Our freedom from the Law is not one of those finer points of doctrine scholars can amuse themselves arguing about while the rest of us get down to the real nitty-gritty of living Christian lives. No sort of truly Christian living will be possible to us at all unless we get a hold of this truth. Ignore it, and our best efforts will lead us into disillusionment or despair.
There are 'drop-outs' from the Christian pathway because they were not taught what Paul teaches in this passionate chapter. What he has to say in it is vitally important.
Remember the personal background against which he wrote it. In his younger days, he gave himself to the shaping of his life by the Law of Commandments God had given to Moses. He was a dedicated man in his unconverted days. "As touching righteousness under the Law," he says, "I was blameless." That was no idle boast. He took God and God's Law seriously.
Then on the Damascus road he was appalled to discover that it had made him the enemy of God's Son! Zeal for God's Law had made him hostile to God. What in the world had gone wrong? Better than most, Paul knew what the Law can do to us if we get hold of the wrong end of the stick. So he had a huge concern to make sure his beloved converts did not. He knew how much at risk they were. For who takes God as seriously as the Christian? And what pleads for our whole-hearted devotion like the Gospel? So who is at risk like the Christian is if he gets it all wrong?
Furthermore, what Paul says here Jesus had said before him. Jesus' way of putting it was to say, "Unless your righteousness is of an altogether better sort than that of the Scribes and Pharisees, you won't get near the Kingdom of Heaven." (Matt. 5:20) But the righteousness of the Scribes and Pharisees consisted precisely in keeping the Law of Commandments. Surely a life conformed to them will be a good life. But Jesus and Paul, both, knew better. They speak with one voice when they tell us that that sort of goodness can be so full of badness it makes you a total stranger to God.
What Paul says here stands under the section heading of vs. 5-6. The rest of this chapter develops v. 5, and ch. 8 develops v. 6. The two verses show the difference between relying on the Law to make you righteous, and relying on Christ and the Spirit to make you righteous.
Recall v. 5 - for ch. 7 expounds it: "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."
How the Law is made to work that way, Paul will now show us.
It is no accident that he changes his style at this point, and speaks in the first person, directly out of his own experience: "I, me and my ..." He knows what he is talking about. Somewhere away there in Arabia, in the three years' retreat he took soon after he had become a Christian, it is my guess that he wrestled his way through all this, as he did much else.
It is Paul's sober observation that the effect of the Law in human life - God's Law - is to increase the very sin it forbids, and strengthen sin's hold on us.
He has hinted at this in Romans before -
3:20:"through the Law comes knowledge," not of righteousness, but "of sin";
5:20:"Law came in to increase the trespass"; and now ...
7: 5:"it is the Law that arouses our sinful passions."
He said it again in I Cor. 15: 56, "The strength of sin is the Law."
Whatever strength the Law has it lends to sin, not to righteousness ... not to righteousness at all.
And lest we find all this so puzzling we begin to wonder whether the good Law of God as we understand it can be the same thing Paul is talking about, he assures us that it is by reaffirming ...
• that the Law of which he speaks is 'holy, just and good' v. 6;
• that it is 'spiritual' v. 14;
• and that it is the same Law that 'promised life' v. 10.
Paul even "delights in it in his inmost self," v. 22. He freely accords to the Law the honour that belongs to it as an expression of God's pure and holy will.
Nevertheless, he says plainly that we shall never escape sin's clutches till we recognise that we are dead to it, the way we that we have seen that we have died with Christ out from under it. And the reason for that is that sin takes the Law into its own service, and uses it, as a weapon, to kill us. It uses a thing good in itself to produce an evil result in us. To get hold of the idea it might help to think of glue-sniffing. There is nothing wrong with glue. It is a product of modern technology that is beautifully suited to its purpose. But kids use it for a purpose it was never intended to serve - getting a 'high' by inhaling its fumes and becoming addicted to sniffing it, to their own destruction. It is not the fault of the glue; it is the fault of the kids - of their own stupidity and weakness.
Now Paul says that sin uses the Law to work mischief in us in two ways.
The first way is the way described in verses 7 and 8.
When the Law says, "You shan't lust," the lust in me says, "Won't I indeed! Just watch me!" Prohibitions stimulate rebellion in us. If the notice says, "Don't walk on the grass," the grass, that moment, becomes the very place I want to walk. It is in the very nature of sin that 'it won't be told.' So tell it, and it will show itself in its true colours. All the Law ever does with sin is provoke it - and then condemn it.
"Apart from the Law," says Paul in v. 8, "sin lies dead" - it sleeps. The moment the Law speaks, it wakes up and fights.
"I was once alive apart from the Law," Paul goes on. Perhaps he was referring to his Jewish childhood when he wrote that, because a Jewish child was not reckoned to be ready for the Commandments until he was twelve years old. At that age, he was introduced to them, instructed in them, and obliged to adopt them as his rule of life. Perhaps Paul is remembering that time - "When the commandment came, the sin in me awoke, and asserted itself."
The wolf lying sleepily there in the shade looks harmless enough. But poke it, and it will leap up snarling. The sin in us is the snarl, and the Law is the poke!
"The very commandment that promised life turned out to be death to me."
But there is a second way, and it is much more subtle.
In v. 8, Paul says, "Sin, finding opportunity in the commandment, deceived me, and by it killed me."
Sin uses the Law to deceive us. It takes hold of God's Commandments and uses them to hoodwink us, and lure us into hopeless bondage. That is the trick sin plays with the Law.
How does sin take hold of a thing so good as God's Law and pull the wool over our eyes with it, while it gags and binds us?
Recall what Paul has taught us sin is.
This is where the study of ch. 1 becomes important. If we did not follow Paul there, we shall not understand him here.
He there defined sin as the pursuit of our own good elsewhere than in God. Sin is the itch we have to secure our own good, our own way. Wanting our own good is not wrong of course. The only alternative is to want our own harm, which is silly. Where we do go wrong is in what we conceive our good really to be, and where we have to go to get it. We conceive our good to lie in the possession of what the creation has to offer - beauty, wealth, pleasure, romance, power, status, men's admiration, their servitude, and all the rest. It is a blunder - a stupid, wilful blunder. There is no goodness to be found anywhere but in God. Our good awaits us, not in the Creation, but in the Creator.
"None is good," as Jesus told the rich young ruler, "save God only." The only 'good' there is is God. There is nowhere else to find it but in Him. Not even Jesus Himself was good with a goodness of His own, as He said more than once. That Jesus was good - and He truly was - only came about because He was filled with the fulness of God. But we do not want to be good that way. We want our good to be of our own choosing and of our own making.
This has been the lure, the bait, that sin has dangled temptingly in front of us from the very beginning.
What was the temptation Eve faced? "When she saw that it was good for food, and a delight to the eyes, and to be desired to make one wise ..." That was the promise sin held out to her. "It looks good, it tastes good, and by golly, it does you good." That is the lure.
Sin does not seduce us by inviting us to be evil ... saying to us, "Come, let me introduce you to the thrill of becoming really bad." No. Sin says, "Come, let me show you the real good. There's a whole world out there, waiting for you. I can introduce you to a range of possibilities you haven't even dreamed about ... possibilities that will never open up to you while you rely, like a silly simpleton, on God alone. That's childish. Come on now, grow up. Come of age. You're old enough and intelligent enough to decide for yourself what's good for you."
Responding to that lure we all go astray - we 'miss the mark' (the Bible's commonest word for sin).
We want the good life - but we have our own idea what the good life is, and we want it our way. Inevitably, when we go after it, we come into collision with God's way at some point or other. We are convinced then that if we do what God wants we shall miss out; there is some advantage to be gained which we shall lose if we listen to God. That is how we become liars and cheats and thieves and fornicators and adulterers and bullies and manipulators and all the rest; and then we have to 'cover up,' because we find that we have entered the lonely, frightening world of guilt. Suddenly God is a stranger to us - and a threat; and so we start looking for excuses and reasons not to believe in Him. We have found what we were looking for - we have found what the good is and what the evil is; only we wake up to find that it is from the side of evil that we are looking at it.
Then what happens?
God gives us His Law! Yes, His Law. God gives it.
It is the action of a loving Father, to show us where we have gone wrong. "By the Law comes knowledge of sin."
"Here," God says, "let me show you where you're going wrong. Here's a diagram of the good life, do you see? But you went wrong here, see? ... and here."
Now when God addresses His Law to us there are three ways we can respond.
We can eat humble pie, and say, "Yes, God, I see you're right. I've been a fool. I'm sorry, truly sorry. Please forgive me. Take my hand. I want to walk with You."
We can reject what He shows us in His Law, and say, "That's bad news, that is. You expect me to live cooped up inside restrictions like that? No thank you." Then we become declared, deliberate sinners. Somewhere along the line, we all do that.
And this is the thing Paul says that sin deceives us into doing. It uses the Law of God on us to serve its own ends.
Sin says, "I want you to be free, to be your own man, to 'make it' on your own."
But then sin says to itself, "Dear me, now God's gone and given my client His Law. That's blown it. We can't very well quarrel with that, can we? If I tell my client to defy God and His Law, I'll blow my cover. Can't do that ... we'll have to be more subtle."
So now sin comes to us and says, "Well now, I hear you've been given this blueprint from God. Very good. It's obviously the right way to go. So you take it seriously, son. Model your life on it. God won't approve of you if you don't ... you have to be good to be loved. (A lie we persist in telling our children) So this Law is the way to go.
"Right then. I'll help you. Come on now, get
with it. Try.
"Great. That's good. Yes, you can do it. Splendid. My goodness, God
will be impressed!"
Sin takes the Law into its service, and uses it to deceive me.
I am being good, am I not? ... in strict accordance with God's very own requirements. He must approve. It is His recipe I'm following. I am becoming righteous, am I not? "Behold, O God, my holy, glowing heart!"
And all the while, sin is laughing up it sleeve, chuckling with evil glee.
"Behold the perfect man," sin boasts. "I, sin, am producing him. What better disguise can I give him to wear than this outward show of perfection? But he's mine!"
We poor dupes do not realise that in our pride of achievement we have become, not only strangers, but rivals to God: "This is my product, this righteous life I'm building ... all my own work." ("You don't have to believe in God to live a good life.")
And we do not see that what we are building is not the real thing at all.
I once read of a thing that some people on a
safari in Africa came across in a clearing in the jungle. There were
piles of sticks scattered about in it, just as though someone had
built a lot of fires and then forgotten to light them. It was odd.
Who had put them there? And why had they not lit them?
And then it dawned on one of the party what the explanation was.
The apes up in the trees had been watching the humans build and light
their fires. They gathered sticks, and arranged them ... so ... and
... poof! - fire leapt up in them. So the apes gathered sticks and
arranged them ... so ... and waited ... and waited. But no 'poof'! So
they tried again ... and again ... and again! They would try till
Doomsday and no fire would come. They did not have the spark.
*
That is what a man does when he 'apes God,' trying to be righteous by putting all the sticks of the commandments in place. Only God has the spark! But the person who is trying to be righteous by the Law is not going to God for the spark. He will not let God be God to him. He is insisting that he manufacture, himself, a product only God can supply. And all he builds is a heap of dead sticks - 'dead works,' the Bible calls them. Only they are worse than a pile of innocent sticks - they are mouldy, and they smell ... with pride.
"By means of the Law, sin deceives me, and by it slays me."
No wonder Jesus said to the Pharisees - the moral men: "Truly I tell you, the racketeers and the prostitutes will go into the Kingdom of Heaven before you."
And that stings sin into a frenzy. For the eyes of Jesus have penetrated its disguise. Now it comes out into the open as the enemy of God that it really is, as the father of lies that it has been from the beginning. It will not let God be God.
So it comes about that the good men, the religious men, turn and rend the Lord of glory. Their sin cannot stand that sort of exposure.
The same sin is in us all ... and it is no less virulent in us than it was in Caiaphas. It will go to any lengths to preserve the deception. That is why the harder we try to be righteous by setting up the Law as our task, the more wretchedly we fail. The more earnestly we aspire, the more desperately we betray our aspirations. I have had times when I have gone aside of set purpose to sort out the whole of my life with God, and set my heart resolutely against all my sins. And within half an hour, they have mounted a blitz on me till I cannot see through them! Paul is right: "I am sold out to sin. I don't understand my own behaviour. I don't do what I want to do; instead, I do the very things I hate. It's not that I have a quarrel with God's Law - I approve it: I do. What is it in me that drives me to defy it?"
And his answer is - sin. It is in us, like an organised self - a treacherous, ungovernable self - that stubbornly sabotages every effort we make to fulfil the Law of God. We can will what is right, but we cannot get it done!
Knowledge we ask not - knowledge Thou hast lent;
But Lord the will - there lies our bitter need.
Give us to build above the deep intent
The deed ... the deed. (John Drinkwater)
So Paul goes on in vs. 21-25, "So I find it to be a law, (this is the way it always goes) that when I want to do right, evil lies close at hand. I delight in this Law of God in my inmost self - I do; but I see in my members - in this civil war that is my wretched self - another law, which is at war with all my good intentions - and it always prevails."
Verse 25 summarises the whole discussion: "So then, I of myself serve the Law of God with my mind, but with my flesh I serve the Law of Sin."
In the Greek the emphasis there falls on the three words, 'I of myself'; that supplies the key to what he is saying. All the way through he has been describing the man - whether he be Christian or not is beside the point - who is trying to make it on his own with only the Law to go by.
"When you try to be righteous the Law way," Paul is saying, "that's how it will always be. Your sinful passions will always be aroused by the Law."
There is no way out of that. It is an impasse. We shall never get on top of our sins that way.
If all we have is a written code and our own will-power, then God pity us, for we shall always be defeated. No way can we can become good by way of the Law. If we fail to keep it, it crushes us; if we succeed in keeping it, it chokes us to death with pride. Either way it kills us.
That is not the way a Christian becomes righteous. When we try, we are being what Paul calls 'carnal' - "walking according to the flesh." When Paul uses the word 'carnal' he does not mean by it what we normally mean. We use the word to mean 'obsessed with sex.' But in Paul's meaning of the word we can be thoroughly moral and still be 'carnal.' Being carnal does not mean we scorn morality; it means we try to be moral the Law way ... we try to be like God without God. That is what we do when we set up the Law as our task, because what we do is set up God's Law in the place of God Himself - and we must not let anything take God's place, not even His Law. The only 'creature' we may set up in God's place is His Son! And how we do that is the theme of ch. 8.
The Law was given to show us our sin. That is all it can rightly do. Try and make it do more than that, and it will twist in our hand like a deceitful bow. At the touch of Law, sin always springs to life. If anything is to be done about it, it needs a different touch!
That is what Romans 7 was written to say. It was written to sound the final death-knell over the notion that we can ever get to be righteous by way of the Law. It makes no difference whether we try to do this before or after we become a Christian, the result will always be the same. If our understanding of this chapter is right, then the arguments about whether Paul was describing the experience of an unregenerate or a regenerate man are all pre-empted. I find earnest Christians telling us, in all seriousness, that Romans 7 is the best we can hope for in this life; Paul has the courage and the honesty, they say, to come right out with it and say, "Face it, folks: until you get to glory, this is the best you can hope for." How awful! There has to be something better than that, or where has the Gospel ... the Good News gone? If Romans 7 is the 'normal Christian life' then the Gospel is bad news!
Happily, Romans 8 is the Gospel. We "walk according to the Spirit, not according to the Law." As we have seen, Paul's shout of joy in v. 25 is because 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."
It is worth reflecting that Paul's preoccupation with the Law must surely have arisen from his conversion experience, when it became blindingly obvious to him that his very zeal for the Law had turned him into an enemy of the Son of God; what in God's Name had gone wrong? He had clearly had to wrestle long and hard with this issue. The issue is no less relevant to day than it was in his Jewish milieu, for whatever the attitude to the Mosaic Law may be, there is not a society on earth that knows any other method to govern human behaviour than by the making and enforcement of laws, and its inability to make bad men good is as obvious today as ii was in Paul's day. Paul's quarrel was not with the Law itself (Rom. 7:12), but with the use to which in our sinfulness we put it. (Rom. 7:13-14).
* Quoted by Len Barnett in "Live for Kicks" [N.S.S.U. 1964] p. 150ƒƒ, from Major Lewis Hastings book of African Travel "Dragons Are Extras"
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