Deuteronomy 30:6

30:6 The Lord your God will also cleanse ¹  your heart and the hearts of your descendants ²  so that you may love him ³  with all your mind and being and so that you may live.

Psalms 130:8

130:8 He will deliver ⁴  Israel

from all the consequences of their sins. ⁵ 

Ezekiel 11:19-20

11:19 I will give them one heart and I will put a new spirit within them; ⁶  I will remove the hearts of stone from their bodies ⁷  and I will give them tender hearts, ⁸  11:20 so that they may follow my statutes and observe my regulations and carry them out. Then they will be my people, and I will be their God. ⁹ 

Ezekiel 36:25-27

36:25 I will sprinkle you with pure water ¹⁰  and you will be clean from all your impurities. I will purify you from all your idols. 36:26 I will give you a new heart, and I will put a new spirit within you. I will remove the heart of stone ¹¹  from your body and give you a heart of flesh. ¹²  36:27 I will put my Spirit within you; ¹³  I will take the initiative and you will obey my statutes ¹⁴  and carefully observe my regulations. ¹⁵ 

Romans 6:14

6:14 For sin will have no mastery over you, because you are not under law but under grace.

Romans 6:17-22

6:17 But thanks be to God that though you were slaves to sin, you obeyed ¹⁶  from the heart that pattern ¹⁷  of teaching you were entrusted to, 6:18 and having been freed from sin, you became enslaved to righteousness. 6:19 (I am speaking in human terms because of the weakness of your flesh.) ¹⁸  For just as you once presented your members as slaves to impurity and lawlessness leading to more lawlessness, so now present your members as slaves to righteousness leading to sanctification. 6:20 For when you were slaves of sin, you were free with regard to righteousness.

6:21 So what benefit ¹⁹  did you then reap ²⁰  from those things that you are now ashamed of? For the end of those things is death. 6:22 But now, freed ²¹  from sin and enslaved to God, you have your benefit ²²  leading to sanctification, and the end is eternal life.

Romans 7:23-25

7:23 But I see a different law in my members waging war against the law of my mind and making me captive to the law of sin that is in my members. 7:24 Wretched man that I am! Who will rescue me from this body of death? 7:25 Thanks be ²³  to God through Jesus Christ our Lord! So then, ²⁴  I myself serve the law of God with my mind, but ²⁵  with my flesh I serve ²⁶  the law of sin.

Romans 8:2-3

8:2 For the law of the life-giving Spirit ²⁷  in Christ Jesus has set you ²⁸  free from the law of sin and death. 8:3 For God achieved what the law could not do because ²⁹  it was weakened through the flesh. By sending his own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh and concerning sin, he condemned sin in the flesh,

Romans 8:13

8:13 (for if you live according to the flesh, you will ³⁰  die), ³¹  but if by the Spirit you put to death the deeds of the body you will live.

Titus 2:14

2:14 He ³²  gave himself for us to set us free from every kind of lawlessness and to purify for himself a people who are truly his, ³³  who are eager to do good. ³⁴ 

James 4:5-6

4:5 Or do you think the scripture means nothing when it says, ³⁵  “The spirit that God ³⁶  caused ³⁷  to live within us has an envious yearning”? ³⁸  4:6 But he gives greater grace. Therefore it says, “God opposes the proud, but he gives grace to the humble.” ³⁹ 

James 4:1

Passions and Pride

4:1 Where do the conflicts and where ⁴⁰  do the quarrels among you come from? Is it not from this, ⁴¹  from your passions that battle inside you? ⁴² 

James 3:8

3:8 But no human being can subdue the tongue; it is a restless ⁴³  evil, full of deadly poison.

[30:6]  ¹ tn Heb “circumcise” (so KJV, NAB, NIV, NRSV); TEV “will give you and your descendents obedient hearts.” See note on the word “cleanse” in Deut 10:16.

[30:6]  ² tn Heb “seed” (so KJV, ASV).

[30:6]  ³ tn Heb “the Lord your God.” See note on the second occurrence of the word “he” in v. 3.

[130:8]  ⁴ tn Or “redeem.”

[130:8]  ⁵ tn The Hebrew noun עָוֹן (’avon) can refer to sin, the guilt sin produces, or the consequences of sin. Only here is the noun collocated with the verb פָּדָה (padah, “to redeem; to deliver”). The psalmist may refer to forgiveness per se (v. 4), but the emphasis in this context is likely on deliverance from the national consequences of sin. See L. C. Allen, Psalms 101-150 (WBC), 192.

[11:19]  ⁶ tc The MT reads “you”; many Hebrew mss along with the LXX and other ancient versions read “within them.”

[11:19]  ⁷ tn Heb “their flesh.”

[11:19]  ⁸ tn Heb “heart of flesh.”

[11:20]  ⁹ sn The expression They will be my people, and I will be their God occurs as a promise to Abraham (Gen 17:8), Moses (Exod 6:7), and the nation (Exod 29:45).

[36:25]  ¹⁰ sn The Lord here uses a metaphor from the realm of ritual purification. For the use of water in ritual cleansing, see Exod 30:19-20; Lev 14:51; Num 19:18; Heb 10:22.

[36:26]  ¹¹ sn That is, a heart which symbolizes a will that is stubborn and unresponsive (see 1 Sam 25:37). In Rabbinic literature a “stone” was associated with an evil inclination (b. Sukkah 52a).

[36:26]  ¹² sn That is, a heart which symbolizes a will that is responsive and obedient to God.

[36:27]  ¹³ tn Or “in the midst of you.” The word “you” is plural.

[36:27]  ¹⁴ tn Heb “and I will do that which in my statutes you will walk.” The awkward syntax (verb “to do, act” + accusative sign + relative clause + prepositional phrase + second person verb) is unique, though Eccl 3:14 contains a similar construction. In the last line of that verse we read that “God acts so that (relative pronoun) they fear before him.” However, unlike Ezek 36:27, the statement has no accusative sign before the relative pronoun.

[36:27]  ¹⁵ tn Heb “and my laws you will guard and you will do them.” Jer 31:31-34 is parallel to this passage.

[6:17]  ¹⁶ tn Grk “you were slaves of sin but you obeyed.”

[6:17]  ¹⁷ tn Or “type, form.”

[6:19]  ¹⁸ tn Or “because of your natural limitations” (NRSV).

[6:21]  ¹⁹ tn Grk “fruit.”

[6:21]  ²⁰ tn Grk “have,” in a tense emphasizing their customary condition in the past.

[6:22]  ²¹ tn The two aorist participles translated “freed” and “enslaved” are causal in force; their full force is something like “But now, since you have become freed from sin and since you have become enslaved to God….”

[6:22]  ²² tn Grk “fruit.”

[7:25]  ²³ tc ‡ Most mss (א* A 1739 1881 Ï sy) read “I give thanks to God” rather than “Now thanks be to God” (א¹ [B] Ψ 33 81 104 365 1506 pc), the reading of NA²⁷. The reading with the verb (εὐχαριστῶ τῷ θεῷ, eucaristw tw qew) possibly arose from a transcriptional error in which several letters were doubled (TCGNT 455). The conjunction δέ (de, “now”) is included in some mss as well (א¹ Ψ 33 81 104 365 1506 pc), but it should probably not be considered original. The ms support for the omission of δέ is both excellent and widespread (א* A B D 1739 1881 Ï lat sy), and its addition can be explained as an insertion to smooth out the transition between v. 24 and 25.

[7:25]  ²⁴ tn There is a double connective here that cannot be easily preserved in English: “consequently therefore,” emphasizing the conclusion of what he has been arguing.

[7:25]  ²⁵ tn Greek emphasizes the contrast between these two clauses more than can be easily expressed in English.

[7:25]  ²⁶ tn The words “I serve” have been repeated here for clarity.

[8:2]  ²⁷ tn Grk “for the law of the Spirit of life.”

[8:2]  ²⁸ tc Most mss read the first person singular pronoun με (me) here (A D 1739^c 1881 Ï lat sa). The second person singular pronoun σε (se) is superior because of external support (א B {F which reads σαι} G 1506* 1739*) and internal support (it is the harder reading since ch. 7 was narrated in the first person). At the same time, it could have arisen via dittography from the final syllable of the verb preceding it (ἠλευθέρωσεν, hleuqerwsen; “has set free”). But for this to happen in such early and diverse witnesses is unlikely, especially as it depends on various scribes repeatedly overlooking either the nu or the nu-bar at the end of the verb.

[8:3]  ²⁹ tn Grk “in that.”

[8:13]  ³⁰ tn Grk “are about to, are certainly going to.”

[8:13]  ³¹ sn This remark is parenthetical to Paul’s argument.

[2:14]  ³² tn Grk “who” (as a continuation of the previous clause).

[2:14]  ³³ tn Or “a people who are his very own.”

[2:14]  ³⁴ tn Grk “for good works.”

[4:5]  ³⁵ tn Grk “vainly says.”

[4:5]  ³⁶ tn Grk “he”; the referent (God) has been specified in the translation for clarity.

[4:5]  ³⁷ tc The Byzantine text and a few other mss (P 33 Ï) have the intransitive κατῴκησεν (katwkhsen) here, which turns τὸ πνεῦμα (to pneuma) into the subject of the verb: “The spirit which lives within us.” But the more reliable and older witnesses (Ì⁷⁴ א B Ψ 049 1241 1739 al) have the causative verb, κατῴκισεν (katwkisen), which implies a different subject and τὸ πνεῦμα as the object: “The spirit that he causes to live within us.” Both because of the absence of an explicit subject and the relative scarcity of the causative κατοικίζω (katoikizw, “cause to dwell”) compared to the intransitive κατοικέω (katoikew, “live, dwell”) in biblical Greek (κατοικίζω does not occur in the NT at all, and occurs one twelfth as frequently as κατοικέω in the LXX), it is easy to see why scribes would replace κατῴκισεν with κατῴκησεν. Thus, on internal and external grounds, κατῴκισεν is the preferred reading.

[4:5]  ³⁸ tn Interpreters debate the referent of the word “spirit” in this verse: (1) The translation takes “spirit” to be the lustful capacity within people that produces a divided mind (1:8, 14) and inward conflicts regarding God (4:1-4). God has allowed it to be in man since the fall, and he provides his grace (v. 6) and the new birth through the gospel message (1:18-25) to counteract its evil effects. (2) On the other hand the word “spirit” may be taken positively as the Holy Spirit and the sense would be, “God yearns jealously for the Spirit he caused to live within us.” But the word for “envious” or “jealous” is generally negative in biblical usage and the context before and after seems to favor the negative interpretation.

[4:6]  ³⁹ sn A quotation from Prov 3:34.

[4:1]  ⁴⁰ tn The word “where” is repeated in Greek for emphasis.

[4:1]  ⁴¹ tn Grk “from here.”

[4:1]  ⁴² tn Grk “in your members [i.e., parts of the body].”

[3:8]  ⁴³ tc Most mss (C Ψ 1739^c Ï as well as a few versions and fathers) read “uncontrollable” (ἀκατασχετόν, akatasceton), while the most important witnesses (א A B K P 1739* latt) have “restless” (ἀκατάστατον, akatastaton). Externally, the latter reading should be preferred. Internally, however, things get a bit more complex. The notion of being uncontrollable is well suited to the context, especially as a counterbalance to v. 8a, though for this very reason scribes may have been tempted to replace ἀκατάστατον with ἀκατασχετόν. However, in a semantically parallel early Christian text, ἀκατάστατος (akatastato") was considered strong enough of a term to denounce slander as “a restless demon” (Herm. 27:3). On the other hand, ἀκατάστατον may have been substituted for ἀκατασχετόν by way of assimilation to 1:8 (especially since both words were relatively rare, scribes may have replaced the less familiar with one that was already used in this letter). On internal evidence, it is difficult to decide, though ἀκατασχετόν is slightly preferred. However, in light of the strong support for ἀκατάστατον, and the less-than-decisive internal evidence, ἀκατάστατον is preferred instead.