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Bible Dictionaries
Mortify
Hastings' Dictionary of the New Testament
or This word translates (Authorized Version and Revised Version ) θανατοῦν (Romans 8:13) and νεκροῦν (Colossians 3:5). Elsewhere in the NT the former word is applied only to the infliction of physical death (by the Greek medical writers to ‘mortification’ in the pathological sense), the latter to senile decay of the vital powers (Romans 4:19, Hebrews 11:12). In the passages cited the words are synonymous, and are used, as the contexts plainly show, in an ethical sense. Although St. Paul is far from disparaging the necessity of wholesome self-discipline (1 Corinthians 9:27), the idea, readily suggested by the associations of the word ‘mortify,’ of a gradual subjugation of the bodily appetites by the practice of bodily austerities, is here foreign to his thought. His exhortation is to ‘put to death the (evil) practices of the body’ (Romans 8:13), and this is to be done, not by physical means, but by the ‘spirit’; and again to put to death ‘the members which are upon the earth’ (i.e. the impure and selfish lusts of which the bodily members are the natural instruments-fornication, uncleanness, etc.), and for this end the rules of an arbitrary asceticism are of no value (Colossians 2:16-23).
The main emphasis of St. Paul’s doctrine of sanctification is ever on the positive issue of the believer’s vital union with Christ-that ‘newness of life’ which by its native force expels and excludes the lustings of the lower nature (Romans 13:14, Galatians 5:18, Ephesians 5:18, 2 Timothy 2:22); yet necessarily the negative principle is also involved. By man, in his present state, spiritual life is realizable only through the slaying of sin; union with the Crucified implies crucifixion of the passions and lusts (Galatians 5:24). While ‘raised together with Christ,’ we ‘seek the things that are above’ (Colossians 3:1), the converse fact that in Christ ‘we died’ (Colossians 3:3) carries with it the converse requirement, as it does also the power, to kill out what is base and sensual and to hold all natural appetites in rigid subordination to the highest ends of life.
Robert Law.
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Hastings, James. Entry for 'Mortify'. Hastings' Dictionary of the New Testament. https://www.studylight.org/dictionaries/eng/hdn/m/mortify.html. 1906-1918.
