Romans 8:6

Vv. 6 explains (γάρ, for) the moral necessity with which this motion constantly proceeds, from the inward moral state to aspiration, and from aspiration to action. There is on both sides, as it were, a fated end to be reached, which acts at a distance on the will by an attraction like that which is exercised by a precipice on the current of a river as it approaches it. No doubt one might take the words death and life as characterizing the two tendencies themselves. But the argument does not find so natural an explanation thus, as if we take the two words to express the inevitable goal to which man is inwardly impelled in both ways. This goal is death on the one hand, life on the other. The flesh tends to the former; for to gain the complete liberty after which it aspires, it needs a more and more complete separation from God; and this is death. The Spirit, on the contrary, thirsts for life in God, which is its element, and sacrifices everything to succeed in enjoying it perfectly. Neither of these two powers leaves a man at rest till it has brought him to its goal, whether to that state of death in which not a spark of life remains, or to that perfect life from which the last vestige of death has disappeared.

Death is here, as in Romans 8:2, separation from God, which by a course of daily development at length terminates through physical death in eternal perdition (Romans 6:23). Life, in Scripture, denotes a fully satisfied existence, in which all the faculties find their full exercise and their true occupation. Man's spirit, become the abode and organ of the Divine Spirit, realizes this life with a growing perfection to eternal life. Peace is the inward feeling of tranquillity which accompanies such an existence; it shows itself particularly in the absence of all fear in regard to death and judgment (Romans 8:1). There is no changing the nature of these two states and walks (Romans 8:5), and no arresting the latter in its onward march (Romans 8:6). The way of salvation is to pass from the first to the second, and not to relapse thereafter from the second to the first.

The two theses of Romans 8:6 are justified in the following verses, the former in Romans 8:7-8, the latter in Romans 8:9-11.