ΡΩΜΑΙΟΥΣ

1. Is the Law Sinful? (7:7-12)

After releasing the believer from the law in 7:1-6, Paul knows the next obvious question. If the law is something we have died to, something we serve in newness rather than the oldness of the letter — has the law itself been sinful? Has the problem been with the law?

His answer is a thunderclap: mē genoito. By no means. The law has not been the problem. The law has been the diagnostician. Paul writes that he would not have known sin except by the law. He would not have known what coveting was if the commandment had not said "You shall not covet." The law did not create sin. The law revealed sin.

Think of the law as a flashlight in a dark room. The flashlight reveals the hazards on the floor — the table corners, the toys, the cord across the rug — but the flashlight is not the hazard. Switch off the flashlight and the hazards do not disappear; they only become invisible until you trip over them. The law functions the same way. It does not create the sin in our hearts. It exposes the sin that was already there.

Paul ends the section with a verse worth memorizing. Therefore the law is holy, and the commandment holy and just and good. No quarrel with the law. The problem was never with God's standard. The problem has always been with sinful hearts that the standard exposes.

2. Sin's Use of the Commandment (7:8-13)

But Paul presses further. There is something perverse in the way sinful human nature responds to the law. Tell a child not to touch the hot stove and you have just created the urgent question of how the stove feels. Tell someone whatever you do, don't think of the word "elephant" and they will think of elephants for the rest of the afternoon. The commandment does not produce the impulse, but it gives the impulse a clear target. Sin, Paul says, "taking opportunity by the commandment, produced in me all manner of evil desire."

This is not a flaw in the law. It is a feature of sin. Sin uses the very prohibitions designed to restrain it as raw material for further rebellion. The law that should have led to life becomes — through the perversity of indwelling sin — the occasion of death. Paul makes that clear in verse 13: it was not the good law that brought death; it was sin, using what is good, that worked death in him, so that sin might be exposed as exceedingly sinful.

3. The Internal War (7:14-20)

Then Paul does something most theological writers in the ancient world would not have done. He becomes intensely personal. He opens up the daily struggle of the believer with indwelling sin. The man who wrote the most important theological document in church history pauses to confess that he himself does not understand what he does. He wants the good. He hates the evil. And yet he keeps falling into the very evil he hates.

Every Christian who has ever wrestled with a long-standing sin will recognize that sentence. It does not describe failure to know what is right. It describes failure to do what one knows is right. Paul lays out the strange anatomy of this struggle. The "I" that wants the good is the new self — the believer regenerated by the Spirit. The "I" that keeps doing the evil is the residual sinful nature still resident in the body. Both are present in the same person. They are not equals — the new nature is supreme — but the old nature is not yet dead, and it goes on lobbying for its desires until the resurrection.

Paul presses the point in verse 17: Now then, it is no longer I who do it, but sin that dwells in me. He is not making an excuse. He is not trying to evade responsibility. He is identifying the source of the impulse. The new self he became at conversion is not the one generating the sin. The source is the indwelling sinful nature that has not yet been removed. The believer remains responsible — but the believer is also clear about which part of himself is the problem.

4. The Two Laws Within (7:21-23)

Out of this struggle Paul names a "law" — a principle, a regularity — that operates in his members. The Greek word nomos can mean the Mosaic Law, but it can also mean a fixed principle that always operates a certain way. Paul says he finds the principle that when I want to do good, evil is present with me. That regularity is so consistent it functions like a law.

There are several "laws" at work in Romans 7. There is the law of God — the Mosaic standard. There is the law of the mind — the inner delight in God's law that marks the new nature. There is the law in the members — the principle of indwelling sin still operating in the physical body. And the new nature and the old nature wage war in the believer every day.

This is the great Christian paradox. The believer has been justified, set free from sin's dominion, raised with Christ — and yet still wrestles with the residual presence of sin until the resurrection. Justification was instantaneous; sanctification is a war. Glorification will be the day that war ends.

5. The Wretched Man's Cry (7:24)

This realization wrings from Paul the most personal cry in the entire letter. O wretched man that I am! Who will deliver me from this body of death? Preachers often illustrate the phrase "body of death" with a cruel punishment the Roman poet Virgil tells of an ancient tyrant: living men chained to corpses, forced to drag a dead body wherever they went until they themselves died. Whether Paul had that story in mind is uncertain, but the picture fits. Paul says the indwelling sin still lodged in his mortal body feels like that. It is a corpse he must drag, a weight he cannot put down, an old nature not yet dead but no longer alive enough to stop fighting.

Notice that this is the cry of a believer — not an unbeliever. Unbelievers are not wretched over sin; they are comfortable in it. Only the regenerate heart cries out at the gap between what it wants to do and what it actually does. The cry of "wretched man" is itself evidence that the new nature has taken hold. The dead do not lament their corpses; the living do.

6. Thanks Be to God (7:25)

Paul does not leave us in the lament. He immediately answers his own cry. Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord!

The deliverance has already been provided. The deliverer is named. The full experience of that deliverance — the complete victory — awaits the resurrection, when the body of death will be exchanged for a body of glory. But the deliverer is at work now, and the assurance that He has secured the final victory is enough to enable the believer to keep fighting today.

Notice the final sentence of the chapter: So then, with the mind I myself serve the law of God, but with the flesh the law of sin. The two natures coexist in the believer until the resurrection. Paul does not pretend the war is over. He acknowledges it is real, and he sets up the next chapter — Romans 8 — where the Spirit's empowerment in this war becomes the theme. There is no condemnation. There is power for victory. There is glory ahead. The believer who cried "wretched man" in chapter 7 will hear in chapter 8 that nothing can separate him from the love of God in Christ Jesus.

The honest assessment of Romans 7 is the necessary doorway into the glorious confidence of Romans 8. Anyone who has not felt the wretched-man cry has not understood the depth of the war within. Anyone who has felt it but stops there has not yet heard the answer. Paul refuses to let his readers off either hook. Sin is more serious than easy religion admits; grace is more powerful than weary religion believes. Both halves of that sentence are the point of Romans 7.