The Law Reveals Sin
Romans 7:1-6
This afternoon I had something of a
thrill, going through different things as I'm unpacking and packing all this
stuff at my dad's house to move out. I found a small box that had about
four small silver spoons in it. It seems I had seen this box once or
twice before in the last couple of weeks and I turned it over. I hadn't
seen before that there was a note on the bottom written by my grandmother who
said that this had belonged to her grandmother in 1863. Her grandmother
was married to a man named Thomas Henry Stout, Sr. who pastored ten or eleven
churches in Alabama and Georgia, I found out, including a chaplain in the
Confederacy. I think one of these old pictures I have, a linotype or
daguerreotype or something like that with a lot of silver content in them, was
one of him. I think there are two or three other pastors in the family
tree somewhere, hiding behind the weeds.
We're in Romans 7 now. We've
taken a little bit of a sidetrack over the last several lessons to look at
passages in other Pauline letters that reinforce what he's saying here; talking
about what is the relationship of the Law to the Christian life. This is
historically a major problem among Christians ever since Acts 10 and 11
when Peter first took the gospel to the Gentiles and then came back to
Jerusalem in chapter 11 and told them what happened, and the great concerns
about what relation the Law had to these new Gentile Christians. Were
they going to be coming under the Law, or just exactly what was their
responsibility? In our study on Tuesday night in Acts, we will come
to Acts 15 which is called the Jerusalem Council where they hammered some
issues out in relation to that, and also the book of Galatians reflects this
same issue but it's been a problem ever since then all the way up to the
present.
Number one: we have a large number
of Christians who don't understand the role of the Mosaic Law in and of itself,
in an absolute sense. Number two, they don't
understand the relationship of the Law to the present Church Age. There's
failure to understand what Paul has emphasized back in Romans 6:14 that we are
not under the Law but we are under grace. They don't understand the
significance of that statement that we are under grace or the relationship of
the believer to the Law, which means understanding its purpose in the Old
Testament no longer exists. Spirituality is not
related to morality. That doesn't mean that spirituality is immoral but
it means we don't achieve a state of spirituality or spiritual maturity by following
a moral or ethical system.
That's what the Mosaic Law
did. It laid out an ethical, moral system based on the holiness and the
righteousness of God but it didn't enable the believer to fulfill or obey the
Law. So it created sort of a tension that was there, showing that man on his own, apart from some eternal divine change, cannot
meet the requirements. So spirituality and spiritual growth are not based
on just following moral dictates. That's not going to do it. It's
just going to lead to the kind of frustration that it leads Paul to in this
particular chapter. So what we see in Romans 7, starting in verse 8, is
the explanation that the Law reveals the sinfulness of the sin nature and the
sin nature as the cause of spiritual death. If you understand that, then
you understand this chapter.
It's pointing out that the Law isn't
sin, though it produces sin, because we all know that whenever you tell
someone not to do something that's the first thing they are going to want to
do. Even if it never occurred to them before to do it, now they want to
do it. So the Law through its prohibitions makes certain things clear
that you're not supposed to do. In a sense, it exacerbates or sort of
energizes the sin nature to do those very things. But the sin comes from the
sin nature; the sin doesn't come because the Law said, “thou shalt not
murder” or “thou shalt not commit adultery”, or “thou shalt not have any other
gods besides me”. That's not the cause of sin. The cause of sin is
the internal sin nature and the volition of each individual believer.
They make that choice. No matter what the circumstances might be, no
matter what the education might be, the problem is always the response of the
individual in their volition.
So the Law exposes or reveals the
sinfulness of the sin nature and it is the sin nature that is the cause of
spiritual death and living a death-like experience, even for believers.
So as we come out of the introductory section here Paul concluded in verse 6,
“But now we have been delivered from the Law [that indicates a complete release
from the Law], having died to what we were held by...” So death, as it
often does in Scripture, emphasizes not the cessation of existence but it
emphasizes a separation. So we died to the Law, that is what held us, so
we are separated from the Law. It no longer has authority. Verse 6
continues, “...so that we should serve in the newness of the Spirit, and not in
the oldness of the letter.” Even though there was service in the Old Testament,
as we've seen, they couldn't serve because internally there is no change.
There's regeneration 1.0 in the Old
Testament. It meant you moved from being spiritually dead to spiritually
alive. You went from not having a human spirit to having a human
spirit. But that's the most that you got with regeneration. It
didn't have all the other features that regeneration has in the Church Age or
will have in the Millennial Kingdom. So we have regeneration 1.0 in the
Old Testament, which is just your basic core concept of moving from spiritual
death to spiritual life, gaining a human spirit, which gives the individual
believer a certain ability to understand divine truth because the natural man
cannot understand the things that are revealed by the Spirit of God. That
revelation would be in the Word, according to 1 Corinthians
2:14. So we have this basic regeneration in the Old
Testament. There's no death to the sin nature. There's no breaking
of the power of the sin nature. All of that is part of the Baptism by the
Holy Spirit—identification with Christ in his death, burial, and resurrection—and
that just isn't there in the Old Testament.
Now when we get to the New
Testament, where we get regeneration 2.0. Regeneration 2.0 includes as
ancillary features, the indwelling of the Holy Spirit and the filling of the
Holy Spirit. It includes freedom from the sin nature because of the
identification with Christ in His death, burial, and resurrection. All of
that becomes sort of a secondary feature that comes with regeneration.
Because the Holy Spirit leaves the earth during the Tribulation period,
believers will sort of go back to the Old Testament period, maybe regeneration
1.5. There's a bit of a regression there because there's no indwelling of
the Holy Spirit, no filling of the Holy Spirit; it's going to be a different
spiritual life in that period of time leading up to the return of Christ.
Then when Christ comes and
establishes His Kingdom the spiritual life is going to take this huge shift,
this huge change from what the saved Jews in the Tribulation period
experience. It's very similar to the limited regeneration of their Old
Testament ancestors. Then when Christ returns and establishes the New covenant which we've looked at the last few weeks, this
is going to bring features that go far beyond the spiritual features to
regeneration 2.0 in the Church Age. It's going to bring in a complete
change of heart, an intuitive knowledge of the Word and the doctrine, and it's
going to give them a completely new interior spiritual life that is based on
this more of a direct knowledge of God than the indirect knowledge of God that
we have today. There are a lot of different features that come along in
the Millennial Kingdom.
It's not simply regeneration that
makes that difference. Basic regeneration is moving from spiritual death
to spiritual life. Each dispensation has different features related to
God the Holy Spirit. As I pointed out in the last study, the newness of
the Spirit emphasizes that this is the new life that comes in this Church Age
and it is also connected back to verse 4 of chapter 6 where Paul writes,
“Therefore we were buried with Him through baptism into death, so that as
Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, even so we also
should walk in newness of life.” So connecting those two statements
related to 'newness' we see this is the purpose for which Church Age believers
are saved: to walk or to live or to manifest their life in terms of this new
spiritual dimension by walking by the Spirit (using the language in Galatians).
In this next section, verses 7-12,
the question is asked, “Is the Law sin?” In verse 7, Paul says, “What
shall we say then? Is the Law sin?” Then he's going to answer it in
verses through 12. His answer is: No, it is holy; it's set
apart; it's righteous. As he says in verse 12, “Therefore the Law is
holy, and the commandment holy, and just [righteous], and good.” It is
intrinsically good. There's nothing wrong with the Law. It is
inherently righteous but it doesn't change the internal makeup of the
individual.
In verse 7 he is using the first
person pronoun, 'we', which he has done throughout the previous chapter.
He switches back and forth with a lot of different pronouns. In chapter
6, verse 1, he says, “What shall we say then? Shall we continue in sin
that grace may abound?” He goes on in verse 2 of chapter six, “Certainly
not. How shall we who died to sin live any longer in it?” And then
in verse 3, he shifts from that 'we' to a second person plural, “Do you not
know that as many of us as were baptized into Christ were baptized into His
death?” And throughout chapter 6 he continues to talk mostly in terms of
first person plural 'we'.
But something changes in Romans 7:7
when he says “...I would not have known sin except through the Law. For I
would not have known covetousness unless the Law had said, 'Thou shalt not
covet'.” So suddenly he shifts from a first person plural to a first
person singular. This has created a lot of tension over the years because
it has been interpreted a variety of different ways. There are some who
think he is speaking sort of in a way representing the human race, using a
first person singular to speak of himself as a representative of the whole
human race. There are others who think he is using this in some sort of
generic sense as Adam or a Jew in a representative sense. But when Paul talks
elsewhere in Romans using the first person singular he is always talking about
himself. He does this in Romans 14:15. He never uses that first
person singular in some sort of representative or referential way. He
does it only in terms of himself. So, most likely, he's talking about
himself.
Some people say, “Well, no Orthodox
Jew would ever make the statement that he would not have come to know sin
except through the Law.” But that's a limited response. It really
doesn't satisfy the usage of the pronoun as Paul does it throughout this
particular section. So he asks the rhetorical question; “Is the Law sin?”
Believe me, I have had conversations with believers who have said that.
They say, “Look at the Mosaic Law. It's just terrible.” But the
Mosaic Law in and of itself, is righteous. It's
how it's abused and distorted, for example, by the legalism in the Old
Testament and the Pharisees in the New Testament. That's what made it a
source of evil during the 1st century.
Paul very strongly rejects that
whole idea saying, “May it never be. On the contrary...” Now he
makes his point, “I would not have known sin except through the Law.” He
offers an explanation, “For I would not have known covetousness unless the Law
had said, 'You shall not covet'.” The English uses just the word 'know'.
But the Greek uses two different words for 'know' and it uses them in different
grammatical senses, which brings out a very subtle point. In the first
statement, he is saying, “I would not have come to know...” This is just a
simple aorist tense which is just understood as a simple past action but it
uses the Greek verb ginosko, which
has the idea of coming to learn something through a normal process of learning
and growth and acquisition of knowledge. So he says, “I would not
have known sin...” He is recognizing the fact that as we develop in our
knowledge of any doctrine, of any idea, it is a process. He says, “I
would not have known [come to know] sin except through the Law.”
Now this reveals one of the first
purposes of the Law. It is to teach us what sin is. It does this
through all of the different regulations that emphasize what makes a person
ritually unclean. Becoming ritually unclean is not the result of
committing a sin. There are certain things that a person can do or
happens over the course of life that would make you ritually unclean. If
you were to come into contact with a dead body, then you're ritually
unclean. We learned a little bit about that in our study in Acts on Tuesday nights with Simon the tanner. Simon
the tanner would come into contact with animal carcasses as he skinned them and
treated the hides every day and he would be ritually unclean until
sundown. At sundown that ritual uncleanness ended. But handling
animal skins and tanning them certainly is not a sin but it is dealing with the
whole issue of death. Death is the result of sin so all these things that
rendered a person ceremonially unclean were because they engaged or were
involved in some activity that were related to some of the judgments and curses
outlined in Genesis, chapter 3.
When you read through Leviticus, it
seems like whatever you do, or places you go, or activities you're involved in,
make you unclean. The point is that sin is pervasive. Sin
influences everything in our life. We constantly sin and are not aware of
it. We have mental attitude sins. We're arrogant, we're angry, we're
resentful, we're bitter, we're jealous, we have various lustful thoughts; all
kinds of things go on all day long, and they may be just momentary, lasting
three or four seconds, but all of these sins take us out of fellowship.
There has to be cleansing. We need to keep short accounts through 1 John
1:9.
So what Paul is saying is that how
he came to learn about sin was through this teaching method in the Mosaic Law
through the prohibitions and the various commands in the Mosaic Law. Then
he explains it by giving a particular example. That's why he shifts the
specific knowledge verb to oida, and why he
changes the tense. He says, “...for I would not have known.” He
changes the tense to oida because
it's something you've learned, something you know. The pluperfect tense
emphasizes something that's completed but the results continue. So he is
talking about the fact that he learned it at a point in time in the past and he
continues to understand the principle. That's the difference between the
two verbs.
So he says, “… for I would not have
known...” He learned this in the past and by
shifting the verb he's emphasizing the importance of this one example. He
says, “...For I would not have known about coveting unless the Law had said,
'you shall not covet'.” The reason he uses this example is that if you go
through the other nine commandments in the Decalogue or Ten Commandments then
what you discover is that all of the others are overt sins of some kind:
idolatry, murder, disrespect for parents, adultery, thievery, things of this
nature. But the last sin is one you can't hide from. That's
coveting. It's a mental attitude sin and everybody covets something in
one way or another. It's the manifestation of the lust patterns in the
sin nature. So Paul zeroes in on this particular commandment because he
could rationalize the other nine. “Well, I've never been an
idolater. I've never been an adulterer. I haven't given false
witness. I haven't stolen anything. I've never committed
murder. I am righteous.” But when he comes to a mental attitude sin
this is the real problem.
Every time you deal with
legalists—and right now with all the stuff in the news is about
evangelicals, about why evangelicals didn't show up to vote—
you discover that there's a lot of legalism and
legalistic ideas about the Christian life that are buried in a lot of these
different mentalities in the evangelical church. The evangelical church
today, and in a broader sense, conservative thinking today, you have a
situation very similar to what was going on in the 1st century and
what was going on in the sixties [not the 1960's but the 1st century
sixties], you had the rebelliousness against the authority. Among the
conservatives in Israel you had many different parties. The Zealots were
one of the most widely known but there were many. They fragmented and
that's what arrogance always does.
Arrogance is a hidden mental attitude
sin. Everybody starts thinking “I'm right on these nine points.
You're different from me on that tenth point so I'm not going to have anything
to do with you.” Then you would find some other group and they're
emphasizing seven other things and they say, “Because you disagree with me
you're out, you're wrong”, and they begin to fight each other literally; not
metaphorically; not argumentatively. They literally fought each
other during the siege of Jerusalem in A.D. 70. Jewish zealot groups were literally
killing each other while they were killing the Romans. We're seeing
something similar to that today. We're seeing a lot of conservatives
fragmenting. This is a trend. It may improve a little bit in the
next few years and it may get worse after that. I'm not saying this is an
absolute end. I'm not a prophet but it's the kind of thing that's
characteristic of carnality.
We emphasize certain overt sins as
the worst thing and we don't deal with the lack of humility, the lack of
arrogance, the lack of dependence upon God, and that's fundamental to living
the Christian life. Arrogance is tenacious, number one; and number two:
arrogance always camouflages itself. Now we have to pay attention to that
second rule. I've never emphasized that before but arrogance camouflages
itself. We get into forms of self-justification and self-deception.
That's what camouflage is. It's self-deception. We convince
ourselves that we're not arrogant while we're being extremely arrogant.
That produces very divisive consequences. You can't love and be
arrogant. They're mutually exclusive.
I think this is one of the things
that Paul is emphasizing in Galatians 5:19-21 when he gives the works of the flesh,
because among those works of the flesh there's an emphasis on factions and
being argumentative and divisive, and fighting with one another; all of these things.
And in the context Paul is commanding that we as Christians are to love our
neighbor as our self. The key to doing that comes two verses later when he
says we're to “walk by means of the Spirit and we won't fulfill the lusts [the
drive] of the sin nature.” Then he talks about the Spirit wars against
the flesh and the sin nature, the sin nature wars against the Spirit, and then
he gives evidences of sin nature control and lists 13 or 14 different sins
there. Several of them relate to this kind of divisiveness and factions,
and that kind of thing that is the result of the sin nature being in
control. Whenever you look at any group and they're backbiting and
they're fighting each other and they're schismatic and all this it's because
arrogance is underneath all that. There's no humility. They're
fighting because they're just filled with arrogance. Everybody thinks
they're right and everybody else is wrong and there's no compromise on any
issue that is not the primary issue.
This happens in lots of different
areas. It has happened in evangelical Christianity in the last 40
years. When I was in seminary you studied systematic theology, and you would
study all these various positions and historical theology. You would study
how these different theological positions have developed historically. And I
would say—I don't know how to quantify this, this is just sort of a guess
in terms of numbers—but if there were 100 different theological positions
in 1975 held by evangelicals, there are 10,000 different positions today.
There are people holding views that no one ever heard of forty years ago, or no
one ever talked about forty years ago. Forty years ago post-millennialism
was dead; now post-millennialism is alive and is fragmenting itself in a
hundred different ways. It's all because of arrogance. We are
emphasizing that we have the answer and everyone else is wrong.
In America we see this historically
over the last two hundred years with the development of numerous different
denominations. Most of the Protestant denominations in the world came out
of America. The major ones had their roots in Europe but in the United
States they split all kinds of different ways. Now they're splitting
again but now they have a new wrinkle to it. They became
non-denominational so that every church becomes its own denomination.
Basically every church becomes its own theological faction because of some
nuance is better than all these other churches. That just leads to more
and more fragmentation, and this imploding is taking place because there's a
lack of real humility toward God among believers and it's impacted by the
culture and then it impacts the culture.
So the aspect of mental attitude sin
is foundational for understanding sin. This is why it's so silly and
superficial when people start worrying about doing something that causes them
to lose their salvation. It really renders mental attitude sins somewhat superficial
and focuses on some sort of external sin. But even the most minute mental
attitude sin is as disruptive to your relationship to God as the most socially
unacceptable overt sin. And yet we want to focus on these five or six
really bad sins just because of their nature, rather than looking at the
divisive, very small mental attitude sins. So Paul says that it's that
commandment that exposes mental attitude lust.
By following the Law he could never
achieve what the Law and righteousness demanded, mostly because he would
get proud every time he would think about how successful he was obeying the
Law. He was coveting that approbation as the very motivation for obeying
the Law and this just exposed his complete inability to ever achieve any kind
of righteousness. As we look at what Paul says in Romans 7:1-12, in
answering the question about is the Law sin, he says in verse 12, “Therefore,
the Law is holy and the commandment holy and just and good.” And verse 14
states, “And we know that the Law is spiritual...”
Now this points out another aspect
because a second debate comes into issue here. That is, whether or not
Paul is speaking in verses 13-25 as an unbeliever, in a pre-salvation state, or
whether he is speaking as a believer. There are theological partners that
go with this. If you take a position that he's an unbeliever, that's a
position that's more consistent with a “Lordship salvation position.”
Lordship salvation position says basically that if you're truly regenerate,
then you're not going to commit certain sins or if you do it won't last very
long. They don't understand the sinfulness of sin. Now they'll talk
a lot about that but they really have a problem when it comes to people who
commit certain kinds of sin. They'll always say, “Well, I always thought
that person was saved but if they were saved, how could they do X, whatever it
is.” It's the fact that they don't understand that the sin nature is
still a problem, so when they look at all this struggle Paul talks about in
verses 13-25, they say, “Well, if he was saved, he wouldn't have that degree of
wrestling with sin.” But if he weren't saved, he wouldn't understand the
aspect of the Law as spiritual. He wouldn't have the struggle with sin
because if you're not saved, you're spiritually dead, and the only thing you do
is get led around by the sin nature.
So Paul emphasizes this quality of
the Law: it's just, holy and spiritual. The second thing he points
out is that the Law reveals and illuminates sin. It exposes sin so that
we understand what our fallen condition is. Earlier, in chapter 5:20,
Paul talks about how the Law provoked sin. He says, “Moreover, the Law
entered that the offense might abound.” He's pointing out that if you're
told not to do something you're going to think about doing it. So the Law
just sort of exacerbates the problem; it was already there but now it's
surfacing. 1Timothy 1:8, Paul says “But we know that the Law is good when
it's used lawfully.” Also, in the Old Testament a couple of different
verses in Psalm 119 talk about the fact that the “one who follows the Law [has
wisdom from the Law] has life.” The Law is what gives life.
The question then is, what is the
role of the Law in relation to sin? Christianity has historically been
confused about this. I want to go over a couple of points. The Law
here in this whole passage is not talking about a generic law or generic
principles. It refers specifically to the Mosaic Law. The word nomos is the Greek word for law and it's
used approximately 195 times in the New Testament and 180 of those times
refer to the Mosaic Law.
Interestingly, if you skip down to
the last 3 or 4 verses in this chapter, we see a couple of examples where 'law'
is used and it's not the Mosaic Law. In verse 21, Paul says, “I find then
[when he discovered sin dwelling in him] a law that evil is present within
me...” Now that's not talking about the Mosaic Law. In the next
verse he says, “For I delight in the Law of God [the Mosaic Law] according to
the inward man.” In verse 23, he says, “For I see another law [not the
Mosaic Law] in my members warring against the law of my mind [not the Mosaic
Law] bringing me into captivity to the law of sin which is in my members.
O wretched man that I am. Who will deliver me from this body of
death? I thank God—through Jesus Christ our Lord! So then,
with the mind I myself serve the Law of God [Mosaic Law] and with the flesh the
law of sin [not the Mosaic Law].” So you see several places he uses the
word nomos and it's not related to the Mosaic
Law, but most places it is. So Law refers primarily to the Mosaic Law as
it does in the first part of this chapter.
To understand the Mosaic Law we have
to understand the basic concept of a covenant. The Mosaic Law defines a
covenant God made with Israel on Mount Sinai. It was a temporary
covenant. A covenant is something like a contract between one party and
another party. In this case it's between God and Israel. It clearly
defines who the parties to the covenant are. If you own a house and have
a mortgage contract, that mortgage is between you and the mortgage
company. If you're leasing a place, that lease contract is between you
and the owner of the house. Now, if you live in an apartment complex, you
may be in apartment 110 and you have a lease agreement with the owner of that
apartment complex. Then your next door neighbor may have lived in that
complex much longer than you did and he has a lease agreement with the same
apartment owner but his terms may be different from yours and you can't make
his terms your terms. You can't say, “Well, he's supposed to pay twice a
month, I'm supposed to pay once a month; he pays $900 a month, I have to pay
$1100 a month. I think I like his terms better so I'll pay his terms
instead of my terms.” You can't do that. The contract is between
the owner and the lessee, or in the case of a mortgage, the person who is
buying the house.
It is the same with your credit card
company. You have a credit card with Chase Bank and you have your
contract with Chase Bank. The next-door neighbor has his Chase Bank
account. He probably has a pretty similar contract but it may be a little
bit different in terms of the percentage point, but you can't go and apply his
if he has a better percentage on his credit card, and apply the figures and pay
his percentage. The contract is a legal document that defines the
relationship between two parties. So the Mosaic Law only applied to Israel:
the house of Judah and the house of Israel. It didn't apply to the
Gentiles. There's no place in the Old Testament where you can find a
Gentile being held accountable for anything that is unique to the Mosaic
Law.
If you read through Isaiah,
Jeremiah, Ezekiel, the minor prophets, there are many places that announce
judgment on all the Gentile countries but they're never held accountable for
violating the Sabbath or the Sabbatical year. Yet Israel is held
accountable for that and the land had to have seventy years of rest.
That's why when Israel was taken out during the Babylonian Captivity, it lasted
seventy years. Daniel read about this in the beginning of chapter
9. He's reading about this in Jeremiah that this would last for seventy
years. He gets out his TI calculator and calculates all the numbers and
realizes he's at the sixty-eighth or sixty-ninth year and he began to pray that
God would reveal to him how God was going to restore Israel to the land.
It's operating on the assumption that God means what He says. This is all
spelled out in the Mosaic Law.
When we get into the Church Age, we
are not Jews. We are not a part of the house of Israel, the house of
Judah. We are not spiritualized, allegorized Israelites. We are not
a spiritual Israel. That term is never used for Gentiles or Church Age
believers. There's one passage in Galatians 6 where Paul says, “Give my
greeting to the Israelites among you.” It's not talking about the whole
group of believers there but to the Jewish believers within the total body of
believers there in Galatia. So the Mosaic Law was a particular covenant
between God and Israel and it was temporary. It had a time stamp on it
and when the cross occurred, that was the end of the
Mosaic Law. So the conclusion is that the Mosaic Law was a contract
between God as the party of the first part and the nation, Israel, as the party
of the second part. It had nothing to say to Christians, except by
analogy, except by application.
As we look at other problems with
relation with the Law, we see four basic confusions. The first confusion
is that the Law is thought to be the basis for salvation in the Old
Testament. But the Law was never the basis for salvation in the Old
Testament. It was designed to expose the need for salvation and the
inadequacy of people to save themselves. Romans
3:20, “...for by the Law is the knowledge of sin.” Not salvation.
Romans 5:20, “Moreover the Law entered that the offense might abound, but where
sin abounded, grace abounded all the more.” Then 1 Timothy 1:8-9, “We
know that the Law is good if one uses it lawfully, knowing this: that the law
is not made for a righteous person but for the lawless and insubordinate, for
the for the ungodly and for sinners, for the unholy and profane, for murderers
of fathers and mothers, for manslayers ...” It's
not that it changes them or saves them. It is to protect society from
those who are unruly.
As we look at Romans 7:8, Paul says,
“But sin, taking opportunity by the commandment, produced in me all manner of
evil desire.” When Paul heard the prohibition he started lusting after
all sorts of things. He had approbation lust, power lust, probably sexual
lust, and all sorts of other lusts because he was told not to lust. “For
apart from the Law, sin is dead.” What he means by that is the same thing
that James meant in James 2:17 when he made a similar statement, “Thus, also,
faith by itself, if it does not have works, is dead.” It doesn't mean it
doesn't exist; it means it's non-operational. It doesn't produce
anything. Faith without works isn't non-existent; it's not fulfilling
it's objective, it's not producing anything. Same thing that Paul says in
Romans 7:8, “... For apart form the Law, sin is dead.”
If the Law exacerbates sin, then if the
Law's not there sin is not going to be exposed and exacerbated, it's going
to just sort of lie dormant. It's sort of like if you were a child back
in the fifties and sixties and had chicken pox, then that chicken pox is still
in your body but it's dormant. Then something can come along and activate
that and the next thing you know you have shingles. Or you could have
Bell's palsy or some other things that are related to that chicken pox
virus. It's dormant until there's something external that energizes
it. The Law is that way towards our sin nature. The sin nature is
going along in a rather dormant case and then the Law comes along and says,
“Don't do that. Don't do this. Quit doing that. Quit doing
this,” and all of a sudden everything flares up and we start committing a lot
of sins.
Then Paul says, speaking of his own
background, in verse 9: “I was alive once without the Law but when the
commandment came, sin revived and I died.” It doesn't mean he just
started to sin; it means it just wakes it up. It goes out of its dormancy
and becomes very active and he is talking about death here in terms of its
operational impact. It renders him ineffective in terms of his spiritual
life. So we read in verse 10, “And the commandment which was to bring
life, I found to bring death.” The commandment was to bring life; if you
obey the Law you'll be prosperous. The Psalmist in Psalm 1 says, “Blessed
is the man who meditates on the Law day and night.” The picture here is
of a man who is very fruitful and very prosperous as a result of his
application of the Law. So the Law was to bring life, but Paul says it
brings death because it activates the sin nature.
Verse 11, “For sin, taking occasion
by the commandment, deceived me...” At the core of sin is arrogance: “I
want to do what I want to do apart from what God wants me to do.” The
five “I wills of Satan” at their very core is “I want to do what I want to do
and disobey what God wants me to do.” So sin is “I will” rather than
God's will. Sin or arrogance becomes self-deceptive and it destroys
us. He's not talking about going from spiritual life to spiritual
death. He's talking about carnal death and being non-productive in your
spiritual life. Then he concludes in Romans 7:12, “Therefore the Law is
holy and the commandment holy and just and good.” What he has been showing
all the way through these six verses is that the Law is good but it exposes and
aggravates the sin nature.
Starting in verse 13, he asks
another question, “Has then what is good [the Law] become death to me?”
And again, he denies that. There's nothing negative, there's nothing
harmful in the Law. “Certainly not! But sin, that it might appear sin,
was producing death in me through what is good...” See
the Law is the means God used to expose sin and to make us realize that we were
fallen and needed to be completely dependent upon God. He continues,
“...so that sin through the commandment might become exceedingly sinful.”
I could get away with a veneer of self-righteousness covering over my sin until
the Law started getting into all this detail about what I could and couldn't do,
and that just inflamed my sin nature and I realized how sinful I was.
Then he says in verse 14, “For we know that the Law is spiritual...” So again,
good things about the Law, “...but I am carnal sold under sin.”
Once again, is this Paul before he's
saved or Paul after he's saved? If it's Paul before he's saved, what he
would be saying is that he is in bondage of sin, but what Paul teaches everywhere
else is that we are born that way. This isn't something that comes about as
it is exposed by the Law. So he says it creates
carnality because we follow the sin nature rather than reckoning that we are
dead to the sin nature, so we put ourselves back under bondage to sin.
It's the picture of the slave market. The slave's been set free but he
runs back and says, “Put the manacles back on me. I would much rather
live in slavery.”
This is like Israel after they've
been redeemed and freed from their slavery in Egypt and they get out in the
wilderness. God is taking care of them and they have complete freedom. They
say, “I want to run back to the leeks and garlic of Egypt and I want to be in
slavery again.” They didn't have the capacity for freedom, which means
they don't have the capacity for responsibility. It's like
the generation growing up in the United States today. Many of them have
become dependent, they don't think in terms of
independence anymore—independence from government. The first thing
they do when there's a problem is think, “How can I get more from the
government?” It's a mentality of slavery, so when they create this
dependency mentality they're going to vote for further dependency and further
provision. They don't want to be independent.
Historically immigrants came to this
country so they could get away from government and make something of their life
themselves. We've lost sight of that. It comes down to a spiritual issue
of whether you want to be spiritual slaves or not. So Paul uses that same
issue here. Notice that nowhere here does he talk about the Holy Spirit,
and that's the point. All through chapter 7 Paul is simply trying to live
out his spiritual life on the basis of obeying the Law. There's no
mention of the Holy Spirit until we get to the eighth chapter. This is
the believer trying to please God on his own out of the power of the flesh or
just simple morality.
Then we get to the big tension in
the next six verses where Paul talks about the conflict that occurs. He
says in verse 15, “For what I am doing, I do not understand
...” In other words he's talking about doing something that is
disobedient to the Law, something immoral, something unethical, something that
violates the law. He says, “I'm doing this and I don't understand.”
“... For what I will to do, that I do not practice...” As much as he tried
to make himself do the right thing, all that happens is he focuses on that and
he does the wrong thing. He ends up doing the wrong thing, which is
disobeying God. He says, “... but what I hate, that I do.” He's
saying, “I'm not doing what I want to do and I get short tempered, I'm tired,
I'm lustful, I'm lazy—whatever the sins are such as arrogance—the
more I focus on it, the more I'm sinful.” That's the conflict. He
can't figure out how to rise above that because there's not a focus on the Holy
Spirit.
In verse 16, “If, then [and we're
going to assume it's true], I do what I will not to do [in other words, if I do
what I don't want to do], I agree with the Law that it is good.” He's
saying he does what he doesn't want to do and he realizes he shouldn't do it
because his conscience is telling him that it's wrong, so now he's agreeing
with the Law, that the Law is good. In verse 17, he says, “But now, it is
no longer I who do it, but sin that dwells in me.” Now some people have
taken this wrong and say, “Well, this is like a spiritual split
personality.” That's not what he's talking about here. He uses
himself to explain that in light of his new position in Christ, it's no longer
himself that's doing it but it's the sin nature. He has let the sin nature get
the best of him, and it's his volition.
Verse 18 further explains, “For I
know that in me, (that is, in my flesh) nothing good dwells...” This is a recognition that we
are all sinners and that is so important here. Even after salvation we
still have a sin nature that deceives us, that leads us into all kind of corruption,
and the only way to conquer it is not by just 'pulling ourselves up by own
spiritual bootstraps' but by learning to walk by the Spirit on the basis of
God's Word. He recognizes
this, “For I know that in me, (that is, in my flesh) nothing good dwells for to
will is present with me [I want to do the right thing] but how to perform what
is good, I do not find.”
Now there's not a single Christian
who wants to live the Christian life who doesn't experience this tension.
We say, “I just don't know how to do it on my own.” Good, you can't do it
on your own. It's not that the spiritual life is hard; it's
impossible. You can't do it on your own. You can only do it through
dependence on God the Holy Spirit and His Word. And it takes time; it
takes a lot of retraining and reeducation.
Verses 20-21, “Now if I do what I will
not to do, it is no longer I who do it, but sin that dwells in me. I find then
a law, that evil is present with me …" What a great expression of total depravity!
Evil still dwells within me as a believer. Now the Lordship crowd can't
say this. This is one reason why they say someone can't be a Christian
who says evil dwells within him because that's just like an unbeliever.
Regeneration never removes the sin nature. It just removes the tyranny of
the sin nature. "...the one who wills to do
good.” As much as I want to do the right thing there's still this
something in me that's pulling me in the wrong direction.
Verse 22, “For I delight in the Law
of God according to the inward man.” He couldn't say that if he was an
unbeliever. No unbeliever says, “I delight in the Law of God in my inner
man.” It just doesn't work; they're not regenerate so they can't do
it. He has this conflict, which shows he must be a believer. Verse
23, “But I see another law in my members warring against the law of my mind...” This
is the same conflict of the flesh warring against the spirit, the spirit
against the flesh in Galatians 5: 17-18, and when this law is warring against
the law of my mind which wants to follow the Lord, verse 22 continues, “...it
brings me into captivity to the law of sin which is in my members.”
This brings us back to chapter six
where we put ourselves back under the slavery to the sin nature. And then
to wrap it up, Paul just in a scream of spiritual agony says in verse 24, “O
wretched man that I am! Who will deliver me from this body of
death?” He's saying, “I just try to do it on my own. I'm just
miserable because the more I try to do the right thing I do the wrong
thing. The more I don't want to do the wrong thing I end up doing it anyway.
This is horrible. How do I get out of this endless cycle of
carnality?”
In verse 25 he begins to shift, “I
thank God through Jesus Christ our Lord! So then with the mind I myself
serve the Law of God, but with the flesh the law of sin.” Then as
soon as we get into chapter eight, he immediately starts talking about the Law
of the Spirit of life in Christ. It's the Holy Spirit that gets us out of
this downward spiral of carnality and basically operational death—not
spiritual death, but we're living like we're a spiritually dead person. So he's
back to the same kind of position he's talking about at the end of chapter six
where he says in verses 22 and 23, “But now having been set free from sin, and
having become slaves of God, you have your fruit to holiness, and the end,
everlasting life. For the wages of sin is death, but the gift of God is
eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord.” Whether you're a believer or an
unbeliever, the wages of sin is death. It's a death-like existence for
the believer. You're living like you're a spiritually dead person.
So we'll come back next time and get into Romans 8:1 and begin to focus on the
upward, positive trajectory of the spiritual life.