Or don’t you know, brothers (for I speak to men who know the law), that the law has dominion over a man for as long as he lives? For the woman that has a husband is bound by law to the husband while he lives, but if the husband dies, she is discharged from the law of the husband. So then if, while the husband lives, she is joined to another man, she would be called an adulteress. But if the husband dies, she is free from the law, so that she is no adulteress, though she is joined to another man. Therefore, my brothers, you also were made dead to the law through the body of Christ, that you would be joined to another, to him who was raised from the dead, that we might produce fruit to God. For when we were in the flesh, the sinful passions which were through the law worked in our members to bring out fruit to death. But now we have been discharged from the law, having died to that in which we were held; so that we serve in newness of the spirit, and not in oldness of the letter.
What shall we say then? Is the law sin? May it never be! However, I wouldn’t have known sin, except through the law. For I wouldn’t have known coveting, unless the law had said, “You shall not covet.” But sin, finding occasion through the commandment, produced in me all kinds of coveting. For apart from the law, sin is dead. I was alive apart from the law once, but when the commandment came, sin revived, and I died. The commandment which was for life, this I found to be for death;
John Calvin 1540 · Public Domain On vv1, 2, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10 Though he had, in a brief manner, sufficiently explained…
Though he had, in a brief manner, sufficiently explained the question respecting the abrogation of the law; yet as it was a difficult one, and might have given rise to many other questions, he now shows more at large how the law, with regard to us, is become abrogated; and then he sets forth what good is thereby done to us: for while it holds us separated from Christ and bound to itself, it can do nothing but condemn us. And lest any one should on this account blame the law itself, he takes up and confutes the objections of the flesh, and handles, in a striking manner, the great question respecting the use of the law.
1. Know ye not, etc. Let the general proposition be that the law was given to men for no other end but to regulate the present life, and that it belongs not to those who are dead: to this he afterwards subjoins this truth — that we are dead to it through the body of Christ. Some understand, that the dominion of the law continues so long to bind us as it remains in force. But as this view is rather obscure, and does not harmonize so well with the proposition which immediately follows, I prefer to follow those who regard what is said as referring to the life of man, and not to the law. The question has indeed a peculiar force, as it affirms the certainty of what is spoken; for it shows that it was not a thing new or unknown to any of them, but acknowledged equally by them all.
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(For to those who know the law I speak.) This parenthesis is to be taken in the same sense with the question, as though he had said — that he knew that they were not so unskilful in the law as to entertain any doubt on the subject. And though both sentences might be understood of all laws, it is yet better to take them as referring to the law of God, which is the subject that is discussed. There are some who think that he ascribes knowledge of the law to the Romans, because the largest part of the world was under their power and government; but this is puerile: for he addressed in part the Jews or other strangers, and in part common and obscure individuals; nay, he mainly regarded the Jews, with whom he had to do respecting the abrogation of the law: and lest they should think that he was dealing captiously with them, he declares that he took up a common principle, known to them all, of which they could by no means be ignorant, who had from their childhood been brought up in the teaching of the law.
John Calvin's Commentaries (1540-1563) — public domain. Text from the Calvin Translation Society English edition (1840s-50s) via the Christian Classics Ethereal Library (ccel.org). Calvin's coverage is partial (roughly two-thirds of the Bible); uncommented books and verses are honest gaps, never fabricated. The 19th-century editor's footnotes and remarks are omitted so the notes are faithfully Calvin's own voice.
Geneva Bible translators 1599 · Public Domain On vv1, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10 By propounding the similitude of a marriage, he compareth…
By propounding the similitude of a marriage, he compareth the state of man both before and after regeneration together. The law of matrimony, saith he, is this, that so long as the husband liveth, the marriage abideth in force, but if he be dead, the woman may marry again.
Geneva Bible (1599) marginal notes — public domain.
John Trapp 1656 · Public Domain On vv1–10 1 Know ye not, brethren, (for I speak to…
1 Know ye not, brethren, (for I speak to them that know the law,) how that the law hath dominion over a man as long as he liveth?
Ver. 1. Know ye not, brethren] Bellarmine saith of his Romans (more true perhaps of these), Romani sicut non acumina, ita nec imposturas habent. As they are not very knowing, so not cunning to deceive.
John Trapp, A Commentary or Exposition upon All the Books of the Old and New Testament (1647–1656) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword module.
Matthew Poole 1685 · Public Domain On vv1, 2, 3, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10 The apostle, having showed in a former chapter how…
The apostle, having showed in a former chapter how believers are freed from the dominion of sin, proceeds in this chapter to declare, that they are free also from the yoke of the Mosaical law, because that was dead to them, and they to it. This he illustrates, and proceeds by the familiar allegory of a husband and his wife: Look, as a wife is free from her husband when he is dead, and may then marry another, and be no adulteress; so believers are dead to the law, and are free to be married to another, even to Christ, that is raised from the dead, that upon their marriage they may bring forth fruit unto God.
By the law here he means the law of wedlock, or the law of Moses about that matter, as appears by the instance given in the next verse.
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The word man here is common to both sexes, and may be applied to either, for both are subject to the aforementioned law.
Matthew Poole's English Annotations on the Holy Bible (1683–1685) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword/MySword module.
William Burkitt 1703 · Public Domain On vv1, 2, 5, 7, 8, 9, 10 As if the apostle had said, "You Jews, who…
As if the apostle had said, "You Jews, who study the law and are well acquainted with it, cannot but know that the law of God hath power over a man to require of him exact, perfect, and perpetual obedience, and to accuse, condemn, and bind him over to the curse for the least breach and violation of it; and all this a long as he liveth under the law, and is not freed from the malediction of it by faith in Christ"
Learn hence, 2. That the law of God, in the force and strength of it, and as considered in itself, is a very hard lord and master, exacting perfect, personal, and perpetual obedience to its commands and binding sinners over to the curse for the least transgression and violation of it.
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Learn, 2. That Jesus Christ has freed all believers from the rigour of the law, from the curse of the law, and from the irritation of the law: that is, from the power which is in the law, to stir them up in sin through the corruption of their own hearts and natures.
Blessed be God! we are by Christ freed from, and dead to the law, as a covenant of life; but we are under it, and may we all our days sit under the shadow of it with great delight, as an eternal rule of holy living.
William Burkitt's Expository Notes on the New Testament (1700–1703) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword module.
Matthew Henry 1710 · Public Domain On vv1, 7 Among other arguments used in the foregoing chapter to…
Among other arguments used in the foregoing chapter to persuade us against sin, and to holiness, this was one (Rom 7:14), that we are not under the law; and this argument is here further insisted upon and explained (Rom 7:6): We are delivered from the law. What is meant by this? And how is it an argument why sin should not reign over us, and why we should walk in newness of life? 1. We are delivered from the power of the law which curses and condemns us for the sin committed by us. The sentence of the law against us is vacated and reversed, by the death of Christ, to all true believers. The law saith, The soul that sins shall die; but we are delivered from the law. The Lord has taken away thy sin, thou shalt not die. We are redeemed from the curse of the law, Gal 3:13. 2. We are delivered from that power of the law which irritates and provokes the sin that dwelleth in us. This the apostle seems especially to refer to (Rom 7:5): The motions of sins which were by the law. The law, by commanding, forbidding, threatening, corrupt and fallen man, but offering no grace to cure and strengthen, did but stir up the corruption, and, like the sun shining upon a dunghill, excite and draw up the filthy steams. We being lamed by the fall, the law comes and directs us, but provides nothing to heal and help our lameness, and so makes us halt and stumble the more. Understand this of the law not as a rule, but as a covenant of works. Now each of these is an argument why we should be holy; for here is encouragement to endeavours, though in many things we come short. We are under grace, which promises strength to do what it commands, and pardon upon repentance when we do amiss. This is the scope of these verses in general, that, in point of profession and privilege, we are under a covenant of grace, and not under a covenant of works - under the gospel of Christ, and not under the law of Moses. The difference between a law-state and a gospel-state he had before illustrated by the similitude of rising to a new life, and serving a new master; now here he speaks of is under the similitude of being married to a new husband.
I. Our first marriage was to the law, which, according to the law of marriage, was to continue only during the life of the law. The law of marriage is binding till the death of one of the parties, no matter which, and no longer. The death of either discharges both. For this he appeals to themselves, as persons knowing the law (Rom 7:1): I speak to those that know the law. It is a great advantage to discourse with those that have knowledge, for such can more readily understand and apprehend a truth. Many of the Christians at Rome were such as had been Jews, and so were well acquainted with the law. One has some hold of knowing people. The law hath power over a man as long as he liveth; in particular, the law of marriage hath power; or, in general, every law is so limited - the laws of nations, of relations, of families, etc. 1. The obligation of laws extends no further; by death the servant who, while he lived, was under the yoke, is freed from his master, Job 3:19. 2. The condemnation of laws extends no further; death is the finishing of the law. Actio moritur cum person - The action expires with the person. The severest laws could but kill the body, and after that there is no more that they can do. Thus while we were alive to the law we were under the power of it - while we were in our Old Testament state, before the gospel came into the world, and before it came with power into our hearts. Such is the law of marriage (Rom 7:2), the woman is bound to her husband during life, so bound to him that she cannot marry another; if she do, she shall be reckoned an adulteress, Rom 7:3. It will make her an adulteress, not only to be defiled by, but to be married to, another man; for that is so much the worse, upon this account, that it abuses an ordinance of God, by making it to patronise the uncleanness. Thus were we married to the law (Rom 7:5): When we were in the flesh, that is, in a carnal state, under the reigning power of sin and corruption - in the flesh as in our element - then the motions of sins which were by the law did work in our members, we were carried down the stream of sin, and the law was but as an imperfect dam, which made the stream to swell the higher, and rage the more. Our desire was towards sin, as that of the wife towards her husband, and sin ruled over us. We embraced it, loved it, devoted all to it, conversed daily with it, made it our care to please it. We were under a law of sin and death, as the wife under the law of marriage; and the product of this marriage was fruit brought forth unto death, that is, actual transgressions were produced by the original corruption, such as deserve death. Lust, having conceived by the law (which is the strength of sin, Co1 15:56), bringeth forth sin, and sin, when it is finished, bringeth forth death, Jam 1:15. This is the posterity that springs from this marriage to sin and the law. This comes of the motions of sin working in our members. And this continues during life, while the law is alive to us, and we are alive to the law.
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II. Our second marriage is to Christ: and how comes this about? Why,
1. We are freed, by death, from our obligation to the law as a covenant, as the wife is from her obligation to her husband, Rom 7:3. This resemblance is not very close, nor needed it to be. You are become dead to the law, Rom 7:4. He does not say, "The law is dead" (some think because he would avoid giving offence to those who were yet zealous for the law), but, which comes all to one, You are dead to the law. As the crucifying of the world to us, and of us to the world, amounts to one and the same thing, so doth the law dying, and our dying to it. We are delivered from the law (Rom 7:6), katērgēthēmen - we are nulled as to the law; our obligation to it as a husband is cassated and made void. And then he speaks of the law being dead as far as it was a law of bondage to us: That being dead wherein we were held; not the law itself, but its obligation to punishment and its provocation to sin. It is dead, it has lost its power; and this (Rom 7:4) by the body of Christ, that is, by the sufferings of Christ in his body, by his crucified body, which abrogated the law, answered the demands of it, made satisfaction for our violation of it, purchased for us a covenant of grace, in which righteousness and strength are laid up for us, such as were not, nor could be, by the law. We are dead to the law by our union with the mystical body of Christ. By being incorporated into Christ in our baptism professedly, in our believing powerfully and effectually, we are dead to the law, have no more to do with it than the dead servant, that is free from his master, hath to do with his master's yoke.
2. We are married to Christ. The day of our believing is the day of our espousals to the Lord Jesus. We enter upon a life of dependence on him and duty to him: Married to another, even to him who is raised from the dead, a periphrasis of Christ and very pertinent here; for as our dying to sin and the law is in conformity to the death of Christ, and the crucifying of his body, so our devotedness to Christ in newness of life is in conformity to the resurrection of Christ. We are married to the raised exalted Jesus, a very honourable marriage. Compare Co2 11:2; Eph 5:29. Now we are thus married to Christ, (1.) That we should bring forth fruit unto God, Rom 7:4. One end of marriage is fruitfulness: God instituted the ordinance that he might seek a godly seed, Mal 2:15. The wife is compared to the fruitful vine, and children are called the fruit of the womb. Now the great end of our marriage to Christ is our fruitfulness in love, and grace, and every good work. This is fruit unto God, pleasing to God, according to his will, aiming at his glory. As our old marriage to sin produced fruit unto death, so our second marriage to Christ produces fruit unto God, fruits of righteousness. Good works are the children of the new nature, the products of our union with Christ, as the fruitfulness of the vine is the product of its union with the root. Whatever our professions and pretensions may be, there is no fruit brought forth to God till we are married to Christ; it is in Christ Jesus that we are created unto good works, Eph 2:10. The only fruit which turns to a good account is that which is brought forth in Christ. This distinguishes the good works of believers from the good works of hypocrites and self-justifiers that they are brought forth in marriage, done in union with Christ, in the name of the Lord Jesus, Col 3:17. This is, without controversy, one of the great mysteries of godliness. (2.) That we should serve in newness of spirit, and not in the oldness of the letter, Rom 7:6. 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: we must now serve in newness of spirit, by new spiritual rules, from new spiritual principles, in spirit and in truth, Joh 4:24. There must be a renovation of our spirits wrought by the spirit of God, and in that we must serve. Not in the oldness of the letter; that is, we must not rest in mere external services, as the carnal Jews did, who gloried in their adherence to the letter of the law, and minded not the spiritual part of worship. The letter is said to kill with its bondage and terror, but we are delivered from that yoke that we may serve God without fear, in holiness and righteousness, Luk 1:74, Luk 1:75. We are under the dispensation of the Spirit, and therefore must be spiritual, and serve in the spirit. Compare with this Co2 3:3, Co2 3:6, etc. It becomes us to worship within the veil, and no longer in the outward court.
Matthew Henry's Commentary on the Whole Bible (1708–1710) — public domain (CC PDM 1.0). Text via the HelloAO Bible API.
John Gill 1763 · Public Domain On vv1–10 Know ye not, brethren,.... The apostle having asserted, Rom…
Know ye not, brethren,.... The apostle having asserted, Rom 6:14, that the believing Romans were "not under the law"; which he knew would be displeasing to many, and excepted to by them, especially the Jews that were among them, who though they believed in Christ, yet were zealous of the law, takes it up again, and explains and defends it. That they were the Jewish converts at Rome he here particularly addresses, appears partly from his calling them "brethren", for they were so according to the flesh, as well as in a spiritual relation, and this he rather mentions to soften their resentments, and conciliate their minds to him; and partly from the words included in a parenthesis,
for I speak to them that know the law; not the law of nature, but the law of Moses, as the Jews did, being trained up in the knowledge of it; to these he appeals, saying, "know ye not", for the truth of a principle or maxim he afterwards improves, which they could not be ignorant of,
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how that the law hath dominion over a man as long as he, or "it",
liveth; for the word "liveth" may refer either to man or to the law. The law may be said to live, when it is in full force, and to be dead, when it is abrogated and disannulled; now whilst it lives, or is in force, it has dominion over a man; it can require and command obedience of him, and in case of disobedience can condemn him, and inflict punishment on him: and this power it has also as long as the man lives who is under it, but when he is dead it has no more dominion over him; then "the servant is free from his master", Job 3:19; that is, from the law of his master; and children are free from the law of their parents, the wife from the law of her husband, and subjects from the law of their prince. This is so clear a point that none can doubt of it. The Jews have a saying (d), that
"when a man is dead, he becomes , free from the law, and from the commands.''
(d) T. Bab. Sabbat, fol. 30. 1. Niddah, fol. 61. 2. & T. Hieros. Kilaim, fol. 32. 1.
John Gill's Exposition of the Whole Bible (1746–1763) — public domain (CC PDM 1.0). Text via the HelloAO Bible API.
John Wesley 1765 · Public Domain On vv1, 2, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10 The apostle continues the comparison between the former and…
The apostle continues the comparison between the former and the present state of a believer, and at the same time endeavours to wean the Jewish believers from their fondness for the Mosaic law. I speak to them that know the law - To the Jews chiefly here. As long - So long, and no longer. As it liveth - The law is here spoken of, by a common figure, as a person, to which, as to an husband, life and death are ascribed. But he speaks indifferently of the law being dead to us, or we to it, the sense being the same.
John Wesley, Explanatory Notes Upon the Whole Bible (1754–1765) — public domain. Text via the GEBible commentary corpus.
Adam Clarke 1810 · Public Domain On vv1–10 The law has power over a man as long…
CHAPTER VII.
The law has power over a man as long as he lives, 1.
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And a wife is bound to her husband only as long as he lives,
2, 3.
Christian believers are delivered from the Mosaic law by Christ
Jesus, and united to God, 5-7.
By the law is the knowledge of sin, 8.
But it gives no power over it, 9-11.
Yet it is holy, just, and good, 12.
How it convinces of sin, and brings into bondage, 13-24.
No deliverance from its curse but by Jesus Christ, 25.
NOTES ON CHAP. VII.
The apostle having, in the preceding chapter, shown the converted Gentiles the obligations they were under to live a holy life, addresses himself here to the Jews who might hesitate to embrace the Gospel; lest, by this means, they should renounce the law, which might appear to them as a renunciation of their allegiance to God. As they rested in the law, as sufficient for justification and sanctification, it was necessary to convince them of their mistake. That the law was insufficient for their justification the apostle had proved, in chapters iii., iv., and v.; that it is insufficient for their sanctification he shows in this chapter; and introduces his discourse by showing that a believing Jew is discharged from his obligations to the law, and is at liberty to come under another and much happier constitution, viz. that of the Gospel of Christ, Ro 7:1-4. In Ro 7:5 he gives a general description of the state of a Jew, in servitude to sin, considered as under mere law. In Ro 7:6 he gives a summary account of the state of a Christian, or believing Jew, and the advantages he enjoys under the Gospel. Upon Ro 7:5 he comments, from Ro 7:7-25, and upon Ro 7:6 he comments, Ro 8:1-11.
In explaining his position in Ro 7:5 he shows:
1. That the law reaches to all the branches and latent principles of sin, Ro 7:7.
2. That it subjected the sinner to death, Ro 7:8-12, without the expectation of pardon.
3. He shows the reason why the Jew was put under it, Ro 7:13.
4. He proves that the law, considered as a rule of action, though it was spiritual, just, holy, and good in itself, yet was insufficient for sanctification, or for freeing a man from the power of inbred sin.
For, as the prevalency of sensual appetites cannot wholly extinguish the voice of reason and conscience, a man may acknowledge the law to be holy, just, and good, and yet his passions reign within him, keeping him in the most painful and degrading servitude, while the law supplied no power to deliver him from them, Ro 7:14-24, as that power can only be supplied by the grace of Jesus Christ, Ro 7:25. See Taylor.
Verse 1. For I speak to them that know the law] This is a proof that the apostle directs this part of his discourse to the Jews.
As long as he liveth?] Or, as long as It liveth; law does not extend its influence to the dead, nor do abrogated laws bind. It is all the same whether we understand these words as speaking of a law abrogated, so that it cannot command; or of its objects being dead, so that it has none to bind. In either case the law has no force.
Adam Clarke's Commentary on the Bible (1810–1826) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword/MySword module.
Joseph Benson 1811 · Public Domain On vv1, 4, 5, 7, 9 Rom 7:1-3. Know ye not, brethren — The apostle,…
Rom 7:1-3. Know ye not, brethren — The apostle, having shown that justified and regenerated persons are free from the dominion of sin, shows here that they are also free from the yoke of the Mosaic law, it being dead to them, Rom 7:6; and they to it, Rom 7:4 : for I speak to them that know the law — To the Jews or proselytes chiefly here; that the law — The Mosaic dispensation in general, to which you were espoused by Moses; hath dominion over a man — Over a Jew married to it, and engaged to observe it; as long as he — Rather, as long as it liveth; that is, abideth in force, and no longer. For it would be contrary to the apostle’s design, to suppose the sense of this to be as our translation renders it, as long as he, that is, the man in question, liveth; for he professedly endeavours to prove that they had outlived their obligations to the law. But the rendering here proposed is natural, and suits the connection with the following verses, in which the law is represented as their first husband, whose decease left them free to be married to Christ. The law is here spoken of, by a common figure, as a person to which, as to a husband, life and death are ascribed. It is as if he had said, The dominion of the law over particular persons can, at the utmost, last no longer than till it is itself abrogated; for that is, as it were, its death; since the divine authority going along with it was the very life and soul of it. Suppose that to cease, and the letter of the precept becomes but a dead thing, and with respect to its obligations, as if it had never been. But he speaks indifferently of the law being dead to us, or us to it, the sense being the same. For the woman, &c. — Just as it is, according to the law itself, with respect to the power of a husband over his wife, who is bound by the law to be subject to her husband so long as he liveth —
The law here referred to is not merely that particular branch of the law of Moses which respected marriage, but also and especially the law of marriage promulgated in paradise, Gen 2:24; whereby our Lord declared marriages were appointed to continue for life, except in the case of adultery, Mat 19:6. This argument was peculiarly adapted to the Jews, whose connection with God, as their king, was represented by God himself under the idea of a marriage, solemnized with them at Sinai. But if the husband — To whom she was bound, be dead, she is loosed —
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From that law, which gave him a peculiar property in her. So then, if while her husband liveth, γενηται ανδρι ετερω, she become the property of another man, &c. — The apostle, says Theodoret, “does not consider here the permission given by the law of Moses to the woman divorced to be married to another, as being taught by Christ not to approve of such divorces; but he seems only to intimate that she had no power to dissolve this bond by putting away her husband, or that this divorce rendered her husband dead in law to her, she being not to return to him again. Deu 24:4.” Perhaps we ought rather to say, he speaks in the general, not entering exactly into every excepted case that might be imagined. To infer, therefore, hence, as some have done, that adultery is not a sufficient foundation for divorce, is very unreasonable. But if her husband be dead, she is free from that law — Which bound her to be in subjection, and yield conjugal affection to her husband only; so that she is no more an adulteress — Subject to the shame and punishment of one; though she be married, γενομενην ανδοι ετερω, becoming the property of another man; for death, having interposed between them, hath dissolved the former relation. He is dead to her, and she to him.
Joseph Benson's Commentary on the Old and New Testaments (1811–1818) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword module.
Albert Barnes 1834 · Public Domain On vv1–10 Know ye not - This is an appeal to…
Know ye not - This is an appeal to their own observation respecting the relation between husband and wife. The illustration Rom 7:2-3 is designed simply to show that as when a man dies, and the connection between him and his wife is dissolved, his Law ceases to be binding on her, so also a separation has taken place between Christians and the Law, in which they have become dead to it, and they are not now to attempt to draw their life and peace from it, but from that new source with which they are connected by the gospel, Rom 7:4.
For I speak to them ... - Probably the apostle refers here more particularly to the Jewish members of the Roman church, who were qualified particularly to understand the nature of the Law, and to appreciate the argument. That there were many Jews in the church at Rome has been shown (see Introduction); but the illustration has no exclusive reference to them. The Law to which he appeals is sufficiently general to make the illustration intelligible to all people.
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That the law - The immediate reference here is probably to the Mosaic Law. But what is here affirmed is equally true of all laws.
Hath dominion - Greek, Rules; exercises lordship. The Law is here personified, and represented as setting up a lordship over a man, and exacting obedience.
Over a man - Over the man who is under it.
As long as he liveth - The Greek here may mean either “as he liveth,” or” as it liveth,” that is, the law. But our translation has evidently expressed the sense. The sense is, that death releases a man from the laws by which he was bound in life. It is a general principle, relating to the laws of the land, the law of a parent, the law of a contract, etc. This general principle the apostle proceeds to apply in regard to the Law of God.
Albert Barnes' Notes on the Bible (1834–1885) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword/MySword module.
Haydock's Catholic Bible Commentary 1859 · Public Domain On vv1, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9 As long as it liveth; or, as long as…
As long as it liveth; or, as long as he liveth. (Challoner) --- This seems the literal construction, rather than as long as he, the man, liveth. For St. Paul here compares the law (which in the Greek is in the masculine gender) to the husband, whom a wife cannot quit, nor be married to another, as long as the husband liveth, without being an adulteress: but if the husband be dead, (as the law of Moses is now dead, and no longer obligatory after the publishing of the new law of Christ) the people that were Jews, and under the Jewish law, are now free from that former husband, to wit, the written law of Moses. Nay, this people also are become dead to the law, (ver. 4.) because the law itself is dead by the body of Christ, or, as in the Greek, by reason of the body of Christ offered and sacrificed for you, and for all on the cross: so that now you must look upon yourselves as spiritually married to him: which agrees with what follows, that you may belong to another, (in the Greek, to another husband) to Christ, who is risen from the dead, and is now the spouse of your souls. (Witham)
George Leo Haydock (1774–1849), Haydock's Catholic Family Bible and Commentary, 1859 edition — public domain. Excludes Psalms (Douay-Rheims chapter numbering differs from Protestant) and Deuterocanonical books (Catholic canon only).
John Nelson Darby 1862 · Public Domain On v1 Romans Chapter 7
Romans Chapter 7
We have considered the effect of the death and resurrection of Christ with reference to justification and to practical life. In the early part of the epistle (to Rom 5:11) He has died for our sins. From chapter 5:12, He having died, we reckon ourselves dead to sin and alive to God through Him. Our state as under the two heads, Adam and Christ, has been discussed. Another point remained to be treated of by the apostle-the effect of this last doctrine upon the question of the law. The Christian, or, to say better, the believer, has part in Christ as a Christ who has died, and lives to God, Christ being raised from the dead through Him. What is the force of this truth with regard to the law (for the law has only power over a man so long as he lives)? Being then dead, it has no longer any hold upon him. This is our position with regard to the law. Does that weaken its authority? No. For we say that Christ has died, and so have we therefore; but the law no longer applies to one that is dead.
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In bringing out the effect of this truth, the apostle uses the example of the law of marriage. The woman would be an adulteress if she were to be to another while her husband was alive; but when her husband is dead she is free. The application of this rule changes the form of the truth. It is certain that one cannot be under the authority of two husbands at once. One excludes the other. The law, and Christ risen, cannot be associated in their authority over the soul. But in our case the law does not lose its force (that is, its rights over us) by its dying, but by our dying. It reigns over us only while we live. It is with this destruction of the bond by death the apostle began. The husband died, but in application it is annulled by our dying. We are then dead to the law by the body of Christ (for we have to do with a Christ risen after His death), that we should be to Him who is raised from the dead, in order that we should bear fruit for God; but we cannot belong to the two at once.
When we were in the flesh-when, as man, any one was held to be walking in the responsibility of a man living in the life of nature, as a child of Adam, the law to him was the rule and perfect measure of that responsibility, and the representative of the authority of God. The passions which impelled to sin acted in that nature, and, meeting with this barrier of the law, found in it that which, by resisting it, excited the will, and suggested, even by the prohibition itself, the evil which the flesh loved and which the law forbade; and thus these passions acted in the members to produce fruit which brought in death. But now he was outside its authority, he had disappeared from its pursuit, [35] being dead in that law to the authority of which we had been subjected. Now to have died under the law would have been also condemnation; but it is Christ who went through this and took the condemnation, while we have the deliverance from the old man which is in death. Our old man is crucified with Him, so that it is our deliverance to die to the law. It did but condemn us, but its authority ends with the life of him who was under that authority. And being dead in Christ, the law can no longer reach those who had been under it: we belong to the new husband, to Christ risen, in order that we should serve in newness of spirit, the goodwill of grace in our new life, and-as the apostle will afterwards explain, by the Holy Ghost [36] -not in the bondage of the letter.
This is the doctrine. Now for the conclusions that may be deduced from it. Is the law, then, sin, that we are withdrawn from its authority? By no means. But it gave the knowledge of sin, and imputed it. For the apostle says, that he would not have understood that the mere impulse of his nature was sin, if the law had not said, Thou shalt not covet. But the commandment gave sin occasion to attack the soul. Sin, that evil principle of our nature,[37] making use of the commandment to provoke the soul to the sin that is forbidden (but which it took occasion to suggest by the interdiction itself, acting also on the will which resisted the interdiction), produced all manner of concupiscence. For, without the law, sin could not plunge the soul into this conflict, and give the sentence of death in it, by making it responsible in conscience for the sin which, without this law, it would not have known. Under the law lust acted, with the conscience of sin in the heart; and the result was death in the conscience, without any deliverance for the heart from the power of concupiscence.
Without the law, sin did not thus agitate a will which refused submission to that which checked it. For a barrier to the will awakens and excites the will: and the conscience of sin, in the presence of God’s prohibition, is a conscience under sentence of death. Thus the commandment, which in itself was unto life, became in fact unto death. “Do this and live” became death, by shewing the exigencies of God to a sinful nature whose will rejected them, and to a conscience which could not but accept the just condemnation.
A man walks in quiet indifference, doing his own will, without knowledge of God, or consequently any sense of sin or rebellion. The law comes, and he dies under its just judgment, which forbids everything that he desires. Lust was an evil thing, but it did not reveal the judgment of God; on the contrary, it forgot it. But when the law was come, sin (it is looked at here as an enemy that attacks some person or place), knowing that the will would persist and the conscience condemn, seized the opportunity of the law, impelled the man in the direction contrary to the law, and slew him, in the conscience of sin which the law forbade on the part of God. Death to the man, on God’s part in judgment, was the result. The law then was good and holy, since it forbade the sin, but in condemning the sinner.
Was death then brought in by that which was good? [38] No. But sin, in order that it might be seen in its true light, employed that which was good to bring death upon the soul; and thus, by the commandment, became exceedingly sinful. In all this, sin is personified as some one who seeks to kill the soul.
Such then was the effect of the law, that first husband, seeing sin existed in man. To bring this out more plainly, the apostle communicates his spiritual apprehension of the experience of a soul under the law.
We must remark here, that the subject treated of is not the fact of the conflict between the two natures, but the effect of the law, supposing the will to be renewed, and the law to have obtained the suffrage of the conscience and to be the object of the heart’s affections-a heart which recognises the spirituality of the law. This is neither the knowledge of grace, nor of the Saviour Christ, nor of the Spirit. [39] The chief point here is not condemnation (although the law does indeed leave the soul under judgment), but the entire want of strength to fulfil it, that it may not condemn us. The law is spiritual; but I, as man, am carnal, the slave of sin, whatever the judgment of my inward man may be: for I allow not that which I do. That which I would I do not; and that which I hate I practise. Thus loving and thus hating, I consent to the law that it is good. It is not that I do the evil as to moral intent of the will, for I would not the evil which I do; on the contrary I hate it. It is the sin then that dwells in me, for in fact in me (that is, in my flesh-the whole natural man as he is) there exists no good, for even where there is the will, I do not find the way to perform any good. Power is totally wanting.
InRomans 7:20 the apostle, having this explanation, lays stress upon the I and me. “If that which I myself would” (we should read), and “It is no longer myself that does it, but the sin that dwelleth in me.” I find then evil present with the myself which would do good; for, as to the inward man, I delight in the law of God. But there is in me another constant principle which wars against the law of my mind, which brings me into captivity to this law of sin in my members. So that, whatever my desires may be, the better even that they are, I am myself a miserable man. Being man, and such a man, I cannot but be miserable. But, having come to this, an immense step has been taken.
The evil here spoken of is the evil that is in our nature, and the want of power to get rid of it. The forgiveness of sins hadbeen fully taught. What distresses here is the present working of sin which we cannot get rid of The sense of this is often a more painful thing than past sins, which the believer can understand as put away by the blood of Christ. But here we have the conscience of sin still in us, though we may hate it, and the question of deliverance is mixed up with our experience, at least till we have learned what is taught us in this part of the epistle, to judge the old man as sin in us, not ourselves, and reckon ourselves dead. Christ, through whom we now live, having died, and being a sacrifice for sin, our condemnation is impossible, while sin is condemned and we free through “the law of the Spirit of life in him.” It is not forgiveness, but deliverance, sin in the flesh being condemned in the cross.
Under divine grace the renewed man learned three things. First, he has come to the discovery that in him, that is, in his flesh, there is no good thing; but, secondly, he has learned to distinguish between himself, who wills good, and sin which dwells in him; but, further, that when he wills good, sin is too strong for him. Having thus acquired knowledge of himself, he does not seek to be better in the flesh, but deliverance, and he has it in Christ. Power comes after. He is come to the discovery and to the confession that he has no power. He throws himself upon another. He does not say, How can I? or, How shall I? but, Who shall deliver me? Now it was when we were devoid of all strength that Christ died for the ungodly. This want of strength is discovered; and we find grace at the end, when with regard to what we are, and to all hope of amelioration in ourselves, grace is our only resource.
But happily, when we cast ourselves upon grace, there is nothing but grace before us. Deliverance is accomplished by our not being alive in the flesh at all: we have died away from it, and from under the law, which held us in bondage and condemnation, and we are married to another, Christ raised from the dead; and as soon as the distressed soul has said, “Who shall deliver me?” the answer is ready, “I thank God through Jesus Christ our Lord.” The answer is not, He will deliver. Deliverance is already accomplished: he gives thanks.
The man was wretched in conflict under law, without knowledge of redemption. But he has died in the death of Christ out of the nature which made him so; he has quite done with himself. The deliverance of God is complete. The two natures are still opposed to each other, but the deliverance is not imperfect. This deliverance wrought of God, and the progress of its manifestation, are developed in the next chapter.
We may here remark that the apostle does not say, “We know that the law is spiritual, and we are carnal.” Had he done so, it would have been to speak of Christians, as such, in their proper and normal condition. It is the personal experience of what the flesh is under law, when the man is quickened, and not the state of a Christian as such before God. Observe, also, that the law is looked at from the point of view of Christian knowledge-”we know”-when we are no longer under it, and when we are capable of judging concerning its whole import, according to the spirituality of him who judges: and who sees also, being spiritual, what the flesh is; because he is now not in the flesh, but in the Spirit. [40] Literally, this passage is not the condition of anyone at all; but principles opposed to each other, the result of which is laid open by supposing a man under the law: the will always right, but good never done, evil always. Nevertheless to the conscience this is the practical condition of every renewed man under the law. We may remark one other important principle. Man in this condition is entirely taken up with himself; he desires good, he does not perform it, he does that which he would not. Neither Christ nor the Holy Ghost is named. In the normal condition of a Christian, he is occupied with Christ. But what is expressed in this seventh chapter is the natural and necessary result of the law, when the conscience is awakened and the will renewed. For to will is present with him. But he is under law, sees its spirituality, consents to it, delights in it after the inner man, and cannot perform what is good. Sin has dominion over him. The sense of unanswered responsibility, and the absence of peace, cause the soul necessarily to turn in upon itself. It is taken up entirely with self, which is spoken of nearly forty times fromRomans 7:14. It is well to be so, rather than to be insensible. It is not peace.
This peace is found elsewhere, and it is in this; when reduced to the consciousness of one’s own inability to do good towards God, one finds that God has done for us the good which we need. We are not only forgiven but delivered, and are in Christ, not in the flesh at all.
The conflict goes on, the opposition between the two natures continues, but we give thanks to God through our Lord Jesus Christ. [41] Remark here that deliverance is only found when there is the full conviction of our incapacity and want of power, as well as of our sins. It is much more difficult to arrive at this conviction of incapacity than at that of having sinned. But the sin of our nature-its irremediable perversity, its resistance to good, the law of sin in our members-is only known in its legal gravity by experience of the uselessness of our efforts to do well. Under the law the uselessness of these efforts leaves the conscience in distress and bondage, and produces the sense of its being impossible to be with God. Under grace the efforts are not useless, and the evil nature shews itself to us (either in communion with God, or by downfalls if we neglect communion) in all its deformity in presence of that grace. But in this chapter the experience of sin in the nature is presented as acquired under the law, in order that man may know himself in this position-may know what he is as regards his flesh, and that in fact he cannot succeed in this way in coming before God with a good conscience. He is under the first husband; death had not yet severed the bond as to the state of the soul.
We must now remember that this experience of the soul under the law is introduced parenthetically, to shew the sinful condition to which grace applies and the effect of the law. Our subject is that the believer has part in the death of Christ and has died, and is alive through Him who is risen; that Christ, having by grace gone under death, having been made sin, has for ever done with that state in which He had to do with sin and death in the likeness of sinful flesh; and having for ever done with all that was connected with it, has entered by resurrection into a new order of things-a new condition before God, totally beyond the reach of all that to which He had subjected Himself for us, which in us was connected with our natural life, and beyond reach of the law which bound sin upon the conscience on God’s part. In Christ we are in this new order of things.
Footnotes for Romans Chapter 7
35: It is thus, I doubt not, that this passage should be read. My reader may perhaps find “the law being dead.” The expression, “dead to that wherein we were held,” alludes toRomans 7:4, where it is said, “ye died to the law.” Christ under the law died under its curse. To be in the flesh is to live under the responsibility of a man in his natural life-a child of fallen Adam. In that life (unless it is lawless) the law is the rule of human righteousness. We must not confound the flesh being in the Christian with a man being in the flesh. The principle of the old life is still there, but it is in no way the principle of his relationship to God. When I am in the flesh, it is the principle of my relationship with God; but, its will being sinful, it is impossible that I should please God. I may seek for righteousness in it-it will be on the ground of law. But the Christian is dead by Christ to all that state of things-does not live of that life; his life is in Christ, and he has received the Holy Ghost. The flesh is no longer the principle of his relationship with God; on that ground he has owned himself lost. Elsewhere we learn that he is in Christ on the ground upon which Christ is before God. The Holy Ghost, as we shall see, places him there in power by faith, Christ being his life.
36: He does not say here by the Spirit, because he has not yet spoken of the gift of the Holy Ghost in virtue of the work of Christ. He only speaks of the manner, the character, of the service rendered.
37: It will be remembered that all through this part of the epistle (that is, from chapter 5: 12) we have to do with sin, not with sins.
38: Sin and death are correlative. The law is introduced in order to make manifest through the offence what they both are. The apostle first asks, “Is the law sin?” since its result was death to man. God forbid! but it gave the knowledge of sin, and wrote death upon the soul through judgment, man being a sinner. The second question is, “The law being thus good in itself, has it become death to me?” No. It is sin which (in order that it might appear in all its enormity) has slain me, using the law as a means, in my conscience. It found in man’s condition the means of perverting this good thing, and making it death to him.
39: There is also conflict, when the Holy Ghost dwells in us. Gal 5:1-26 speaks of this. “The flesh lusteth against the Spirit,” etc. But then we are not under the law, as the apostle goes on to say, “If ye are led by the Spirit, ye are not under the law.” Here the person spoken of is under the law: everything is in connection with the law. The law is spiritual; we consent to the law, we delight in the law. Neither Christ nor the Spirit is mentioned until the question of deliverance comes in.
40: This gives the key to this-alas! because souls are not free-much spoken-of passage. It is not the present experience of any one, but a delivered person describing the state of an undelivered one. An undelivered person could not speak exactly thus, because he is uneasy as to the result for himself. A man in a morass does not quietly describe how a man sinks into it, because he fears to sink and stay there; when he is out, he describes how a man sinks there. The end of Rom 7:1-25 is a man out of the morass shewing in peace the principle and manner in which one sinks in it. All this part of the epistle is more complicated than what precedes chapter 5: 12, because our own experience is in conflict with what faith teaches us to say. If through grace I am forgiven and justified, there is no contradiction in my experience. It is what God has done for me outside myself. My debt is paid. But if I am to say, I am dead to sin, my experience contradicts it. Hence we have no rest in this respect, till we give up self or flesh as wholly bad and irremediable, and learn that, consequent on redemption, we are not in the flesh at all. Compare chapters 7 and 8.
41: The last verse of chapter 7 speaks of the abstract mind and character of the opposed natures; one the mind, however, and purpose of heart in the renewed man; the other, the fact of flesh being there, one “I myself,” the other “my flesh.” So the “I” is right; only it is not considered under the law or the contrary.
John Nelson Darby — Synopsis of the Books of the Bible: the New Testament (c. 1857–1862) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword module.
Lange's Commentary on the Holy Scriptures 1864 · Public Domain On vv1, 7 Fourth Section.—The transition, in principle and reality, of Christians…
Fourth Section.—The transition, in principle and reality, of Christians from the service of the letter under the law into the service of the Spirit under grace, by virtue of the death of Christ. Believers should live in the consciousness that they are dead to the law.—Tholuck: “Your marriage with Christ, having taken the place of the dominion of the law, necessarily leads to such a dominion of God in a new life.”
Rom_7:1-6
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1Know ye not, brethren (for I speak to them that [those who] know the law), how [omit how] that the law hath dominion over a man as long [ἐφ̓ ὅσον κρόνον,for as long time] as he liveth? 2For the woman which hath a husband [the married woman]1 is bound by the law to her husband so long as he liveth [to the living husband]; but if the husband be dead [have died],2 sheis loosed from the law of her husband. 3So then if, while her husband liveth, she be married to another man, she shall be called an adulteress: but if her husband be dead [have died], she is free from that law; so that she Isaiah 4 no [not an]3 adulteress, though she be married to another man. Wherefore [Accordingly], my brethren, ye also are become [were made]4 dead to the law by [through] the body of Christ; [,] that [in order that]5 ye should be married to another, even to him who is [was] raised from the dead, that we should bring forth fruit unto [to]6 God. 5For when we were in the flesh, the motions [passions]7 of sins, which were by [by means of] the law, did work [ἐνηργεῖτο,, wereefficient, wrought] in our members to bring forth fruit unto [to] death. 6But now we are [have been] delivered from the law, that being dead [having died to that]8 wherein we were held; that we should serve [so that we serve]9 in newness of spirit [the Spirit],10 and not in the oldness of the letter.
EXEGETICAL AND CRITICAL
Summary.11—a. The figure of marriage and the law of marriage to describe the relations of believers to the law (Rom_7:1-3); b. The application of the figure: the marriage did not remain pure, because sin, whose motions were by the law, insinuated itself. It is dissolved by death (Rom_7:4-6).
Rom_7:1. Know ye not. [̓̀Η ἀγνοεῖτε. Comp. Rom_6:3. The particle ἤ implies a doubt, and connects always with some preceding categorical clause (Winer, p. 474).—On the connection. Meyer deems it a resumption of Rom_6:14, but immediately linked to last main thought (Rom_6:22), viz., that the Christian had his fruit unto holiness, and the end, eternal life (which is proved in Rom_6:23).—R.] Since the ἤ assumes a doubt at the beginning (Rom_3:29; Rom_6:3); the Apostle intimates that not all the believers in Rome are conscious of the whole conclusion, that the gospel has made them free from the service of the Mosaic law—a conclusion that he will now make clear to them by the figure of the law of marriage. Therefore the question, Should you not fully know the consequence of the right of marriage in case one of the couples dies? has this meaning: Should you not fully know the consequence of the death of believers by and for the law? The course of treatment is this: After having shown that they are no more under sin, with, more particular reference to the Gentiles, the Apostle now declares, with more particular reference to the Jews, that they too are no more under the law. The unity warranting this transition consists in the fact, that one cannot be under sin without being under the sense of the law, and that he cannot be under the law without being under the sense of sin. So far, therefore, our deduction extends back not only to Rom_6:14, but even to Rom_5:20; Rom_3:9; Rom_2:17. That is, the law comes into consideration here so far as it is the power of the letter, which kills (2Co_3:6)—the phenomenon is completed as the experience of sin (see Rom_7:24).
Singular views: 1. Reiche: The κυριεύειν. in Rom_7:1 refers to the χύριος in the concluding verse of chap. 6; 2. Meyer: The freedom of Christians from the law follows from the truth of the foregoing verse. But the Apostle’s transition consists in his design to show that Christians are just as dead to the law by baptism in the death of Christ, as they are dead to sin. This arises from the fact that they have received eternal life as the gift of God in Christ. They are therefore dead, by the death of Christ, to death, as a result of sin, as they are dead to death as a result of the law, according to Rom_7:24. [Meyer’s view in 4th edition is indicated above.—R.]
Brethren. Certainly not merely the Jewish Christians (according to Grotius, and others; also Tholuck, in a qualified way) are meant in this address (Meyer). Yet Meyer, in denying this, overlooks the fact that the Jewish Christians are regarded most prominently, because the point in question is respecting the law (see Rom_9:3). [The only limitation being “those who know the law,” it must be remembered that in the apostolic age, as well as since, the knowledge of the Old Testament on the part of Christians in general is presupposed.—R.]
For I speak to those who know the law. [Parenthetical, as in the E. V. Explanatory of brethren.—R.] Of what law does he speak? It must not be overlooked, that what the Apostle further adduces as the design of the law, already reminds of the law of nature. Therefore Koppe: every law is meant. Glöckler: the moral law. But though the Roman law might have a similar purport, the Apostle nevertheless means the Mosaic law itself; for the point of his argumentation is, that, according to the principles of the Mosaic law itself, Christians must be regarded as having been made free by this law. It is not necessary to prove that the Mosaic law in general, but not the law of marriage in particular (Beza, Carpzov [Bengel], and others), is meant here. The Jew did not have a separate marriage-law; yet the Mosaic law, with reference to the marriage-law, is meant.—And who are those who know the law? Explanations: 1. The Roman Christians, the majority of whom were Jewish Christans; 2. The Jewish-Christian portion, to whom Paul addresses himself in particular (Philippi, and others); 3. In addition to these, the Gentile Christians, who, as Jewish proselytes, had been entrusted with the law (De Wette, and others); 4. Tholuck calls to mind, that the Gentile Christians became acquainted with the law. [As the customs of the synagogue remained to a large extent those of the early Christian assemblies, the Old Testament was read to all believers, as indeed was necessary to their Christian instruction. One could not be a Christian even then, and remain ignorant of the law.—R.] The question in general here is not a difficult specialty of the Mosaic law, but a principle evidenced also by natural law, which, for this very reason, does not result from one passage, but from the connection of the Mosaic law. Tholuck: “One of the legal maxims current among the Jews; Este endeavors in vain to prove it from the Old Testament.” Yet the example of Ruth, Abigail, and even of the second marriage of Abraham, is more than one legal maxim current among the Jews. Moreover, the legal principle in Rom_6:7 is of kindred nature.
That the law hath dominion. We must not connect ὁ νόμος τοῦ ἀνθρώπου (Mosheim, and others), but νόμος with κυριεύει. Man is certainly, however, the man in question placed under the law. [Wordsworth explains: “The law (of Moses) is lord over the man—the human creature—whether man or woman. Comp. Chrysostom, Theodoret, Augustine.” This takes the verb in the literal sense: to be lord, and introduces the figure of the marriage at once, thus avoiding any difficulty about the special law, for the whole law is personified. Meyer seems to favor this view also.—R.]
For as long time as he liveth [ἐφ’ ὅσον χρόνον ζῇ]. According to Rom_7:2-4, the ζῇ evidently refers to the man himself, and not to the law, so that, in a metaphorical sense, it would have the force (as Origen, Erasmus, Bengel, and others think) of making the figure itself plainer. This would have been to prove first that the law has no more force. Philippi understands the ζῇν to be the old, natural life. See Tholuck on the contrary: in this case the appeal to legal knowledge would be inappropriate, and the figure already violated. The law is personified as master, just as sin is in the foregoing section. [And the point of the figure is not affected by referring the verb to the man, for whichever party dies, the relation ceases. Comp. Hodge.—R.] Meyer gives prominence to the point, that ἐφ̓ ὅσον χρόνον is emphatic.12
Rom_7:2. For the married woman is bound by the law to the living husband [ἡ γὰρὕπανδρος γυνὴ τῷ ζῶντι ἀνδρὶ δέδεταινόμω̣. A concrete explanation of the proposition of Rom_7:1 (Meyer), introduced by γάρ, which has here the force of for example (Hodge, Alford). The perfect δέδεται here denotes the continuing character of the binding (Winer, p. 255), which agrees with the emphatic ἐφ’ ὅσον χρόνον (Rom_7:1). ̔̔̔́Υπανδρος, subject to the man, married, only here in the New Testament, but current in later Greek authors.—R.] The figure in Rom_7:2-3 is quite clear, but its application is difficult. Since the law is compared with the first man, and Christ with the second, this seemed to be the application that should follow: The law, as the first man of the theocratic Church, is dead; now, the Church can be freely married to Christ. Therefore even Usteri, Rückert, and others, have remarked that the figure is not clearly carried out; and Chrysostom took the view, that Paul, through forbearance toward the Jews, reversed the relation in his application, and that, instead of saying, the law or the husband is dead, he says, You who were formerly bound by the law are dead. [So Wordsworth, who, however, joins with it several other reasons.—R.] Meyer, with Fritzsche, thus relieves the difficulty: In consequence of the unity of the matrimonial relation, death is an event common to both parties; when the husband is dead, the wife is legally dead to the husband. We may in this case ask, Why did not the Apostle conform his figure to the application, and designate the wife herself as the dead part? Clearly, because of the second marriage. This explanation of Fritzsche and Meyer (concinnity) is established by the Apostle, and also rendered emphatic by his language. As the woman is not dead, but is killed in respect to her marriage relation, or is situated as dead, by the natural death of her husband, so believers have not died a natural death, but are made dead to the law, since they are crucified to the law with Christ. The idea, dead in a marriage. relation is therefore the tertium comparationis. The θανατοῦσθαι in Rom_7:4 is therefore like the καταργεῖσθαι of a widow, in which also a death-like orphanage is indicated. That the law itself is also dead, as a letter, by its statutory application to the crucifixion of Christ, follows, without any thing further, from what has been said. Tholuck, not being satisfied with Meyer’s removal of the difficulty, seems desirous of placing himself on the side of those who give an allegorical interpretation to the passage commencing with Rom_7:2. Explanations:
1. The wife is the soul, the husband is sin; sin dies in the fellowship of believers with Christ’s death (Augustine, and others; Olshausen).
2. Only the νόμος can be regarded as the husband (Origen, Chrysostom, Calvin, Philippi). Likewise, with special reference to the sense of guilt (Luther); with special reference to sin (Spener).
De Wette and Meyer have properly rejected the introduction of allegory in Rom_7:2-3; it destroys all legal evidence of the figure. The Apostle did not avoid saying ἐθανατώθη ὁ νόμος because he wished to give a more pregnant expression to the thought, and to include in one the other side also, but because θανατοῦσθαι is different from a simple ἀποθνήσκειν, and because the retroactive inference from the act which the administration of the law has committed on the body of Christ is proximate to the dying of the law (according to Heb_8:13; decayed and waxed old). The gospel is eternally new, because it refers to only eternal relations. The law grows old from the beginning, because, in its outward and national character, it relates to transitory and ever-changing relations. Application to Catholicism and Protestantism. (All they that take the sword, &c.) ̔́Υπανδρος, viro subjecta; the wife had no right to separate herself.13
But if the husband have died, she is loosed from the law of her husband [ἐὰν δὲ αποθάνῃ ὁ ὰνήρ, κατήργηται ἀπὸ τοῦνόμουτοῦ ἀνδρός. On the conditional clause, see Textual Note2. On the verb, comp. Gal_5:4, Lange’s Comm., p. 127. The genitive is one of reference, of the object respecting which, see Winer, p. 177.—R.] That is, which relates to her husband. On the relationship of the expression χατήργηται to the ἐθανατώθητε, comp. Meyer’s translation: “She has become undone, and thereby free and absolved from the law which related to her husband (united her to him).” (See Gal_5:4.)
Rom_7:3. She shall be called an adulteress. She receives the name in a formal and legal way. And therewith she is subject to the severest punishment of the law—stoning. [Lev_21:10; comp. Joh_8:5.]
[She is free from that law, ἐλευθέραἐστὶν ἀπὸ τοῦ νόμου. The article shows that the reference is to the law of the husband, hence the E. V.: that law, is correct.—R.]
So that she is not an adulteress. Meyer insists upon the idea of design: in order that she be no adulteress; and declares this to be the design of the Divine legal ordinance—which Tholuck there pedantically finds. Yet the expression here might certainly have been chosen with reference to this application. The Judaists assuredly charged the believing Jews with apostasy, and therefore with religious adultery. Hence Paul says εἶναι instead of χρηματίζει;14 and Fritzsche has strikingly made the τοῦ μὴ εἶναι dependent on ἐλευθέρα. [All these views are alike grammatical. That of Fritzsche is harsh, however, while Meyer’s seems to be adopted more to prepare the way for the parallel he makes (Rom_7:4): in order that ye should be married to another. It is not necessary to press the figure to this extent, however.—R.]
Rom_7:4. Accordingly, my brethren. [̔́Ωστε, see Winer, p. 283.—R.] The explanation follows here first; this is not allegorical, but symbolical, because marriage represents, in the external sphere of life, what religion does in the inward and higher (Eph_5:32).—Ye also, as the widowed wife.—Were made dead to the law15 [ἐθανατώθητετ ῷ νόμω. See Textual Note4. The verb is aorist, referring to a definite act in the past, viz., the release from the law at justification.—R.] That is, in relation to the marriage-covenant. The expression ἐθανατώθητε is chosen, not merely because Christ’s death was a violent one, but also because it describes the death of Christians to the law as a death incurred by virtue of the administration of the law.
Through the body of Christ [διὰ τοῦσώματος τοῦ Χριστοῦ]. In, and, at the same time, with Him, as He was put to death. The atoning effect of the sacrificial death cannot, at all events, be the premise here, although it is included. [The aorist shows that the reference is definite; the proposition indicates the means of the death to the law. Two opinions prevail: (1) That it refers to the atoning death of Christ as the ground of justification. So Hodge, and others. It may be urged in favor of this, that this is the means or ground of justification, and that thus the antithesis to “was raised” is preserved. But the Apostle generally speaks of the death of Christ in plain terms, when he refers to it. Col_1:22, which Hodge quotes as an instance of “His body,” meaning His death, adds the qualifying phrases, “of His flesh,” “through death.” (2) With Tholuck, Meyer, Lange, and others, it may be referred to the fellowship with Christ in His death. This view accords better with the point which the Apostle has reached in his argument, as well as the idea of union with Christ underlying this passage. This does not deny, but implies the atoning efficacy of His death, which is always latent, if not patent, in the Apostle’s argument. It has been the fault of some commentators, to insist en finding an expression of it, where it is only implied.—R.]
Christians are dead, buried (chap. 6.), and risen (Col_3:1) with Christ; indeed, they are even, in principle, transported to heaven (Php_3:20). But since they are dead with Him, they are, like Him, dead “to the law through the law” (Gal_2:19). [Comp. Commentary in loco, pp. 50, 51.—R.] Calvin, Grotius, Koppe, and others, have explained, that the ἐθανατώθη τῶ νόμῳ is a milder expression for ὁ νόμ. ἐθανατώθη, ἀπέθανεν ὑμῖν. This explanation does not regard the difference between natural and violent death, nor self-destruction. The law could not be dead; this would have been revolution. As a Divine form of revelation, it had to grow old and vanish away (Heb_8:13); but as a human ordinance it has itself inflicted death. Therefore the law still retained its former historical and ethical (not religious and essential) force toward those who were not dead to it by the fellowship of Christ.
Through the body of Christ, διὰ τοῦ σώματος θανατωθέντος. It may be asked, in what relation this being dead with the body of Christ stands to the being reconciled by the body of Christ. Tholuck: “Fellowship with the death of Christ includes freedom from the καταρά of the law (Gal_3:10), and this latter, which is brought to pass by thankful love in return, includes the death of the old man to sin (Rom_6:6) and strengthening to a new life.” The becoming free from the νόμος is consummated with the development of repentance and faith—that is, with justification; the having become free from the old law is decided when the new law, the law of the Spirit, the righteousness of faith, appears (Eph_2:16).
In order that ye should be married to another [εἰς τὸ γενέσθαι ὑμᾶς ἕτερω. The clause seems to be final. In order that; the purpose of the death to the law was union to Christ.—R.] Γίνεσθαι τίνος, to become the possession of a husband. The figure of conjugal communion of the believing Church with the Lord (2Co_11:2; Eph_5:2; Eph_5:5; Rev_21:8). To another. The stronger ἕτερω̣ is here used. [And it is more closely defined, even to him who was raised from the dead, τῷ ἐκ νεκρῶν ἐγερθέντι.—With good reason is this added.—R.] Not only do Christians belong to the risen Christ because He has acquired them by His death (1 Peter i.), but also because they themselves, having been dead with Him, have become a heavenly race, a super-terrestrial people, who, as risen ones, can be united only with the Risen One; therefore their continued connection with the law of this life would be a misalliance. The common element of this new communion is the new life.
That we should bring forth fruit to God [ἵνακαρποψορήσωμεν τῶ̣ θεῶ. Final clause (so Tholuck, Meyer, De Wette, Alford). The dative is dat. commodi apparently.—R.] The figure of marriage leads to that of the fruit of marriage (Theodoret, Erasmus, Meyer, and others). Tholuck, on the contrary: “Since a reference to καρπός (Rom_6:22) occurs, and since καρπὸν ποιεῖν, ψέρειν, and even κα̇ρποψορεῖν (Mar_4:20; Luk_8:15; Col_1:10), frequently occur in a metonyme derived from the fruits of the field, as a technical Christian phrase for the practical effects of the life of faith, and the allusion recurs in Rom_7:6, where the figure is not that of marriage, it seems very unsafe to accept the figure of the fruit of children.” Reiche and Fritzsche have even rejected this interpretation, because an undignified allegory arises; they have therefore construed the figure as referring to the field, or fruits of the field. Philippi likewise; De Wette, on the contrary, accepts the former view. But the allegory of an unfruitful marriage cannot be more dignified than that of a fruitful one. Yet the spiritual fruit of righteousness, in accordance with its supersensuous nature, is produced for God, for glorifying God. [The figure must not be so pressed as to make the fruit of the marriage to God, as Father; to His glory, is the meaning.—R.]
Rom_7:5. For when we were in the flesh [ὅτε γὰρ ἦμεν ἐν τῇ σάρκι. Meyer: “The positive and characterizing expression for the negative: when we were not yet made dead to the law.” Alford: “Virtually = ‘under the law. ” Hodge; “When in your unrenewed and legal state.” For a more thorough discussion, see the Excursus in the next section.—R.] The antithesis of Rom_7:5 should serve to explain the last conclusion in Rom_7:4. The γάρ tells us: According as we were situated in our fleshly tendency, we must now also be situated in the Divine tendency. The εἶναι denotes the stand point of personality; the outward tendency of life from a definite principle. Here, therefore, the tendency of life is from the principle of the flesh. Explanations: 1. Meyer: The σάρξ, the humanity in us (what, then, would not be human in us?),16 in its opposition to the Divine will; the element of life in which we exist. The opposite to the ἀποθανόντες of Rom_7:6. 2. Theodoret, Œcumenius: In the κατὰνόμου πολντεία. The flesh is the material and external part of the body and the life. Therefore, since we stood in this external tendency, which, as an external and analytical form of life (dependent on the individual ἐπιθυμίαι), also in its better form, took the law as a combination of external and analytical precepts. [Of these, (1) is much to be preferred. Dr. Lange does not make it clear whether he adopts the view of flesh, given immediately above. There are very strong objections to it in any case.—R.]
The passions of sins [τὰ παθήματατῶν ἁμαρτ ιῶν]. According to Meyer and Tholuck, the genitive of object. “From which the sins arose.” Tholuck cites Jam_1:15 as proof. We hold, however, that sins are here denominated producers of the passions. For the passions, παθ., are not, as Tholuck holds, the same as the ἐπιθυμίαι (according to which Luther translates lusts), but they are the ἐπιθυμίαι enhanced by the impulse of the law. Then, in the case of sins arising as consequences of the παθήμ., the idea would follow that abortions to death have been produced from the marriage-bond of the law itself with man. The connection with the law assumes, therefore, at the same time, a connection with the ἁμαρτία (see Rom_6:13), and this, in the isolation of individual ἁμαρτίαι, was operative as producer by the sinful passions excited by the law in the members. The law itself did not bring forth the fruit of death; but it stirred up sin, so that the latter made the ἐπιθυμίαι into παθήματα, and thus into productive forces. [Either view is preferable to the Hendiadys: sinful feelings (Olshausen, Hodge), which is forbidden by the plural ἁμαρτιῶν. Π·αθήματα is passive (comp. Gal_5:24), and hence it is perhaps better to take the genitive, as that of the object (which led to sins), so as to accord with what is predicated in ἐνηργεῖτο.—R.]
Which were by means of the law. Τὰδιὰ τοῦ νόμου. Grotius supplies ψαινόμενα, which is too little; Meyer, sc., ὄντα, which is far too much. According to Rom_7:9, ἀναζώντα. Tholuck: “Many of the older commentators, in order not to let the law appear in too unfavorable a light, explained thus: of the knowledge of sin communicated by the law (thus Chrysostom, Ambrose, Bullinger, and others). Yet, thus construed, διὰ νόμου would stand beyond the pragmatism of the passage.” Tholuck, like Meyer, would also supply the verb. subst. [The proximity of Rom_7:7 supports the obvious meaning: occasioned by the law (Meyer: vermittelt), not caused, however.—R.]
Wrought [ἐνηργεῖτο]. Middle. Were efficient in a fruitful manner.
In our members [ἐν το·ῖς μελεσιν ἡμῶν. Hodge weakens the force, by making this almost = in us.—R.] Single productions between individual passions and individual members, in which the central consciousness was enslaved for the production of individual miscarriages.
To bring forth fruit to death [εἰς τὸκαρποψορῆσαι τῶ̣ θανάτω. This clause expresses not merely the result (Hodge), but the final object of the energizing (Meyer, Alford,), being parallel to the last clause of Rom_7:4.—R.] Meyer: To lead a life terminating in death. Expressing but little, almost nothing, here. That false fruit, abortions, or miscarriages, might arise (wherefore the subst. καρπός itself must be avoided). Erasmus: ex infelici matrimonio infelices fœtus sustutimus, quidquid nasceretur morti exiltoque gignentes. Luther: Where the law rules over people, they are indeed not idle; they bring forth and train up many children, but they are mere bastards, who do not belong to a free mother. Meyer would also here limit death to the idea of eternal death; see above. [He also carries out the figure of progeny, which Lange retains here, so far as to make “death” here a personification. This is less justifiable than the reference to eternal death, which conveys a truth, and forms a fitting antithesis to τῷ θεῷ (Rom_7:4).—R.]
Rom_7:6. Bat now we have been delivered from the law [νυνὶ δὲ (antithesis to ὅτε, Rom_7:5) κατηργήθημεν ἀπὸ τοῦ νόμου. Notice the aorist, which Paul uses so constantly in reference to the accomplished fact of justification.—R.] We are annulled in relation to the law, and therewith the law is annulled to us. (On the reading ἀποθανόντος, see the Critical Note on the Text; also Tholuck, p. 330.)
Having died to that wherein we were held [ἀποθανόντες ἐν ᾧ κατειχόμεθα]. We must understand τούτω̣ before ἐν ᾧ. Meyer explains: in which we were confined as in a prison. More in harmony with the former view is this: whereby we were chained as by a legal and even matrimonial obligation. Wherefore we certainly do not need to refer ἐν ᾧ merely to νόμος (with Origen, Koppe, De Wette, Philippi [Hodge], and others). Tholuck: “The law, therefore, is regarded as χατέχων, as a chain, analogously to the ἐψρουρούμεθα συγχεχλεισμένοι, Gal_3:23, so far as it holds its subjects in δουλεία (Rom_8:15; 2Ti_1:7). The direct reference of the ἐν ᾧ to sin (according to Chrysostom, Œcumenius, and others) is too strong on the opposite side.”—The cause of the chaining of man by sin on one side, as well as by the law on the other, was the totality of the εἶναι ἐν τῇ, as it expressed itself in mere divisions of lust and legality. This is clear from what follows: in the oldness of the letter.
So that we serve [ὥστε δουλεύειν ἡμᾶς. The clause is not final, as the E. V. indicates; the service is a present state, already resulting from the accomplished fact of deliverance from and death to the law. Serve God, is the meaning, the omission of θεῷ being due to the self-evident difference of reference in the two phrases which follow. The consciousness of the readers would tell them that the old service was one to sin, the new one to God (so Meyer).—R.] The δουλεύειν can be spoken ironically in only a conditional manner. We have really our external life to enslave, but not after the old way, in single portions and acts, according to individual precepts, motives, and affections, but in the newness of the Spirit; therefore by virtue of the perfect principle of the Spirit, which is ever new, and always assuming a new form. The ἐν denotes not merely the sphere of activity (Meyer), but the power, the principle of activity itself.
In newness of the Spirit [ἐν καινότητε πνεύματος. Untenable views: That ἐν is redundant, and the dative the object of the verb δουλεύειν; that there is a Hendiadys (new spirit, Hodge). The E. V. is fond of Hendiadys, and very often misconstrues ἐν, but has avoided these mistakes in the present instance. Alford correctly remarks, that the datives “are not” as in Rom_6:4, attributes of the genitives which follow them, but states in which those genitives are the ruling elements.—What is the precise force of πνεύματος?—R.] Meyer: “It is the Holy Spirit, as the operative principle of the Christian life.” Clearly, it is the spirit as itself the inward Christian principle of life, which is certainly not to be thought of without the communion of the Holy Spirit. For the Holy Spirit as πνεῦμα simply, operating objectively, was also the producer of the γράμμα, which here constitutes the antithesis. This principle is itself an eternal newness, and has, as a result, an eternal newness as the principle of the absolute renewal. Tholuck: “The spirit of grace produced by God’s gracious deed.” [With Meyer, Alford, and others, it seems best to refer this to the Holy Spirit. The absence of the article is not against this view; as the opinion of Harless, that π·νεῦμα without the article is subjective, is not well established. (Comp. Meyer on Rom_8:4; Harless, Eph_2:22; Lange’s Comm., Gal_5:16, p. 137.) This passage seems to point to chap. 8, where πνεῦμα occurs so frequently, in the sense of the Holy Spirit; the more so as σάρξ occurs just before (Rom_7:5). The objection, that the Holy Spirit, working objectively, was the author of the letter, and hence that the antithesis requires another meaning, has not much weight. See notes on Rom_8:4 ff.—R.]
And not in the oldness of the letter [καὶ οὐ παλαιότητι (only here) γράμματος. Not = old letter (Hodge), nor yet = under the law, in the flesh, though these latter thoughts are implied. The genitive seems to be gen. auctoris, as πνεύματος in the previous clause.—R.] On the γράμμα, see Rom_2:29; 2Co_3:6. The law viewed externally, and, by its historical and subjective externalization, become an old and dying object, παλαιότης. Meyer writes somewhat unintelligibly: The παλαιόης, according to the nature of the relation in which the γράμμα stands to the principle of sin in man, was necessarily sinful (see Rom_7:7 ff.), as, on the other hand, the χαινότης must be necessarily moral in consequence of the vitally influencing πνεῦμα. [The service which resulted from the rule of the letter, was not merely their old service, but a service having in it an element of decay. The service under the law, precisely the written law (when viewed as the γράμμα), was a killing yoke, is still, when the service is in the oldness of the letter. Meyer evidently means, that a law with external precepts, of the letter, necessarily so acts upon man’s sinfulness, that the very service he attempts to render is sinful. The letter killeth (2Co_3:6).—Such a characterization of the service under the law forms a fitting warning against a return to legalism—an appropriate conclusion to this section, and a point of connection with Rom_7:7.—R.]
DOCTRINAL AND ETHICAL
1. The connection with sin, according to Rom_6:12-23, was a slavish state; the connection with the law, on the other hand, according to the present section, was comparable to an earthly marriage-state. The connection of believers with Christ now appears, in comparison with this, as a super-terrestrial marriage-covenant (see Eph_5:32).
2. It is only by keeping the figure of the law of marriage free from an allegorical interpretation, and by distinguishing between the figure itself and its historical application, that the evidence clearly appears which the argumentation of the Apostle contemplated, and particularly for the Jewish Christians. But this evidence still continues in force. The standpoint of external legality, and that of living faith, cannot be confused as religious principles. Both standpoints are sundered by the death of Christ. Where they seem to be united, the confession of the law, or the legal confession of faith, is the dominant religious principle; while the opposite principle has the meaning only of a historical and ethical custom, which, from its nature as a legal custom, as much limits the Catholic man of faith, as it, in the character of an evangelical custom, burdens the legal, Romanizing Protestant.
3. Tholuck: “The law is annulled in relation to believers, not in its moral import, but, as Calovius remarks, quoad rigorem exactionis, quoad maledictionem, et quoad servilem coactionem.” According to the Sermon on the Mount, as well as according to Paul, it is done away so far as it is fulfilled; it is annulled in a negative sense so far as it is annulled in Christian principle, the law of the Spirit. An inward principle has come from the external precept; an inward rule from the external form; an inward tendency from the external law; a unity from multiplicity; a synthesis from the analysis; and from the ordinance, “Do this and live,” the order, “Live and do this.” It must be borne in mind, that Paul here speaks of the finite, formal character of the law, and not of the law as a type of the New Testament, as it has become transformed into the law of the Spirit. [Comp. Doctrinal Notes on Galatians, Gal_3:19-29, pp. 88, 89.—R.]
4. The figure of marriage, which extends through the Old Testament in typical forms, is here employed in reference to the relation between Christ and the whole body of believers. The individual believer participates freely in the marriage-bond of this body, yet not in a mystical, separatistic isolation of his relation to Christ.
5. In Rom_7:5 Paul speaks especially concerning the passions of sins, which are excited and occasioned by the law; and there is no reason for understanding among them the abnormal forms of passionate excitement. The history of Pharisaism, and of fanaticism in general, from the crucifixion of Christ down to the present day, teaches us how very much additional weight is also added by the normal forms. In this direction there has arisen the odium generis humani, as well as the increasingly strong warfare of hierarchical or ecclesiastical party-law against the eternal moral laws of humanity, in which the nature of God himself is represented, while in the statute only the distorted apparent image of the Church, and not its eternal pith, is reflected.
6. The abortions of ordinances at enmity with the gospel and humanity reached the centre of their manifestation in the crucifixion of Christ; but they everywhere reappear, where Christ is again crucified, in a grosser or more refined sense. And this not only occurs where the written revealed law is perverted into fanatical ordinances, but also where the ideals of the natural law (Rom_2:14) are distorted to fanatical caricatures, as is shown in the history of the Revolution of 1848.
7. On Rom_7:6. Tholuck: “γράμμα, πνεῦμα (Rom_2:29). The former is chiefly a designation of the external principle; the latter, of the inwardly operative principle. And this inwardly operative principle is the gracious spirit produced by God’s gracious act. Calvin: Spiritum litterœ opponit, quia antequam ad dei voluntatem voluntas nostra per spiritum sanctum formata sit, non habemus in lege nisi externam litteram, quœ frœnum quidem externis nostris actionibus injicit, concupiscentiœ autem nostrœ furorem minime cohibet. And Melanchthon: Ideo dicitur littera, quia non est verus et vivus motus animi, sed est otiosa imitatio interior vel exterior, nec ibi potest esse vera invocatio, ubi cor non apprehendit remissionem peccatorum.”
8. How the law, in its letter or finite relation, began to grow old immediately after the beginning of legislation, is shown to us clearly by the history of the Israelites; and Deuteronomy even gives the canonical type of this truth. The history of the Christian Church teaches, on the other hand, how the newness of the spiritual life becomes constantly newer in its power of renewal. But the same antithesis is again manifested in the continual obsolescence of the Church in the Middle Ages, and in the continued rejuvenating of the evangelical Church.
HOMILETICAL AND PRACTICAL
On Rom_7:1-6
As Christians, we belong no more to the law, but to Christ. 1. Because we are dead to the law by Jesus, who abolished the power of the law; 2. Because we are united to Him by the same fact, in order to bring forth fruit to God (Rom_7:1-6).—Marriage as a type of spiritual relations: 1. As a type of our relation to the law; 2. As a type of our relation to Christ (Rom_7:1-6).—As the relation of man to Christ is altogether different from that to the law, so is Christian marriage, on the other hand, altogether different from that of the Old Testament (Rom_7:1-6).—How death divides, but also unites (Rom_7:4).—Union of heart with Christ the Risen One is the condition of the happy union of human hearts with each other so as to bring forth fruit unto God (Rom_7:4).—How miserable it was to live under the law in the flesh; how happifying it is to live under grace in the Spirit! Proof: 1. Description of the state under the law: a. we were in bondage; b. sinful lusts worked in our members to bring forth fruit unto death; c. we served the letter. 2. Description of the condition under grace: a. we are free; b. the newness of the Spirit incites us to bring forth fruit unto God; c. we serve the Spirit, and not the letter any more (Rom_7:5-6).
Starke: As a thistle-bush is full of thistles, so are unconverted and carnal men full of the fruits of the flesh (Rom_7:5).—Christ frees us from the burden of the law, that we may take His yoke upon us (Rom_7:6).—Hedinger: We are free from the law, not as a precept of duty—which remains perpetually—but in its condemnation, compulsion, and sharpness (Rom_7:1).—Where there is not a heart and ready will, there is only external labor and weariness; where conversion of the life and spiritual increase are not exhibited in the inner man, it is lost work and the service of the letter, even if one should wear out the temple-floor with his knees, give his body to be burned, and become a beggar and a hermit!
Spener: Our perverted nature is such, that, when any thing is forbidden, we have all the greater desire to have it. We have often seen children think less of, and have no desire for, a certain thing, for which they have all the more desire when forbidden. So, when the law forbids this and that, we are prompted toward it by our wicked nature (Rom_7:5).—We are not so free that we do not have to serve any more; only the kind of service is different. Formerly it was compulsory, now it is rendered with a joyful will; then it was the letter, now it is the spirit (Rom_7:6).—Roos: The truth which Paul here portrays (Rom_7:1-4) is this: that nothing but death annuls the dominion of the law.
Lisco: The complete freedom of man from the law promotes his true sanctification (Rom_7:1-6).—The relation of man to the law.—Application of this relation to believers (Rom_7:4).—Advantages of the new state above the old one under the law (Rom_7:5-6).
Heubner: The Christian is free from the coercion of the law (Rom_7:1-6).—The death of Christ became freedom from the compulsory power and curse of the law: 1. As abrogation of the Levitical sacrificial system; 2. As inducement toward free and thankful love toward God (Rom_7:4).—Irreligious politicians express only their ignoble and servile manner of thinking, when they deem all religion to be only of service as a bridle for the people (Rom_7:4).—The nature of the Christian is spirit: 1. In reference to faith; 2. In reference to action. The latter stands in contrast with this spirit in these same respects (Rom_7:6).
Besser: Here, for the first time since Rom_1:13, Paul addresses the saints at Rome as brethren—brethren “in Christ Jesus our Lord” (Rom_7:1).—”But now”—this now is an evangelical key-note of the Epistle to the Romans; comp. Rom_3:21, and other places (Rom_7:6).
Lange: The death of Christ a serious boundary between the legal and the evangelical, believing, standpoints: 1. The meaning of this boundary itself; 2. The application: no religious confusions of the two standpoints. By a customary connection of them, one is made to mean only a moral limitation, which, after all, is not in conformity with the internal relations.—The sensuous power and spiritual weakness of legalism consists in its being an earthly relation, confined to this life, though in the fear of God (in this life the head, the city of God, the apparent image of the kingdom, &c).—The marriage-bond of the free Church of God is a super-terrestrial relation, and therefore the power of the renewal of the earthly life: a. Christ in the next life and in this one; b. Faith also; c. The Church as well.—The reciprocal action between the law and sin unto death, a counterpart to the reciprocity between the Spirit of Christ and faith unto new life.—The contrast between the Old and New Testament in its full meaning: 1. The Old Testament growing old and making old from the beginning; 2. The New Testament renewing itself and the world from the beginning.—But a New Testament is in the essence of the Old, as well as an Old is in the manifestation of the New.
[Burkitt: All the wisdom of the heathen, and of the wisest persons in the world, was never able to discover the first sinful motions arising from our rebellious natures; only the holy law of God makes them known, and discovers them to be sin. Such is the holiness of the law of God, that it requires not only the purity of our actions, but also the integrity of all our faculties.—Scott: Self-righteous pride and antinomian licentiousness are two fatal rocks on which immense multitudes are continually wrecked, and between which none but the Holy Spirit can pilot us; and the greatest objections of open enemies to the doctrines of grace derive their greatest plausibility from the unholy lives of many professed friends.—Clarke: The law is only the means of disclosing our sinful propensity, not of producing it; as a bright beam of the sun introduced into a room shows millions of motes in all directions—but these were not introduced by the light, but were there before, only there was not light enough to make them manifest—so the evil propensity was in the heart before, but there was not light sufficient to discover it.
Literature, chiefly Homiletical, on the 7 th of Romans: Arminius, Dissertation on the True and Genuine Sense of Romans VII., Works, 2, 471; E. Elton, Complaint of a Sanctified Sinner Answered, or Explanation of the 7th Chapter of Romans, London, 1618; J. Stafford, Scripture Doctrine of Sin Considered, in Twenty-five Discourses on Romans VII., London, 1772; J. Glas, The Flesh and the Spirit, Works, 3, 142; J. Fraser, Scripture Doctrine of Sanctification; A. Knox, Letter to J. S. Harford, Esq., on the Seventh Chapter to the Romans, Remains, 3, 409.—J. F. H.]
Footnotes:
[1]Rom_7:2.—[The E. V. renders ὕπανδ ρος: which hath a husband; which is less forcible than the single word married. It is true that neither renderings convey the exact sense of the original, so well as: das dem Manne unterthänige Weib (Lange); yet, as the idea of subjection, expressed in the Greek, is still, to some extent, implied in married, it is the best rendering that can be given.—The periphrasis: so long as he liveth, is altogether unnecessary; the living husband, is both more forcible and more exact.
[2]Rom_7:2.—[The active verb die should be substituted for be dead. The question arises, How can we best express the delicate shade of the Greek conditional proposition: ἐὰνδὲ ἀπο θάνῃ. Alford gives: have died; Wordsworth: shall have died; Amer. Bible Union: die. The first seems preferable; the second is strictly literal, since the aorist implies something which takes place antecedent to what is affirmed in the apodosis, but is not so elegant; the last is that bald conditional form, which should be reserved for the equivalent Greek form (εἰ with the optative or indicative). These remarks apply to the same clause, as it occurs in ver 3.
[3] Rom_7:3.—[The negative belongs to the verb, and is joined to the noun, at the expense of forcibleness. Forbes remarks, that here the E. V. destroys the regularity of the parallelism. The first, second, and third lines in the original correspond exactly to the fourth, fifth, and sixth respectively.
Ἄρα οὖν ζῶντος τοῦ ἀνδρὸς
μοιχαλὶς χρηματίσει,
ἐὰν γἑνηται ἀνδρὶ ἑτέπω̣·
ἐὰν δὲ ἁποθάνη ͅὁ ἀνήρ,
ἑλευθέρα ἐστὶν ἀπὸ τοῦ νόμου, τοῦ μὴ εἶραι αὐτἡν μοιχαλίδα,
γενομένην ἀνδρὶ ἑτέρω̣
So then, as long as her husband liveth,
She shall be called an adulteress,
If she be married to another man;
But if her husband be dead,
She is free from the law so as to be no adulteress,
Though she be married to another man.
[4]Rom_7:4.—[Were made dead (Amer. Bible Union), though not very elegant, is perhaps the best rendering of ἐθανατώθητε. Mortify, would be ambiguous here. Were slain, is preferred by Alford, because the more violent Greek verb is used, recalling the violent death of Christ; but this would point to the act of killing, rather than to the fact of being deprived of life, which is the prominent thought here.
[5]Rom_7:4.—[Both clauses are final, though differing in form. By changing the first that of the E. V. into in order that, the force of the Greek is preserved, and its varied form in a measure reproduced.
[6]Rom_7:4.—[As unto God is the usual rendering of εἰς τον θεόν, to God will serve to represent the simple dative: τῷ θεῷ. The meaning seems to be: to the glory of God.—The dative, τῷθαν άτω̣ is also found at the close of Rom_7:5.
[7]Rom_7:5.—[The E. V. usually renders παθήματα, sufferings. Here, passions (Wordsworth, and others; Lange: Leidenschaften) is etymologically exact, and, on the whole, preferable to motions, emotions (Amer. Bible Union), stirrings (Alford).
[8]Rom_7:6.—[The Recepta reads ἀποθανόντ ος; a conjecture of Beza’s, arising from a misunderstanding of the text, having no uncial support. D. E. F. G. (Vulgate, and some Latin authorities) read τοῦ θανάτου; a gloss, to get rid of the participle, which was regarded as disturbing the structure of the sentence (Meyer). א. A. B. C. K. L., many versions and fathers, warrant the correctness of ἄποθανόντες, which is now almost universally adopted. (The English text is emended to correspond.)
[9]Rom_7:6.—[The clause is ecbatic and present: ὥστε δουλεύειν.
[10]Rom_7:6.—[If the reference be to the Holy Spirit, the above emendation is necessary. If not (as Dr. Lange holds), the clause should read: in newness of spirit and not in oldness of letter. See Exeg. Notes on both views.—R.]
[11][On the difficulty respecting the figure, see the full remarks of Prof. Stuart in loco.—R.]
[12][Meyer’s note is excellent: “Not before he dies does the law lose its dominion over him; so long as he lives, he remains subject to it. If this is considered, and an entirely irrelevant ‘only so long as he lives’ be not interpolated, the thought seems neither trivial nor disproportionate to the appeal made to the legal knowledge of the readers. For a peculiarity of the νόμος consists in this, that it cannot, as human laws, have only temporary validity, or be altered, suspended, nor can one be exempt from it for a time, &c. No, so long as man lives, the dominion of the νόμος over him remains.” Of course, this means previous to the death to the law (Rom_7:4).—R.]
[13][She is bound to him by the law—i.e., the Mosaic law—which made no provision for her loosing herself (in Deu_24:2 it was the power of the husband, not the wife, to repudiate the relation). Here the law is no longer spoken of figuratively.—R.]
[14][That is, they might be and were so called, but yet were not guilty of religious adultery.—R.]
[15][Dr. Hodge at some length combats the view, that the Mosaic law (or rather the Jewish economy) is alone referred to throughout this passage. He rightly says: “Paul here means by the law, the will of God, as a rule of duty, however revealed.” See on Rom_3:20, p. 122 (also Gal_2:16, pp. 49, 52). The most untenable of all views is that which limits νόμος to the ritualistic Jewish observances.—R.]
[16][To this interpolation it may be rejoined: What, then, would not be σάρξ in us? What is not carnal, sinful, in us?—R.]
Lange's Commentary on the Holy Scriptures (Critical, Doctrinal, and Homiletical), ed. John Peter Lange, English translation edited by Philip Schaff (1864–1880) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword module.
Robert Jamieson, A. R. Fausset & David Brown 1871 · Public Domain On vv2–10 if her husband be dead--"die." So Rom 7:3.
if her husband be dead--"die." So Rom 7:3.
Jamieson, Fausset & Brown — Commentary Critical and Explanatory on the Whole Bible (1871) — public domain (CC PDM 1.0). Text via the HelloAO Bible API.
Daniel D. Whedon 1874 · Public Domain On vv1, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9 b. Emancipation from servility to law, Rom_7:1-6.
b. Emancipation from servility to law, Rom_7:1-6.
In the apostle’s view the Christian, by his new life in the Redeemer, walks in the paths of holiness under no compulsion of law, but spontaneously and of his own free will. (Note on Rom_6:14, and on Mat_11:30.) He is, therefore, that much emancipated from law. This beautiful state of freedom from servility to law he illustrates by the case of the married female whose husband is dead and she prepared to contract a new matrimony. The woman is the new Church, the deceased husband is the forestalled law, and the new bridegroom is Christ.
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1. Know the law—Not by the Jewish polity alone, but universally, subjection to law terminates at death. Hence the apostle assumes that his brethren know law; not the law, with the article, as in the English translation.
Over a man—Over a person; for the Greek word may imply either sex, and the apostle in fact selects a female for his illustration.
Daniel D. Whedon (gen. ed.), Commentary on the Old and New Testaments (1874–1909) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword module.
The Cambridge Bible for Schools and Colleges 1878 · Public Domain On vv1–10 Ch. Rom_7:1-6. The same subject. Illustration from matrimony
Ch. Rom_7:1-6. The same subject. Illustration from matrimony
1. Know ye not, &c.] The passage from hence to end of Rom_7:7 is closely connected with the last chapter. By a perfectly new simile (marriage), it illustrates further what has been just illustrated by the metaphor of slavery, and (in the first part of ch. 6) by the union of the justified with Christ;—namely the Christian’s entire disconnexion from the claims, and so from the ruling influence, of sin, in virtue of the new and sacred union.
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to them that know the law] Lit. law; without article. But the immediate context shews that the Mosaic Law, (and probably especially its sanctions regarding marriage), is meant. The whole Roman Church, whether Jewish or Gentile, would be familiar with it; many of them having been disciples of the synagogue, and all being directed constantly to the use of the Old Testament by apostolic precept and example. See on Rom_4:18.—This brief parenthesis is quite in keeping with the courtesy of St Paul’s writings.
hath dominion] i.e. has a claim on him; same word as Rom_6:9, where see note.
a man] Lit. the man; the individual, as the second party in any given case—the Law being the first party.
as long as he liveth] Not “only as long as he liveth,” as this is sometimes explained. The emphasis is on the abiding claim of the Law up to death, which alone can cancel it. This general and certain principle is now at once applied to the special case at which St Paul aims in illustration—the case of marriage.
The Cambridge Bible for Schools and Colleges (gen. ed. J. J. S. Perowne; Cambridge University Press, 1878–1918) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword module.
Ellicott's Commentary for English Readers 1878 · Public Domain On vv1, 2, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10 (1) Know ye not.—Here again insert “or”: Or know…
(1) Know ye not.—Here again insert “or”: Or know ye not, &c., carrying on the thought from the end of the last chapter. Is not, argues the Apostle, what I say true? Or do I hear the old objection raised again, that the system under which the Christian is living is not one of grace in which eternal life is given freely by God, but the Mosaic law? That would show an ignorance—which in you I cannot believe—of the fact that the dominion of the Law ceases with death, of which fact it is easy to take a simple illustration.
To them that know the law.—The Roman Church, as we have seen, was composed in about equal proportions of Jewish and of Gentile Christians. The Jews would naturally know the provisions of their own law, while the Gentile Christians would know them sufficiently to be aware of the fact, from their intercourse with Jewish members of their own community, and from hearing the Old Testament read in the synagogues, where their public worship was still conducted. The practice of reading from the Old Testament did not cease on the transition from Jewish to Christian modes of worship; it survives still in the “First Lesson.”
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VII.
(1-6) The Apostle takes up an idea to which he had alluded in Rom_7:14-15 of the preceding chapter, “Ye are not under the Law, but under grace;” and as he had worked out the conclusion of the death of the Christian to sin, so now he works out that of his death to the Law. This he does by an illustration borrowed from the marriage-bond. That bond is dissolved by the death of one of the parties to it. And in like manner the death of the Christian with Christ releases him from his obligation to the Law, and opens out to him a new and spiritual service in place of his old subjection to a written code.
A Bible Commentary for English Readers, edited by Charles John Ellicott (1878–1897) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword module.
The Pulpit Commentary 1880 · Public Domain On vv1, 2, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9 Vers. 1-6. Here comes in the third illustration of…
Vers. 1-6. Here comes in the third illustration of the moral obligation of the baptized. It rests on the recognized principle that death cancels the claims of human law on a person; (cf. Rom_6:7) and this with especial reference to the law of marriage, as being peculiarly applicable to the subject to be illustrated, since the Church is elsewhere regarded as married to Christ. As has been observed above, it is from the Law that Christians are now said to be emancipated in the death of Christ; not from sin, as in the previous sections. Hence this section might at first sight seem to introduce a new line of thought. But it is really a continuation of the same, though differently viewed; for, in the sense intended by St. Paul, being under the Law is equivalent to being under sin. How this is has already more or less appeared; and it will be shown further in the latter part of this chapter. For elucidating the connection of thought between this and the preceding sections, it may be here briefly stated thus: A fundamental axiom with the apostle is that "where no law is, there is no transgression"; (Rom_4:15; cf. Rom_5:13 Rom_7:9) i.e. without law of some kind (including in the idea both external law and the law of conscience) to reveal to man the difference between right and wrong, he is not held responsible; to be a sinner before God he must know what sin is. Human sin consists in a man doing wrong, knowing it to be wrong; or, at any rate, with an original power and opportunity of knowing it to be so. (This, be it observed, is the idea running through the whole of Ro 1, in which all mankind are convicted of sin; the whole drift of the argument being that they had sinned against knowledge.) Law, then, in making sin known to man, subjects him to its guilt, and consequently to its condemnation. But this is all it does; it is all that, in itself, it can do. It can remove neither the guilt nor the dominion of sin. Its principle is simply to exact entire obedience to its requirements; and there it leaves the sinner. The above view applies to all law, and of course peculiarly to the Mosaic Law (which the writer has all along mainly in view) in proportion to the authority of its source and the strictness of its requirements. Thus it is that St. Paul regards being under the Law as the same thing as being under sin, and dying to the Law as the same thing as dying to sin. Grace, on the other hand, under which we pass in rising again with Christ, does both the things which law cannot do: it both cancels the guilt of sin (repentance and faith presumed), and also imparts power to overcome it.
Are ye ignorant, brethren (for I speak to persons knowing law), how that the Law hath dominion over a man for so long time as he liveth? i.e. so long as the man liveth; not so long as the Law liveth in the sense of viget, or "remains in force," though Origen, Ambrose, Grotius, Erasmus, and others, for reasons that will appear, understood the latter sense. It is not the natural one.
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HOMILIES BY C.H. IRWIN Vers. 1-17. The position of the Law under the New Testament.
The apostle is here continuing his discussion of the immoral suggestion to which he alluded in the previous chapter (ver. 15), "What then? shall we sin, because we are not under the Law, but under grace?
I THE RELATION OF THE LAW TO THE CHRISTIAN.
1. he Christian"s union with Christ involves his freedom from the Law.
(1) From the Law as condemning him. "Ye are become dead to the Law by the body of Christ" (ver. 4). The Christian, by faith in Jesus Christ, becomes a participator in his death. "Who is he that condemneth? It is Christ that died; There is therefore now no condemnation to them that are in Christ Jesus.
(2) From the Law as a motive-power. "But now we are delivered from the Law, having died to that wherein we were held Revised Version; that we should serve in newness of spirit, and not in the oldness of the letter" (ver. 6). The Authorized Version is here misleading when it translates, "that being dead wherein we were held." The apostle does not speak of the Law as being dead, but of Christians as being dead to the Law. The Law is not dead, but we are dead to it. We have a higher and a better life.
2. But this union with Christ and freedom from the Law do not imply that he is free to commit sin. The principles of the Law remain, though the power of it is gone, so far as justification or condemnation of the Christian is concerned. The Law was powerless to give fife. Through the sinfulness of our nature it brought forth fruit unto death (ver. 5). But our very freedom from the Law is in itself a reason for holy living. Christ implants in us a new principle. We now "serve in newness of spirit." Professor Croskery ("Plymouth Brethrenism") deals with this subject very fully in a chapter on "The Law as a Rule of Life." "If Old Testament saints," he says, "could be under the Law cud yet not under curse, because they were under the promise that is, under the covenant of grace why should not New Testament saints, saved by grace, be under Law likewise, as a rule of life, without being overtaken by the curse? What difference was there between David"s sin and Peter"s sin, in relation to the Law? If David was bound to keep the ten commandments, including the seventh, are not New Testament saints similarly bound? Does not James settle this point when he says, "He that said, Do not commit adultery, said also, Do not kill", (Jam_2:11) and says this, too, to Christians? The passage (Rom_6:14) means, "Ye are not under the Law as a condition of salvation, but under a system of free grace. The Law still remains as the rule of life, the standard of obedience. St. Paul himself says in this same chapter, "With.the mind I myself serve the Law of God" (ver. 25). And our Lord himself said, "Think not that I am come to destroy the Law or the prophets; I am not come to destroy, but to fulfil". (Mat_5:17)
II THE RELATION OF THE LAW TO THE SINNER.
1. The Law reveals to him the depths and power of his own sinfulness. After the apostle has shown how, in the unregenerate nature, "the motions of sins, which were by the Law, did work in our members to bring forth fruit unto death," he asks, "What shall we say then? Is the Law sin?" (ver. 7). That is to say Is the Law therefore in itself sinful? does it encourage sin? Far from it, he says. "Nay, I had not known sin, but by the Law." That is I had not known the force or power of sin but by the law. "Sin, that it might appear sin, working death in me by that which is good; that sin by the commandment might become exceeding sinful" (ver. 13). Some would condemn the Bible because it describes sin, and pictures some of its best characters as falling into sins of gross description. But this, so far from being a defect of the Bible, is at once an evidence of its truthfulness, and an element in its purifying power upon humanity. The Bible does not describe sin to make us love it, but to turn us from it. So it is with the Law of God. It may awaken in our minds suggestions of sins that we would not otherwise have thought of (vers. 7, 8), but conscience at once recognizes that this is due, not to the Law itself, but to the sinfulness of our nature.
2. The Law remains as the standard of right life. "The Law is holy, and the commandment holy, and just, and good" (ver. 12); "The Law is spiritual" (ver. 14). Here is the answer to those who regard the Law as abrogated. The Law is still binding as the rule of life, the standard of morality. It therefore condemns the sinner. Thus still it becomes our schoolmaster, to bring us to Christ. C.H.I.
HOMILIES BY T.F. LOCKYER Vers. 1-6. The two unions.
The apostle has spoken of freedom from the Law, and of the new reign of grace; but lest this freedom should be disputed, he here establishes it. The Mosaic Law, as such, touches only this present life; death does away with its claims. Christ, therefore, by his death, is freed from its demands; and we, by our spiritual fellowship with him, are likewise free. Free from the old union, to enter on the new. Such is the argument of these verses.
I DEAD TO THE LAW. Law is not spoken of here in its Divine perfection, but in its partial, external character as revealed through Moses. A law of rigid retribution: "Do this, and live;" "Do that, and die." A law of mere restraints, not of renewal
1. Of this law, death was the annulment, even as the penalties did not extend beyond the grave. It laid its sanctions on the whole of life; further than life it did not go. An example of this is found in the Jewish law of marriage, which, like all mere national laws of marriage, can only touch this present life. The law of the union, in such external legislation, is only until death. The death of either destroys the law.
2. Has not Christ, then, by his death, escaped the claims of all such legislation? Dying, he has died unto the dispensation of Moses; he is now no longer the Jew; the Law has no authority over him. He is now only the Divine Man; he has risen into all the spiritual freedom and power of the life of God. No narrow, prohibitive Law is the law of his risen life; but the perfect, quickening law of God. And are not we dead, in]aim, to all the limitations and restraints of the Law? Our very union with him, by faith, releases us now from all its claims. It is as though we were dead. The unhappy marriage-bond is broken.
II ALIVE TO CHRIST. But if so, a new marriage-bond is formed. Dead to the Law, we live to Christ. The one has no more claim; the other has every claim. We are joined to him now, indissolubly one.
1. The plenitude of spiritual power is ours in him. No law of the letter restrains, but a law of the Spirit inspires. His Spirit] which he hath "poured forth", (Act_2:33) which he hath "poured out upon us richly". (Tit_3:6) Is it not so? a law written on the heart the law of liberty, the law of love.
2. And being thus filled with power, through faith in him, we bring forth fruit unto God. The old union, with the Law, wrought fruit, but it was fruit unto death. Its very holiness, as a mere exterior restraint in contact with our carnal nature, was an excitant to sin. Fruit unto death] yes; for, sowing to the flesh, we reaped corruption. But now, God"s law works in us, as a quickening power. God"s love is our very life; and the fruit is unto life, unto God!
Have we such union with Christ? an indefeasible union, utter and for evermore? For such is truly the new life of faith. "Christ liveth in me": (Gal_2:20) we must be satisfied with nothing short of this. T.F.L.
HOMILIES BY R.M. EDGAR Vers. 1-6. The two marriages of the soul.
In the preceding chapter we saw how justification leads of necessity to sanctification. Once we realize that we have died in Jesus for sin, we are spiritually prompted to enter with a risen Saviour into newness of life. We realize our consecration to God. We give up the slavery to sin, and become slaves to God; and our fruit is found unto holiness, and our end everlasting life. The apostle, moreover, has affirmed that" we are not under Law, but under grace". (Rom_6:14) This he proceeds more fully to explain. "Slavery" may be the idea under sin, but "marriage" becomes the idea about Law. Under the Law provision was always made for a second marriage. If death took one of the married persons away, the survivor was at liberty to contract a second marriage. It is this figure which the apostle employs in the present section. He represents the soul as first wedded to Law; then, through death with Christ for sin and unto Law and resurrection with Christ to newness of life, the soul is legally warranted in contracting a second marriage, and this time with Christ himself. The Law is the soul"s first husband; and Christ becomes the second. We cannot do better, then, than consider, in the first place, the soul"s first marriage to the Law; in the second place, how this unhappy marriage is dissolved; and in the third place, the soul"s second marriage to Jesus Christ.
I THE SOUL"S FIRST MARRIAGE TO THE LAW. It has been thought by some that this seventh chapter comes in strangely after the third; but if we will bear in mind that in the third chapter the apostle is showing the Law to be unequal to man"s justification, while here he is showing it to be unequal to man"s sanctification, all difficulty about his line of thought will disappear. The point insisted upon in the present chapter is that, although the Law is in itself holy, it cannot make men holy. Its sanctification does not pass over to the legal soul. Now, in an unhappy marriage the husband may be quite blameless; he may, poor man, be dying his very best; but the wife proves so incorrigibly bad that nothing but wretchedness results. This, then, is the Pauline idea. The Law is holy, just, and good; but the soul wedded to the law is sinful, so that there is nothing but irritation and unhappiness as the result. In fact, the sinful soul gets provoked by the demands of Law, and acts more recklessly than if no such demands were made. This will come out more clearly as we proceed with the chapter. It is sufficient here to insist that the soul which is wedded to legalism is sure to experience an unhappy union; the legal soul finds the union with Law exacting and exasperating, and the only hope for it is in getting the union dissolved.
II HOW THIS UNHAPPY MARRIAGE IS DISSOLVED. Now, it is important here to notice that the apostle does not represent the Law as having died. This would have been the natural use of the marriage figure. If Law be the husband, and if the soul, wedded to the Law, is to contract another union, must not the husband first die? The apostle takes another line altogether. The Law does not die; but the soul may "die to the Law," and so die out of the legal union. If, then, having died out of the one relation, it is raised into a new life, then it is in a position to contract a second marriage. This, according]y, is the ground taken up by Paul in this passage, The soul dies to the Law in the Person of Christ, and so the unhappy union gets dissolved. This is what is expressed in ver. 4, "Wherefore, my brethren, ye also were made dead to the Law through the body of Christ; that ye should be joined to another, even to him who was raised from the dead" (Revised Version). That is to say, Christ died; we die by faith in him to the Law"s claims. All are met. Law, accordingly, has no further right over us. We are no longer its wife. We have died in our spiritual experience out of our old relation; that state is past. It is most important that we should see that legalism can exercise no sanctifying power. Its only fruit is pride and death (ver. 5). There is no hope for the soul but surrendering its legalism, and betaking itself through death and resurrection to a better union and a happier life.
III THE SOUL"S SECOND MARRIAGE TO JESUS CHRIST. The apostle"s idea is that the soul, having died in Jesus to the Law, and having thus dissolved the unhappy union, gets raised along with Christ and is united to him as the second and better husband. It is to a risen Saviour that the risen soul is united. Jesus is the Bridegroom, and the soul the bride. (cf. Joh_3:29) And regarding this second marriage of the soul, it is a happy one; for:
1. The soul receives the Spirit of Christ, and so becomes one with him. There can be in this case no ill-asserted union. Christ can make his bride one in spirit with himself, and so the sweetest unity of spirit prevails.
2. As the risen Saviour, he secures the devotion of the soul in a way that abstract law never could. The devotion of a true wife to her husband is something essentially different from and infinitely higher than obedience to a code of laws. It is here that sanctification is secured. The soul is led to feel that a Saviour, who has lived and died for its redemption, deserves the homage of the heart. In this way obedience passes into the enthusiastic devotion of the whole nature, and becomes a passion of the soul. This is the "newness of the spirit," as distinguished from the "oldness of the letter," to which the apostle declares the renewed soul comes.
3. The fruit of this marriage with Christ is consecration to God. The soul is joined to the risen Saviour that "we might bring forth fruit unto God." Now, just as in married life, when children come, they are consecrated unto God, so the fruits of our union with Christ consist in those "good works which are by Jesus Christ to the praise and glory of God." Good works are the united product of Christ and the believing soul. "Without me ye can do nothing," he tells us. And so we are to rejoice in them as the fruit of that spiritual union existing between the Saviour and the soul. It is for us to test ourselves by these facts, and see to it that we are united to Christ, as the bride is to her husband. R.M.E.
The Pulpit Commentary (1880–1919), ed. H.D.M. Spence-Jones & Joseph S. Exell — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword module.
The Biblical Illustrator 1887 · Public Domain On vv1, 4, 5, 7 Know ye not, brethren … how that the law…
Rom_7:1-6
Know ye not, brethren … how that the law hath dominion over a man as long as he liveth?
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Believers not under the law as a covenant of works
I. All men are, naturally, under the law as a covenant of works.
1. As men. God made man capable of moral government; he was naturally bound to obey the will of his Maker. The moral law: perfect obedience to this law could never entitle him to any greater degree of happiness, yet God was pleased to superadd a promise of everlasting life upon obedience, to which He annexed His awful sanction, In the day that thou sinnest, thou shalt surely die. This is what we call a covenant: as such it was proposed on the part of God, and it was accepted on the part of man. Now as this covenant was made with Adam as the federal head, so all men are naturally under it.
2. As sinners. In this view sinners are under the law as a broken covenant, which therefore can afford no relief to them that seek salvation by it (Gal_3:10-12).
II. To be under the law, and especially as a broken covenant, is a most dreadful thing.
1. The law requires perfect, universal, and everlasting obedience of all that are under it. Now this law is not abolished or made void, either by Christ or by any of His apostles. I am not come to destroy, but to fulfil; for verily I say unto you, till heaven and earth pass, one jot or one tittle shall in no wise pass from the law, till all be fulfilled (Mat_5:17-18; Rom_3:31). How dreadful then is such a state, since no mere man can thus keep it. And while the Christian betakes himself to the mercy of God in Christ, as his only hope, the sinner supports his vain confidence in the supposition that God will not insist on His claim.
2. It denounces against every transgressor the most awful curse (Jam_2:10-11; Gal_3:10).
III. Many have obtained a glorious deliverance out of this dreadful state. In Christ they are made brethren: Know ye not, brethren.
IV. They who are delivered from this state are to be distinguished from others in the ministry of the Word. Addressing himself to believers, Paul appeals to their spiritual knowledge and judgment, Know ye not.
1. There is a knowledge peculiar to the saints, whereby they know the things that are excellent; they have judgment to distinguish betwixt truth and error; an inward principle (1Jn_2:27; 1Jn_5:20) which teaches them the knowledge of every truth necessary for consolation or salvation.
2. One great reason why many know not the truth, is not merely owing to their ignorance of it, but often to their prejudice against it.
3. Sound and saving knowledge hath respect not only to the truth itself, but also to the use we are to make of it.
4. It is no inconsiderable part of our happiness when we are called to minister unto such as know the truth as it is in Jesus.
Conclusion:
1. If all men are naturally under the law as a covenant of works, who can wonder if they seek life by that covenant? Natural light, natural conscience can discover no other way of salvation.
2. If all are miserable who are under the law, especially as a broken covenant, this calls upon men who are under a profession of religion to examine themselves as to their state before God.
3. If believers are delivered from the law as a covenant, yet still let them remember, They are under the law to Christ.
4. If true believers are to be distinguished from others in the ministry of the Word, let them distinguish themselves, not only by a public profession, but also by a becoming walk and conversation. (J. Stafford.)
The believers relation to the law and to Christ
I. The believers former connection with the law.
1. The law, considered in the figurative capacity of a husband, had a right to full and implicit subjection. But alas! all mankind had violated the authority of this first husband; they had abused his rights, resisted his claims, and thus exposed themselves to the fatal consequences of his just denunciations.
2. Yet, miserable as this state is, men in general are insensible of it. They still show attachment to the law, despite their disobedience; and place, as a wife does on her husband, infatuated dependence. As God said to Eve, Thy desire shall be to thy husband, so it is with the sinner as to the law.
II. The dissolution of this connection. This consists in the sinners deliverance from the obligation to obedience as the condition of life, and from the curse attending disobedience.
1. When and how does this take place? The answer is--The law hath dominion over a man as long as he liveth.… Ye are become dead to the law. Here is the decease of one of the parties, by which the union is dissolved.
2. This decease refers to the death of the believer in Christ (Rom_6:7-8), who bore the curse of the law in his stead (Gal_3:13). Thus the effects of the first husbands displeasure cannot reach them.
3. And not only is the curse of the law removed, but our connection with it, as a condition of life, is forever done away, as effectually as the relation between husband and wife is dissolved by death.
III. He is then married to another, etc., which expresses the believers new relation with Jesus (see also Eph_5:30-32; Joh_3:29; Rev_21:2).
1. To this new husband all believers are subject. They feel his authority as that at once of rightful claim and of tender affection. They delight in obeying Him who loves them. And in Him they are truly blessed. He smiles upon them, and enriches them with a dowry of spiritual treasures.
2. This connection, being with Him who is raised from the dead, is indissoluble (Rom_6:9). The Husband never dies; nor do they ever die to whom He stands thus related. Joined to the Lord, they are one spirit; and the spiritual union is lasting as eternity.
IV. The consistency of this new connection with all the rights and claims of the first husband. These claims were just, and had a right to be fully implemented. The believer has not satisfied them in his own person; but his Substitute has by His obedience and death magnified the law and made it honourable. Hence the laws claims upon him cease as completely as the claims of a husband when dead on the surviving wife.
V. The absolute necessity of the dissolution of all connection with the law, in order to a sinners being joined to Christ. The two connections cannot subsist together. The sinner who is joined to Christ must die completely to the law. While he retains any connection with it, in the way of seeking or expecting life from it, he is not united to Christ. As the worship of idols was styled adultery, when practised by that people whom Jehovah had espoused to Himself--so all such connection with the law is unfaithfulness to our Divine Husband. He must be all our salvation, and all our desire. Let no one, however, think that we are pleading for freedom from the law as the rule of life. Its obligation in this sense remains immutable (Rom_3:31; 1Co_9:21, etc.).
VI. The blessed effects of the dissolution of the connection with the law, and the formation of the union with Christ. The bringing forth fruit unto God. The fruit meant is, no doubt, holy obedience and service (Rom_6:22). Such fruit is as naturally the effect of union to Christ, as the fruit of the womb is the expected result of the marriage relation. No fruit acceptable in the sight of God can be produced while the former connection continued (Rom_7:5). They who are under the law are in the flesh; and can bring forth no fruit but unto death. All is devoid of the only principle of acceptable service--faith working by love. There is no true fruit unto God produced till the connection with the law has been dissolved, and that with Christ has been formed (Rom_7:6). The fears of the law, uniting with the pride of self-righteousness, may produce considerable outward conformity to the precepts of the law; whilst there is no true principle of godliness within. There may be much in the eyes of men that is amiable; while in the sight of God all the service is rendered in the oldness of the letter--under the influence of the principles of the old, is service in newness of spirit, i.e., to serve God in sincerity, under the influence of those principles and views and dispositions which constitute a mind renewed by the Spirit of God (Eze_36:26). (R. Wardlaw, D. D.)
True Christian liberty implies
I. Freedom from the compulsory action of law. It can neither--
1. Alarm;
2. Condemn;
3. Become a source of bondage.
II. The freedom of devoted love to Christ.
1. Who has won the heart;
2. Constrains our service;
3. By His death and resurrection. (J. Lyth, D. D.)
Dead to the law, married to Christ
1. The apostle has illustrated the transference that takes place at conversion by the emancipation of a slave whose services are due to the lawful superior under whom he now stands enrolled. The apostle now turns to those who know the law, and deduces from the obligations which attach to marriage, the same result, i.e., an abandonment by the believer of those doings which have their fruit unto death, and a new service which has its fruit unto God.
2. There is a certain obscurity here arising from the apparent want of sustained analogy. True, the obligations of marriage are annulled by the death of one party; but Paul only supposes the death of the husband. Now the law is evidently the husband, and the subject the wife. So that, to make good the resemblance--the law should be conceived dead, and the subject alive. Yet, in reading the first verse, one would suppose that it was on the death of the subject, and not of the law, that the connection was to be dissolved. It is true that the translation might have run thus, The law hath dominion over a man so long as it liveth; but this does not suit so well with Rom_7:4, where, instead of the law having become dead unto us, we have become dead unto it; so that some degree of that confusion which arises from a mixed analogy appears unavoidable. It so happens, too, that either supposition stands linked with very important truth--so that by admitting both, this passage becomes the envelope of two important lessons.
I. The law may be regarded as dead; and he our former husband, now taken out of the way, has left us free to enter upon an alliance with Christ.
1. The death of the law did indeed take place at the death of Christ. It was then that He blotted out the handwriting of ordinances that was against us. It was then that the law lost its power as an offended Lord to take vengeance of our trespasses. Certain venomous animals expire on the moment that they have deposited their sting and its mortal poison in the body of their victim. And thus there ensues the death of both sufferer and assailant. And on the Cross there was just such a catastrophe.
2. Without Christ the law is in living force against us. Men under earnestness, who have not found their way to Christ, stand related to it as the wife does to an outraged husband: a state of appalling danger and darkness from which there is no relief, but in the death of that husband.
3. The illustration of our text opens a way for just such a relief as would be afforded by the death of the first tyrannical husband, and by the substitution of another in his place, who had cast the veil of oblivion over the past, and who admits us to a fellowship of love and confidence. Christ would divorce you, as it were, from your old alliance with the law; and welcome you, instead, to a new and friendly alliance with Himself. He bids you cease from the fellowship altogether.
4. And to deliver this contemplation from any image so revolting as that of our rejoicing in the death of a former husband; and finding all the relief of heaven in the society of another, you have to remember that the law has become dead--not by an act which has vilified the law or done it violence, but by an act which has magnified the law and made it honourable.
4. When a sense of the law brings remorse or fearfulness into your heart, transfer your thoughts from it as your now dead, to Christ as your now living husband.
II. The believer may be regarded as dead. The other way by which marriage may be dissolved is by the death of the wife. And so the relationship between the law and the subject may be dissolved by the death of the subject (Rom_7:4). The law has no more power over its dead subject than the husband has over his dead wife.
1. This brings us back to the conception already so abundantly insisted on, that in Christ we all died in law; so that the law can have no further reckoning with us, having already had that reckoning in the person of Him who was our Surety and our Representative. And just as the criminal law has done its utmost upon him whom it has executed, so the law can do no more in the way of vengeance with us, having already done all with Him who was smitten for our iniquities.
2. After our old relationship with the law is thus put an end to, the vacancy is supplied by Him who, after having removed the law through His death out of the station it had before occupied, then rose again and now stands in its place. The wife owes a duty to her second husband as well as her first. It is true that with the former the predominant feeling may have been that of obligation mixed with great fearfulness; and that, with the latter, the predominant feeling may be sweet and spontaneous affection. But still it is evident that there will be service, possibly much greater in amount and certainly far worthier in principle. Under the law we are bidden to do and live; under Christ we are bidden to live and do. In working to the law it is all for ourselves that we may earn a wage or a reward. In working to Christ it is all the freewill offering of love and thankfulness (2Co_5:16). (T. Chalmers, D. D.)
Marriage with Christ
1. The dissolution of the former marriage.
2. The new marriage.
3. Its fruits.
The believer, released from the law by dying in fellowship with the death of Christ, is free to enter into a new union with the risen Christ, in order to bring forth the fruits of holiness to Gods honour. (Archdeacon Gifford.)
The Biblical Illustrator, edited by Joseph S. Exell (c. 1880s–1900s) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword module.
The Expositor's Bible 1887 · Public Domain On v7 Chapter 16
Chapter 16
THE FUNCTION OF THE LAW IN THE SPIRITUAL LIFE
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Rom_7:7-25
THE Apostle has led us a long way in his great argument; through sin, propitiation, faith, union, surrender, to that wonderful and "excellent mystery," the bridal oneness of Christ and the Church, of Christ and the believer. He has yet to unfold the secrets and glories of the experience of a life lived in the power of that Spirit of whose "newness" he has just spoken. But his last parable has brought him straight to a question which has repeatedly been indicated and deferred. He has told us that the Law of God was at first, ideally, our mystic husband, and that we were unfaithful in our wedded life, and that the injured lord sentenced to death his guilty spouse, and that the sentence was carried out-but carried out in Christ. Thus a death divorce took place between us, the justified, and the Law, regarded as the violated party in the covenant-"Do this and live."
Is this ancient husband then a party whom we are now to suspect, and to defy? Our wedlock with him brought us little joy. Alas, its main experience was that we sinned. At best, if we did right, (in any deep sense of right,) we did it against the grain; while we did wrong, (in the deep sense of wrong, difference from the will of God,) with a feeling of nature and gravitation. Was not our old lord to blame? Was there not something wrong about the Law? Did not the Law misrepresent Gods will? Was it not, after all "Sin itself in disguise," though it charged us with the horrible guilt of a course of adultery with Sin?
We cannot doubt that the statement and the treatment of this question here are in effect a record of personal experience. The paragraph which it originates, this long last passage of chapter 7, bears every trace of such experience. Hitherto, in the main, he has dealt with "you" and "us"; now he speaks only as "I," only of "me," and of "mine." And the whole dialect of the passage, so to say, falls in with this use of pronouns. We overhear the colloquies, the altercations, of will with conscience, of will with will, almost of self with self, carried on in a region which only self-consciousness can penetrate, and which only the subject of it all can thus describe. Yes, the person Paul is here, analysing and reporting upon himself; drawing the veil from his own inmost life, with a hand firm because surrendered to the will of God, who bids him, for the Churchs sake, expose himself to view. Nothing in literature, no "Confessions" of an Augustine, no "Grace Abounding" of a Bunyan, is more intensely individual. Yet on the other hand nothing is more universal in its searching application. For the man who thus writes is "the chosen vessel" of the Lord who has perfectly adjusted not his words only but his being, his experience, his conflicts and deliverances, to the manifestations of universal spiritual facts.
We need hardly say that this profound paragraph has been discussed and interpreted most variously. It has been held by some to be only St. Pauls intense way of presenting that great phenomenon, wide as fallen humanity-human will colliding with human conscience, so that "no man does all heknows." Passages from every quarter of literature, of all ages, of all races, have been heaped around it, to prove, (what is indeed so profoundly significant a fact, largely confirmatory of the Christian doctrine of Original Sin,) that universal man is haunted by undone duties; and this passage is placed as it were in the midst, as the fullest possible confession of that fact, in the name of humanity, by an ideal individual. But surely it needs only an attentive reading of the passage, as a part of the Epistle to the Romans, as a part of the teaching of St. Paul, to feel the extreme inadequacy of such an account. On the one hand, the long groaning confession is no artificial embodiment of a universal fact; it is the cry of a human soul, if ever there was a personal cry. On the other hand, the passage betrays a kind of conflict far deeper and more mysterious than merely that of "I ought" with "I will not." It is a conflict of "I will" with "I will not"; of "I hate" with "I do." And in the later stages of the confession we find the subject of the conflict avowing a wonderful sympathy with the Law of God; recording not merely an avowal that right is right, but a consciousness that Gods precept is delectable. All this leads us to a spiritual region unknown to Euripides, and Horace, and even Epictetus.
Again it has been held that the passage records the experiences of a half-regenerate soul; struggling on its way from darkness to light, stumbling across a border zone between the power of Satan and the kingdom of God; deeply convinced of sin, but battling with it in the old impossible way after all, meeting self with self, or, otherwise, the devil with the man. But here again the passage seems to refuse the exposition, as we read all its elements. It is no experience of a half-renewed life to "take delight with the law of God after the inner man." It is utterly unlawful for a half-regenerate soul to describe itself as so beset by sin that "it is not I, but sin that dwelleth in me." No more dangerous form of thought about itself could be adopted by a soul not fully acquainted with God.
Again, and quite on the other hand, it has been held that our passage lays it down that a stern but on the whole disappointing conflict with internal evil is the lot of the true Christian, in his fullest life, now, always, and to the end; that the regenerate and believing man is, if indeed awake to spiritual realities, to feel at every step, "O wretched man that I am"; "What I hate, that I do"; and to expect deliverance from such a consciousness only when he attains his final heavenly rest with Christ. Here again extreme difficulties attend the exposition; not from within the passage, but from around it. It is liberally encircled with truths of liberty, in a servitude which is perfect freedom; with truths of power and joy, in a life which is by the Holy Ghost. It is quite incongruous with such surroundings that it should be thought to describe a spiritual experience dominant and characteristic in the Christian life.
"What shall we say then?" Is there yet another line of exegesis which will better satisfy the facts of both the passage and its context? We think there is one, which at once is distinctive in itself, and combines elements of truth indicated by the others which we have outlined. For those others have each an element of truth, if we read aright. The passage has a reference to the universal conflict of conscience and will. It does say some things quite appropriate to the man who is awake to his bondage but has not yet found his Redeemer. And there is, we dare to say, a sense in which it may be held that the picture is true for the whole course of Christian life here on earth; for there is never an hour of that life when the man who "says he has no sin" does not "deceive himself". {1Jn_1:8} And if that sin be but simple defect, a falling "short of the glory of God"; nay, if it be only that mysterious tendency which, felt or not, hourly needs a divine counteraction; still, the man "has sin," and must long for a final emancipation, with a longing which carries in it at least a latent "groan." So we begin by recognising that Paul, the personal Paul, speaking here to all of us, as in some solemn "testimony" hour, takes us first to his earliest deep convictions of right and wrong, when, apparently after a previous complacency with himself, he woke to see-but not to welcome-the absoluteness of Gods will. He glided along a smooth stream of moral and mental culture and reputation till he struck the rock of "Thou shalt not covet," "Thou shalt not desire," "Thou must not have self-will." Then, as from a grave, which was however only an ambush, "sin" sprang up; a conscious force of opposition to the claim of Gods will as against the will of Paul; and his dream of religious satisfaction died. Till we close ver. 11 (Rom_7:11), certainly, we are in the midst of the unregenerate state. The tenses are past; the narrative is explicit. He made a discovery of law which was as death after life to his then religious experience. He has nothing to say of counter facts in his soul. It was conviction, with only rebellion as its issue. Then we find ourselves, we hardly know how, in a range of confessions of a different order. There is a continuity. The Law is there, and sin is there, and a profound moral conflict. But there are now counter facts. The man, the Ego, now "wills not," nay, "hates," what he practises. He wills what God prescribes, though he does it not. His sinful deeds are, in a certain sense, in this respect, not his own. He actually "delights, rejoices, with the Law of God." Yet there is a sense in which he is "sold," "enslaved," "captured," in the wrong direction.
Here, as we have admitted, there is much which is appropriate to the not yet regenerate state, where however the man is awakening morally, to good purpose, under the hand of God. But the passage as a whole refuses to be satisfied thus, as we have seen. He who can truly speak thus of an inmost sympathy, a sympathy of delight, with the most holy Law of God, is no half-Christian; certainly not in St. Pauls view of things.
But now observe one great negative phenomenon of the passage. We read words about this regenerate sinners moral being and faculties; about his "inner man," his "mind," "the law of his mind,"; about "himself" as distinguished from the "sin" which haunts him. But we read not one clear word about that eternal Spirit, whose glorious presence we have seen: {Rom_7:6} characterising the Gospel, and of whom we are soon to hear in such magnificent amplitude. Once only is He even distinctly indicated; "the Law is spiritual" (Rom_7:14). But that is no comfort, no deliverance. The Spirit is indeed in the Law; but He must be also in the man, if there is to be effectual response, and harmony, and joy. No, we look in vain through the passage for one hint that the man, that Paul, is contemplated in it as filled by faith with the Holy Ghost for his war with indwelling sin working through his embodied conditions.
But he was regenerate, you say. And if so, he was an instance of the Spirits work, a receiver of the Spirits presence. It is so; not without the Spirit, working in him, could he "delight in the Law of God," and "with his true self serve the law of God." But does this necessarily mean that he, as a conscious agent, was fully using his eternal Guest as his power and victory?
We are not merely discussing a literary passage. We are pondering an oracle of God about man. So we turn full upon the reader-and upon ourselves-and ask the question, whether the heart cannot help to expound this hard paragraph. Christian man, by grace, -that is to say, by the Holy Spirit of God, -you have believed, and live. You are a limb of Christ, who is your life. But you are a sinner still; always, actually, in defect, and in tendency; always, potentially, in ways terribly positive. For whatever the presence of the Spirit in you has done, it has not so altered you that, if He should go, you would not instantly "revert to the type" of unholiness. Now, how do you meet temptation from without? How do you deal with the dread fact of guilty imbecility within? Do you, if I may put it so, use regenerate faculty in unregenerate fashion, meeting the enemy practically alone, with only high resolves, and moral scorn of wrong, and assiduous processes of discipline on body or mind? God forbid we should call these things evil. They are good. But they are the accidents, not the essence, of the secret; the wall, not the well, of power and triumph. It is the Lord Himself dwelling in you who is your victory; and that victory is to be realised by a conscious and decisive appeal to Him. "Through Him you shall do valiantly; for He it is that shall tread down your enemies." {Psa_60:12} And is not this verified in your experience? When, in your regenerate state, you use the true regenerate way, is there not a better record to be given? When, realising that the true principle is indeed a Person, you less resolve, less struggle, and more appeal and confide-is not sins "reign" broken, and is not your foot, even yours, because you are in conscious union with the Conqueror, placed effectually on "all the power of the enemy"?
We are aware of the objection ready to be made, and by devout and reverent men. It wilt be said that the Indwelling Spirit works always through the being in whom He dwells; and that so we are not to think of Him as a separable Ally, but just to "act ourselves," leaving it to Him to act through us. Well, we are willing to state the matter almost exactly in those last words, as theory. But the subject is too deep-and too practical-for neat logical consistency. He does indeed work in us, and through us. But then-it is He. And to the hard-pressed soul there is an unspeakable reality and power in thinking of Him as a separable, let us say simply a personal, Ally, who is also Commander, Lord, Life-Giver; and in calling Him definitely in.
So we read this passage again, and note this absolute and eloquent silence in it about the Holy Ghost. And we dare, in that view, to interpret it as St. Pauls confession, not of a long-past experience, not of an imagined experience, but of his own normal experience always-when he acts out of character as a regenerate man. He fails, he "reverts," when, being a sinner by nature still, and in the body still, he meets the Law, and meets temptation, in any strength short of the definitely sought power of the Holy Ghost, making Christ all to him for peace and victory. And he implies, surely, that this failure is not a bare hypothesis, but that he knows what it is. It is not that God is not sufficient. He is so, always, now, forever. But the man does not always adequately use God; as he ought to do, as he might do, as he will ever rise up afresh to do. And when he does not, the resultant failure-though it be but a thought of vanity, a flush of unexpressed anger, a microscopic flaw in the practise of truthfulness, an unhallowed imagination, darting in a moment through the soul-is to him sorrow, burthen, shame. It tells him that "the flesh" is present still, present at least in its elements, though God can keep them out of combination. It tells him that, though immensely blest, and knowing now exactly where to seek, and to find, a constant practical deliverance (oh, joy unspeakable!), he is still "in the body," and that its conditions are still of "death." And so he looks with great desire for its redemption. The present of grace is good, beyond all his hopes of old. But the future of glory is "far better."
Thus the man at once "serves the Law of God," as its willing bondman (δουλευω, Rom_7:25), in the life of grace, and submits himself, with reverence and shame, to its convictions, when, if but for an hour, or a moment, he "reverts" to the life of the flesh.
Let us take the passage up now for a nearly continuous translation.
What shall we say then, in face of the thought of our death divorce, in Christ, from the Laws condemning power. Is the Law sin? Are they only two phases of one evil? Away with the thought! But-here is the. connection of the two-I should not have known, recognised, understood, sin but by means of law. For coveting, for example, I should not have known, should not have recognised as sin, if the Law had not been saying, "Thou shalt not covet." But sin, making a fulcrum of the commandment, produced, effected, in me all coveting, every various application of the principle. For, law apart, sin is dead-in the sense of lack of conscious action. It needs "a holy Will," more or less revealed, to occasion its collision. Given no holy will, known or surmised, and it is "dead" as rebellion, though not as pollution. But I, the person to whom it lay buried, was all alive, conscious and content, law apart, once on a time (strange ancient memory in that biography!). But when the commandment came to my conscience and my will, sin rose to life again, ("again"; so it was no new creation after all) and I-died; I found myself legally doomed to death, morally without life power, and bereft of the self-satisfaction that seemed my vital breath. And the commandment that was lifewards, prescribing nothing but perfect right, the straight line to life eternal, proved for me deathwards. For sin, making a fulcrum of the commandment, deceived me, into thinking fatally wrong of God and of myself, and through it killed me, discovered me to myself as legally and morally a dead man. So that the Law, indeed, is holy, and the commandment, the special precept which was my actual death blow, holy, and just, and good. (He says, "the Law, indeed," with the implied antithesis that "sin, on the other hand," is the opposite; the whole fault of his misery beneath the Law lies with sin.) The good thing then, this good Law, has it to me become death? Away with the thought! Nay, but sin did so become that it might come out as sin, working out death for me by means of the good Law-that sin might prove overwhelmingly sinful, through the commandment, which at once called it up, and, by awful contrast, exposed its nature. Observe he does not say merely that sin thus "appeared" unutterably evil. More boldly, in this sentence of mighty paradoxes, he says that it "became" such. As it were, it developed its "character" into its fullest "action," when it thus used the eternal Will to set creature against Creator. Yet even this was overruled; all happened thus "in order," so that the very virulence of the plague might effectually demand the glorious remedy.
For we know, we men with our conscience, we Christians with our Lords light, that the Law, this Law which sin so foully abused, is spiritual, the expression of the eternal Holiness, framed by the sure guidance of the Holy Spirit; but then I, I Paul, taken as a sinner, viewed apart from Christi am fleshly, a child of self, sold to be under sin; yes, not only when, in Adam, my nature sold itself at first, but still and always, just so far as I am considered apart from Christ, and just so far as, in practice, I live apart from Christ, "reverting," if but for a minute, to my self-life. For the work I work out, I do not know, I do not recognise; I am lost amidst its distorted conditions; for it is not what I will that I practice, but it is what I hate that I do. But if what I do is what I do not will, I assent to the Law that it, the Law, is good; I show my moral sympathy with the precept by the endorsement given it by my will, in the sense of my earnest moral preference. But now, in this state of facts, it is no longer I who work out the work, but the indweller in me-Sin.
He implies by "no longer" that once it was otherwise; once "the central" choice was for self, now, in the regenerate life, even in its conflicts, yea, even in its failures, it is for God. A mysterious "other self" is latent still, and asserts itself in awful reality when the true man, the man as regenerate, ceases to watch and to pray. And in this sense he dares to say "it is no more I" It is a sense the very opposite to the dream of self-excuse; for though the Ego as regenerate does not do the deed, it has, by its sleep, or by its confidence, betrayed the soul to the true doer. And thus he passes naturally into the following confessions, in which we read at once the consciousness of a state which ought not to be, though it is, and also the conviction that it is a state "out of character" with himself, with his personality as redeemed and new-created. Into such a confession there creeps no lying thought that he "is delivered to do these abominations"; {Jer_7:10} that it is fate; that he cannot help it. Nor is the miserable dream present here that evil is but a phase of good, and that these conflicts are only discordant melodies struggling to a cadence where they will accord. It is a groan of shame and pain, from a man who could not be thus tortured ii he were not born again. Yet it is also an avowal, - as if to assure himself that deliverance is intended, and is at hand, -that the treacherous tyrant he has let into the place of power "is an alien" to him as he is a man regenerate. Not for excuse, but to clear his thought, and direct his hope, he says this to himself, and to us, in his dark hour.
For I know that there dwells not in me, that is, in my flesh, good; in my personal life, so long, and so far, as it "reverts" to self as its working centre, all is evil, for nothing is as God would have it be. And that "flesh," that self-life, is ever there, latent if not patent; present in such a sense that it is ready for instant reappearance, from within, if any moral power less than that of the Lord Himself is in command. For the willing lies at my hand; but the working out what is right, does not. "The willing," as throughout this passage, means not the ultimate fiat of the mans soul, deciding his action, but his earnest moral approbation, moral sympathy, "the convictions" of the enlightened being. For not what I will, even good, do I; but what I do not will, even evil, that I practice. Now if what I do is what I do not will, no longer, as once, do I work it out, but the indweller in me, Sin.
Again his purpose is not excuse, but deliverance. No deadly antinomianism is here, such as has withered innumerable lives, where the thought has been admitted that sin may be in the man, and yet the man may not sin. His thought is, as all along, that it is his own shame that thus it is; yet that the evil is, ultimately, a thing alien to his true character, and that therefore he is right to call the lawful King and Victor in upon it.
And now comes up again the solemn problem of the Law. That stern, sacred, monitor is looking on all the while, and saying all the while the things which first woke sin from its living grave in the old complacent experience, and then, in the regenerate state, provoked sin to its utmost treachery, and most fierce invasions. And the man hears the voice, and in his new-created character he loves it. But he has "reverted," ever so little, to his old attitude, to the self-life, and so there is also rebellion in him when that voice says "Thou shalt." So I find the Law-he would have said, "I find it my monitor, honoured, aye and loved, but not my helper"; but he breaks the sentence up in the stress of this intense confession; so I find the Law-for me, me with a will to do the right, -that for me the evil lies at hand. For I have glad sympathy with the Law of God; what He prescribes I endorse with delight as good, as regards the inner man, that is, my world of conscious insight and affection in the new life; but I see (as if I were a watcher from without) a rival law, another and contradictory precept, "serve thyself," in my limbs, in my world of sense and active faculty, at war with the law of my mind, the Law of God, adopted by my now enlightened thinking power as its sacred code, and seeking to make me captive in that war to the law of sin, the law which is in my limbs.
Unhappy man am I Who will rescue me out of the body of this death, out of a life conditioned by this mortal body, which in the Fall became Sins especial vehicle, directly or indirectly, and which is not yet {Rom_7:23} actually "redeemed"? Thanks be to God, who giveth that deliverance, in covenant and in measure now, fully and in eternal actuality hereafter, through Jesus Christ our Lord.
So then, to sum the whole phenomenon of the conflict up, leaving aside for the moment this glorious hope of the issue, I, myself, with the mind indeed do bondservice to the law of God, but with the flesh, with the life of self, wherever and whenever I "revert" that way, I do bondservice to the law of sin.
Do we close the passage with a sigh, and almost with a groan? Do we sigh over the intricacy of the thought, the depth and subtlety of the reasoning, the almost fatigue of fixing and of grasping the facts below the terms "will," and "mind," and "inner man," and "flesh," and "I"? Do we groan over the consciousness that no analysis of our spiritual failures can console us for the fact of them, and that the Apostle seems in his last sentences to relegate our consolations to the future, while it is in the present that we fail, and in the present that we long with all our souls to do, as well as to approve the will of God?
Let us be patient, and also let us think again. Let us find a solemn and sanctifying peace in the patience which meekly accepts the mystery that we must needs "wait yet for the redemption of our body"; that the conditions of "this corruptible" must yet for a season give ambushes and vantages to temptation, which will be all annihilated hereafter. But let us also think again. If we went at all aright in our remarks previous to this passage, there are glorious possibilities for the present hour "readable between the lines" of St. Pauls unutterably deep confession. We have seen in conflict the Christian man, regenerate, yet taken, in a practical sense, apart from his Regenerator. We have seen him really fight, though he really fails. We have seen him unwittingly, but guiltily, betray his position to the foe, by occupying it as it were alone. We have seen also, nevertheless, that he is not his foes ally but his antagonist. Listen; he is calling for his King.
That cry will not be in vain. The King will take a double line of action in response. While his soldier-bondservant is yet in the body, "the body of this death," He will throw Himself into the narrow hold, and wonderfully turn the tide within it, and around it. And hereafter, He will demolish it. Rather He will transfigure it, into the counterpart-even as it were into the part-of His own body of glory; and the man shall rest, and serve, and reign forever, with a being homogeneous all through in its likeness to the Lord.
William Robertson Nicoll, ed., The Expositor's Bible (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1887–1910) — public domain. 65 of 66 books (1 Corinthians is not separately keyed, as that volume carries no machine-parseable verse references); section-level commentary keyed to the opening verse. Introductory and overview sections not keyed to a specific passage are excluded.
B. W. Johnson 1891 · Public Domain On vv1, 2, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10 1–4. I speak to them who know the law.…
1–4. I speak to them who know the law. Not the law, but law; know the powers of law. The argument of the Jews was that the law of Moses was of perpetual obligation, but they knew that death released a man from its power. It reigned only over the living.
B. W. Johnson's The People's New Testament with Notes (1889–1891) — public domain. Electronic text from the Christian Classics Ethereal Library (CCEL) ThML edition.
The Preacher's Complete Homiletical Commentary 1892 · Public Domain On vv1, 7 Rom_7:1.—The law is lord over the man. There is…
CRITICAL NOTES
Rom_7:1.—The law is lord over the man. There is nothing shocking in the assertion that we are no longer under the law. You all know that the power of the law over a man ceases at death; and we are dead.
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Rom_7:2.—The soul first married to sin, then to Christ.
Rom_7:3.—Adultery considered infamous among the Romans.
Rom_7:4.—Freed from the power of the law as a covenant, having endured its curse; that the fruit of our union may be sanctified to God (Wordsworth).
Rom_7:5.—The apostle does not disparage the law, and so give countenance to the Manichæan heresy. “Ab sit hoc ab animo qualiscunque Christiani” (Augustine).
Rom_7:6.—The law, indeed, is still our rule, our guide, our governor, but it ceases to be a tyrant over us, a tormentor of us (Dr. Barrow). “The law,” says Calvin, “puts a check upon our external actions, but does not restrain our concupiscence.” “No Christian man whatsoever,” says the Church of England, “is free from the obedience of the commandments which are called moral.” Delivered from the law, not as regards its moral precepts, but its carnal, external performances.
MAIN HOMILETICS OF THE PARAGRAPH.—Rom_7:1-6
A sorrowful and a joyful marriage.—Happy the loving wife who is married to the true husband, Jesus Christ, feels devotion to His person, accepts with loyalty His directions, and, leaning upon His arm, walks joyfully through the wilderness of this world to the revealing realm where the spirit of St. Paul will flash the brightness of his intelligence upon the mysterious utterances made in this seventh chapter, as well as in other parts of this epistle. The first six verses of the chapter present us with an allegory. We have two marriages—the one to the law and the other to Christ. The law reigns and has power while it has life; but its authority ceases when death supervenes. The law is dead as a reigning and oppressive power when Christ the liberator appears. All former bonds are destroyed when Christ comes and takes the wife wrongfully married. When this divine union is consummated, there is bliss indeed.
I. The first marriage is:
1. A mere legal connection. No true love enters into the relationship. There are no sweet dalliances between the soul and the law. We are seeking to carry out the allegory, so that it must not be inferred that we intend to advocate the dissolution of the marriage bond through mere incompatibilities of tempers, or the easy method by which the married may be set free in some countries.
2. An irksome restraint. The soul married to the law is bound, but longs for freedom. Notice the expressions “bound by the law” and “sweetly married to another.” Bound we may be, and are, to Christ; but it is by the silver link, the silken tie, the secret sympathy, of love.
3. A monotonous service. During this first marriage state the soul serves in oldness of the letter; the bright spirit of love does not appear upon or in the dreary pathway of the bound wife. She perhaps Pines for love, and weeps in secret; she serves in the oldness of the letter; and all freshness is being extracted from her nature.
4. A repellent relationship. The motions of sin, the passions of sin, work in the wife; and there are many quarrels between the soul and the law. The married life is marked by many bickerings, much disquietude; and the wife has many heart-burnings.
5. The source of an unpleasant family. Sometimes in earthly marriages the wife finds in her children sweet forgetfulness of the sufferings she may have endured at the hands of her husband. No blame can attach to this husband; for the law is holy, just, and good. In this case the wife’s sufferings arise from the incompatibility of the relationship; and there are to her no compensations, for the fruit is unto death. None of the children wear the newness and beauty of youth. The bounding steps of young life are not heard; the joyous laughter and merry peals of healthy childhood do not enliven. Death shadows everywhere appal. A sickly group crawls through the dwelling. Who shall deliver? How long will the bondage last? “Christ hath redeemed us from the curse of the law, being made a curse for us: for it is written, Cursed is everyone that hangeth on a tree.” The crucified body of Christ, His whole mission, His complete mediatorial work, secures the law’s death. The wife is set free. Let the joy bells be rung. A second marriage may be consummated.
II. The second marriage is an exact contrast to the first.—
1. It is a love connection. When first the soul hears the voice of Christ, it is as the voice of the beloved speaking in gentlest whispers, that sound as heaven’s own music, richer than any that can strike upon human ears. The Bridegroom loves the bride out of the infinite love of His own gracious nature. That love is creating; for it produces in the bride a love brighter and more enduring than any of the loves of earth. Happy marriage day when the soul is married to Him who has been raised from the dead! The sun of heaven shines through earth’s gloom upon the spiritual espousals.
2. It has joyous constraint. Bound, but free. A slave, but unwilling to be liberated. A wife who has changed her name, merged her individuality, foregone her supposed rights, counted all her precious possessions as loss, and yet rejoices in her losses because she has found an infinite gain in the Husband who is chief among ten thousand, and altogether lovely.
3. It is lively service. The wife serves in newness of spirit. Where love is the spirit is ever new and ever young. The soul will serve in newness of spirit through unending cycles. When we get old, the newness of the spirit abates. But this wife never feels the decrepitude of age. The newness of the spirit is never touched by the hand of time which makes other things grow worse. Earthborn spirits will die. The glories of time will be disfigured. Our realms of beauty will be laid waste. But the Christ spirit abides for evermore. The soul wife married to Christ will joyfully serve for ever.
4. It is the source of happy products. We are married unto Christ that we should bring forth fruit unto God. A beautiful family blesses the divine union. Corner stones polished after the similitude of a palace adorn. Plants grown up in youthful comeliness shed their fragrance, unfold their beauty, and provide their luscious fruit. The garners are full of all Christian graces, and afford all manner of spiritual store. Happy the wife that is in such a case; yea, happy is that soul which is married unto the risen Saviour! Let us then not continue in bondage to the law, for it is dead; let us not try to galvanise the law into the semblance of life. Let us seek for soul union with the immortal Christ; let us strive to serve in newness of spirit which is newness of love; for it has always upon it the dews of heaven’s bright morning.
“What does it teach?”—A book bearing this title professes to have discovered the true interpretation of the chapter, which is said to be a description of the Jew under the Mosaic law. Our thanks must be given to every worker who seeks to throw light on biblical difficulties. Still we cannot feel that the question is settled. The theory, it is said, makes the whole chapter plain, and yet the analysis of the chapter has to us the appearance of special pleading, which is like an admission of weakness, The writer says, “It is believed that learned and pious expositors, under the influence of the strong drift of thought, have taken for granted a view of the passage which is erroneous.” May not this new expositor have been led wrong under the influence of the strong drift of his own thought? Take his statement: “ ‘I delight in the law of God.’ This expression is distinctly Jewish, and not Christian.” Why should not a Christian use συνήδομαι when speaking of the law of God? ἡδονή is evidently connected with the Hebrew עדן, “delight,” “loveliness”; and why should not St. Paul use the expression, “I am pleased together with the law—what pleases the law pleases me”? This delight may not amount to highest spiritual joy, for it produces a conflict. And again the author asks us to notice the “hopeless wail of the wretched slave” in Romans 7, and the sorrows “cheerfully borne” by the Christian as described in 2 Corinthians. We notice and observe that St. Paul says, “We that are in the tabernacle do groan, being burdened.” Is the groaning Christian of the Corinthians any worse than the “wretched man” of the Romans, and who at last triumphs over his wretchedness through the power of Jesus Christ? But our main objection to the writer’s theory is not found in his exegesis, is not contained in his statements, but in his very strange omission. He says St. Paul “brings in to support his assertion an illustration (drawn, doubtless, from the recollection of his own past experience) in which he pictures a conscientious Jew,” etc. Is the experience of Romans 7 drawn from the recollections of St. Paul as a Jew under the Mosaic law? Does the self-reproach of that chapter harmonise with the self-complacency of the Pharisee? The writer’s Jew is carnal, sold under sin. While the Saviour’s Jew is described as feeling himself perfect. He had no remorse. He lifted a complacent brow to heaven. His voice sounded exultingly through the temple, “God, I thank Thee,” etc. The writer’s Jew says, “So then with the mind I myself serve the law of God; but with the flesh the law of sin.” St. Paul’s Jew—the Jew of his own pre-Christian life—says, “An Hebrew of the Hebrews: as touching the law a Pharisee; concerning zeal, persecuting the Church; touching the righteousness which is in the law, blameless.” When a third edition of the book is issued, we shall be glad to hear how it comes to pass that St. Paul in chap. 7 draws a picture of the Jew so different from his own recorded state. If a heathen became converted to Christianity, we could not suppose him describing a character which had no resemblance to his own, unless indeed he wanted to make himself better than his fellow. Why should St. Paul in Philippians make himself a blameless keeper of the law, and in Romans make the Jew put forth feeble attempts at keeping the law. Does any ancient or modern Jew have the strivings of Romans 7? Jews as a class are self-righteous, and consider themselves blameless. It is only when conviction works that the Jew begins to feel his shortcomings. Saul had no remorse. He persecuted the saints of God, and thought he was doing God service. He was blameless. When he was not blind, his soul was dark; but when darkness was over the visual orbs, his soul was getting a power of vision. In the house of Judas sin revived. In the days of Saul’s blindness he kept crying, “O wretched man that I am! who shall deliver me from the body of this death?” When the scales fell from his eyes, much of the despairing tone departed from his soul, and straightway he preached Christ in the synagogues, that He is the Son of God—the power of God unto salvation, the great deliverer from the curse and the tyranny of the law. However, the theory is not so new as the words seem to imply. Something very similar is found among the fathers of the Pietistic School and the rationalistic critics. They think that the apostle introduces himself as the personification of the legal Jew. Godet appears to follow in the same pathway, though we cannot be quite sure as to his teaching. Certainly he makes light of the theory that the passage applies to the regenerate man; and Godet is perhaps more ingenious in destroying other theories than in establishing one of his own. Happy man who has never been brought into captivity to the law of sin which is in our members! If the Christian life is a fight, a contest, a struggle, then there must be an old man of sin against which the new man in Christ Jesus makes war. Perhaps there may be a combination of experiences in the passage—the experience of the enlightened and conscientious Jew. We obtain from the dark and more desponding parts of the description the experience of the soul under strong conviction, such as that felt by Saul in his days of blindness, to which we have referred; and the experience of the regenerate man who places before himself a lofty ideal, and feels how far short he comes of attaining the ideal. After all, this seventh chapter must be placed among the things of St. Paul which are hard to be understood. We do not see the necessity of straining every point, of attaching a moral meaning to every turn of a letter. Scholarship is good, but it will not enable us to attain the unattainable; and we believe that in the present state we must be willing to confess our inability to understand everything, to solve all difficulties, and to reconcile all apparent discrepancies.
Rom_7:4. Four stages of Paul’s experience.
I. We are to study the personal career of Paul as here sketched by himself.—We see him at four stages.
1. As Paul the self-satisfied (see Rom_7:9). “I was alive, apart from law, once.” This may mean one or both of two things:
(1) it may indicate a state of self-unsuspectingness in distinction from one of conscious transgression; or
(2) a state of self-security as opposed to one of conscious danger. Fuller autobiographic touches, as given elsewhere, throw much light upon this. Few young men are mentioned in Scripture who seem to present a more pleasant picture of the exterior bearing of their early manhood. Paul was doubtless a model of uprightness and of conscientious religiousness. There is every indication that he was as rigid a Churchman and as stern a moralist as could well be found; probably no young man could be found to surpass him as a model of social propriety. Still, as he now looks back on that self-satisfied past, he owns “Apart from law, sin was dead”; it lay undisturbed in the depths of the spirit, still as death. I was so content with my attainments that I actually came to a most charming conclusion about myself—“touching the righteousness which is in the law, blameless!” That self-complacency was destined to be disturbed,
2. At a later stage we find Paul becoming Paul the terrified. This transition is described between the latter part of the ninth verse and the close of the thirteenth. “When the commandment came, sin revived”; it started up as a reanimated body from the tomb, and the awful spectre of sin so alarmed me that “I died. And the commandment, which was ordained to life, I found to be unto death.” Though it promised life, yet it promised life only to law-keepers. But I was a law-breaker; hence, there I lay, under the death sentence. Nor was this all. “Sin, taking occasion by the commandment, deceived me, and by it slew me.” If there be any self-will, tell a man he must not do this or that, and he is at once provoked to wish to do it. Thus sin, through the commandment, becomes exceeding sinful. And hence, with the weight of the law which condemns heart sin pressing upon him, Paul sinks down oppressed.
3. Paul the struggler. He is not only convicted of sin, but he sees that the conviction is just, that the commandment is holy, just, and good. But he himself is all wrong; he wants to get right; he struggles to escape from the grasp of law. With what success he shall tell for himself in Rom_7:14-24. And no further than this did he get; no further could he get; no further can any one ever get who has to thread his way by the light of law alone. A rule, however excellent and perfect, will never help a man to keep it. Nor did the pure and holy law help Paul to its fulfilment. So far, and so far only, under law. But oh, happy change!
4. We have now to look at Paul the free! In the first verse of the eighth chapter he shows us how things stand NOW. “There is therefore NOW no condemnation,” etc.—i.e., from all that I have said about Christ, righteousness, grace, life, it follows that whereas I, as a guilty man, could never, under law alone, rise above a despairing struggle, yet NOW, in Christ Jesus, I am a free man! The condemning sentence of the law is no more. The life and power I wanted, which the law cannot give, are given me by Jesus; so that whereas, under law, I was a struggling captive, in Christ Jesus I am gloriously free. The law stirred up sin; Christ conquers. The law condemns; Christ absolves.
II. In this personal experience Paul sets forth the peculiarity of the believer’s life in Christ.—We here learn:
1. That for a sinful man no conceivable relation to law alone can be perfectly satisfactory. Law, as such, can give neither absolution for sin nor power against it.
2. These two wants which law reveals are in Christ supplied.
3. If any believers never get beyond Paul’s third stage (or the struggling one), they have their privileges in Christ yet to learn.
4. Some call the fourth stage, that of freedom, the “higher” Christian life. No; it is the Christian life.
5. When we thus receive Christ in all His fulness, then we shall cry, I have found it! I have found it! The secret of life, power, peace, freedom, song, is in Christ, and Christ alone. What law enjoins the Spirit of God creates; and to that holiness, when struggled after in vain when toiling alone, the spirit will soar by its own living power when Christ fills us with His glorious life.—C. Clemance, B.A., D.D.
Rom_7:7. Knowledge of sin by the law.—Although the apostle aimed in this epistle to show that the law by itself was unable and unfitted to secure men’s salvation, it is evident both that he honoured the law as an expression of the divine character and will, and that he considered it from a Christian point of view to fulfil a most important purpose. Especially in this verse does he set forth the law as awakening conscience to sin, and so preparing the way for the introduction of the gospel, both in the order of the divine dispensation and in the course of individual experience. His own spiritual history is represented as typical: “I had not known sin but by the law.”
I. Law is the revelation of the superior will to the subject and inferior will.—There is a sense in which the word “law” is commonly used in the exposition of physical science. It is in such connections equivalent to uniformity of antecedence and sequence. But this, though a queer employment of the term, is secondary and figurative, part of the connotation is intentionally abandoned. The fuller meaning of law is seen when the reference is to requirements of certain modes of action, and when the requirement is made by one who has a just right to make it, a just claim upon the submission and obedience of those to whom the command is addressed. The superiority in the lawgiver does not lie simply in physical power, but in moral character and authority.
II. Being under such law implies the possession of intelligent and voluntary nature.—The inferior animals are not, in the proper sense of the term, under law. Nor are babes, or idiots, or any whose moral nature is undeveloped. Man as an intelligent being can apprehend law, as an active and voluntary being can obey law. Kant has put the matter in a very striking and a very just light in saying that whilst the unintelligent creation acts according to law, an intelligent being has the prerogative of acting according to the representation of law—i.e., he can understand, consciously adopt, and willingly and without constraint obey the law. Freedom is the power to obey or to disobey.
III. In proportion to the definiteness of the law is the measure of responsibility attaching to those who are subject to it.—Confining attention to human beings possessed of thought, reason, and will, we cannot fail to detect degrees of acquaintance with the revelation which in various ways is vouchsafed to the race. There are those, as for example untutored savages and the “waifs and strays” of a civilised community, whose knowledge of the divine will is both very imperfect and very indistinct. Such in former ages was the case of the Gentiles as compared with the highly favoured Jews. Now our Saviour Himself and, following His teaching, the highly inspired apostles have plainly taught that responsibility varies with knowledge and opportunity.
IV. On the other hand, the possession of express and verbal laws involves heightened responsibility.—When the knowledge of duty is clear, defection and rebellion are aggravated in guilt. The sin of transgression is increased as the light sinned against is brighter. Such was the case with the Jews, who were worthy of sorer condemnation than the Gentiles where both were disobedient. Comparatively they only knew sin who knew the law by which sin is prohibited. True there is a general conscience, against which even the unenlightened transgressors are offenders, but they are the worst culprits who having the light walk not in it.
V. Thus the law by revealing a higher standard of duty, and by making sin “exceeding sinful,” prepares the way for the introduction of the divine gospel of salvation and life.—The apostle avers that but for the law he had not known sin—i.e., comparatively. If this had been all, he would have had little reason to thank the law. But in fact the law, proving the holiness and righteousness of God and the powerlessness of man to obey, served to make the introduction of a new dispensation, that of grace, doubly welcome. Men were brought to feel their need of a Saviour, and, when that Saviour came, to receive Him with alacrity and gratitude, and to use the means prescribed by which the penalties of the law may be escaped and the blessings of eternal salvation enjoyed.—Prof. Thompson.
SUGGESTIVE COMMENTS ON Rom_7:1-6
Christ dissolves the union.—The law is but an imperfect embodiment of the justice of God. To say that the law forbids our rescue from sin is to say that the justice of God forbids it. But the death of Christ made it consistent with the justice of God to pardon the sinner. Therefore by the death of Christ we are released from the bondage to which the justice of God bound us in a way which does not contradict but manifests the justice of God, and in order that we may be united to Christ, and thus live a life devoted to God (comp. Gal_3:13 f.). It is easy to apply this to the case of those who have broken, not only the law of Moses, but the more solemn law of Christ. As in the history of the world, so in the history of each individual, God speaks first in the form of law. Even the gospel, to those who read it first, is but an embodiment of the eternal principles of right and wrong. But these principles condemn the sinner. And many conscientious men feel that for God to pardon their sins and smile upon them would be to set aside these eternal moral principles. And because they know that God will not do this, they dare not believe His proclamation of pardon. But in this section we are reminded that the death of Christ has satisfied the eternal principles which forbade our pardon, by revealing the evitable connection of sin and death, and that, without infringing them, God may now set us free. Justification through the death of Christ, as explained in Rom_3:26, is plainly implied in this section. For that by Christ’s death we are set free from a union with sin to which the law bound us can only mean that His death made it consistent with God’s justice to set us free from the power of sin, which implies, since bondage to sin is the divinely ordained penalty of committing sin, forgiveness of our past sins. We are also plainly taught that Christ died in our place; for He bowed for a time to the power of death, and became its victim in order to rescue us from its power.—Beet.
Why does Paul use the wife as a figure?—The difficult question in this verse is why Paul takes as an example a wife losing her husband and free to remarry, rather than a husband losing his wife and enjoying the same right; for the two cases equally demonstrate the truth of the maxim of Rom_7:1. The fact that the law bound the woman more strictly than the husband does not suffice to explain this preference. It is the application which Paul proposes to make of his example to the spiritual life which will give us the solution of the question. It shows, in point of fact, that Paul had in view, not only the breaking of the believer’s soul with the law (the first husband), but also its new union to the risen Christ (the second husband). Now in this figure of the second marriage Christ could only represent the husband, and the believer, consequently, the wife. And this is what leads the apostle to take a step further, and to attribute death to the wife herself; for Christ having died, the believing soul cannot espouse Him except as itself dead. The expression “to be in the flesh” is very far from being synonymous with “living in the body” (comp. Gal_2:20). The term “flesh,” denoting literally the soft parts of the body, which are the usual seat of agreeable or painful sensations, is applied in biblical language to the whole natural man, in so far as he is yet under the dominion of the love of pleasure and the fear of pain—that is to say, of the tendency to self-satisfaction. The natural complacency of the ego with itself—such is the idea of the word “flesh” in the moral sense in which it is so often used in Scripture.—Godet.
Mosaic law is meant.—It has been a question to whom the apostle’s argument is addressed. Many interpreters consider him as addressing himself to Christians generally, and they think that what is here established may apply to the law written on the heart as well as to the law of Moses. But if we consider that what is here established is the releasing of men from the law alluded to, that they may be made subject to another law, we shall see that no other law can be meant but the Mosaic law and the law of the gospel. For as there can be no release from the law written on the heart, the apostle’s remark cannot apply to it. We must therefore admit that this part of the argument is addressed to the Jewish Christians, and that it is intended to convince them that they are now at liberty, without the violation of any duty, to forsake the law of Moses and embrace the gospel. And that the apostle has in view the law of Moses may be inferred from his addressing his argument to men who “know the law,” for it could hardly be said of Gentile converts that they knew the Jewish law. This illustration may seem to us to be drawn from a more familiar subject than would now be thought proper for explaining such a topic. But when we consider that in the Old Testament the relation of God to His chosen people is sometimes represented under the similitude of a marriage solemnised at Mount Sinai, and that in consequence God is represented as calling Himself their husband; and when we look back to that state of ancient manners which rendered this figurative mode of speech forcible and appropriate, we shall admit that, in speaking to the Jews, to whom this portion of the epistle is addressed, it was a very natural illustration, as well as one that explained clearly the point which the apostle meant to press on their attention. Every Jew, therefore, who carefully considered his situation merely as depending on the law must have been sensible of inordinate emotions leading him to actual sin, and he must have been aware also that for actual guilt the law made no allowance and offered no means of pardon. No doubt the Jews under the law lived in the hope of forgiveness, and no doubt those of them whose conduct was suitable to their religious privileges obtained it. But this was not derived from the strict letter of their law. It was derived from that gracious dispensation which their law prefigured, and from which alone sinners can obtain forgiveness. The law could not possibly be a principle of justification, “for when ye were under its authority,” saith the apostle, “your corrupt propensities led you to the commission of actions which the law itself punished with death” (Rom_7:6). “But now,” continues he, “we are delivered from the law, that being dead wherein we were held; that we should serve in newness of spirit, and not in the oldness of the letter.”—Ritchie.
Law superseded by the gospel.—The apostle continues the subject of a complete sanctification, or, in other words, of a perfected human being after the model of Jesus. His object in this section is to show that every scrap and fragment of obligation to the law were annihilated. He addresses the Jews who were acquainted with the law, and shows them by a familiar illustration how entirely it had been superseded by the gospel, and how perfectly free they were to become Christians without any longer continuing to be Jews. It was a matter requiring great delicacy and address to maintain the divine legation of Moses and the original binding authority of his institutions, and at the same time to lead the Jews onward who had been thus educated, and every fibre of whose intellectual and moral being was inwoven in the law, and to open to their faith and admiration the greater beauties and glories of Christianity. In truth, the idea of the progressive nature of all religion, as well as of life in general, seems to be one of the hardest lessons for man to learn, whether under the Jewish or the Christian system. He becomes fossilised in ceremonials and creeds, and hears with reluctance the ceaseless command of God’s providence, Go up higher. In regard to the many questions how St. Paul’s rhetoric shall be justified, and how the several limbs of his comparison shall be matched with one another, we have nothing to say while the main drift of his remarks is so apparent. Thus Beza says, “The old man is the wife, sinful desire the husband, sins the children”; and Augustine that “there are three—the soul is the woman, the passions of sin the husband, and the law the law of the husband.” Origen, Chrysostom, Calvin, and others, “Men are the wife, the law the former husband, Christ the new one.” If Paul were a writer who carried out his figures regularly, all such criticism would be very fine and useful; but he is not, and to attempt in every instance to set the different parts in order is not only a work of supererogation but of impossibility. To hunt needles in haymows, or to attach again the strewn leaves of the forest to the identical boughs from which they have fallen, would be as easy and as profitable as to pursue this word-criticism to its niceties, with a view of resting upon it any essential doctrine or precept. The Bible in general, and the writings of Paul in particular, lie, like great nature herself, vast, various, somewhat chaotic and disjointed, a creation in progress, and not a creation finished, but everywhere full of gleams of surpassing beauty, touches of deepest feeling, and electricities and magnetisms and fires of quickest power. The words of Professor Stuart are most true, and it would have been well if he had always “recked his own rede”: “Many a time have I read the Epistle to the Romans without obtaining scarcely a glimpse of it. When I ask the reason of this, I find it in neglect to look after the general object and course of thought in the writer. Special interpretation stood in the way of general views; the explanation of words hindered the discerning of the course of thought.”—Livermore.
ILLUSTRATIONS TO CHAPTER 7
Rom_7:6. Newness of spirit.—The economy of the gospel is to put a man in a new condition, and then he will appear in a new character. St. Paul says, “Now we are delivered from the law, that being dead wherein we were held; that we should serve in newness of spirit, and not in the oldness of the letter.” This statement of the apostle was strikingly illustrated in the history of Israel. The law was given, not to Israel in Egypt, but to Israel delivered out of the bondage of Egypt. God first puts Israel into a new condition—a state of liberty—before He expects Israel to appear in a new character. The fulfilling of the law was to be the test of gratitude and love for a redemption received: “And God spake all these words, saying, I am the Lord thy God, which brought thee out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage. Thou shalt have no other gods before Me,” etc. “If ye love Me, keep My commandments.” Take an illustration of this text from daily life. We go into a mechanic’s shop. The workmen leave at 6 p.m. I enter the room at 5.45. I see one man looking at the clock—sluggishly move his tools—again look up—again work. At last the clock strikes. Down go his tools; he hastens home. I note a striking contrast in another man who seems absorbed in his work. The clock strikes, but still he works; his eye has not noted the flight of time. I linger, but still be works, and sings as he works. I go to him, and ask, “Why do you remain at work when your fellow-workman has left the shop?” He smiles, and says, “Oh, the other man is a hireling; he is paid by the hour. My father owns the shop. Of course I am anxious that his work should turn out well. I have an interest in the business. He is a good father to me,” etc. The hireling serves in the “oldness of the letter”; the son in the “newness of the spirit.” “I will run in the way of Thy commandments,” said David, “when Thou hast enlarged my heart.”—Bardsley’s “Texts Illustrated.”
The Preacher's Complete Homiletical Commentary (gen. ed. Joseph S. Exell; Funk & Wagnalls, c. 1892) — public domain (pre-1929). A full-Bible homiletical/sermon-outline anthology covering 65 of 66 books (2 John is absent from the source module). Text from a community e-Sword module.
William B. Godbey 1900 · Public Domain On vv1, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10 1-4. While the Bible contains but one great compound…
MATRIMONIAL ILLUSTRATION OF SANCTIFICATION
1-4. While the Bible contains but one great compound fact, i. e., sin and its remedy, accommodatory to our feeble and finite senses, while locked up in these houses of clay, it utilizes an infinite diversity of imagery, beautifully and variantly expository of the wonderful redemptive scheme. Since God is the Author of both nature and grace, there is perfect harmony throughout His works in both departments. Consequently the deep and otherwise incomprehensible spiritual truths revealed in the Bible are constantly elucidated with an infinite diversity of imagery, deduced from the most common affairs and events of every-day life. The church of God throughout the Bible is symbolized by a holy woman, and that of Satan, i. e., the fallen church, by a harlot. In these four verses we have a grand metaphoric truth revealed under the figure of a woman becoming enamored of a most lovable man, and while exceedingly anxious to become his bride, still encumbered with an old husband, for whose death she must patiently wait before the much-desired nuptials can be legally celebrated. This woman is the human soul betrothed to Christ in regeneration, gladly receiving His periodical visits in revival times, bringing her nice presents and talking more and more about the projected wedding, which is only postponed with great reluctance, awaiting the death of the loathsome old, tobacconized, drunken, wife-beating husband, who is none other than Adam the First, here antithesized by the law, and must get out of the way before the long-anticipated matrimonial solemnization with her new lover, Adam the Second, can take place. Meanwhile the courtship is progressing, and it seems the old husband will never die, her delectable lover drops a hint: “If that’s all your trouble, you have nothing to do but turn him over to me, and I will dispatch him in the twinkling of an eye.” At this suggestion, she leaps and shouts uproariously. Behold, the old husband is dead and the long-anticipated wedding celebrated on the spot, involving the double interest of old Adam’s funeral and the festal joys of holy wedlock with her Divine Spouse.
William B. Godbey, Commentary on the New Testament (1896–1900) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword module.
The Sermon Bible 1900 · Public Domain On v1 Rom 7:1-6
Rom 7:1-6
"Law versus Grace.".
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Note:—
I. St. Paul’s maxim that it is death which puts an end to all obligation created by statute law. Expositors have often remarked how fond this apostle was of legal phraseology, and especially of illustrations borrowed from jurisprudence. His whole doctrine of justification, as we have it in the earlier portion of this Epistle, is in fact cast in a forensic mould. The verses immediately preceding this chapter describe conversion in language borrowed from an ancient legal process for the manumission of slaves. In harmony with the same obvious tendency of his mind, St. Paul is here borrowing a legal maxim to set forth the necessity for our Lord’s judicial death; and citing an instance of it from the marriage law of the Hebrews. The maxim is this: nothing save death can ordinarily cancel the binding obligation of civil law over its subjects; but death always does so. What we are clearly meant to gather from this legal illustration is that the decease of Jesus as the legal representative of His people was necessary, in order to dissolve the claims over them of the Divine law.
II. St. Paul contends that it is indispensable that men should be loosed from the legal obligation, if ever they were to attain to real holiness. The lex scripta of Mosaism failed because it was only a lex scripta. It stood over against the fallen nature of man as the bare utterance of a stronger will, an imperative as cold and rigid as the stone it was graved upon, with nothing about it to quicken inward affection or move the deep springs of spiritual good in the human heart. In the gospel a new Word steps into the vacant seat of moral control, and begins to exert his quickening influence upon the moral life. That other is Christ Himself, risen from the dead and reigning in virtue of the grace He brings. If I am so joined to Him as to be delivered from the law through His death, then I must be so joined to Him as to be animated by His life. In the room of the dead letter of Moses’ decalogue, prescribing duty to a dead soul, Christ breathes into the man a living spirit. The love for what pleases God proves itself the parent of a troop of happy impulses and pure affections and glad obediences to all the holy and perfect will of our Father in heaven.
J. Oswald Dykes, The Gospel according to St. Paul, p. 191.
Reference: Rom 7:1.—Preacher’s Monthly, vol. ii., p. 248.
Rom 7:4
I. "Ye are dead." This spiritual death must surely be in some profound sense—so often and so earnestly is the phrase reiterated—the mystical image of that death from which it derives its name. Whither does death conduct us? "Today shalt thou be with Me in paradise," said the Lord of Life to the dying penitent. He Himself "preached to spirits in confinement," preserved in the secret citadel of God; a world where, as He declared, all live unto Him, and whose happier region perhaps is typified by the bosom of Abraham, which the Jews employed to express it and which our Lord has consecrated by His adoption. The triumphant fulness of heavenly glory seems to demand the body no less than the spirit; and may we not fairly deem, with many of our safest and holiest divines, that there is beyond this scene, in some lone region of the illimitable universe, a home for the spirit, embodied, or clad it may be, with some fine and invisible materialism, where in the calm expectation of consummate bliss it learns the art of higher happiness, and trains its faculties for coming glory. And as in all our physical changes spiritual changes more essential seem pictured, I cannot but think that as our death represents the spiritual death that opens the Christian’s course, so this intervening state of holy anticipation seems eminently to represent the peculiar blessedness that follows death to sin and to the law.
II. Departed saints are dead to the world, dead to its sins, dead to its avenging law. It cannot cast its shadow across the grave, and it cannot prolong one pang of bitterness, one touch of temptation. Its waves are broken beneath the walls of that sheltered paradise. These are the franchised of Christ and of death; dust has returned to dust that the spirit might return unto God; they have died into His eternal life. This is the story of the dying saint; such dying saints must you be even now, if you would live even now with Jesus.
W. Archer Butler, Sermons, 2nd series, p. 116.
References: Rom 7:4.—Christian World Pulpit, vol. xxv., p. 56. Rom 7:5-25.—Homilist, new series, vol. i., p. 109. Rom 7:6.—H. W. Beecher, Christian World Pulpit, vol. iv., p. 11; Ibid., Sermons, 10th series, p. 217. Rom 7:6, Rom 7:25.—Spurgeon, Sermons, vol. ix., p. 216.
Rom 7:7
I. These are searching words, and direct our thoughts to the hidden light in pursuance of the design of explaining and enforcing the plan of man’s justification in the gospel through the merits of Jesus Christ by faith. The Apostle shows that all men, Jew and Gentile alike, are sinners, deserving of death; that the law could not justify because all had disobeyed the law; and by baptism into Christ’s death the Christian had died, as it were, to the law, and is no more bound to the law of the covenant than a woman after her husband’s death is by the vows of her first marriage. Having thus been obliged to speak disparagingly of the law as a covenant in comparison with the gospel, the Apostle hastens to prevent an inference derogatory to the law itself, and consequently to the character of Him who gave it. The law has laid down a broad clear rule of right, and by taking away every plea of ignorance, and placing the weight of God’s authority in the scale, it has, as it were, opened our eyes, and shown us that we are sinners.
II. Consider the sin of unlawful desires. The product of our corrupt nature may spring up spontaneously from the original soil, an evidence always of original sin, the parent of actual sin. The world is full of occasions which call them forth; the devil suggests, and the heart too readily answers to the call. They are the first steps towards the acts of sin and the actual violation of the letter of God’s law, and when they in reality take place, the struggle issues, either in resisting the temptation by Divine grace and overcoming it, or a sin which results from yielding and defeat. The desire of sin, when indulged in, is as sinful as the act itself. The sinfulness of unlawful desires impresses upon us all the necessity of self-examination and watchfulness and prayer. Such desires are the natural offspring of our own evil heart, we are liable to their intrusion at all times and in all places. We should accustom ourselves to examine our desires, our thoughts, wishes, and external temptations, and judge them, not as carrying no guilt because not proceeding to the outward deed, but as mental acts, having their own moral character, and, as such, condemned or acquitted by the spiritual law of God. The weapons of this warfare of ours must not be carnal, but from God, and mighty to the pulling down of strongholds, if we would cast down the imaginations and every high thing that exalteth itself against God.
Bishop Temple, Oxford and Cambridge Journal, March 11th, 1880.
References: Rom 7:7.—Bishop Temple, Clergyman’s Magazine, vol. ix., p. 145; Ibid., Church of England Pulpit, vol. ix., p. 145.
Rom 7:7-13
A Chapter in Saul’s Early Life.
I. St. Paul repels with energy the idea that there can be anything essentially bad, unholy, or immoral about the blessed law of God itself. On the contrary, but for that law he could never have reached any real knowledge of sin. Only by the law’s clear discovery of moral good does it bring home to us the conviction of sin’s sinfulness. During childhood, and sometimes well on into early youth, we do not realise God’s law. A moment arrives when the law of God comes home to the conscience with new power. In the case of young Saul, it was especially the tenth commandment which came home. It became plain to him that God forbids not merely doing wrong, but wishing wrong. He saw that to be good, therefore, one has to watch the earliest budding of a bad wish within the heart—nay, that if the bad wish bud there at all, the law is already, and in that fact, broken. Ah! the happy dream life was ended then. Here was the death of all his peace and gladness. "Sin revived," says he, with a terse pathos, "sin awoke unto life, and I died."
II. The law had failed, then, shall we say? Instead of quenching sin in Saul’s soul it had inflamed it. It had produced self-condemnation, inward strife, despair, and death. Was the law to blame for that? No, it was the very perfection and glory of the Decalogue that it contained that tenth and most spiritual precept. It was just its exceeding broadness and nobleness which made it impossible for unregenerate Saul to keep it. It was no fault of the law that it wrought in Saul lust and death; but it was the fault of what Saul had now learned to know as sin. Not sins, but sin: not sinfulness even as a simple quality of the sinner, but sin as a force, a dread and mighty factor in the human soul, which lies deep, deeper than desire, and proves itself strong, stronger than the better will that strives against it. In His mercy God meant men to learn this bitter, humbling, but most salutary lesson, that the natural heart is at enmity against God, since it is not subject to the law of God, neither indeed can be.
J. Oswald Dykes, The Gospel according to St. Paul, p. 201.
Rom 7:9
The Place of the Law in the Salvation of Sinners.
We have here:—
I. A life which a man enjoys in and of himself before he knows God. "I was alive without the law once." This is the natural state of the fallen. It is here called life, and elsewhere it is called death. The wide diversity of the names employed to designate the same thing need not cause surprise. The one term expresses the true state of the man, and the other term expresses the man’s own view of his state. In God’s sight it is death; in his own imagination it is life.
II. The Exodus from that Egypt; the escape from that false life by a dying. "The commandment came, sin revived, and I died." (1) "The commandment came." It is no longer an imitation law, modelled on the measure of his own attainments, which might be pressed upon his conscience, and yet not extinguish his self-righteous life. It is the unchanging will of the unchanging God—the word which liveth and abideth for ever. It is a hammer that breaketh the rock in pieces. (2) "Sin revived" at the entrance of this visitant. The commandment coming in did not cause, but only detected, sin. It was by the light of the commandment, when it came, that he discovered the sin which had all along been living and reigning in his heart and life. (3) "I died." The life in which he had hitherto trusted was extinguished then. Chased by the strange usurper from every part of its long-cherished home, the life flickers over it a moment, like the flame of an expiring lamp, and then darts away into the unseen.
III. He lives in another life. No interval of time separated the two. The death that led from one life was the birth of another. It is one act. The dying is the living. The exodus from this life is the entrance into that. He does not remain one moment dead. The instant after his death, you hear him exclaiming, "I died." His own voice declaring how and when he died is the surest evidence that he lives. "Nevertheless, I live, yet not I, but Christ liveth in me." "Our life is hid with Christ in God."
W. Arnot, Roots and Fruits, p. 69.
References: Rom 7:9.—H. W. Beecher, Christian World Pulpit, vol. ix., p. 299. Rom 7:9-25.—H. W. Beecher, Ibid., vol. iii., p. 179.
Rom 7:11
I. The sentiment of law, nowadays, is killing the living consciousness in man; it was so, it has been so, in all ages; man is not only in danger from the great majesties of nature, he is in danger not less from himself and from his own works. In many directions they are assuming proportions not less than terrible to him. He may say with the Apostle, "The law slew me." What, then, did the word law mean to St. Paul? What did he find in it? The whole Epistle to the Romans is an exhibition of the reconciliation made by God, of man with His law. It is to us a cold, hard word; but it represents that which is highest in God—order, holiness, rectitude. The moderns think they have advanced far, when they discover that the universe moves upon the wheels of law. Paul plainly enough declares that, and he further opens his epistle declaring that man alone breaks through the barriers of law. This is the subject of the first chapter. Immoral is unlawful.
II. I conceive, then, that so long as we limit the Pauline conception of the word law to the legalism of Judaism, we do injustice, not only to the argument of the Apostle, but still more injustice to the scope and intention of the Christian system. When I hear Paul speak of the law of God, I understand by it God’s expressed will. But then we know that will is the expression of God’s character. God is a sovereign, but He has a law in His own being, beyond and beneath which He cannot go. He can do nothing unholy. He can do nothing wrong, nothing beneath the character of God.
III. The law of consciousness is used by the Apostle, when he rises from the review of the symmetry of things to the conditions of character by which God has made Himself known to us. But the birth of consciousness in the soul is the awakening of conscience; and while consciousness broods over matter, as a master over a slave, conscience, a still more inexorable master, broods over the consciousness. Law is still a terror, that which is fixed; the rigid hard law of things is still a sentence and a doom. But the law becomes our schoolmaster to bring us to Christ. He is a new force in the soul. Terrified by what is fixed and arbitrary in law, I wanted to find the security of the law of permanence transcended by the law of change, and I find it here. I discover how "the law and the Spirit of life sets free from the law of sin," that is conscience, "and of death," that is nature.
E. Paxton Hood, Dark Sayings on a Harp, p. 173.
References: Rom 7:11.—Spurgeon, Sermons, vol. xviii., No. 1045; C. J. Vaughan, Lessons of the Cross and Passion, p. 241.
Rom 7:12
It is plain that the revelation of the law is made to assist us in copying the pattern which is there set before us. Consider the defect of character which is the natural consequence of not being fully impressed with each one of these three characteristics of God’s government and His creation.
I. A man may be deficient in a sense of the holiness of the law. Of course he who does not feel the holiness of the law will not fully feel its goodness, still less its justice. The defect of such a man’s character is a tendency to be earthly. To have his hopes, his aims, his labours, bounded by this present life; to lose all hold of the heavenly, unearthly side of religion; to be much more moral than devotional; to cut out all his duties by an earthly pattern. This defect of character admits of many degrees. But it is plain that such a man is not fashioned on the highest type. His service may be genuine as far as it goes; but it is imperfect, not only as all human service is imperfect in the execution, but imperfect in the very conception and idea.
II. Again, a man may not have a strong sense of the goodness of God’s law. Such a man, of course, has but a poor and narrow idea of holiness. But still he may have much more sense of that than of God’s goodness. He shuts himself out from much that is tender, much that touches the heart, much that softens and blesses, because he will not open his senses to receive the gifts of his Maker.
III. Lastly, a man may be wanting in a sense of the justice of God’s government. And perhaps for us imperfect creatures this is the most dangerous deficiency of all. Such a one generally shows his want by a weak desire to bury the past. He has no sense of a sin once done being a substantive thing tied inevitably to substantive consequences. And for this very reason he cannot feel any need for a Redeemer or a redemption. And so he never comes with a full acknowledgment of his guilt to the foot of the Cross, resigning soul and body to Him who alone can cleanse.
Bishop Temple, Rugby Sermons, p. 111.
Rom 7:13
I. What is sin? Rebellion—the resistance of a human mind against the sovereignty of its Creator. It little matters, in comparison, what may be the act by which a rebel shows that he is a rebel; the fact is the important thing—that he is in a state of rebellion. Man measures sin by the degree of the injury which a sin inflicts on society, or upon the man who does it. God measures sin by the degree of the rebellion which He sees in that sin against Himself. What we call the sin is in His sight only the index of the sinfulness which lies deep down in the heart.
II. No sin is single, no sin is solitary, there are no islands in sin. The principle of obedience is a single thing; the man that has broken one law has violated the principle of obedience, and therefore he is as much a breaker of the law as if he had broken a thousand things. Again, all God’s law is one law. It resolves itself into one—Thou shalt love the Lord thy God. He that hath done one sin did not love God; therefore by his want of love he has brought himself guilty to the count of all the law—for the law is love.
III. Every sin which a man does, lies in a series—in which that one sin is a link, and none can calculate what will be the chain of repetitions and the chain of consequences, which shall stretch on and on from sin to sin, from person to person, from circle to circle, from age to age—beyond time into eternity. The sins that we do very soon pass out of our memory, in the crowd of new and pressing engagements and thoughts which come around us; we perhaps very little realise now the sins which once pressed very heavily and were very vivid to our consciences. But with God’s view each one sin is as green and fresh as at the moment when it was done. Let us try then to look on sin as God looks on it, and we shall better appreciate the infinite grace of Him who was made sin for us.
J. Vaughan, Fifty Sermons, 2nd series, p. 319.
References: Rom 7:13.—Spurgeon, Sermons, vol. xix., No. 1095; Ibid., Morning by Morning, p. 71; Preacher’s Monthly, vol. iii., P. 103.
Rom 7:14-25
Dualism in the Life.
I. This is the earliest place in this Epistle where the two terms "flesh and spirit" occur in clear contrast, with the peculiar ethical sense conferred upon them by one another. In the next chapter we find them in constant use, as the key words of his argument. The point of St. Paul here is that the law of God partakes of His own nature. It, too, is spiritual. It reflects the Divine character, for it expresses the Divine will, and therefore between it and the nature of man, as man now is, there holds precisely the same incompatibility which our Lord affirmed between what is born of the flesh and what is born of the spirit. In this sad closing picture of his own experience, even after his mind had become reconciled to the law, St. Paul has made himself a mirror in which men of earnest holiness and habits of self-scrutiny have in every age seen themselves reflected. Such an internal dualism—such a strife of opposites—such a comparative impotency to realise the good they propose, are standing characteristics of saintliness, if we may judge saints by their most secret confessions and self-examinations.
II. St. Paul speaks of the law in his members as waging such successful war, that it even carried him off at times into captivity, like a prisoner of war. For the sinful principle which has its seat in an inborn disposition makes sudden sallies when a soul is off its guard, then leaps on with some gust of passion, and before it can gather itself up to resist it is swept forward by the unexpected pressure and is lost. So anger overtakes some, so lust others. Let us entreat God for a watchful temper. In Christ Jesus is a spirit of life. What the law never could do, because it was weak through the flesh, God has done in Christ. The Spirit whom we have received in Christ is the true answer to every "Who shall deliver?" Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord.
J. Oswald Dykes, The Gospel according to St. Paul, p. 211.
References: Rom 7:18.—Clergyman’s Magazine, vol. iv., p. 84; W. Ground, Christian World Pulpit, vol. xiii., p. 316; H. W. Beecher, Sermons, 5th series, p. 115. Rom 7:19.—H. W. Beecher, Christian World Pulpit, vol. xviii., p. 364.
Rom 7:20
What are the lessons of life which we have to deduce from the doctrine of original sin?
I. First, of course, there is that dependence on God’s help, which we can never too often repeat to our hearts as our only stay. We have to learn not merely as an abstract truth but as a living fact, as a principle which will check and control, and yet uphold our hearts throughout the day, that we are in God’s hands and not our own. We are not the real combatants in the great battle; rather our souls are the battle-field, and Christ and sin fight there for supremacy, and we can but surrender ourselves to one of the two. We are weak and helpless, except in as much as God may help us. If we would ask what are the tokens of our having learnt the lesson, the answer is, that besides the quiet trust in God, the chief token of our having learnt to lean on God, and not on ourselves, is the avoidance of all unnecessary temptation.
II. As on the one hand we learn our absolute dependence on God, so do we learn and get comfort in our Christian warfare. We learn that there is a sense in which we can, like the Apostle, disclaim our own faults and say as he did, "It is not I that do it, but sin that dwelleth in me." In so far as we do not consent to our own faults, in so far they are not our own; in so far as we yield to them, they are ours. And God who is greater than our hearts, and knoweth all things, can see when we have honestly striven, and assuredly will not deny His help in such a struggle.
III. We must not be disappointed, or cast down, or disheartened, because we find our self-improvement very much slower than we expect or like. The evil to be cured is past human remedy. God will cure it if we wish. But He will cure it in His own way, and at His own time. We must be content to fight the battle in His name and strength, and leave the issue in His hands.
Bishop Temple, Rugby Sermons, p. 122.
References: Rom 7:21.—Preacher’s Monthly, vol. ii., p. 262. Rom 7:21-25.—A. D. Davidson, Lectures and Sermons, p. 458.
Rom 7:22-23
Victory amid Strife.
I. There are, says an ancient father, four states of man. In the first, man struggles not, but is subdued; in the second, he struggles and is still subdued; in the third, he struggles and subdues; in the fourth, he has to struggle no more. The first state of heavy sluggish acquiescence in sin is man’s condition when not under the law of God. The second, of a fruitless, ineffectual struggle, is his state under the law, but not with the fulness of Divine grace. The third, wherein he is in the main victorious, is under the full grace of the gospel. The fourth, of tranquil freedom from all struggle, is in the blessed and everlasting peace. Three of these states there are now. However any be under the power of grace, they, while in the flesh, must have conflict still. It would not be a state of trial without conflict. And this conflict is within, as well as without. This very condition of our being must be good for us, since God, after He has redeemed, regenerated, renewed us, has given us of His Spirit, and made us members of His Son, united us to Christ, and made us temples of the Holy Ghost, but still leaves more or less responsibility in those whom He willed to sit on His right hand and on His left in His kingdom.
II. This conflict is continual. It spreads through the whole life and through every part in man. Man is besieged on all sides. No power, no faculty, no sense, is free from this warfare. Every sense is tempted or tempts to sin; the law of sin is found, although by God’s grace it reigns not, in all our members. But though the whole man is besieged thus within and without, his inward self, his life, his soul, where God dwells, whereby he is united to God, is hemmed in, but not overcome, unless his will consents. "Sin lieth at the door." The will holds the door closed; the will alone opens the door. If thou open not the door thyself, sin cannot enter in. Resist the very first motions. It is then that thou art most in thy own power. Be not weary of resisting, although the temptation come again and again. Each such resistance is an act of obedience to God; each, done by His grace, draws down more of His grace to thee; in each His good pleasure will the more rest upon thee; by each thou wilt become more a vessel of His grace and love, more fitted and enlarged for His everlasting love.
E. B. Pusey, Sermons, vol. ii., p. 327.
References: Rom 7:22, Rom 7:23.—Spurgeon, Sermons, vol. xviii., No. 1062; A. P. Peabody, Christian World Pulpit, vol. xxxii., p. 397.
Rom 7:22-25
I. When a man begins to hunger and thirst after righteousness, and, discontented with himself, attempts to improve himself, he soon begins to find a painful truth in many a word of the Bible to which he gave little heed, as long as he was contented with himself and with doing just what pleased him, right or wrong. He soon finds out the meaning and the truth of that terrible struggle between the good in him and the evil in him, of which St. Paul speaks so bitterly in the text. How, when he tries to do good, evil is present with him. How he delights in the law of God with his inward mind, and yet finds another law in his body warring against the law of God, and bringing him into captivity to the law of sin. How he is crippled by old habits, weakened by cowardice, by laziness, by vanity, by general inability of will, till he is ready—disgusted at himself and his own weakness—to cry, "Who shall deliver me from the body of this death?"
II. Let him but utter that cry honestly; let him once find out that he wants something outside himself to help him, to deliver him, to strengthen him, to stir up his weak will, to give him grace and power to do what he knows instead of merely admiring it and leaving it undone; let a man only find out that; let him see that he needs a helper, a deliverer, a strengthener, in one word a Saviour, and he will find one. Like St. Paul, after crying "O wretched man that I am!" he will be able to answer himself, "I thank God—God will deliver me, through Jesus Christ our Lord. Christ will stir up this weak will of mine, Christ will give me strength and power, faithfully to fulfil all my good desires, because He Himself has put them into my heart—not to mock me, not to disappoint me, not to make me wretched with the sight of noble graces and virtues to which I cannot attain, but to fulfil His work in me."
C. Kingsley, All Saints’ Day, p. 41.
References: Rom 7:22-25.—Plain Sermons by Contributors to "Tracts for the Times," vol. iii., p. 34. Rom 7:23.—Spurgeon, Sermons, vol. xxv., No. 1459. Rom 7:24.—Good Words, vol. iii., p. 445; T. Arnold, Sermons, vol. iii., p. 37; C. J. Vaughan, Lessons of the Cross and Passion, p. 227.
Rom 7:24-25
I. The consciousness of sin is so far a universal fact of human nature, that if any one of us is without it, it is because of some disease and defect in his own mind. The conviction of sin may be stifled, nay, it is stifled every day, and yet it is universal as light is universal, although some may shut their eyes close and admit none of it; so is the consciousness of sin universal, although many believe that they have got rid of it altogether. For this very absence of conviction only proves the incompleteness of their nature. They deceive themselves, and the truth is not in them. They are sleeping steeped in cold mists and poisonous dews, but they know not the poison because they are asleep. Yet fire burns and poison destroys not the less, when the senses that are sentinels against them desert their posts. Every man whose nature is complete and awake and active knows that there is such a thing as sin and that he is a partaker in it.
II. In what does the consciousness of sin consist? It is the consciousness of division and strife within a man. His mind is not at peace with itself. In our pride we revolt against God, and all our inner thoughts start into rebellion against us. Today, with its high hopes and promises, passes censure on tomorrow with its foolish outbreaks and lame performances. If we could add a little weight to our will, or abate but a little from the force of our temptations!—but as it is, the secret record of our lives would be a register of unfulfilled intentions.
III. Such a condition must be one of misery, out of which it is natural to try to escape, either by the door of deliverance opened to us by Christ in His gospel, or through the gates of death and hell. And all these belong not to the nature of sin itself, but only to our consciousness of it. Let us remember that the Physician is close at hand, who will pour balm into our wounds, who will create a new heart and a new spirit within us.
Archbishop Thomson, Lincoln’s Inn Sermons, p. 188.
References: Rom 7:24, Rom 7:25.—Spurgeon, Sermons, vol. v., No. 235; T. Arnold, Sermons, vol. v., p. 313; J. Wells, Thursday Penny Pulpit, vol. xv., p. 5; H. W. Beecher, Christian World Pulpit, vol. vi., p. 347; Ibid., vol. xiv., p. 356; Preacher’s Monthly, vol. ii., p. 96. Rom 7:25.—Good Words, vol. iii., p. 447. Rom 8:1.—G. Moberly, Parochial Sermons, p. 157; Three Hundred Outlines on the New Testament, p. 128; Preacher’s Monthly, vol. i., p. 420; vol. ii., p. 258; vol. vii., p. 113; Spurgeon, Evening by Evening, p. 44. Rom 8:1-4.—D. Bagot, Church of England Pulpit, vol. xiii., p. 125.
The Sermon Bible, ed. William Robertson Nicoll (1888–1900) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword module.
F. W. Grant 1903 · Public Domain On v1 Subdivision 3. (Rom 7:1-25; Rom 8:1-4.)
Subdivision 3. (Rom 7:1-25; Rom 8:1-4.)
Realized deliverance as united to Christ by the Spirit.
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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 (Rom 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 Exo 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" (Gal 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!*
{*The distinction so often pressed between moral and ceremonial law is one which Scripture does not make. Law is the expression of the will of God, whether it be in some moral command or some outward ceremonial. Is not this suggested by the presence of the fourth commandment? While the observance of a day of rest is of the greatest benefit to man, yet the special day to be observed and the nature of the observance are, as we might say, arbitrary. There is nothing intrinsically immoral in the disregard of the seventh day, as there would be in the violation of the sixth or seventh commandments. And yet the fourth commandment was as binding as any of the others, because it was the expressed will of God. So all the ceremonial law was His will for His people. But all is done away in Christ, and we are told that the very law "written and engravers in stones" -the ten commandments -has been done away (2Co 3:7; 2Co 3:13). -S.R.}
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" (1Co 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 (Rom 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." . . . (Eze 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! (2Co 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" (Rom 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.
F. W. Grant, The Numerical Bible (4th ed., 1903) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword module.
J. R. Dummelow 1909 · Public Domain On v1 The Inadequacy of the Law to save
The Inadequacy of the Law to save
1-6. St. Paul had spoken of the Law in a way which would offend an earnest Jew: cp. Rom_3:20-21; Rom_4:15; Rom_5:20. In this chapter (Rom_7:7-25) he shows that the Law is divine in its character and beneficent in its work, but unable to free a man from the power of sin. Indeed, though not the cause, it is the occasion of sin. But first, in Rom_5:1-6, the statement in Rom_6:14, that Christians are not under law, is enforced and explained. Law which governs one state of life is often not applicable to another. Of this the marriage law is an example. And the Christian, by the death of his old self, has passed into another state, one in which the Law no longer has force.
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Paraphrase. '(1) Does any one hesitate at my statement (Rom_6:14) that we “are not under law”? Let me remind him that the power of any law over a man ends at his death. And we have died with Christ to the old state of sin in which law applies, and risen with Him to a new life. (2) Or the change in our condition may be compared to the remarriage of a woman after the death of her husband. By his death, the legal ties which bound her to him were annulled; (3) for now the Law has no power to condemn the woman, although it condemned a second union while the husband lived. (4) In like manner, the Law which applied to us when we were wedded to our old self, had no more to do with us when our old self was crucified with Christ. So we were free to wed the risen Christ, that through union with Him we might bring forth fruit for God our Master. (5) The state in which our fleshly nature ruled was not of such a character that we should desire to return to it. For the sinful passions which the Law revealed, and by revealing stimulated, caused us to bring forth fruit for Death as our master. (6) But, as it is, the Law has ceased to affect us. This does not mean that we are free to sin, but that now we serve God from inward impulse, instead of because we are told to do so by a law.'
1. Know the law] lit. 'know law,' i.e. probably law in general: all know that law ceases to be concerned with people when they are dead.
2. Loosed] RV 'discharged': cp. Rom_7:6. Law of her husband] i.e. the marriage law.
4. By the body of Christ] i.e. through your union with Christ crucified.
5. Motions of sins] RV 'sinful passions.' 'Passions' = passive feelings, e.g. hunger; sinful, when they control the will. By the law] cp. Rom_7:7-25, Rom_5:20, and on Rom_6:14.
6. Delivered] RV 'discharged.' That being dead] RV 'having died to that,' i.e. to the Law. Spirit] RV 'the spirit.' In the new state, the spiritual part of the man has been emancipated, and has become the predominant part of him. He lives, as it were, in a spiritual world, and has become a spiritual person; and therefore desires to carry out God's will freely and fully. In the old state, his obedience was constrained, and therefore limited, by a written code.
7-13. Although, in order that we might truly serve God, it was necessary that we should be set free from the Law (Rom_7:1-6), yet the Law is not evil. On the contrary, it does God's work, for it detects the sinfulness hidden in the soul, and exposes it in its true nature.
Paraphrase. '(7) Are we to infer (e.g. from Rom_7:5) that the Law is evil? Not so: the Law brings sin to light. For example, the tenth commandment made me conscious of the sin of coveting. (8) Not only so, but my sin became active when there was a commandment to resist, so that I coveted all the more because coveting is forbidden. Without law, sin is dormant. (9) So it was with me; my conscience was untroubled until I realised the commandment, then sin sprang to life, and I knew myself to be dead before God. (10) How startling a consequence of a commandment which pointed the way to spiritual life! (11) But it was the fault of sin within, which persuaded me to love that which I knew the commandment forbade, not the fault of the commandment, (12) which is holy and righteous and beneficent. (13) Thus I realised the exceeding wickedness of the sin within me, for it not only brought me to death, but did so by preventing the beneficent commandment from having any other effect than that of awakening my resistance.'
7. Lust] RV 'coveting.' St. Paul instances the most searching and comprehensive commandment of the second table.
8. Taking occasion] RV 'finding occasion.' By the commandment, etc.] RV 'wrought in me through the commandment all manner of coveting.' Without] RV 'apart from.'
9. I was alive] 'I' emphatic
10, Ordained] RV omits.
11. Deceived] RV 'beguiled': cp. Gen_3:13. 'All sin is committed under a deception, momentary at least, as to (1) the satisfaction to be found in it, (2) the excuse to be made for it, (3) the probability of its punishment' (Vaughan).
13. But sin] Understand 'became death unto me.' Working] RV 'by working.'
14-25. St. Paul, taking his own case as typical, shows that spiritual death (Rom_7:11-13) is due, not to the Law, nor to the free choice of his true self, which approves the Law (vv.
14-16, 22), but to the power of sin within (Rom_7:17, Rom_7:20.). In doing so, he draws a picture of conflict, in which he does evil unwillingly, and is unable to do the good he wishes (Rom_7:15-20). His personality includes two parts—'flesh' (the lower animal nature) and 'mind' or 'inward man' (i.e. the part which thinks and reasons). The 'mind' reverences God's Law, but is conquered by the 'flesh,' which sin controls. He needs a deliverer (Rom_7:21-25).
The state described is that of one who has been awakened to the claim of God's Law and to hate sin, but is not under the power of the Spirit of Christ (Romans 8). It probably describes St. Paul's experience for some length of time before his conversion.
Paraphrase. '(14) The Law appeals to man's spiritual nature, and that is why I cannot keep it, for the fleshly nature, over which sin rules, predominates in me. (15) I am like a slave, who works out his master's thoughts without sharing them. I do not what I wish, but what I hate, (16) thus acknowledging the moral excellence of the Law even while I break it. (17) It follows that the sin which dwells within me is the real agent of my wrong-doing. (18) For I know that no good dwells in my fleshly nature, because my good wishes are ineffectual, (19) and I do the evil I wish to avoid. (20) But if I do it against my will, the sin which dwells within me is the real agent. (21) Thus I am not free. Although I wish to do the good, sin says, “Thou shalt not do good, thou shalt do evil,” and I am obliged to obey. (22) My reason and conscience delight in the Law of God, (23) but the law of sin (Rom_7:21), which rules my body, wars against the dictates of my reason and conscience and robs me of my liberty. (24) I need a deliverer from this reign of sin in my body' (cp. Rom_6:6; 'body of sin'), '(25) whom I find in Christ. The sum of the matter is that, left to myself, I am divided, serving a law of God with my reason and conscience, but a law of sin with my fleshly nature.'
15. Allow] RV 'know.'
24. The body of this death] Sin and death go together. The body which is under the power of sin is also given over to death.
J. R. Dummelow, A Commentary on the Holy Bible (Macmillan, 1909) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword module.
J. W. McGarvey 1914 · Public Domain On vv1–10 [In Rom_6:14 Paul laid down the principle that sin…
[In Rom_6:14 Paul laid down the principle that sin does not have dominion over Christians, because they are not under law, but under grace. The section which we have just closed discusses the first clause of this proposition under the figure of slavery, and shows that sin does not have dominion over us, for we have changed masters. This section discusses the second half of the proposition under the figure of marriage, and shows that we are not under the law, but under grace, for in Christ we have died as to our former husband (law), and been married to our new husband (grace).] Or are ye ignorant, brethren (for I speak to men who know the law), that the law hath dominion over a man for so long time as he liveth?
J. W. McGarvey (with Philip Y. Pendleton), Commentaries on the New Testament (The Fourfold Gospel, 1914; Acts; and the epistles) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword/MySword module.
C. I. Scofield 1917 · Public Domain On vv1, 4, 6, 7, 8, 9 Sin. (See Scofield "Rom 3:23").
sin
Sin. (See Scofield "Rom 3:23").
The Scofield Reference Bible (1917 edition), notes by C. I. Scofield — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword module.
Arno C. Gaebelein 1922 · Public Domain On v1 1. The Law and its Dominion. (Rom 7:1-3.)
CHAPTER 7
1. The Law and its Dominion. (Rom 7:1-3.)
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2. Dead to the Law and Married to Another. (Rom 7:4-6.)
3. Concerning the Law; its Activities and Purpose. (Rom 7:7-13.)
4. The Experience of a Believer in Bondage to the Law. (Rom 7:14-24.)
5. The Triumphant note of Deliverance. (Rom 7:25.)
Rom 7:1-3
The law is now more fully taken up. We have learned before that by the works of the law no man can be justified before God. But when the sinner is justified by faith, does he need the law to please God? Can obedience to the law produce in him the fruit of holiness unto God? What is the relation of the justified believer to the law? Is he still under the dominion of the law or is he also delivered from the law and its bondage? These questions are answered in this chapter. An important principle is stated in the first verse. The law has dominion over a man as long as he lives. The law has dominion over man (both Jews and Gentiles). The law, which is holy, just and good (Rom 7:12) condemns man, his sinful nature and the fruits of that sinful nature, and in this sense it has dominion over every man and holds him in its grasp. But when death takes place, the rule of the law is broken. It cannot touch a dead man. The penalty of the broken law is death, when that sentence is executed, the law can have no longer dominion.
An illustration from the marriage law as instituted by God is given to make this clear. Husband and wife are united in a union till death dissolves it. The married woman is bound by that law to her husband as long as he lives. When he dies she is free and can be married to another. And we are become dead to the law by the body of Christ. The body of Christ means the death of Christ on the Cross. On the cross He bore the judgment which is our due. He bore the penalty and the curse of the law for us. “Christ hath redeemed us from the curse of the law, being made a curse for us, for it is written, Cursed is every one that hangeth on a tree” (Gal 3:13). The penalty of the broken law has been met and the law is vindicated. Inasmuch, then as His death is our death, in that we died with Christ, the law can have no more dominion over us; “we are dead to the law by the body of Christ.”
Rom 7:4-6
The old union is dissolved. Death has done its work and it is now possible after being freed from the law to be married to another. In Galatians the question about the law and its authority is viewed from another side. The law was the schoolmaster unto Christ; now after faith is come, the full truth concerning redemption by the death of Christ is made known, we are no longer under a schoolmaster (Gal 3:23-25). Being then dead to the law by the body of Christ we are married to another. And this other One is He who died for us and who is risen from the dead. Justified believers are in a living union with a risen Christ; He lives in us and we live in Him. And the result of this most blessed union is fruit unto God. The law could not produce any fruit whatever but only death; nor can the legal principle bring forth fruit unto God in a believer. Ephraim was joined to idols as we read in Hosea. But Ephraim observed the Lord, heard Him and became like a green fir tree. And the Lord adds, “From Me is thy fruit found” (Hos 14:8). The parable of the vine and the branches (Joh 15:1-27) illustrates in a simple and blessed way the apostolic statement, “Married unto another--that we should bring forth fruit unto God.” As the branch is in closest union with the vine and the sap of the vine produces the fruit, so are we one with Christ, and abiding in Him we bring forth the fruit unto holiness, the fruit which pleases God.
And “when we were in the flesh” (our former state) the passions of sins were by the law. The law by its holy character brings out what the natural man is and stirs up the passions of sins. But it is different now. We are delivered from the law and we can serve in newness of Spirit. We have a new nature, even eternal life, and in that we can render a true spiritual service.
Rom 7:7-13
“Is the law sin?” is the next question raised. It springs logically from the statement that the passions of sins, coming out of an evil, sinful heart, were by the law and bringing forth fruit unto death. Still another “God forbid” is the answer. The law was given that we might have through that law the knowledge of sin. “I had not known sin, but by the law.” I would not be conscious of lust, unless the law said, “Thou shalt not covet.” The law given by a holy God is God’s detective. The law forbids and the commandment at once brings out what is in the heart of man. Therefore, no blame can be put upon the law. Sin is that which must be blamed. Sin is lawlessness, rebellion against God and the law brings out that rebellion. Therefore apart from the law sin was dead, that is, dormant. But as soon as the commandment is given, the evil heart rebels against it and man is detected to be a sinner and a transgressor. Let us notice the change of the pronoun “we” to “I.” Some thirty times this little word “I” is found in Rom 7:7-25. We are brought upon the ground of personal experience; it has to be discovered and learned experimentally. The Apostle personifies this experience and speaks thus personally describing how a believer learns the lessons about the law, how the law cannot help a justified believer, and but makes of him a wretched man. It must also have been his own experience.
“For I was alive without the law once, but when the commandment came, sin revived, and I died.” This is the experience of a man who is ignorant of the spirituality of the law. He thinks himself alive, but when the commandment came, its spiritual demands realized (the law is spiritual, Rom 7:14), the false notion of being alive was detected, for sin revived and he died, which means that sin, discovered by the law, condemned him to death. “And the commandment which was unto life was found for me to be unto death.” In connection with the commandment, the law, it is written, “This do, and thou shalt live.” And so in this experience--he tries next to get life by the law, but he found it was unto death, for the declaration of the law is “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; Deu 27:26). He speaks of sin, his evil nature, as one who had deceived him into all this, so that the law could manifest its power in slaying him. Rom 7:12 is the real answer to the question, “Is the law sin?” The law is holy, and the commandment holy, and just and good. And because the law is holy it gives knowledge of sin and detects sin, bringing it to light in all its hideousness and then pronounces the sentence of death. One other question is asked, “Was then that which is good (the law) made death unto me?” God forbid. But sin, that it might appear sin, working death in me by that which is good; that sin by the commandment might become exceedingly sinful.” It all comes back upon sin (the evil nature, the flesh). Thus by the commandment sin becomes exceeding sinful.
Rom 7:14-24
But all this must be learned by experience, especially the fact “I am carnal,” the knowledge that in my flesh there dwelleth no good thing and that I have no power, I am powerless against indwelling sin. What person is it who describes his experience in these words? Some have applied it exclusively to the Apostle. Others state that it pictures an awakened sinner and not a converted man. The man described is born again, but is in bondage to the law and is ignorant of his deliverance in Christ. We find first the statement “we know that the law is spiritual.” This is the knowledge which a true Christian possesses concerning the law. And the Christian who knows this great truth, that the law is spiritual, also has learned another truth. “I am carnal and sold under sin.” Here then it is where experience begins. True Christian experience is to know our full deliverance in Christ and to walk in the Spirit; the experience of a Christian in struggling with the old nature and discovering what is that old nature, the flesh, is put before us in Rom 7:15-24. That we have here a converted person is seen by the fact first of all, that he does not want to do evil, he wants to do good and cannot do it and therefore hates what he does. The carnal nature, the flesh, which is still in a converted person, is thus demonstrated as enslaving him, however, he is no longer a willing slave, but he hates that old thing which has the mastery over him. In hating it and condemning sin, he does the same what the law does, for it also condemns sin. In this way he consents to the law that it is good. The seventeenth verse is of much importance. “Now then it is no more I that really do it, but sin that dwelleth in me.” He learns the difference between himself as born again, in possession of a new nature, and the old nature. He begins to distinguish himself as in possession of a new nature that wills to do good, hating evil, and sin in him, the flesh in which dwells nothing good, but all that is evil. “For I know that in me, that is, in my flesh dwelleth no good thing, for to will is present with me; but how to perform that which is good I find not.” It is a great discovery to find out by experience, that although the believer is born again, he has a nature in him which is evil, which cannot bring forth a good thing. But the will is present with him to do good, because he is born again; however, he finds not the power in himself to perform what is good. And now the conflict between the two natures is on. It brings out some important facts. “It is no more I that do it, but sin that dwells in me.” He as born again, no longer loves sin; he hates it. Because he does that which he does not want to do he can truthfully say “it is no more I that do it.” Furthermore he delights in the law of God after the inward man. This can never be said of an unconverted man, but only he who has a new nature can delight in the law of God. But he finds himself in helpless captivity to the law of sin which is at work in his members. He finds out that while he has a new nature to will good and to hate evil, he has no power; sin is too strong for him. And this is to teach the believer that he must get power to overcome outside of himself. All his resolutions and good wishes cannot supply the strength to do. That he is self-occupied, seeking power by what he does and tries to do, is seen from the use of the little word “I.” The name of the One in whom we have deliverance, Christ, is not mentioned once. The case is clear, it is the description of the experience of a believer, who is justified, born again, in union with Christ, dead with Him, risen with Him and indwelt by the Holy Spirit; but he lacks the knowledge of this and tries by his own efforts and in his own strength, through keeping the law, to obtain holiness. Having discovered that nothing good dwells in his flesh; that the flesh is not himself, but sin in him and that, because it is too strong for him, he is powerless, the cry of despair is uttered by him. “O wretched man that I am! Who shall deliver me from the body of this death?” He has reached the end of self. He looks now for deliverance from another source, outside of himself. The answer comes at once. “I thank God through Jesus Christ our Lord.” In Him there is deliverance and what that deliverance is, we shall learn from the first four verses of the eighth chapter. The two laws are mentioned once more in the last verse of this chapter. With the mind, as born again, he serves the law and the law gives him no power; in the struggle with the old nature he is enslaved by the law of sin.
Arno C. Gaebelein, The Annotated Bible (1913–1922) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword module.
Paul E. Kretzmann 1924 · Public Domain On vv1, 7 Freedom from the Law. 7:1-6
Freedom from the Law. 7:1-6
v. 1. Know ye not, brethren, (for I speak to them that know the Law,) how that the Law hath dominion over a man as long as he liveth?
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v. 2. For the woman which hath an husband is 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.
v. 3. So, then, if, while her husband liveth, she be married to another man, 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.
v. 4. Wherefore, my brethren, ye also are become dead to the Law by the body of Christ, that ye should be married to another, even to Him who is raised from the dead, that we should bring forth fruit unto God.
v. 5. For when we were in the flesh, the motions of sins which were by the Law did work in our members to bring forth fruit unto death.
v. 6. But now we are delivered from the Law, that being dead wherein we were held, that we should serve in newness of spirit, and not in the oldness of the letter.
Paul here introduces another illustration of the statement in v. 14 of the preceding chapter that we are not under the Law, but under grace: Or do you not know, brethren, that law has power over a man as long as he lives? He appeals to their knowledge of, their familiarity with, law and legal procedure, especially on the basis of the Mosaic Law. If a person does not want to accept Paul’s argument that the believers are free from all legal obligations, there is only one alternative left, namely, to assume that the persons to whom it is directed are ignorant of that great principle according to which all obligations to the Law are terminated with death. The authority and right of the Law with regard to any man extends over his entire life, but not beyond. When a person is dead, there can be neither fulfillment nor transgression of the Law. The apostle, of course, argues entirely from the standpoint of the Law. And he demonstrates and illustrates his general statement by adducing an example, namely, that of the obligation of the marriage-tie. The woman subject to the man, the married woman, is bound to her husband by the law while he lives; but when her husband is dead, the law binding her to her husband, the command concerning the husband, is canceled, to wit, that she is his wife and that of no other man. By her husband’s death the legal relation to her husband is invalidated, rendered void, broken off, and she is free, she is no longer bound by that particular rule. And from this presentation it follows that she will be designated as an adulteress if she have become a wife, have entered into relations as a wife, with another man, while her husband is yet living; but the death of her husband gives her freedom from that particular law, in order that she might not be an adulteress if she became the wife of another. That, according to the divine economy, is the object of her freedom from the law, of her being liberated from the special ordinance concerning married women, that she may marry after the death of her husband without becoming guilty of adultery. And it is implied that the man also, by his death, is no longer bound by the law relating to his wife. The institution and ordinance of marriage embraces a mutual obligation and liability, which loses its validity when one of the contracting parties dies.
What the apostle had in mind with this reference to the obligation of the marriage law is brought out in his application: And thus, my brethren, you also have become dead to the Law through the body of Christ, in order that you should become subject to another one, unto Him that was raised from the dead, that we may bear fruit to God. The case of the believers in the New Testament is very similar to that of the married woman just discussed. They are dead to the Law. Christ was put to death, with violence, and they with Him. But by this fact they have been completely severed from any connection with the Law, through the death of Christ, and they now belong to Jesus by virtue of His resurrection. The similarity and the symbolism is clear throughout. Just as death releases every person from the obligation of the Law, so the death of Christ has definitely released us from the liability of the Law, has annulled the Law, in fact. And whereas the believers before their conversion were bound under the Law, they are now, by the death of Christ, liberated from the former obligation and now belong to the resurrected Christ as their rightful Spouse. And the result of this wonderful union is the bringing forth of fruit unto God, the fruit of good works, which are done to the praise and honor of God.
Having thus shown that the believers are freed from the Law by the death of Christ, the apostle proceeds to show the necessity and the consequence of that change: For when we were in the flesh, the passions of sins, the evil tendencies of sins, which were made operative, set in motion by the Law, were active in our members to bring forth fruit unto death. But now we are freed from the Law, the Law being invalidated in our case, by having died unto that in which we were being firmly held, the result being that we serve in the newness of the Spirit and not in the oldness of the letter. This result can and shall be attained in our case. All men, in the state before their conversion, are in the flesh, they are sinful, weak, mortal creatures, with a mind continually directed toward that which is evil, or at best satisfied with an external morality. In that condition, the passions, the affections and desires that dominate man in his unconverted state were operative, active in our members, since our members executed the evil ideas of the heart. And the passions were all the more successful in this because they were incited by the Law. The Law, therefore, in carnal man, serves only to further or increase sin, since it does not remove the passions, but only serves to stir them up. And the object of the passions was, in the final analysis, that we should bring fruit to death. That is ever the tendency of the passions, to be operative and active in actual sins, to bring forth such shameful works as will result finally in death and destruction for the sinner, Jas 1:15. But through Christ a change has been brought about. The Law has been placed out of commission so far as we are concerned, it no longer has dominion over us. And this has been effected by our having died unto that in which we were being firmly held. By accepting Christ in faith, we have become partakers of His vicarious death, which was a satisfaction to the Law. And therefore we, having died unto our sinful flesh and unto sin, are thereby delivered from the rule of the Law. In our present state, then, in consequence of this freedom from the Law, we serve God in newness of the Spirit and not in the oldness of the letter. In the former condition of man, under the Law, he has only the literal demands of the Law before him, which afford no strength and power for good, hut only stir up all the sinful desires. But in the Christian the new life and being is created and controlled by the Spirit of God. It is the resurrected Christ who through the Holy Spirit works all good things in the Christians, brings forth splendid fruits of sanctification. Note: We Christians have become partakers of all the blessings of Christ’s redemption, and thus are freed not only from the curse of the Law, but also from the rule and liability of the Law. The Law, the written Law of Moses, is no longer our lord and master, we are no longer bound by its fetters. As regenerated children of God, as His new creatures, we are bound to His good pleasure and do His will for the sake of our blessed Redeemer. We are governed only by love, led only by grace.
Paul E. Kretzmann, Popular Commentary of the Bible (1921–1924) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword module.
unfoldingWord translationNotes 2017 · CC BY-SA 4.0 On vv1, 2, 4, 6, 7, 9 Connecting Statement:
Connecting Statement:
Paul explains how the law controls those who want to live under the law.
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do you not know, brothers ... that the law controls a person for as long as he lives?
Paul asks this question to add emphasis. AT: "So you certainly know that people have to obey laws only while they are alive" (See: Rhetorical Question)
brothers
Here this means fellow Christians, including both men and women.
the law controls a person for as long as he lives
Paul gives an example of this in Romans 7:2-3.
translationWords
brother
law, laws
unfoldingWord translationNotes — © Distant Shores Media and the Door43 World Missions Community, licensed CC BY-SA 4.0. Source: git.door43.org/Door43/en_tn.
Tyndale Open Study Notes 2022 · CC BY-SA 4.0 On vv1, 2, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10 7:1 Both Jewish Christians and many of the Gentile…
7:1 Both Jewish Christians and many of the Gentile Christians were familiar with the law. Jews were taught the law of Moses from birth. Many of the Gentiles in the church at Rome had been God-fearers, Gentiles who were interested in Judaism and attended the synagogue regularly. • the law applies only while a person is living: Paul may be paraphrasing a rabbinic saying: “If a person is dead, he is free from the Torah and the fulfilling of the commandments” (Babylonian Shabbat 30a; baraita Shabbat 151).
Tyndale Open Study Notes — © Tyndale Open Resources, licensed CC BY-SA 4.0. Text via the HelloAO Bible API.