Chapter 7 of Romans is of intense interest because it includes such a true and moving description of the inner struggle many honest Christians have with sin. We 'identify' with Paul in what he says, and with real feeling: "The good that I would I do not, and the evil that I would not, that I do" ... and "Wretched man that I am, who shall deliver me?"
We say, "That's me. Now how do I get out of ch. 7 into ch. 8?" because ch. 8 describes the joyful sort of experience a Christian ought, we feel, to enjoy, while ch. 7 describes the miserable sort of experience most know only too well. Ch. 8 describes a Christian who is 'on top,' where in ch. 7 everything is on top of him.
The first six verses are Paul's explanation of how it comes about that the Christian is 'not under the Law.'
We are still working through the passage that stands under the Section Heading of 6:14 - "Sin shan't lord it over you, since you're not under law but under grace." The rest of ch. 6 was about being under grace; now in ch. 7 Paul expands on the other half of the statement, "You are not under law."
What does it mean, and how does it come about?
Let us be clear first about one thing that he does not mean. When Paul says "we are not under law," he does not mean that we are to pay no heed to God's Law at all. He is not saying, "Look, forget the Commandments. You don't have to know them, you don't have to bother with them, you don't even have to think about them. You're done with them." Paul does not mean that. The Law of Commandments is, after all, a true Word of God; we ignore it at our peril. And none of the apostles, Paul included, did ignore it.
But what Paul does mean is that for Christians the Law is not what governs our relationship with God. God does not relate to us through His Law; He relates to us through His Son. He does not give us the Law, and then stand off and watch how we cope with it to decide what He will do with us; He gives us the risen Christ to dwell in our hearts by His Spirit, and engages us directly and personally to Himself, motivating us by the persuasion of love. He does not 'go by the book'; He 'leads by the Spirit.'
God does not ask, "How are you making out with my Law?" Rather He asks, "How are you making out with my Son?" It is a difference Paul often described by saying that we are not 'slaves' any longer, but 'sons': God does not boss us around the way a master does his slaves, so everything is a matter of 'orders'; He invites our willing cooperation, the way a father does his child, so everything is a matter of togetherness.
But we do have to be clear about the real meaning of our 'freedom from the Law,' because Paul knows that if we are not, we shall live out the whole of our Christian life toiling under a wretched and quite unnecessary bondage - the very bondage he describes so feelingly in the rest of this chapter. There must be no misunderstanding about the part the Law plays in our personal relationship with God, or we shall end up becoming very disillusioned Christians. The trouble is that we are all of a mind to believe that God 'rates us on our performance' - and we mean our performance in keeping the Commandments. And He does not. For the Christian, that is simply not true. The Law is set aside as the standard by which we are judged, and in its place God puts His Son, and says, "Not as you keep my Law will I receive you, but as you relate to my Son."
We need to be sure that this is so... and rightly so. For we are bound to ask, "How can God set aside His own Law as the means by which He relates to us? Can God really do that? Is He 'cheating' on His own Law, so to speak, if He does that? What purpose does His Law serve if it has no bearing on the way He feels disposed toward us? What did He give it to us for if He takes no account of how we keep it?"
These are all questions Paul knows the thoughtful Christian is bound to ask, and he tackles them patiently and very thoroughly.
In these verses, 7:1-6, he says we are free from the Law because Jesus died.
When Jesus was born into our world, He was born into the same conditions of life into which we are all born. As we know from chapters 1-3, that means that He shared our life with us under all those dreadful powers that hold sway over it - the powers of sin, and of wrath, and of law, and of condemnation and death. He was subject to them all, as we are; they all bore down on Him the way they bear down on us (to our defeat, though not to His). As Paul says in Gal. 4:4, "When the time had fully come, God sent forth His Son, born of woman, born under the Law." Or as he will say in 8:3, He "sent His own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh." He joined us where we really are. He 'wedded' Himself to humanity in its oppressed state (that in fact is the metaphor Paul is going to use).
Another way Paul had of saying this was to describe Jesus in His life among us on earth as 'the last Adam'; He really joined our Adamic race, so as to be a member of it with us. His connection with us in our creaturely life here on earth under the influence of sin, wrath, judgment, law and death was a real, true and vital connection. He did not just play a rôle, like an actor in a play, when He became incarnate. He did not 'come slumming,' so to speak, when He entered life through the narrow door of human birth, "putting up with the misery of it all," until - the job done that He came to do - He could at last thankfully resume His former life in Heaven, and be rid of us all. "He was made man so as never to be unmade more." He threw in His lot with us completely. He 'married' into the human family "for better for worse, for richer for poorer, in sickness and in health, even unto death" ... (though in His case, not even death parted Him from us!).
But when Jesus died, He died 'out from under' (that is the force of the Greek phrase) all those conditions of life in this world that so oppress us - sin, wrath, law, condemnation ... and, indeed, death too, when He rose.
The point Paul wants to make is a very simple one. You do not have to be a theological genius to understand it - it is a simple and obvious thing: When Jesus died, and left the life of this world, He simply moved out of their jurisdiction. He 'exited' from the realm where all those oppressing powers hold sway. When He died, He was done with them all. Simply by dying, he quit their sphere of operations.
Sin's sphere of operations is this life
we live on earth.
God's wrath abides on the life of this world.
God's Law bears only on life in this world.
Its condemnation falls on those who are living in this world's
sin.
Death comes only to those who live in this world.
When Jesus exited the life of this world, He exited all these things ... just by dying. Laws do not apply to men after they have died.
Now when Jesus rose from the dead, He did not come back under all those powers again: risen, glorified and exalted to the Father's right hand, He is free for ever from them all. He is not living His life now, in heaven, under the heavy hand of God's wrath the way He had to when He shared our life with us in the flesh. Sin does not bear down on Him there the way it did when He was here. The Law of Commandments simply does not apply to Christ now - risen and glorified as He is in Heaven - the way it did while He shared the life of this world with us. (Does Jesus, at the right hand of God in heaven, have to keep in mind the Commandment, "Thou shalt not commit adultery?" An absurd thought!)
Simply by dying, Jesus ended His connection with the Law. He 'died to the Law': He died out from under it.
This is only Paul's first point, and it concerns Jesus Himself.
He will come to the way it affects us. But first, he wants us to be clear about the way it affected Him. Dead, He was entirely removed from the realm where the Law of Commandments had any relevance. Where He is living now, in the heavenly places, the Law is simply beside the point. It does not apply there. When He died, He died 'out from under the Law.'
"Now," says Paul, "what happened to Him has a direct bearing on us. Because of our relationship with Him, we are carried out of the Law's jurisdiction too. Just as the Law was lifted away from Him when He died and rose again, so, because we are 'in Him,' it is lifted away too from us."
What Paul is saying is as simple as that. It has often been made into a very complicated thing, which is a pity. Did Paul, I wonder, have any idea what a mountain of disputation his words would throw up in the generations to come? Perhaps he did, because he felt a need to use an illustration at this point to explain them. But the illustration too has become a source of endless disputation! One is reminded of lines in a poem by Byron: of the poet Coleridge, Byron wrote,
"And Coleridge too has lately taken wing ...
Explaining metaphysics to the nation -
I wish he would explain his explanation!"
Before we consider Paul's illustration, let me offer one of my own, because it will help us, I hope, the better to see the force of his.
On May 7, 1945 in Rheims, at the headquarters of the Allied Supreme Command in Germany, Colonel-General Alfred Jodl, Chief of the German Operations Staff, signed an instrument which provided for the unconditional surrender of all German Forces on all fronts, and delivered it into the hands of General Dwight Eisenhower, Supreme Commander of the Allied Expeditionary Force. When he had signed it, Jodl rose and said, "With this signature the German people and the German armed forces are, for better or worse, delivered into the victor's hands ..."
There was a case where the action of one man, because of his connection with the whole nation, involved the whole nation in it with him. If you were a German citizen, you were, from that day on, in a state of surrender to the Allied High Command - whether you knew it or not and whether you liked it or not. The action of the nation's representative committed the whole nation, and was binding upon it.
Now Jesus when He died did so as the representative of the whole human race, because of His real, vital connection with it. Jesus stood in the same sort of relation to humanity as a whole that General Jodl did to Germany. So when Jesus died 'out from under the Law,' all who are in a vital connection with Him died out from under it with him ... just as any German was included in Jodl's act of surrender at the end of the war.
Jesus was the 'Last Adam,' as Paul expressed it. As Adam headed up the race at the beginning of the line, Jesus headed up the race at the end of the line. Jesus could act for the race as Adam did, and His action would be as binding on it as Adam's was. (Paul has already prepared the ground for saying this in ch. 5.)
Now we can consider Paul's marriage illustration. It depends on two points:
1. That Jesus in the body of His flesh was in a real, vital relationship with us as members of Adam's race.
2. That death ends all connection with the Law.
A chart will help to visualise Paul's argument.
Down the left-hand side, you have the situation Paul describes where a woman who has been bound by law to her living husband is freed, when he dies, from all obligation to that law. It is so obvious it needs no elaboration.
Down the right hand side, you have the parallel situation Paul describes where a Christian who has been bound by his shared humanity with Jesus-in-the-flesh is, by Jesus' death 'in the body,' freed from all obligation to the Law.
The illustration fits every aspect of the case perfectly.
To understand it, all it requires is that we see Jesus in His body of human flesh in one rôle, and Christ risen in another. Jesus in the body of His flesh - subject to wrath, law, condemnation and death - corresponds to husband No.1. Christ Risen - no longer subject to wrath, law, condemnation and death - corresponds to husband No. 2.
Our real, vital connection with the earthly Jesus, simply as a member of the human race, involves us in everything that happened to Him in the flesh. As Paul said in II Cor. 5:14, "We thus judge, that if one died for all, then all died."
And our real vital connection with Christ Risen, as men of faith who are 'in Christ' now, involves us with Him in all that is true of Him in His glorified humanity. That is why Paul can say that we are "seated together with Christ in the heavenly places" (Eph. 2:6). Positionally, that is where all believers are.
The connection Jesus made with us in our common humanity, He made on His own initiative by His incarnation - that is when He 'married' humanity.
But the connection we may have with Him in His glorified humanity is one we must make by the response of faith.
That is why Paul says we are free now "to belong to another" - meaning, as he says, "to Him Who is raised up from the dead."
Paul does not hesitate to carry the marriage idea right through, adding that God's purpose in 'marrying' us to Christ in His risen mode of being is that we should 'bear fruit to Him' - the way the union of a married couple bears fruit in the birth of children.
If it seems strange that Paul should refer to Jesus 'in His body of flesh' as one person, and the same Jesus 'risen from the dead' as another person, recall the sort of things he said in other places: II Cor. 5:16 e.g., "Even though we once regarded Christ from a human point of view, we regard Him thus no longer." And we have already drawn attention to the fact that Paul refers to the Lord as both the 'Last Adam,' and as the 'Second Man' (I Cor 15:45 and 47).
There should be no real difficulty about seeing Jesus in more than one rôle. We do not find it a problem to see Him as both Priest and Victim in His sacrificial action at the Cross, where He is both the Lamb of God and the High Priest Who offers it. We regard Him quite comfortably as both man and God. Why should we boggle at this further blending of rôles, seeing Him on the one hand as the Representative Man of the old humanity under the Law, carrying us out from under its jurisdiction by His death, and on the other as Representative Man of the New Humanity carrying us with Him into the realm of the Spirit by His resurrection?
To sum up then, Paul's point simply is: "The death of Jesus carries us beyond the jurisdiction of the Law."
He wants us to grasp the fact, so as really to lay hold of it: "Your relations with God are not governed by the Law any more. They are governed by Christ in the Spirit."
What that means for us in our real experience he now unfolds.
As usual he sums it up in a brief, concise statement, and then goes on to expand on it. That summary statement is vs. 5-6: "While we were living in the flesh, our sinful passions, aroused by the Law, were at work in our members to bear fruit unto death. But now we are discharged from the Law, dead to that which held us captive, so that we serve, not under the old written code, but in the new life of the Spirit."
What it means to live under the Law, finding
our sinful passions aroused by it, will occupy him for the rest of
ch. 7.
What it means to live in the Spirit will occupy him in ch.
8.
Notice that the summary statement in vs. 5-6 is a contrast between one state and another - between the state of living under the Law, and the state of living in the Spirit.
He states the contrast here in verses 5 and 6; in his exposition of those two verses, he recapitulates it at v. 25. There, having just said, "Wretched man that I am, who shall deliver me from this body of death," he says at once, "Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord."
For years I asked, "What, in Heaven's name, is he thanking God for at that point? He doesn't say. He just bursts out with it. Why doesn't he tell us what he's so excited about?"
But he has already told us in verse 6!
His exultant exclamation in v. 25 recapitulates what he has already said in v. 6: "Now we are discharged from the Law, dead to that which held us captive, so that we serve, not under the old written code, but in the new life of the Spirit."
Our understanding of the whole of 7:7-25 has to be governed by the advance statement of it that he gives in summary form in v. 6. And that settles what 7:7-25 is all about - it is all about living under the Law, and what a wretched business it is and will always be ... and the sooner we wake up to the fact that we do not have to live that way the better for us all!
There is a better way, which Romans 8 spells out.
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