02.13. V. The Law Cannot Produce a Holy Life (ch. 7).

V. The Law Cannot Produce a Holy Life (Rom 7:1-25).

We now come to Rom 7:1-25, in which it is set forth, that the law being powerless to justify, is equally unable to sanctify. In the first six chapters three wonderful statements concerning the law have been made, namely: (1) By the deeds of the law there shall no flesh be justified in His sight (Rom 3:20); (2) The law entered, that the offence might abound (Rom 5:20); (3) Ye are not under the law (Rom 6:14). These three propositions, as has been pointed out by others, furnish a working analysis of Rom 7:1-25, as follows: (1) The believer’s freedom from law (Rom 7:1-6); (2) Though the law makes sin to abound, the law nevertheless is not sinful (Rom 7:7-13) i (3) The law cannot deliver from the flesh (Rom 7:14-25). We will consider the chapter in the order thus indicated.

I. Ye also were made dead to the law (Rom 7:16). This statement of verse 4, as given by the Revision, is the core of the paragraph.

(1) The law hath dominion over a man as long as he liveth (Rom 7:1). The marriage relation is used as the basis of an illustration showing how and why the Christian is freed from law. Know ye not, brethren, (for I speak to them that know the law). The word for brethren here is adelphoi and stands for the whole brotherhood in the Roman Church, and is not, as some writers have insisted, confined to the Jewish believers in that brotherhood. It is true that only the Jews had been actually under the law of Sinai, for the Gentiles have not the law (Rom 2:14), yet the apostle here, by the Spirit, is proceeding to show the absence of the legalistic principle in God’s dealings with His people in the gospel. They are not under law, but under grace, and these are two contrasting principles which cannot be yoked together. They pull in opposite directions. If a man is under law, he is not under grace; and if he is under grace, he is not under law. This proposition ought to be self-evident. The apostle writes further, I speak to them that know law. He was addressing intelligent people who knew the working of law as a principle. They lived in Rome, where the very meaning of law, and of force through law, had been taught to the world. There is no definite article before the word law in the parenthetical passage of verse one. He is speaking for the moment of law as a principle, rather than the law of Sinai; howbeit, he has in view all the time throughout the illustration the freedom of the believer from the thunderings of Sinai.

(2) The woman which hath an husband. Here the case is brought before us of a married woman bound by the law to her husband so long as he liveth; but if the husband be dead, she is loosed from the law of her husband. This is simple enough. The marriage relation continues of force between the two parties entering into it so long as they both shall live.

(3) But if her husband be dead, she is free. This also is perfectly clear. A married woman, if she marries another man than her husband, is guilty of bigamy: she shall be called an adulteress: but if her husband be dead, she is free from that law; so that she is no adulteress, though she be married to another man.

(4) Ye also are become dead to the law by the body of Christ (Rom 7:4). Much confusion is found just here among the commentators. It is objected that Paul is mixed in his metaphor, since, in the illustration, it is the husband that dies, whereas, in the application, it is the wife who is become dead. But the matter is clear enough when it is kept in mind precisely what the apostle writes. He does not say merely ye are dead, but ye also were made dead to the law through the body of Christ (R. V.). A wife, by her husband’s death, has ceased to be a wife. Before the event of his death, there was a wife; after that event, the wife is no more. The woman remains, but she has become dead to the law which bound her to her husband, and her death to that law has been brought about by the death of her husband. It is not the metaphor of the apostle that is mixed, but the commentators.

(5) That ye should be married to another. Let the reader be very careful at this point. It at first seems strange that we should read here in the same sentence of the body of Christ, and another, even to Him Who is raised from the dead. For was it not the same Christ that died Who was raised from the dead? How, then, can He be called another? 2Co 5:1-21 will help us here. In 2Co 5:14-16 it is written: One died for all, therefore all died; and He died for all, that they that live should no longer live unto themselves, but unto Him Who for their sakes died and rose again. Wherefore we henceforth know no man after the flesh: even though we have known Christ after the flesh, yet now we know Him so no more. By this statement we learn: (1) That, in the reckoning of God, when Christ died on the cross, the believer died with Him. So, here in Romans, the wife, as a wife, died in her husband’s death; (2) that, when Jesus arose from the dead, we rose from the dead with Him, that henceforth we should live not unto ourselves, but unto Him in Whom we died and rose again; and (3) that the Christ we now know is not the Christ according to the flesh. Of course there is a sense in which He is the same Jesus as before the cross, but, in the gospel sense, He is far different. Our trust centers not in the Christ of Galilee, but in the Christ of glory; not in the Man Jesus, Who walked about doing good in the land of Palestine nineteen centuries ago, but in the Lord Jesus Christ, Who sits today at the right hand of the Majesty on high making intercession for us—”managing our concerns for us” (Heb 7:25, Wakefield’s translation). This point needs to be emphasized in this day. The subtle appeal found everywhere that we should go back to Christ, rejecting the teaching of the epistles and looking for our instruction to His kingdom teachings found in the synoptic gospels, is nothing short of an invention of the adversary. The epistles of the New Testament are the teachings of Christ as truly as His own words quoted in the gospels. And they are the teachings of the risen Christ, the glorified Christ, the present Christ, the Man Christ Jesus, the Man with Whom we have to do, the Man to Whom we are now married.

(6) That we should bring forth fruit unto God (Rom 7:4). In our natural condition, being children of wrath, even as others (Eph 2:3), and joined, or married, to sin, our fruit, the issue of that marriage, the offspring of that relation, was such as to make us ashamed. But now, being made free from sin and having become servants to God, we have our fruit unto holiness (Rom 6:22). The purpose of the marriage relation is that children may be born and reared; they are the logical issue of this relationship. Just so, as in our former marriage to sin, the issue was uncleanness and iniquity (Rom 6:19), it is the purpose of our new marriage, being joined in this holy relation to the risen Christ, that we should bring forth fruit unto God. This is all brought out in Rom 7:5-6 : For when we were in the flesh, the sinful passions (Gr. passions of sins), which were through the law, wrought in our members to bring forth fruit unto death. But now we have been discharged from the law, having died to that wherein we were held (the King James rendering, that being dead wherein we were held, is incorrect).

(7) So that we serve in newness of the Spirit, and not in oldness of the letter (Rom 7:6, R. V.). The Revised Version is to be preferred here above the King James. It is not merely that we have been delivered from the bondage of sin in order that we should serve in newness of spirit, but so that we serve in newness of the Spirit. The contrast between Spirit and letter here is the same as in 2Co 3:1-18, where the Spirit means the Holy Spirit, Who is living and working in and through the Christian-; while the letter means the law of Sinai, the old covenant—a covenant of letters written and engraven in stones. To this Dean Alford agrees, who says, that the Spirit here refers to the Holy Spirit of God, Who originates and penetrates the Christian life; and that the letter signifies the law, being only a collection of precepts and prohibitions, while the gospel is a service of freedom, ruled by the Spirit, Whose presence is liberty. The qualitatively expressed pneumatos, meaning in concrete application the Holy Spirit as the efficient principle of the Christian life, and the qualitative grammatos, characterizing the law according to its nature and character as non-living and drawn up in letters, are the specifically heterogeneous factors on which the two contrasted states are dependent (H. A. W. Meyer). The newness is the new spiritual state, or union with Christ; the oldness of the letter was their former state under the law. The letter means the law. This new service produced holy fruit; the service under law brought forth fruit for death (Stifler). Being married to a new husband we must change our way; still we must serve, but it is a service that is perfect freedom, whereas the service of sin was a perfect drudgery There must be a renovation of our spirit wrought by the Spirit of God, and in that we must serve.

We are under the dispensation of the Spirit, and therefore must be spiritual, and serve in the Spirit It becomes us to worship in the veil and no longer in the outer court (Matthew Henry).

Awaked by Sinai’s awful sound,
My soul in bonds of guilt I found,
And knew not where to go;
Eternal truth did loud proclaim,
‘The sinner must be born again, Or sink in endless woe.’
“Amazed I stood, but could not tell
Which way to shun the gates of hell,
For death and hell drew near;
I strove, indeed, but strove in vain:
‘The sinner must be born again’

Still sounded in my ear.
“When to the law I trembling fled,
It poured its curses on my head;
I no relief could find.
This fearful truth increased my pain:
‘The sinner must be born again’

O’erwhelmed my tortured mind.
“I heard the law its thunders roll,
While guilt lay heavy on my soul—
A vast oppressive load;
All creature-aid I saw was vain;
‘The sinner must be born again,’ Or drink the wrath of God.
“But while I thus in anguish lay,
The bleeding Saviour passed that way,
My bondage to remove. The sinner, once by justice slain,
Now by his grace is born again,
And sings redeeming love.

2. The law is holy (Rom 7:7-13). In this second paragraph of the chapter it is shown that, though the law makes sin to abound, the law nevertheless is not sinful.

(1) What shall we say then? Is the law sin (or sinful)? (Rom 7:7). This question naturally arises out of what has gone before.

(2) God forbid. Nay, I had not known sin, but by the law (Rom 7:7). That the law is not sinful is proved by the very fact that by the law is the knowledge of sin (Rom 3:20). A sinful law would be incapable of revealing the sinfulness of sin. It is because the law is perfect as a standard of righteousness that it so clearly manifests the presence of evil, and by this heavenly standard, every man is convicted of sin. There is no difference: for all have sinned, and come short of the glory of God (Rom 3:22-23).

(3) For I had not known coveting, except the law had said, Thou shalt not covet (Rom 7:7). The Revision is right here in adhering to uniformity in the translation of this Greek word, rendered, in the King James Version, lust, covet, concupiscence, etc.

(4) But sin, finding occasion, wrought in me through the commandment all manner of coveting (Rom 7:8). Without the commandment, sin, though present in the heart of Saul of Tarsus, was unsuspected even by himself. His conscience was not aroused, he was not troubled—”for without the law sin was dead.”

(5) For I was alive without the law once. Conybeare and Howson render here: I felt that I was alive before, when I knew no law. And MacKnight paraphrases as follows: Accordingly I was in my own imagination entitled to life while without the knowledge of law formerly. There is a similar use of the word life in 1Th 3:8, For now we live, if ye stand fast in the Lord. The apostle’s meaning very evidently is, that he feels himself to live on account of the gratifying steadfastness and growth in grace of his beloved fellow-saints whom he had led into the knowledge of Christ.

(6) But when the commandment came, sin revived, and I died (Rom 7:9). What does Paul mean here by the expression, When the commandment came? He was brought up on the commandments, doubtless, at his mother’s knee, and the commandments were studied assiduously at the feet of Gamaliel; but there came a day when his eyes were opened, and he was given to see what the commandments really meant, and that, far from being a means of grace and salvation, they were the means of death and condemnation. Sin was there all the time, but, until the day that the commandment came with all its crushing force upon his consciousness, sin gave him no disquietude. The strength of sin to sting him to death was the law, and when the law was joined to sin in his consciousness, sin, which until then had been dead, came to life, and he died (compare 1Co 15:56-57; 2Co 3:7-9).

(7) And the commandment, which was ordained to life, I found to be unto death (Rom 7:10). Ordained is a supplied word, and is really not in place, for, as a matter of fact, the commandment was not ordained to life. The law is not a ministration of life, but of death (2Co 3:7). And yet Paul could write of the commandment as being unto life because Moses has said, He that doeth these things shall live by them (Lev 18:5; Rom 10:5). Saul of Tarsus, like every other sinner, found himself without power to do these things, and so the law, which was unto life, he found to be unto death. As Conybeare and Howson render it: I felt that I was alive before, when I knew no law; but when the commandment came, sin rose to life, and I sank into death; and the very commandment whose end is life, was found to me the cause of death; for my sin, when it had gained a vantage ground by the commandment, deceived me to my fall, and slew me by the sentence of the law.

(8) Wherefore the law is holy, and the commandment holy, and just, and good (Rom 7:12). This conclusion grows out of the statement of the nth verse. The holiness and justice and goodness of the law is proved by the fact that it slays every sinner with whom it comes in contact. This it must do, else it would be neither holy nor just nor good. The law of Sinai has been described by someone as the concept of the mind of God as to what a man ought to be, and it has its penalty: The soul that sinneth it shall die. So then, if a soul under law sins and. dies not, that is indubitable proof that the law is unholy and unjust and evil. A holy law must of necessity impose and enforce its penalty. This explains the connection between Rom 7:11 and Rom 7:12 : For sin seized the advantage, and by means of the commandment it completely deceived me, and also put me to death. So that the law itself is holy, and the commandment is holy, just and good (Weymouth).

(9) Was then that which is good made death unto me? (Rom 7:13). Rather, Did then that which is good become death unto me? (R. V.). This question logically grows out of what has gone before it. Is it then possible that the law, being holy and just and good, could become death to a man?

(10) God forbid (Rom 7:13). In the last analysis, it was not the law that put Saul to death, but sin, by means of the law. What an awful thing sin is, that by the holy and just law of God it can bring death to God’s creatures! Surely, by this means, sin does in reality appear sin, working death in me by that which is good; that sin by the commandment might become exceeding sinful. Far be that from me. But I say that sin wrought this; that so it might be made manifest as sin, in working death to me through the knowledge of good; that sin might become beyond measure sinful, by the commandment (Conybeare and Howson). The misuse and perversion of good is one of the tests whereby the energy of evil is detected, so that sin by its perversion of the good commandment into a cause of death was shown in its real character as sin (Dean Alford). Says Dr. Stifler: This assertion about the goodness or beneficence of the law starts an acute objection: ‘Was then that which is good made death unto me?’ Can wholesome bread prove poison to the hungry man who eats it? Does fresh, pure water start a fever instead of allaying thirst? How can that which is admitted to be ‘good,’ the law, prove to be ‘death to me?’ This subtle objection is not only answered, but turned into an argument. It was not the law that brought death, ‘but sin.’ And sin wrought death, ‘that (in the purpose of God in giving the law) it might appear sin (inasmuch as it, sin, worked death in me by that which is good).’ How desperate the disease that only grows worse under the appropriate remedy to heal it! But God had an additional purpose in giving the holy law to sinful man, viz: ‘that (in order that) sin by the commandment might become exceeding sinful.’ The coward is not known until he hears the command to march against the foe.

3. But I see another law, bringing me into captivity (Rom 7:14-25). This wail of Rom 7:23 is the burden of the closing paragraph of the chapter, which is a demonstration of the proposition that the law of Judaism could not deliver from the flesh.

(1) The law is spiritual: but I am carnal (Rom 7:14). The apostle has been thinking of himself, up to this point in the chapter, as in the days before he was born again, but the struggle he now proceeds to describe is not that of an unregenerate man trying to save himself, but rather of a regenerate man trying to be good. It is the conflict between the old nature and the new, subsisting together in the believer. The new nature cannot sin, while the old nature can do nothing else. The newly regenerate man, before he learns the better way, is apt to seek victory over the old nature by means of his own efforts. The result of such efforts is always failure, and it takes much bitter experience to teach the believer how helpless he is. It is natural for the human heart to put itself under law, and to seek to perfect itself by means of law-works. By this closing paragraph of chapter 7, we are to learn that, as the law was unable to justify the sinner and make him a child of God, so it is equally unable to sanctify the saint as to his walk. The way of victory is indicated in the 8th chapter.

(2) Sold under sin (Rom 7:14). This expression describes the condition of the carnal man. He is a slave sold into the captivity of sin. And let us remember that the carnal man here is not an unsaved man. He has been saved from the penalty of sin, but he has not yet learned the way of deliverance from the power of sin. He still looks to the law for liberty, whereas the law can bring him only bondage. He is still a sinful man, though saved, and being a sinful man and putting himself under law, there can be but one result, he at once finds himself in a condition of slavery. For as many as are of the works of the law are under the curse: for it is written, Cursed is every one that continueth not in all things which are written in the book of the law to do them (Gal 3:10). It is not enough to approximate the law, and to do the best you can to keep it. Whoever fails, even in one point, is guilty of all (Jas 2:10). It follows, then, that as none of us has reached perfection and as the law tolerates no imperfection, therefore everyone who puts himself under the law thereby brings upon himself the curse of the law. It is often said that, while we are free from the law as a means of life, we are under it as a rule of life; but there is no Scripture for this; indeed, there is much of Scripture against it. The Christian is promised that sin shall not have dominion over him just because he is not under law, but under grace (Rom 6:14). The very moment he is put under the law sin does have dominion over him, and he soon discovers that the sting of death is sin, and the strength of sin is the law, ‘for, while the law is holy, he is carnal, sold under sin.

(3) For that which I do I allow not; for what I would, that do I not; but what I hate, that do I (Rom 7:15). The two I’s here, contending with each other, represent the old nature in Paul and the new. For convenience sake, we might say the struggle here is between Saul of Tarsus and Paul the apostle, abiding together in one body. The change in the tense from past to present in this section, beginning with Rom 7:14, will be observed. Hitherto, says Dean Alford, the passage has been historical: now the apostle passes to the present time, keeping hold yet of the carnal self of former days, whose remnants are still energizing in the renewed man.

(4) I consent unto the law that it is good. This is shown, as the apostle points out, by the fact that he does not himself approve of the evil things he is doing.

(5) It is no more I that do it, but sin that dwelleth in me (Rom 7:17). His failure to lead a good life cannot be ascribed to his wrong attitude toward the law; that failure must be ascribed to indwelling sin. The I is just himself, body, soul, and spirit, that have been seized upon by the alien master which he calls sin (Stifler).

(6) For I know that in me (that is, in my flesh) dwelleth no good thing (Rom 7:18). This is shown from the fact, that while he is able to will that which is good, he is powerless to perform it. The argument grows pathetic, and he again reaches the same conclusion in Rom 7:20 as in Rom 7:17 : It is no more I that do it, but sin that dwelleth in me.

(7) I find then a law (Rom 7:21). By this he refers to a principle he has discovered in his life, namely, that when he would do good, evil is present with him. He delights in the law of God after the inward man, and this is a proof that he is a converted man and is relating his experience as such. But he sees another law in his members, warring against the law of his mind, and bringing him into captivity to sin which is in his members (Rom 7:22-23). Four laws are in view in this passage: the law of God; (2) the law of Paul’s mind, consenting to the law of God; (3) the law of sin, or the tendency to evil in his own members; and (4) the law, or principle, that this law of sin is stronger in him than the law of his mind. It was a great discovery when he learned that he was utterly helpless in this unequal struggle, and cried out for deliverance.

(8) O wretched man that I am! who shall deliver me from the body of this death? (Rom 7:24). He is evidently crying out against his own physical body which is the instrument whereby he is led captive to the law of sin and death. He called it a body of sin in chapter 6:6, and now he calls it a body of death, for it is the seat of sin and death, and he had not yet discovered the way of deliverance from the power of sin and death.

(9) I thank God through Jesus Christ our Lord (Rom 7:25). This is the ready answer to the despairing question just preceding it, and is a proof that, when Paul is writing the words, he is looking back to a past experience through which he has come. Dean Alford says: This exclamation and thanksgiving more than all convince me, that St. Paul speaks of none other than himself, and carries out as far as possible the misery of the conflict with sin in his members, on purpose to bring in the glorious deliverance which follows.—Compare 1Co 15:56-57, where a very similar thanksgiving occurs.

(10) So then with the mind I myself serve the law of God; but with the flesh the law of sin (Rom 7:25). This is a recapitulation of the whole paragraph. The deliverance out of the hopeless warfare indicated in that paragraph is brought into full light in Rom 8:1-39. The contrast between the victory life of Rom 8:1-39 and the life of defeat of Rom 7:1-25 is beautifully set forth by Leighton in a sermon on Rom 8:35 : Is this he that so lately cried out, O wretched man that I am! who shall deliver me? that now triumphs? O happy man! who shall separate us from the love of Christ? Yes, it is the same. Pained then with the thoughts of that miserable conjunction with the body of death, and so crying out who shall deliver, now he hath found a Deliverer to do that for him, to whom he is forever united. So vast a difference is there between a Christian taken in himself and in Christ!