Romans 8:11

Romans 8:11. But if, etc. The body will indeed die, but despite this grace will triumph even over physical death; even the body that must die will ultimately fully share in redemption, at the resurrection, through the indwelling Holy Spirit

Him that raised up Jesus from the dead, etc. This expression has a demonstrative force here: the fact that the indwelling Spirit is the Spirit of Him who raised Jesus from the dead is a pledge that the spiritual quickening will be followed by the physical quickening.

Will quicken even your mortal bodies. This is most naturally referred to the final resurrection of the body; for, although ‘quicken' might of itself include something already begun, the word ‘even' (or, ‘also') seems to limit it to the bodily resurrection. This truth of revelation is so important, and so distinctive, that it deserves the emphasis thus given to it. ‘Even' appear in any other country, nor at any other time, either sooner or later, nor in any other nation, according to the order of divine government and the preordained harmony of history.

Sent forth his Son, who, therefore, must have existed before the incarnation in heavenly glory with the Father. Comp. Colossians 1:15-19; John 1:1.

Born of a woman, is no allusion to the mystery of the supernatural conception (=‘of a virgin'), but expresses simply the realness of the incarnation or Christ's true humanity. Comp.

Job 14:1, ‘man that is born of a woman;' and Matthew 11:11, ‘among them that are born of women.' Every reader knew, of course, who the woman was. The absence of any further allusion to Mary in the Epistles of Paul, who never even mentions her name, goes to show that the excessive veneration of the holy Virgin, as it obtains in the Greek and Roman churches, arose after the Apostolic age. We meet it first in the apocryphal Gospels and then among the fathers of the fourth or fifth centuries, when the term ‘mother of God' came into general use.

Born under the law (the accus. in Gr. implies the motion or transition from the preexistent state into the state of human subjection to the law) is more specific, and defines the humanity of Christ as to its national and religious aspect. He was not only born of a woman, i.e.. a true man, like all others, but a full member of a particular nation and the Jewish theocracy, and hence subject to all its religious ordinances and obligations, in order to redeem those who were under the legal covenant. A Gentile could not have saved the world from the curse of the law; in Israel alone all the historical conditions were at hand; and hence, ‘salvation is of the Jews' (John 4:22), that from them it might pass over in proper order to the whole race.