Freed from the Law

Romans 7:1-6 

I want to start off tonight by talking about presuppositions. This may not be a word commonly used by you so we need to determine if this is just a fancy word or a critical concept. A presupposition is an assumption. These are often unconscious assumptions, beliefs that we have accepted as true, that act as a traffic cop in our thinking in ways that we don't always appreciate. 

We all have presuppositions. We have a couple of recent examples with this that have to do with all the things going on with the attacks in Libya last week. On 9/11/12 we heard news reports about attacks going on at the Embassy there. Then later that evening we heard the attacks had caused the death of our ambassador to Libya plus three more who were associated with the embassy. This is an extremely significant situation. 

The next morning I listened to two mainstream media news stations. I didn't necessarily agree with their take on the situation so I switched over to Fox News.  They had a panel of three, including one who usually represents a more liberal viewpoint, and they were all agreed that this was an act of war. I never heard this on the other news shows that morning. That reflects how these two different groups of people, not necessarily all conservatives, interpreted the events that they saw. The mainstream media did not see the lowering of the U.S. flag and the raising of an Islamist flag over the American Embassy as an act of war. Up until recently, that would certainly have been viewed as an act of war. 

All of this has to do with the mindset that people bring to certain circumstances. That's governed by a presupposition. The presupposition that has governed this administration (I'm not doing this to pick on this administration but it's just such a wonderful example of how presuppositions affect our decisions) has been to not mention Islamists in connection with terrorism. We pick up many assumptions from the culture around us, family, friends, peers, and professors that shape our thinking and our opinions. Some of these are human viewpoint, some are Divine viewpoint, and these been the controlling way we immediately perceive and interpret events. 

Last week immediately after these things become known on Wednesday morning, Romney came out and criticized the administration because their initial reaction was apologize, apologize, apologize. Once he came out and commented on the fact they were portraying  a weakness toward Islamist countries by apologizing then Romney became the target. The fact that there was this initial response that it was our fault because someone did something that offended them, shows a mindset, an assumption about reality that has become increasingly embedded in certain segments of our culture. With this administration, there has been a conscious removal of any mention of Islamists, radical Islamists, Koran-believing Islamists, as the source of terrorism. According to them, all this terrorist activity is just a coincidence that happens to involve a lot of people who have gone to training camps in Afghanistan and Iraq. Who knew they would have this belief?  What a coincidence but we're not going to identify them in any way as being Arab or Muslim. We're only going to identify them as criminals.

As a result of that presupposition in this administration, as they've gone through all the training manuals in the FBI, counter-terrorism organizations, they've removed any verbiage related to Islamists, Islamist terrorists, anything like that. It's just expunged from the official documents. That's the presupposition that there's no Islamic terrorism out there. So when you get warnings, like we received about things that might happen in Cairo and Benghazi, that there may be a terrorism event, because you've put on the wrong-colored glasses governed by this presupposition, you discount it. They firmly believe that Islamic terrorism does not exist. 

Now, a week later, the evidence is overwhelming. The administration and spokesman, Jay Carney, have had to do a 180 degree turn. They never admit they've had to change their mind and they're still claiming Mitt Romney just shot from the hip. He drew and he fired without taking aim. Wait a minute. The reason you see a difference is because the presupposition from the conservative objective is that the terrorist are energized by an Islamic worldview and they do exist. So when something happens on 9/11 and there's an attack on the American Embassy, we can pretty well put two and two together and assume this was an orchestrated assault that had something to do with their marking of 9/11 and instantly label it as a terrorist event. Why? It's a totally different presupposition. It's just an underlying, deeply-submerged belief system about what's going on in reality. When people see certain things they can change their presuppositions if they'll be objective. Those presuppositions can shape how they interpret certain things. 

Another example that came out in the news yesterday were stories about an ancient text that talks about Jesus' wife. The person who is really behind this story of a fragment of a manuscript is a woman, Karen King, a professor at Harvard. The news media do not understand any of these issues. The Daily Mail says, “if genuine, this document casts doubt on a centuries-old, official representation of Mary Magdalene as a repentant whore and overturns the Christian ideal of sexual abstinence.” If you read the fragment, you can't see any of that out of it, but there's just this presupposition negativity toward Christianity. They believe that Christianity is just a lot of mumbo-jumbo that Christians hold on to. 

Karen King is extremely liberal and she's the Harvard professor who came up with this. One article said, “Karen King needs Jesus to have a wife so she can have a future career.” That really nails it.  Her presupposition is that nothing we have in the New Testament is trustworthy at all. You can find fragments of gnostic Gospels from 100-400 years after Jesus lived that tell more about Jesus than you can by going to first century documents by people who actually witnessed the life of Jesus.  That's her presupposition.

Here's the fragment that seems to be the suggestion but no one knows who owns it. It's provenance is unknown; no one knows where it was found. It wasn't discovered in its original location so no one knows how to properly evaluate it. Once any archaeological artifact is removed from its original location it becomes basically useless for demonstrating anything because you no longer have a context for it. 

It's written in Coptic which is the original language used by Egyptian Christians in Egypt. It's a derivative of a hieroglyphic language and one scholar expressed tremendous skepticism. Scholars are quoted in a Tyndale House press release on the topic and they're not even sure it's good Coptic. I was reading on a textual literary discussion group that I am a member of and they were just scoffing at this. They said it was written by someone who barely knew Coptic; someone who barely spoke it. It's just a patchwork quilt, really bad Coptic. Most believe it's some kind of forgery and the fact that no one knows who owns it, where it came from, or where it was found makes it seem as any claim to anything but a forgery would be impossible. Yet the media is making a big, big deal out of this because they're going to say “Oh, so Jesus had a wife. We can prove the New Testament is wrong, etc. etc. etc.”

This is the translation of it. Each of the numbers represent a line on the text. You have the front and the back. The brackets represent where there's something missing so in between those brackets are all that we have.  The first line reads, “Not to me.  My mother gave to me.” Then you have “li” and the word is assumed to be “life”. The second line, “The disciples said to Jesus...” The third line, “Mary is worthy of it...”  Fourth line, “Jesus said to them, my wife...” Fifth line, “She will be my disciple...” Sixth line, “Let wicked people swell up...” Seventh line, “As for me I dwell with her in order to....” Eighth line, “An image....”  Then on the back, “My (looks like it might be mother”) then three and a couple of black lines and then “forthwith.” 

It doesn't really say a whole lot but they extrapolate that this gives us some basic information about Jesus. Why do they do that? Because they have this mindset, this presuppositional framework, that the New Testament can't be what it claims to be. It can't possibly be an even accurate historic document. Karen King was a member of what was called the Jesus Seminar which started back in 1985. This was a group of extremely liberal scholars who took 10 to 15 years evaluating the New Testament with their colored pens, going along and trying to decide what the historical Jesus would have said. Now the term “the historical Jesus” doesn't mean what you think it means.  In scholarly code language that means the information we know to be true about Jesus that didn't come from anything in the New Testament, which we can't trust. In other words, what they mean is anything we get outside the New Testament which we trust. Their presupposition is that anything we get outside the New Testament because, their presuppositional-grid is, the New Testament can't be trusted. When they see something like this, they get all excited and all a-quiver because they're going to trust this more than they're going to trust something from 150 years earlier.  If you're not careful or aware of your own presuppositions, then you lose all objectivity. 

That happens in all kinds of studies and that happens in the passage we're looking at tonight in Romans 7. Romans 7:1-6 is a transitional paragraph from Romans 6 which gives us the foundation, the doctrinal foundation, for the spiritual life in the Church Age, that leads to another discussion in Romans 7:7-25 where Paul is going to show that simple morality or following the moral aspect of the Mosaic Law just isn't enough to give us spirituality. Romans 7:1-6 forms the transition there and in the middle of that, Paul uses an illustration from just a small snapshot of what the Old Testament teaches about divorce. Unfortunately, because of the presuppositional grid of a lot of Christians, they come to this and they look at verses 2 and 3 as if Paul is giving us a definitive explanation of the doctrine of divorce and remarriage, and he's not. All he's doing is taking one small aspect of what is taught in the Mosaic Law and he's using that to illustrate a principle that he's talking about in Romans 7:1-6. 

We always have to be careful at those little presuppositions and study the text and let it speak for itself. As we get started here we have to remember that if we ever take the text out of the context we're left with a con job. Context in Bible study or any kind of literary or legal study is like location in real estate. It's the same thing. In real estate it's talking about a physical, geographical location and its context is talking about a literary location so when you read a paragraph its always in a context. The context of Romans 7:1-6 is in the context of this three chapter section where Paul is dealing with the basis for and how believers are to live the Christian life. 

In Romans 6, the context is on the foundation for our spiritual life, which is what happens at the instant we trust in Christ as Savior. At that instant we are legally identified with Him in His death, burial, and resurrection.  Jesus Christ uses the Holy Spirit to identify us with His death, burial, and resurrection so that the result is we become a new creature in Christ and we are entered into the body of Christ. Now that last phrase is important because Paul refers to this again in Romans 7:4, “My brethren you also have become dead to the Law through the body of Christ” so that connects it back. So Romans 7 contextually comes right out and flows from what he says in Romans 6. We have to understand what Paul is saying in Romans 6. 

I've put up this little chart here to compare the two. Romans 6 talks about the way we were before we were saved. We were “alive to sin”. We were a “slave of sin” in Romans 6:20. That means there's no positive righteousness in our life as an unbeliever.  We are completely controlled by the sin nature. The sin nature not only produces those horrible nasty things that we talk of as sin, whether they're overt sins, such as murder, or genocide, or criminality, or rape or things of that nature, or whether we're talking about sins of the tongue, such as slander or gossip, or whether we're talking about emotional sins/mental attitude sins such as anger, resentment, bitterness, jealousy, sexual lust, any kind of lust. All those make up unseen and immaterial sins. 

Those are all produced by our area of weakness in our sin nature. But our sin nature also produces good because there are many good things done by our sin nature. There are many unbelievers who have a great sense of moral rectitude. They have a great sense of moral integrity. It’s not necessarily spiritual. There are Islamic believers who are very rigid in their observance of their law. That is a sense of moral rectitude. It would differ from us. 

Jehovah's Witness is a Christian heresy that does not believe in the full deity of Jesus Christ. For them there was a time when Jesus began as a human and then they think he receives deity so they don't believe Jesus is fully God. They don't really have payment for sin. They believe you have to work your way to heaven, so you had better be good. You have many people in works-oriented religions like Islam or Jehovah's Witnesses and they're working their way to heaven.  Sadly they're much more trustworthy than many Christians because they're afraid they're going to lose eternal salvation if they commit certain sins. 

The same thing is true with Mormonism.  Mormonism is not a monotheistic religion as many people claim because in Mormonism, any Christian can eventually be good enough to become a god in the next life.  They really have a polytheistic religion, a works-oriented religion. The only way you can make sure you're good enough to get into the next life is to make sure you're fulfilling all the ritual and all the moral requirements of Mormonism. Unless, of course, you're a woman. You have to do all of that plus you have to please your husband because when's he's resurrected in the next life he will ask you to join him. That's the sad thing in Mormonism. Women can't get there without the men. That's one of the reasons why in the 19^th century, Mormonism had polygamy as part of their doctrines because there were many more women than men and if women can't get into heaven without a man, then they had many wives per man. The other reason was that Brigham Young and Joseph Smith were sexual perverts. Joseph Smith made his elders give their wives to him to sleep with as a sign that their loyalty and devotion to him. So there's a lot of really strange things that went on. Usually, modern Mormons try to cover that up, ignore it. It's not part of what they do today that we know of. Who knows what goes on inside the secret temple services in a Mormon wedding? So there are many moral things that an unbeliever can do. So just because someone is not a believer doesn't mean they don't have a sense of moral rectitude. But they're still a slave to their sin nature and they cannot produce any kind of righteousness. 

After we're saved, Paul says, we're dead to sin. It doesn't mean the sin nature is gone. It doesn't say the sin nature is dead to us but that we're dead to the sin nature.  The sin nature doesn't have the same control. In Romans 6:7 he says, “We're justified or freed from sin.” In 6:19 he shifts to the word “freed” eleutheroo [e)leuqerow] and we are no longer a slave to the sin nature; we're a slave to God. 

Nobody is free. You're either a slave to the sin nature or you're a slave to God but you're not free. There's no in-between position. There's no neutrality there. You're one or the other. Before you're saved, you're exclusively a slave to the sin nature. After you're saved you're positionally a slave to righteousness but we use our volition to say, “Yeah I want to go back to the leeks and garlics of my sin nature, so to speak, I want to go back and put myself under its control. It was so comfortable there. I had so many wonderful, comfortable habits that my sin nature provided for me that when life gets a little tense it's a lot easier to let my sin nature solve my problems so I'll just go back to the dominion of my sin nature rather than to try to trust Christ. That gets awfully threatening to actually trust in a promise of Scripture. Therefore rather than trust in the Baptism of the Holy Spirit and living in the power of the Holy Spirit, I'm just going to go back to my comfort zone of the sin nature.” And that's the real challenge for us to make that kind of decision.

So the argument in Romans 6 is that we're dead to sin. We're justified from the sin nature; we're free from the power of the tyranny of the sin nature and we now become a slave to God and a slave to righteousness (Romans 6:19-21).  In Romans 7 Paul simply advances that in relation to the Law rather than talking about being dead to sin, he moves our thinking down the field a little bit. He also says we're dead to the Law. In Romans 7:4, he doesn't say the Law died; we are dead to the law. Just as we have been justified from sin and freed from sin we are now free from the Law in 7:3. That tie to the Law has been abolished, removed. It's been completely nullified in 7:7 for the purpose that we can now live in the Spirit. That's the end game. 

We're not free from the Law so that we can go fulfill every fantasy, every lust of our sin nature. We're freed from the Law so that we can now serve God, so we can be slaves of righteousness and so we can put into practice in our life the principles that God has revealed in Scripture. We're not free to do as we want to do but so we can serve Him. 

As we get into Romans 7:1-6 and we look at this transition, the focus has shifted now from being free from the authority of the sin nature and free from the authority of the Law. There are basically two issues that have to be resolved as we look at these first 6 verses.  The first is: what is the meaning of Law?  Romans 7:1 says, “Or do you not know brethren, for I speak to those who knew the Law....” Who would that be?  Who knew the Law?  Is it Mosaic Law? Is it Roman or Greek Law? Or is it just law in general?  So that's the question.

The second question is: What's the significance of this marriage illustration that he brings in in verses 2 and 3? Let me give you a little hint in terms of you're reading something and you're not sure how it fits, go to the conclusion. Take a look at how the author uses it to reach his conclusion and that will tell you the way that he is using that illustration. Just because an author uses that illustration doesn't mean he's talking about everything related to that illustration. If he's a very good writer he may just be focusing on a very fine point in that illustration and that's what allows him to go to his conclusion. And the conclusion narrows our understanding of the illustration. 

Let's look at the first issue which is this word “law”. The Greek word is nomos [nomoj]. We use the word “anti-nomian” sometimes. “Anti” means against and nomian comes from this word nomos for law. It means someone who is lawless, someone who just wants to live anyway they would like to. It's translated a number of ways and has a number of meanings, depending upon the context. It can refer to a law in general, a principle, it can refer specifically to the Mosaic Law.  It can refer to any law code in general.  It can refer to natural law or it can refer to revealed law or revealed principles or revealed absolutes. 

So this is part of the question. Now when we look at this, we have to ask who Paul is addressing. He's addressing a group of believers who are in the capital city of Rome. And a large segment of this congregation have a Jewish background. They are Jewish background believers so a lot of what Paul has said in this epistle is directly related to those who come to Christianity with a previous mindset which was shaped by the Torah, their study of the Mosaic Law.

He spends a lot of time in the last part of Romans 1, Romans 2, and the first part of Romans 3 showing that righteousness cannot come from the observance of the Law. He's not talking about law in general but about the Mosaic Law in specific. When he finishes Romans 8, he builds to this tremendous crescendo in a couple of verses that are well known to us where Paul concludes by saying, “For I am persuaded that neither death nor life nor angels nor principalities, nor powers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor height nor depth, nor any other created thing is able to separate us from the love of God which is in Christ Jesus, our Lord.” 

He's built to this great conclusion but there's some questions in the back row.  “Now wait a minute.  We're Jewish.  God said He would always love us but He's getting ready to kick our butt.  God doesn't love the Jews anymore because we rejected the Messiah.  How can you say that God's love can't be lost?”  So Paul then in Romans 9, 10, and 11 answers that question why God's love has not been finally or totally lost by the Jewish people.  God still has a plan and a purpose for the Jewish people and they will ultimately come to salvation.  That's how Romans 9, 10, and 11 fits within that particular argument.   

So this Jewish background of his audience is really important for understanding what Paul is saying. When you realize that, it's a little less likely that when Paul talks about law in this epistle, that he is talking about Roman law or Greek law or just law in general. As a matter of fact, the word “law” in Romans never refers to anything but the Mosaic Law. Romans 7:1-6 is a highly debated passage for almost everything that's in here. 

When the word nomos [nomoj] appears in this verse, it doesn't have an article with it. In English the definite article “the” identifies something in terms of its uniqueness or singularity.  For example if we just use an indefinite article “an apple” could be any apple in the category of apples. But if we're talking about “the apple” we're talking about a specific apple. The definite article in English identifies a specific entity within a group or category. In Greek the article has nothing to do with how it's used in English. There are a lot of different ways how an article or the lack of an article can be used in Greek.  In a number of contexts, including this one, the absence of an article makes the noun more specific than the presence of the article.   

It sounds backwards but we have somewhat of a similar example in English, especially British and Canadian English.  They don't go to “the hospital” or “the university”; they go to “hospital” or “university”.  It's because that is viewed as a certain kind of noun that is of a certain class that is more definite inherently.  Like the word “God” in John 1:1. “In the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God and the Word was God.”  There's no article there. 

Jehovah’s Witnesses, when they come knock on our door, will tell us that because when it says “the Word was God” there's no article there it's not the God, it's a god. See, they say it's not saying it was God, it's just a god. That's because they don't understand the role of the article in Greek; that the absence of the article emphasizes the quality, the uniqueness of the noun itself. There are many places in Romans where the law nomos does not have the article with it yet it clearly is referring to the Mosaic Law. Passages such as Romans 2:12, 2:17, and 2:25, the whole section we covered in chapter 2 and in 3:31, 4: 13-14, Romans 10:4. These are all places where “law” occurs without the article. Clearly from context, it refers to the Mosaic Law. 

The word “law” appears some 195 times in the New Testament and 180 of those 195 uses refer to the Mosaic Law so your presupposition when you see the word nomos in the New Testament is that it's the Mosaic Law. There are only 15 out of 195 uses; that's about 7 and a half percent that are not referring to the Mosaic Law. So if you think it's the Mosaic Law, it's got about a 93 percent chance of being the Mosaic Law. In Romans, it never refers to just law in general or Greek Law or Roman Law. It always refers to the Mosaic Law. 

The Mosaic Law was this covenant God made with the Jewish people. That's also important to understand because the Mosaic Law isn't all of the Old Testament. The Mosaic Law comes into effect at a certain point in history. When did that occur?  It occurs on Mt. Sinai when God gave the Law to Moses. It's much broader than the Ten Commandments. There are actually 613 commandments in the Mosaic Law. 

It was designed to be temporary but it was like a constitution for a country. In the United States we have our Constitution and our Constitution defines the laws of the United States.  In the United States it is illegal; it is a felony, to commit murder. Does that make murder wrong in England? No. British Law provides the basis for why murder is wrong in Britain. In other countries you have similar laws. What they reflect, though, is a universal principle behind that.  So murder doesn't become a sin because it's in the Mosaic Law. It was a sin all the way back when Cain killed Abel in Genesis, chapter 4. It's not stated in terms of a negative until you get to Genesis 9 in the Noahic covenant and then “thou shalt not murder” which is literally what the word means in the Ten Commandments in Exodus. 

So the Mosaic Law is a law code defining how the Jewish nation, the Hebrew people, would live.  Remember what happened in the Old Testament.  God called Abraham and He said, through you I'm going to develop a people through whom I will bless the entire world.  There's going to come a time, He said, when they're going to spend 430 years outside of this land that I promised you, but I will be faithful to My promise and I will bring them back.”  So Abraham and his son, Isaac, and his son, Jacob, and Jacob's boys all lived in the land that God promised and then God brought this famine into the Middle East and He provided a way by all that through Joseph for them to be taken out of the land down to Egypt where over a period of 400 years they developed into a mighty nation of about two and a half to about three million people. 

When they came out of Egypt, Egypt became a picture in the Old Testament of slavery to sin. God's bringing them out and providing freedom for the Jewish people was a picture of what God would do in future salvation in freeing us from the tyranny of sin. The Jewish nation is viewed now as a redeemed nation.  Not that everyone in there is redeemed; not that everyone in there is justified but the nation is treated as a redeemed nation. 

The next thing that has to happen after everyone is redeemed or saved is what: how do you live? So the first thing God does is give them the Mosaic Law to show how this unique, holy nation or set-apart nation is going to live, set apart to the service of God.  God called them to be a holy nation, a holy priesthood, a nation among nations that God would work with.  The Mosaic Law was designed to set them apart as a nation.  What's a more Biblical word for set apart?  Sanctified.  God would sanctify them as a nation.  That didn't mean that's how they got saved or justified but that's how a justified nation, a set-apart nation positionally, would live practically by the observance of all the commands and prohibitions in the Mosaic Law. 

So the Mosaic Law was a covenant or contract that God made with Israel and this is how they were to live. Those stipulations, while they, the laws relating to murder, might reflect universal attributes reflecting in other law codes, the laws in the Mosaic Law did not apply to Assyrians, Egyptians, or to anybody else in the ancient world; just as the British laws do not apply to citizens of the United States. It's a different law code. The reason I'm saying that is because when we get into the section on marriage in verses 2 and 3, he is specifically talking about the stipulations in the Mosaic Law.  He's not talking about any other law code and there were stipulations in every other law code in the ancient world related to marriage and divorce because this reflected a Divine institution, something we're forgetting today. That's why I'm belaboring this particular point, so that we can understand this. The other question that's going to come up in this chapter is: why the Law?  Was the Law good?  I've heard people say the Law was really bad. No, the Pharisaical interpretation of the Law was really bad but the Law was good. That's the testimony of the New Testament. That's what Paul will say later on in Romans, chapter 7. In Romans 3:20 he says through the Law comes the knowledge of sin.  The purpose of the Law was not just to justify, and it wasn't really even to provide spiritual growth.  Ritual observance taught things but it didn't provide spiritual growth in and of itself.  Through the Law comes the knowledge of sin.  It was through the Mosaic Law that we learned how sinful we really are.  Before the Law we had a pretty good idea we were sinful but the Law teaches us about all the things that can make you unclean and if you're trying to observe the Law, it's like, “wow, I can't do anything; if I touch certain things, if I go certain places, I'm always got this problem of uncleanness.” Yes, God's making the point how sinful we are. That sin permeates everything. Romans 5:20, Paul says, “The Law came in that the transgression might increase.” See, the more we understood the Law, the more we realized how sinful we really were. 

1 Timothy 1:8, Paul said, “We know that the Law is good, inherently good, because it came from God. The Law is good if we use it lawfully.” The Pharisees were not using the Law lawfully.  They were making it a means of righteousness so that is why it was used wrongly and was distorted. It wasn't designed to make us righteous. Now as we look at this context by way of introduction, Paul makes a statement in Romans 6:14 where he comes to a conclusion in that first major section in chapter 6 where he says, “for sin shall not have dominion over you for you are not under Law but under grace.” 

That's the first mention of Law in this discussion of the spiritual life. A change is taking place. Immediately Paul realizes there's somebody in that audience that is going to distort what he says. If you've ever taught anything, you always wonder what people actually hear. Every now and then someone will say, “I remember when you taught this.”  I don't think so.

I've been in situations like when I taught in Russia the first time, August of 2000, and we were teaching in just this very primitive building and it was about 110 degrees outside and we'd landed at 2:00 in the morning and I had no idea where my brain was. The room is jammed with students with one small window unit to try to cool the temperature down so it was all the way down to 95 degrees and there's not a place where you could put another body in the room. Pam hadn't slept any at night. She was sitting on the back row and I could tell she was sound asleep with those sunglasses on so nobody could tell. 

One side of the room spoke Russian only and the other side spoke Kazak only so I had two interpreters. What I didn't realize going in was that only parts of the New Testament had been translated into Kazak and none of the Old Testament had been translated into Kazak. So the Kazak interpreter was listening to the Russian interpreter. When the Russian interpreter would cite the text and verse, the Kazak interpreter is translating it on the fly without knowing the Old Testament. I just wondered if anyone was getting anything even close to what I'm trying to communicate. 

It's always interesting to hear what people get. Paul recognizes this. He says, “For sin shall not have dominion over you for you are not under Law but under grace.”  He sees the wheels turning between the ears and he knows people are going to say, “We're not under Law.  Let's go party.  We can do whatever we want to do.” So he immediately stops his main line of thinking and goes off on a slight tangent to deal with a possible distortion which is stated in verse 15, “What then, shall we sin because we're not under Law but under grace? Certainly not. May it never be.” So verses 15-23 is really dealing with that issue.

Romans 6:14 takes us to this point where it says “You're not under Law but under Grace.” Romans 7:1 picks up the train of thought where he says, “Don't you know, brethren, for I speak to those who know the Law, that the Law has dominion over a man as long as he lives?” He's dealing with the fact and can say that the Law ends.  Because the Law ends we have a new relationship with God that's not related to the Law. As I pointed out when we studied that, “under Law” relates to the Dispensation of the Law prior to the cross. The cross was the end of the Law, Paul says in Romans 10. The Law ends at the cross and what begins after that is the Age of Grace or the Church Age.  The terms are used somewhat synonymously. The Church refers to the main group that God is working with in this dispensation. Grace is His primary modus operandi in the Church Age. 

That doesn't mean there wasn't grace all through history. We've all been saved through faith by grace. But grace wasn't the dominant feature under the Mosaic Law and just as we're not under Law any more doesn't mean there aren't any absolutes or principles or mandates. There are probably more or as many commands in the New Testament as there were in the Law. We still have absolutes and there's still a protocol plan God has given us. There's still a standard of behavior for members of the Royal Family of God. 

He comes back to this point in verse 1 to show that Law has dominion as long as a man lives but after you die you're not responsible for observing the Shabbat and resting on the 7^th day of every week. You're not responsible for tithing. You're not responsible for observing all the feast days. As a male, you don't have to make your pilgrimage to Jerusalem three times a year because when you die, the Law no longer has any application to you. You're free from the Law. That's his point. 

He then makes an illustration in verses 2 and 3 and then we get to a conclusion in verse 4. Note the conclusion: “Therefore, my brethren...” The fact that he uses the term brethren indicates he's talking to believers, not unbelievers. There's a clear assumption here that believers cannot do what he's saying to do which means believers can sin just as badly and just as perversely as they did before they were saved.  Just because you're saved doesn't mean you're not going to be able to sin in certain ways or that you won't sin in certain ways. 

That's important because there are a lot of people in Christendom who think that if you're truly saved then there are certain things you won't do. So, you think “so and so did that.  He must not be a Christian.” No, they're just living like they did before they were saved. Verse 4 says, “Therefore my brethren, you also have become dead to the Law through the body of Christ.” That's his whole point in this illustration is that a death separates us from the authority of Law.  That's all he's saying.

He's going to use an illustration from marriage: that marriage is a contract but when death occurs, that contract ends.  It's no longer applicable to the husband and wife once death occurs.  He's not giving a discourse on divorce and remarriage.  He says too little or not enough for this to be a discourse on divorce and remarriage. There are too many other things that need to be talked about.  You have to go to Matthew 5, Matthew 19. You have to look at 1 Corinthians, chapter 6 and 7. You have to look at some Old Testament passages to get the whole doctrine of marriage in the Scripture. He's only focusing on one thing; that when there is a legally binding contract, when death occurs, that contract is not binding anymore. So he uses that one aspect of marriage to illustrate that. 

This is seen in the conclusion when he says, “You also have become dead to the Law through the body of Christ that you may be married to another, which is Jesus Christ.” All he's talking about here is that now we have a new authority. Before we were saved in chapter 6, he talked about the fact that we were under the authority or dominion of the sin nature and now after we're saved, we're slaves to righteousness, slaves to God.  This is just saying it in a different way. 

Like a wife is under the authority of her husband before he dies, after he dies, she's free to marry another. She marries another and that's the new authority. He's just building on the same concept we have in chapter 6 that we now have a new authority.  Notice what he says that there's a purpose in this, “...for the purpose that we should bear fruit to God.”  That's why we're saved, to grow to maturity and to produce fruit for God, both in terms of our own spiritual maturity, in serving God in many different ways. 

Bearing fruit to God is a broad concept related to both an internal character fruit of the Spirit, as well as external service.  It does not imply what Lordship people say, “See, if you don't bear fruit, you're not saved.” No, this isn't saying that. It's saying that the purpose for your justification was so that you would have the potential to bear fruit.  It doesn't say that you will necessarily bear fruit. That's your decision. You've been saved for the purpose of bearing fruit unto God. That's why God made all this incredible transformation in our lives. So are we going to activate that or not? That's our decision. 

Next time we'll come back and finish up the transition opening and get into the whole problem with the Law and confusing morality with spirituality in the rest of the chapter.  

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