says where the condemnation went. God sent his Son in the likeness of sinful flesh and for sin, and 3"he condemned sin in the flesh." The condemnation moved. It landed on sin itself, in Christ's own body, so that none is left for the person who belongs to him. That is why "therefore" carries so much weight. The verdict already happened, at the cross, and it fell on the right target.
3"God has done what the law, weakened by the flesh, could not do." The law was never the problem, as chapter 7 insisted. It was holy and good and fully able to name what was wrong. What it could not do was produce the obedience it demanded, because the material it worked with, human flesh, was already compromised. So God sent his Son into the territory sin had occupied, fully human and without sin, and there in that flesh sin met its verdict.
Then Paul draws the line that has run beneath the whole letter: flesh or Spirit, death or life and peace, hostile to God or able to please him. He states it without softening either side. 7"The mind that is set on the flesh is hostile to God."
9"You, however, are not in the flesh but in the Spirit, if in fact the Spirit of God dwells in you." Dwells. It is the word Paul used in chapter 7 for sin, an occupant settled into the believer's members and exploiting a house it never owned. Now the resident has changed. The word is the same and the tenant is different. The Spirit has come to stay.
9"Anyone who does not have the Spirit of Christ does not belong to him." Belonging, in Paul's vocabulary, comes down to who has moved in. 10"If Christ is in you, although the body is dead because of sin, the Spirit is life because of righteousness." The body still carries the marks of the old regime, still mortal, still aging toward death. The Spirit inside it is already living proof that a different regime has taken over.
Then the promise stretches to the body itself. 11"He who raised Christ Jesus from the dead will also give life to your mortal bodies through his Spirit who dwells in you." The power that emptied a tomb lives inside every believer, and Paul says it reaches the body too: the Spirit has claimed the body, a down payment on a resurrection still to come.
The wretched man asked who would deliver him from this body of death. Here is the answer in full. A Person has moved in permanently, already at work, already guaranteeing what the body cannot yet see finished. No condemnation, ever.
Where you still feel the weight of the old tenant's damage, remember who lives there now.
Prayer
Father, thank you that the condemnation we deserved fell on your Son instead of on us, once and completely, at the cross. Thank you that your Spirit has come to dwell in us, to stay, and to make even our bodies his residence. Where we feel the old tenant's damage, remind us who lives here now. Let your Spirit's life reach every part of us until the resurrection you have guaranteed is finished. In Jesus' name, amen.