Romans 7

Romans 7:1-8

Subdivision 3. (Romans 7:1-25; Romans 8:1-4.)Realized deliverance as united to Christ by the Spirit. We come to the working all this out in experience, then. What we have had already is complete enough indeed as to our title to be free: it is the making good to us, with its blessed consequences, of that “life in Christ Jesus,” which is the very “law of the Spirit” which delivers us from the law of sin and death (Romans 8:2). But as the law of the Spirit we are yet to see it, and how Christ comes to have experimentally the place He must have for such result. For the whole aim and work of the Spirit is to exalt Christ; and alas, for the Christian also there needs for this a weaning from self which is apt to be a terribly slow process, -self hiding under the most specious forms of self-renunciation and the quest of holiness. And here is found one of the great mysteries of the divine ways, by an unsubduable self to turn one from self, and bring the sweetest and most effectual remedy out of incurable evil, strength out of weakness, and hope out of despair. It is here that, for the first time we learn what “flesh” is, and conscious captivity to a law of sin in the members brings us to the experience of a liberty which is the assured privilege of the “man in Christ.” It is here also that we find the true character of the law and our need of deliverance from it, in order that we may bring forth fruit to God; the death of Christ being our death to it, as truly as we saw it to be our death to sin before. The law is no more dead than sin is, but we are dead to it -a wholly different thing. The first husband must go, that we may rightly belong to the Second; for we cannot be joined to the two at once. And it is by the Spirit that we are united; the Spirit being as much the seal of Christ’s claim to us as it is the Father’s acknowledgment of His spiritual children. As through the previous subdivision we had the reckoning of faith, so in the present we have this put in connection with experience, which is first of all made to bear witness to the need one has of this, and then becomes the joyful experience of faith itself: The relation of the law to a sinner has already been fully shown. Here it makes known sin, and charges man’s guilt against him, but has no remedy. There were types and shadows, as we know, that looked on to the coming Deliverer, but in this very way pointed away from themselves. In itself it brought upon men wrath only, reckoning up sin in detail, and bringing to an end the ignorance of former times at which God winked, and thus making the offence abound. Justification, peace with God, the glorious righteousness of God which now is manifested in favor of every one who believeth in Jesus, -these things have been fully declared as the fruit of the gospel only, and we are no longer engaged in the discussion of them. It is not the approach of the sinner to God which is before us now, but the walk of the saint -a totally different thing, and which we must not mix up with it, or all lines will become blurred, and the truth no longer distinguishable.

Doubtless there are principles which run through both: for the Christian guided by his own reasonings merely argues very much after the manner of the natural man, and God’s thoughts will not be his thoughts until he is content to have these revealed to him as Scripture has revealed them, and accepts them humbly without the modifications which he is so prone to impose on them. That righteousness is not by the works of the law he may be now convinced, and rejoicing in the realization that Christ alone is this to him, while yet in the matter of holiness he is well-nigh as legal as ever. God’s way is to proclaim Christ for both, but often to deaf ears on the part of believers themselves, who having begun in the Spirit, would yet be perfected by the flesh. For saint as for sinner before, it is hard to accept in simplicity the mortifying truth that “no flesh shall glory in His Presence.” Thus for long, it may be, in the conflict between God’s thoughts and his own, both his own experiences and the word of truth are shrouded in darkness to him; and preferring the way of experience, he finds it the hard teacher which proverbially it is, and at last, if taught truly by it, is only forced to turn to that which he has been unwittingly, yet not the less really, resisting, to learn what it alone can teach him, and that, after all, the moral of his disappointment and misery is to be found in his controverting the way of the Spirit to make Christ as much sanctification as righteousness to him, and to have no flesh glory in the presence of God. But whatever the sameness of the principle involved, it is of all importance to realize, as already said, that here there is no question of peace or acceptance, but of fruit and the ability to produce it. If we mix these things together, and say, here is a soul not at rest as to acceptance, then it may at once be pleaded that the reason for the fruitlessness he finds is simply on this account! Thus the lesson in its breadth will not be learnt, and those who realize in themselves the impotence confessed in the experience here will be tempted to deny the reality of what is theirs, because of the barrenness of the life over which they groan. It is one thing to find no ability to make or assure oneself of peace with God through one’s works, and quite another to find, when the question is one of producing the holiness which God claims, and which it is the instinct of the Christian man to crave, that still there is an impracticable obstacle in the way -a “flesh” in which dwelleth no good thing -which renders futile all his efforts! -to have to say, not when I would find evidence of my salvation, still less when I would make my peace with God, but simply, “when I would do good evil is present with me,” and “the good that I would I do not, but the evil that I would not, that I do”! when consciously “I delight in the law of God after the inward man,” then to “find another law in my members warring against the law of my mind, and bringing me into captivity to the law of sin which is in my members!” There are two views as to these expressions into which it is well known that Christians have got, which equally, but in opposite ways, destroy their proper meaning. The one, which used to be considered, strange as it may seem, the evangelical one, simply accepts the misery of the experience here described, as the ordained and normal condition of the child of God. Ignoring the fact that it is a state of captivity which is ascribed to a law of sin, from which the law of the Spirit is expressly stated to deliver us, it separates, as the division of the chapters does, the bondage from the freedom only by some strange process of thought to identify the one with the other; the experience is taken to be the actual experience of the apostle at the time he was writing, and naturally it is not to be supposed that the state of Christians in general is beyond that of the apostle. The deliverance is, of course, in this case incidental only to special crises of the conflict, and does not affect the general conclusion which is reached at the end of the chapter, that “with the mind I myself serve the law of God, but with the flesh the law of sin.” Against such a view the reaction of the Christian instinct has led many to an opposite extreme, which asserts not only a permanent deliverance from the law of sin for the believer, but a complete removal of the flesh itself, an absolute and experimental death to sin. This does not so much concern us at the present moment; and the misapprehension as to the latter term we have already considered.

1. The apostle first of all shows that the law itself declares the limit of law. And notice that this applies as much to the law of Moses as to any mere human code. The law has dominion over a man as long as he liveth; so long, but no longer: death ends its claim. He brings forward the law of marriage in illustration of this; and here, of course, every one who knows law would admit it at once. But using marriage as he does immediately, simply in a figurative way, it would not suffice for his argument as to the believer’s relation to the law (of Moses) except the principle fully applied to this.

We have elsewhere looked at this, and most important every way it surely is. Moses’ law has to do with the present life, and not beyond. (See notes on Exodus 34:1-7, ante). How necessary and how blessed that it should be so! For if “the man that doeth these things shall live in them,” and “the soul that sinneth, it shall die,” really defined for all eternity the conditions of life and death, who that was under it could escape eternal condemnation? But God could not bind His own hands in such a fashion. The law being intended to give the knowledge of sin, and to cut off from self-righteousness, tested man where he was, and before the eyes of men.

The death it threatened did not appertain to a scene outside man’s ken, where unable to know the facts, he might dream as he pleased of the issue of his trial, but it faced him here and now. “Die!” did he die? Universal history, with every grey hair upon his head, relentlessly gave verdict against him. Yet lost and hopeless as he was on this ground, it did not cut him off from the hope of eternal mercy. Much depends then upon the truth of the apostle’s words here, that the law’s dominion over a man is as long as he liveth, but no longer. When he applies his figure of marriage to illustrate the previous relation of law to the people of God, it would not have answered his purpose at all if the Jew after all could say to him, “Well, but this is only a figure; and you are not really entitled to argue from it as if it were a fact!” But not if he could say, “The figurative purpose for which I use it does not prevent its being a true illustration of the scope of the law; and death really does break the link of relationship between the believer and the law just as my figure intimates, -call it marriage or what you please.” The term “marriage” does, however, suit his purpose here in a remarkable way, as we shall see directly; for it expresses such a relation as might be abused to very galling lordship, while it none the less allows comparison with the sweet and peculiar, exclusive relationship of the Church to Christ, and gives at once the opportunity to raise the question, which here is so important, of fruitfulness or barrenness in these contrasted conditions. It is plain that, while addressing, himself to all believers now, and not to Jews only (for the lesson remains still for us, and for all time), Paul yet looks back to the old dispensation -to the people of God under it, raising no question of other differences which are not in point, but treating all as one continuous history, -a history which in principle is the history of individuals still. For the law, though God is no longer putting people under it, is that which naturally men accept everywhere as from Him, being indeed unable to think out for themselves any other than a legal system. This is, of course, the immense importance for us of this dreary detail of human experience. For the mass of us repeat the history of Israel in this respect, and have to be allowed to learn in this way what we will not learn from the word of God alone. Gentiles as we may be, the Jew is in us all, and we have as a rule to plod on under the yoke which they found so heavy, and yet would not exchange for the easy yoke of Christ. The deliverance must in a sense come to us through the law itself, as the apostle says: “I through the law am dead to the law, that I might live unto God” (Galatians 2:19). 2. Deliverance for us is accomplished in the self-same way as we have before seen with regard to the deliverance from sin: “Wherefore my brethren, ye also were made dead to the law by the body of the Christ, to become Another’s -His who was raised from among the dead, that we might bring forth fruit unto God.” A hard thing this to realize, that for fruitfulness also, and not merely for justification, we must be delivered from that law the holiness of which is so absolute, and the severity of which against sin we have had to learn in the cross on which Jesus died to redeem us! But how natural to think that in this view of the Cross we have exhausted its meaning; and even when such a scripture as the present is before us, to seek escape from its plain significance. Even here many see nothing else than deliverance from legal curse: “that is, freed from the law as a rule of justification, we are at liberty to accept of the offers of gratuitous acceptance made to us in the gospel” (Hodge). On the other hand, we are familiar with the distinctions drawn between the moral and the ceremonial law, the ordinances, which, it is allowed, have passed away before the fulness of Christian light, while the ten commandments are asserted to remain as what was graven upon the tables of stone, as of permanent obligation, -the perfect rule of life for believers still. But neither of these interpretations will stand the test of a fair analysis of the words of the apostle. The question of justification by law has long been settled, and there is here nothing which would indicate any return to it. In all this part, at least until the beginning of the eighth chapter, there is not a word which could even be imagined to be equivalent or akin to justification. The purport here, as we are definitely told, of deliverance from the law is that we may bring forth fruit to God. We are set free absolutely, not from the law in this or that aspect, but without any such reserve at all; and as for the law in its ceremonial part, it can be easily seen by any one who cares to look that there is no reference to it all the way through the experience which is detailed to us. It is not the ceremonial law that says, “Thou shalt not lust,” nor which reveals a law of sin in the members!*
No, it is from the law as a whole that the deliverance must be. “Holy, just and good” as it surely is, it is not the less on that account, as the apostle elsewhere declares, “the strength of sin” (1 Corinthians 15:56); and that which is such can no more be the means of sanctification than of justification. How it is the strength of sin the experience to which we shall presently come will make abundantly clear to us. We have but the statement as yet -the text upon which the comment is to follow immediately. The statement is in itself absolutely plain, that if, as has already been shown us with regard to sin, the believer is dead with Christ through Christ’s substitutionary death for him, and if the law has dominion over a man only “so long as he liveth,” then over him as in the value of the death of Christ before God, law has ceased to have dominion: he is “made dead to the law by the body of Christ.” Thus, and thus alone, is he free to become Another’s, as part of that Church which is the Bride of Christ. This is a peculiar, exclusive relationship, the apostle would tell us, which forbids the old relationship to the law. That was barren; this is to be fruitful: or rather, that, as long as one abides in it, forbids fruit. Its professed aim was fruit, and thus it claimed the husband’s place; and this, for purposes of perfect wisdom, was for a time, and tentatively, allowed, -a relationship too, which only death could sever: not that the law is dead -that is nowhere said -but we are; it was a relationship to men in the flesh, but “they that are in the flesh cannot please God.” A man in the flesh is just a living man; and the cross of Christ is the death sentence, under which he lay, executed upon him, which faith owns, while it finds its deliverance in it, and in Him raised from the dead the One to whom now its every tie is; in a new and blessed life which is not of the old creation, but of the new. But, as has been said, this yet remains to be worked out practically for us in that which follows: as yet we have but the statement, of which we are now to see the meaning and value. 3. The apostle goes on at once to the experience, -though at present only the brief statement still; but he shows the nature and cause of the barrenness of the law, which while to God it is that, is not merely that. Fruit there is, but not to God; it is “fruit unto death.” “For when we were in the flesh, the passions of sins, which were by the law, wrought in our members, to bring forth fruit unto death.” We see why the law is fruitless, or worse: it produces the passions of sins -a strange alliance as it might seem between sin and law, but it is not that, but opposition, as must surely be, and as the detailed experience will fully show: the holy requirements of the law are to the man in the flesh but the presenting of claims it) contradiction to the “mind of the flesh,” which is enmity against God (Romans 8:7). It is merely chafed and irritated, its state brought out, not altered, the knowledge of sin produced, which we have seen to be the characteristic effect of law, but with the result of the aggravation of the whole condition. But we must pause here, to look more closely at all that is in question. The man in the flesh is in its primary sense, as should be evident, just the living man. Here there may be no moral implication whatever, as we are well aware; but it is important to realize, when we come to the meaning of the expression as we find it now employed in that part of Romans upon which we have entered, the original force, upon which the moral one is based. The man in the flesh is in this sense the living, natural man, who has never yet known the death of Christ for sinners, and is, therefore, but identified with the old creation and the flesh; as the Lord says, “That which is born of the flesh is flesh.” Flesh is all that he is. Spirit and soul are hidden, as it were, in this, from which they now take their character. Their life is in the world of sense, in the old creation; there is no real outlook beyond. “When we were in the flesh” applies thus solely to those not in Christ; and the effect of law upon such is what is here described. It is true that there is a mingled experience between this and the proper Christian one, which is presently shown us, and which must be carefully distinguished from either; but for the proper understanding of this mixed condition we must realize the two conditions apart, which are thus mingled.

No Christian can be in that state of which it is said that “they that are in the flesh cannot please God.” But it is just the misery of these that the Christian heart and the unchristian experience are seemingly joined together, although not without a certain modification of one by the other. Of this we shall have presently to speak; but as yet it is not considered, but the two opposite conditions are put in sharpest contrast, so that we may learn them aright. “When we were in the flesh” and “fruit unto death” mark the first of these, that of the natural man whereas the soul in the experience of bondage, soon to be before us, can yet say of the sin from which he has not found deliverance, “It is no more I that do it,” and “I consent unto the law that it is good.” The Christian condition is now put in contrast with that of the natural man: “but now we are set free from the law, having died in that in which we were held, so that we should serve in newness of spirit, and not in oldness of the letter.” As already said, it is not the law that is dead, but we: but death having come in on either side cancels the tie. That was to the man in the flesh, but the man in the flesh is gone; we are dead in the death of Christ, and so in the flesh no longer. Hagar the bondwoman, as the apostle says elsewhere, is the law that gendereth to bondage, and we are set free to enjoy a true and blessed freedom. The law is the ministration of death, and we died in that in which we were held; but thus we found Christ who has died, and under the curse of the law, so that we are set free in a new resurrection life, -still to serve, for Christ our Lord has served and still serves -would we be set free from that? -nay, but to serve in newness of spirit, serving in joy of soul, and no more in the old drudgery yet superficiality of the letter, pressed from the outside upon unwilling hearts. This closes the doctrine of the deliverance; which we cannot, however, fully learn save in the experience of it as practically wrought out in the soul. For this, therefore, we go back of the deliverance to realize the state out of which we are delivered. 4. The apostle carefully leads us on step by step. After the doctrine we have the experience which illustrates and enforces the doctrine. This also is first given us in brief, and then we have the exercises which spring out of the experience, and which make us to realize its meaning and importance. The law of sin in the members is then finally seen as the insurmountable barrier to man which shuts him off from the attainment of the holiness which divine grace has taught every one born of God to long for; and then, as in a moment, the groan of self-despair is cut short by the shout of victory; that which he seeks for is attained, though in a manner how different from his expectation; the law of the Spirit has delivered him from the law of sin and death. With the experience indeed, questions begin at once in the soul, which press for an answer. What means this strange, perpetual connection between sin and law? “Is the law sin?” This connection is not now that of a doctrine, about which one might go astray; it is a fact of consciousness far too manifest to be denied or evaded; but the attitude of the one towards the other is equally unmistakable. Law is the detective under divine government, continually searching out and manifesting it in the light of infinite and omniscient holiness. How startling a revelation as to man, that to provoke lust in him, God has only to forbid it! Sin in its essential character is rebellion against God! Sin takes occasion by the commandment itself to awake all manner of lust against it.

And who is not conscious of this tremendous fact that there is a pleasure in sin just as sin -in one’s own will and way, as that? And think of God having forbidden, not merely a step in the direction of my own will as against His, but even a desire to take that step! How entirely this last commandment of the ten removes the question of true righteousness from being that of the outward life simply, and makes it impossible to think of any righteousness on our part fit for Him! What a new light it throws upon the words, “The man that doeth these things shall live in them”! Yet how simple it is, that a heart set upon that which is not in the will of God for me is moral distance from Him to that extent: for God’s will is never arbitrary merely, but is the expression of His nature; His way may he in the sea, and hidden from me, but it is always in the sanctuary too. If, then, there be in me one bit of self-seeking, how must this inexorable, all-embracing law search it out and awake it into vehement life! No wonder that the apostle says that “without law sin is dead!” This is its efficacy, in fact, while it may seem, when we are seeking help from it, its impotence rather (its impotence is indeed one element of its power), that under its rule sin revives, and we die. It is the ministration of death, though on its face proposing life: what is avowedly for life, is found (and invariably found) to be unto death. And behind all this, though at present quite unseen, divine love and wisdom work; so that death itself is really a “ministration” -the death of self-confidence, and so of self-occupation also, that Christ may in result be all in all. Meanwhile, sin is but discovered by the law, as roused and having strength given to it by the commandment. It should be quite plain that the apostle is not speaking of his present experience in all this, for we shall find him go far beyond it. His “I was alive without the law once,” looks certainly like what was personal to himself; although, of course, it would in fact be the experience of others also, or there would be little use in recalling it. In all the rest that we have here, the “I” is evidently merely illustrative. It is a pronoun significant enough in its constant repetition through all this part, while Christ and the Spirit are not mentioned. The language of self-occupation cannot be mistaken, and it is only God’s mercy when in such a condition there is little else to speak of but sin and misery.

Good self is a worse adversary to Christ than bad self; and it is a good thing if when with our backs to the sun, self becomes but a shadow darkening all we look upon. Law is as we have seen, in its place of service here, and if honestly listened to, the service it will do is excellent. It is a teacher, however, whose work is to make itself unnecessary, and like the plow to which we may compare it, when once the precious seed has taken root and is growing up to harvest, its use would be as disastrous as before it was beneficial. 5. But we have now to look at the exercises and reasonings incident to such a transitional stage as we cannot but here recognize. It is, as we see, the experience of a soul converted truly to God (for no other could say truthfully what is here said), but as yet unconscious of God’s way of power and sanctification; taking up the law in all sincerity to work out holiness by it with God’s help, as before it had sought to work out peace and justification. The necessary result is that self-occupation which the law entails upon all under it. The end sought, whatever the plea of holiness, is necessarily self-satisfaction, if in the most plausible form, and that is the element which spoils as holiness everything into which it enters. Pride was the form in which sin entered first among the angels, where there could be as yet no temptation from without; and it seems the only conceivable way of failure and apostasy under such conditions.

Ezekiel describes it in words which, while openly addressed to the king of Tyre, picture surely no mere earthly king. There is but one who could fit this description, and he the prince of all potentates in a world which has rejected the true Prince. Here then is the description: — “Thus saith the Lord God, Thou sealest up the sum, full of wisdom, and perfect in beauty. Thou hast been in Eden the garden of God; every precious stone was thy covering, . . . Thou art the anointed cherub that covereth; and I have set thee so: thou wast upon the holy mountain of God; thou hast walked up and down in the midst of the stones of fire. Thou wast perfect in thy ways from the day that thou wast created, until iniquity was found in thee. By the multitude of thy merchandise they have filled the midst of thee with violence, and thou hast sinned: therefore will I cast thee as profane out of the mountain of God, and I will destroy thee, O covering cherub, from the midst of the stones of fire. Thy heart was lifted up because of thy beauty; thou hast corrupted thy wisdom by reason of thy brightness: I will cast thee to the ground.” . . . (Ezekiel 28:12-17). How unutterably solemn is such a fall! and how deeply instructive for us, with whom Satan’s attempt is constantly to animate us with the same spirit, while God’s desire and design cannot but be as earnest to “hide pride from man” (Job 33:17). “Ye shall be as God,” was the first temptation, the success of which has left its poison in the depths of our being. Take the apostle as a pregnant example, whose very exaltation to the third heaven, instead of quenching for ever any remainder of such a spirit, necessitated, as he himself has told us, a thorn for him in the flesh, lest he should find in it the incitement to a spiritual exaltation! (2 Corinthians 12:7). What a demonstration for us all of the existence of the flesh still in the most advanced Christians, and of the way in which pride may come into the holiest things! The work of the Spirit is certainly not to comfort us in any self-satisfaction, -too perilous a thing at the best! yet it is here that even the necessity of self-judgment will be urged to keep us occupied with that which true self-judgment would make us turn away from altogether! but to our next: (1) Once again the apostle emphatically affirms the holiness of the law, and more: the law is not only holy: the commandment is holy, righteous, and good. What is the great principle upon which it insists, but love? “Love,” he says elsewhere, “is the fulfilment (or full measure) of the law” (Romans 13:10). In the very giving of the law, disastrous to men as its first consequences may be, love reigns; the law itself is the handmaid of grace. Yet to a soul in the confusion which we find here, at cross purposes with God, and unable to see the end to which it is approaching, this goodness of the law seems only itself confusion in view of the death-sentence which it has brought in. “Did then that which is good,” he asks, “become death unto me?” But conscience answers at once, No, the goodness of the law only makes the character of sin the more manifest and more hateful. The law is right in issuing these commands, against which the evil in me thus rebels. They only establish the authority of Him who only has authority. This spirit of rebellion is against Him who is all that that word “God” implies; and if it be in me, He is right in laying it bare, as well as in the condemnation of it. (2) A further consequence: -I am in contradiction to myself; I am, spite of myself, in bondage to the evil. We know -all Christians do -that the law is spiritual; but I -he cannot say “we” there; it is an exceptional state in him, and terrible in its exceptionality -“I am carnal, sold under sin.” The bondage is clear, in that he cannot sanction, but hates, the very things he practises. He wishes to do the thing he cannot do; but his efforts only make apparent the fetters with which he is bound. His heart and will consent to the law that it is right. Mournful as his condition is, yet he himself, he affirms, is not the real worker of the evil. He is in the grasp of that from which he cannot escape, but yet can separate himself, and which he personifies, to enable him to separate himself the more clearly from it; a horrible, false self which fetters and oppresses what is now through grace his true self.

It is evident that here is the converted man, conscious of what divine grace has wrought in him, and not doubting that he has right to disclaim and cast from him what nevertheless dwells in and masters him. It is a question of power all through, and not of peace: -that is never raised. To raise it is to introduce what confuses the whole; for if peace with God is not yet known by him who is going through this conflict, then it is impossible not to draw the conclusion that, for one who has peace, no such experience is possible: which is against the abundant witness of many who are passing through it. It will be said that the possession of peace will necessarily modify the experience, and there is no doubt that the experience as we have it here must, in any case, be modified. It is given us, as it were, in downright black and white, without shading. No one exactly and always does what he does not approve, but the absolute way in which this is given helps us better to understand the condition; but to introduce the question of peace with God does not merely modify the experience, but alters the whole character of it. As it is plain, the apostle never raises that question here. It is simply power which he has not, and a bondage to the evil which perplexes and harasses him when he would see fruit of his life for God. (3) The result is the manifestation of what Scripture calls “the flesh.” The meaning of the term, as already said, is not difficult to comprehend. The man in the flesh is, as to his higher part, his spirit and soul, immersed, as it were, in the body. He lives a sense-life in the world around him, not drawing his motives from eternity or from the presence of God, which, in fact, he does not recognize. The man before us is not thus. God, and what is pleasing to Him, has become for him the question of his life; but the flesh itself is not, as we see, removed by this. He has not merely to struggle with it, but is rather captive to it, until he has found the secret of deliverance.

He is seeking this at present in a wrong way. He is seeking in himself a better state, in which he can find satisfaction. He puts it, of course, as a question of holiness. Does not God require holiness? Must he not produce it for Him then? God suffers him to be met with this impracticable body of sin over which he is not really master and cannot be.

In the flesh good does not dwell. To will is present with him; to work out the right, is not. The good that he would he does not practise. The evil that he would not, that he does. He repeats this over again as the distress that weighs upon him, and his own personal abhorrence of it, and right to reject it as not himself. 6. This, then, ends the experience. There is nothing more to be said about it. It is simply summed up in the words that close this part. There is a law of sin in the members. We must carefully distinguish this from the presence of sin itself.

Sin remains in us as Christians. We have always to watch, always to guard against it, but a law of sin is a very different matter. A law of sin sets sin in authority and that is surely a wholly unchristian state, although Christians have to pass through it in order to find the freedom which is proper to them. “I delight,” he says, “in the law of God according to the inner man, but I behold another law in my members warring against the law of my mind and making me captive to the law of sin which is in my members.” That ends the whole matter. Deliver himself he cannot. Find strength for this from God, still he cannot. He must come to that point in which he cries out to Another, and deliverance is really found in a way which no man could ever think out for himself or realize, except as taught of God. 7.(1) It closes then with a groan, the groan of absolute despair as to one’s self. It is not, “How shall I?” any more, but, “Who shall deliver me from the body of this death?” Immediately thereupon the answer comes: “I thank God through Jesus Christ our Lord.” It is the first time that that blessed Name comes into the whole experience. Experience it is still, but of the power of a Deliverer. There is no explanation, however, further. A great mistake has been made by interpreters generally in supposing that the verse that follows describes, in fact, the delivered man, whereas, upon the face of it there is no deliverance. It is a man in bondage and not a free man who is described there.

But, in order to find the deliverance, we must ignore entirely the divisions of the chapters and take in the first verses of the eighth chapter, which, in the common version and in the minds of most, are cut off entirely from it. Thus, the deliverance and the bondage are strangely confused. A man who is bondservant to the law of God, that law which gendereth to bondage, is taken to be the man who is consciously dead to the law by the body of Christ and over whom it has no more dominion; and the man who, with the flesh still serves the law of sin, is taken again to be the one who is free from it! The law of sin is that which the law of the Spirit delivers from. There is no “law” of sin when the law of the Spirit has thus delivered. Thus it is plain that on neither side does the last verse of the chapter describe the freeman.

It is a going back, rather, to the old experience, in order that now there may be the full explanation Of the way of deliverance. That has not yet been given. To say that Christ is the Deliverer does not describe the deliverance, and it would be indeed a poor conclusion, after all the misery of this experience that we have been through, to find absolutely no account of the way out. (2) The last verse, therefore, is still the bondage. The man distinguishes indeed himself from himself, but we have seen that he was able to do that before this. That, in fact, is not a deliverance. He is still, as he says, a bondservant in both respects, as to the law and as to sin. The answer comes in the assurance which immediately follows now, that, “There is now, therefore, no condemnation to them that are in Christ Jesus.” That may seem to lead us hack to the question of justification, but there is more than that here. Justification may be indeed the basis, as it is of necessity all through, but the law which delivers him is found in the principle developed for us in the sixth chapter, as already stated, the law of the Spirit, of life in Christ Jesus. “In Christ” means identification with Christ, and it is manifest that when a soul is able to identify himself in a full, practical way, with the Christ who is before God for him, he is at once out of the condition which has just made him utter the groan of despair.

If he can find his true self in Christ, Christ is not in the bondage; there is in Him no body of sin, no sin at all, much less a law of it, and he is in Him before God. That may not seem at first to settle the difficulty.

If it be a question of power, it is still the man down here who has to possess this power, but in the state of self-occupation in which one under the law necessarily is, there can be no possession of power. In the vain attempt to find complacency in a spiritual condition of his own, his eyes are really off Christ, and, as we have said, he sees but his own shadow. God allows this, in order that Christ may be indeed a constant necessity to him and that he may cease to think of himself, good self or bad self, to rejoice in the One who is made all things to him. Thus we shall find in what follows, that there is this singular result. In the conflict which still may be, as we find it in the eighth chapter, the adversaries are no longer one self to another self, but the Spirit to the flesh. Strange it may seem that the flesh remains while the very one of whom he speaks as himself, through this experience which has just been recited, now, nevertheless, drops out entirely.

It is not self at war with self any more. The self that would have gained the battle is really out of the battle.

It is the Spirit who leads, and who alone can lead in the path of victory, and where we have the Spirit, it is of necessity Christ who is before the soul, and not self in any wise. (3) The words of the second verse have, I doubt not, been also read without their due emphasis. It is not simply “the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus hath set me free,” it is not “the law of the Spirit of life,” but there is the clear statement now of what the law of the Spirit, that is, the ruling principle which has come to displace the law of sin, in fact is. The law of the Spirit is that of life in Christ Jesus. We reckon ourselves “dead indeed unto sin, but alive unto God in Christ Jesus.” Our life is only there, in Him. This is not a mere principle of truth embraced. It is a change which enables the Spirit of God now to be freely upon our side.

Through all that we have had in the past chapter, the Spirit most evidently has no place in the experience. The Spirit’s law is that we are, for power as well as for peace, for holiness as well as for justification, in Christ wholly. Life in Christ Jesus is the answer to the death which the law preached, and I am free to forget myself entirely in Him. This self-forgetfulness the legal man dreads, as being almost the same as unholiness. Are we free to forget ourselves after this manner? But, in fact, self-consciousness is that which spoils every Christian grace.

To remember Christ, is of necessity holiness. To identify ourselves with Him as God has identified us, is to give us the highest possible rule of practice, but not merely that; it is to give us also the power which we seek. Christ becomes in it the object before us. We live not to glorify ourselves, but to glorify Him. Here, therefore, we are in full accord with the Spirit, and the result is absolutely sure. (4) This is explained directly. It was impossible for the law to help us. It was weak through the unconquerable flesh. It required from us that which we could never furnish, and the end in this direction, as we have seen, is simply and rightly the despair of self altogether, but God has effaced self for Another; He has sent His own Son in “the likeness of sinful flesh” as the cross manifests Him, but there for sin, our sin, putting it completely away, while, at the same time condemning it utterly. Sin in the flesh is condemned, -I myself, with all that is in me, my own thoughts, my will, my wisdom, my ways, -in the cross, I see the end of it all, but the end of it in the love which has come in fully for me and which now fulfils in me the righteous requirement of the law when it is no longer simply requirement, but the Spirit of God has filled my heart with the joy of Christ. “The joy of the Lord is your strength.” I am free to give myself up to drink in this love which God has shown me and which rests upon me in Christ, in all the fulness of God’s delight in Him. I have no cause now to ask: Must not God condemn the evil in me? He has condemned it, and I read the condemnation there where I find also Himself for me in a grace which knows no conditions, and which holds me fast, therefore, forever. The Christian walk is not according to the flesh, therefore, but according to the Spirit. Self-occupation is of necessity fleshly. The Spirit of God ignores even Himself to glorify Christ.

Thus, we may speak of the Spirit even, in a way which is not spiritual. We may seek in ourselves the fruit of the Spirit, when, after all, we are not in the line of the Spirit’s testimony, and therefore not in the path of the Spirit at all.

The righteousness which the law required cannot be forgotten in the presence of Christ. I am to walk in His company now, and never part. Self-judgment is, in fact, only possible in His presence; and in His presence it is impossible not to exercise it. We have only to remember the scene which has been given us by the apostle in which we find the Lord girded for service, and the water and the towel in His hands. Has He not said: “Except I wash thee, thou hast no part with Me?” “With Me,” of course, not “in Me.” If we are to have part with Him, we must be cleansed indeed, not according to our own thoughts of what cleanness is, but according to His thoughts, and He alone can cleanse us after that fashion. If, on the other hand, the need of cleansing is discovered, I find in it the assurance of my having been thus far not with Him as I should have been.

If my eyes are off Him still, other things may attract me. I must get back to Him in order to find deliverance from the power of all else, in the presence of a love which has purchased me for itself and which has the fullest title over me.